Proxima Fusion raises €411 million to advance Munich demonstrator

Proxima Fusion closed a €411 million financing round and lifted its valuation to €2.4 billion, a haul that gives the Munich stellarator builder the kind of cash that actually buys magnets, site work, and engineering time. XTX Ventures and East X Ventures led the round, with RWE and Google joining as strategic investors, and RWE alone put in €25 million. The deal takes total funding past €650 million, including €95 million in public grants, and more than 90% of its investors are European.

The expensive part is manufacturing readiness: precision magnet systems, superconducting cable production, thermal and mechanical validation, and plant integration. Proxima is trying to turn the high-field stellarator into something repeatable rather than a one-off experiment, which is a harder industrial lift than the slide-deck phase most fusion companies are still stuck in.

The money is aimed first at Alpha, the demonstration stellarator near Munich that Proxima is developing with the Free State of Bavaria and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. On February 26, Proxima, Bavaria, RWE and IPP signed a framework agreement for the project in Garching, with IPP taking the scientific lead. Proxima wants Alpha to validate the high-field stellarator approach behind its commercial plan and to show that the machine can be engineered onto a repeatable product path.

Proxima is leveraging the W7-X stellarator work at IPP, plus newer high-temperature superconducting magnet technology, as it hires across Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The company’s wider ambition points toward a commercial fusion plant at the former Gundremmingen nuclear site in Bavaria, and a net-energy demonstrator in the early 2030s.