We’ve been operating for about a year and four months now. We are the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik, which is the leading Institute in Germany for research on both tokamaks and stellarators, the two main fusion reactor types. We spun out with the belief that a type of stellarator that is called a „QI stellarator“ is the best compromise between all the existing approaches in fusion energy. Our team currently consists of around 45 people. We focus on two parallel tasks: we work on the stellarator engineering design and on high-temperature superconducting magnets, which are a critical hardware component for our stellarators.

We want to commercialize stellarators. We are not describing ourselves – unlike many other fusion companies – as a supplier of a certain component or intermediate product. The magnets that we develop can be applied in many ways for which we want to take out patents. But our focus is really just on developing stellarator power plants and by that on selling energy ultimately. We want to build our first stellarator prototype by 2031.

We have raised about 30 million Euros of private growth capital, 10 million Euros of German public grants, and 17.5 million Euros of blended financing from the European Innovation Council. There is more public funding to be announced soon.

There are more and more venture capital investors who are open to that kind of deep tech investment. In Europe the ecosystem has been growing over the past ten years. Getting early stage funding is not particularly difficult, I would say. Getting the best early stage funding however is always a matter of competition. At Proxima Fusion we had an exceptional start with the founding center Unternehmertum in Munich and the London-based venture capital fund called Plural. We also got investments from the High-Tech Gründerfonds, the Deep Tech and Climate Fonds of the German federal government, Bayern Kapital and Redalpine from Switzerland, among others.

The single biggest cost currently is gathering a team of high quality – and thus it is salaries. Looking forward, the magnets program will also be a sizable hardware investment. Just to get started with the hardware you need a double digit million Euro amount.

2027 is what's on the plan. We have already proven that the design of a powerplant based on the QI stellarator approach is possible. The next single biggest risk is the demonstration magnet. If we show that magnet by 2027 we think it will open many doors – and it will come with a new fundraise which will then fund the construction of the power plant.

We prefer to do it in Munich. Not only because of the partnership with the Max Planck Institut but also because this is where the story belongs. Stellarators are an incredible advantage of Germany, which is why we are here. But to make that possible we still need some preconditions.

We need public support. This is not a project which can be done just by a bunch of smart engineers. We need the Bavarian government to support us and we need the German government to give us the right kind of statement that fusion energy is welcome in Germany. The Minister of education and research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, has been doing a lot to signal that Germany wants fusion energy to flourish here. So we’ve had a great start so far and we totally appreciate the grants we got. But we also still need the right regulatory framework.

With our first prototype we want to demonstrate energy production in a device which is capable of continuous operation. Such a device should be regulated in a similar way to how we regulate particle accelerators for cancer treatment in hospitals, so the German Strahlenschutzgesetz would set appropriate safety standards. So far many other countries have already put analogous regulation into law, among them the United States, the UK and Japan.

As far as I can tell nobody is opposing it. We just have a kind of inertia in the ecosystem. There is a kind of concern that fusion energy may be a distraction from our clean energy targets. We don’t disagree with those who emphasize the importance of other clean energy solutions, including solar and wind. Those technologies are ready to be deployed today and nobody is disagreeing with that. But to achieve net zero by 2050 you also have to think about the next steps because intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar aren’t enough to transition humanity away from fossil fuels. We hope that the public authorities support both considerations in parallel.

We also have been talking about going to Mars since 1969. The fact that we chase a dream for a long time does not mean that the dream loses its quality or desirability. Fusion energy has been chased for a long time because it's worth it. From the technical point of view, 2022 brought a number of changes when it comes to stellarators. One was the completion of the construction of W7-X in Greifswald, the world’s most advanced stellarator, which met all its design targets. This was proof that today we are ready to convert a decade-long scientific endeavor into a commercial path.

We think that in the future there will be one stellarator in every major city. If you want to be relevant by 2050 you need to think in terawatt. One terawatt is one thousand gigawatts. That means you need to think about building several thousand fusion power plants which can produce one gigawatt each. We already have gigawatt-scale power plants today, but they are mostly based on fossil fuels. It is a centralization which is very unlikely to go away because our grid is built for that. And producing energy and distributing energy are both very difficult challenges. Fusion energy does not aim to change the way we distribute energy at all.

Yes, it is possible. There is no reason why we should not be able to finance this in Europe because actually here we also have a lot of money that could be invested. If we manage to unblock certain pools of capital and attract capital from other parts of the world, like the US or the Middle East, we can do amazing things because our research ecosystem is fantastic. Germany has invested a lot in public research. But the translation into the economy just has been very poor so far. We need to remind everyone that Europe is a market and not just a consumer. And fusion energy is a chance for Germany to say: we have a technological advantage which we have built over many years.

In the domain of Stellarators China is currently at least five years behind. In the domain of Tokamaks they are catching up. In the recent years both the US and the European ecosystem have been very generous with China in training people for the sake of clean energy and public research. But now where we are approaching the point of commercialization we have to be aware that wherever there is a technological advantage we need to protect it. Because China is now moving very fast. They are currently building a Tokamak in conditions that are not very transparent, so we don't know any details. But it's quite possible that they are going to have the same time scale as the most funded US fusion startups for tokamaks.

Ambition. They need to be as ambitious as we are. If they demand that we must not be mediocre, we need to demand the same from them. Plus, we need to think as a continent. This idea of France backing French companies, Germany backing German ones, Italy backing Italian start-ups – this is a failure right at the beginning. A company like Proxima needs to be Pan-European for example. Talent needs to be leveraged across the continent and governments need to work together.

I think we need less polarization on some aspects of energy. There is a lot of politics in things that are considered common sense in many other places. For example the debate about base load energy, so a source of energy that can run without interruptions. The need for something that complements photovoltaic and wind is seen as common sense in most places of the world. When you say that we need more than photovoltaics in Germany, people argue that you are against photovoltaics – which is, from our side, not the case. Plus Germany needs more openness to entrepreneurship. There are a lot of things that are still so weirdly complicated for founders and we need to be more open to work in English in general.