Helion Energy, a private startup backed by notable investors like Sam Altman, has raised $425 million in a Series F funding round. The company aims to build the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant by 2028. With this latest investment, Helion has now secured over $1 billion in total funding.
The Series F round saw participation from new investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, SoftBank, and Vision Fund 2, as well as existing investors including Altman, Capricorn Investment Group, Mithril Capital, Dustin Moskovitz, and Nucor. David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO, expressed his excitement about the funding, stating, “We will be radically scaling up our manufacturing in the US – enabling us to build capacitors, magnets, and semiconductors much faster than we have been able to before. This accelerates the construction of the world’s first fusion power plant and then all our plants to come.”
Nuclear fusion is considered the holy grail of energy production by scientists.
Unlike nuclear fission, which splits heavy atomic nuclei, nuclear fusion merges atomic nuclei to generate vast amounts of energy, similar to the reactions that power the sun.
Helion secures substantial Series F funding
Helion’s seventh prototype, Polaris, operates at temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius.
The company is optimistic about generating electricity from this prototype in the near future. The announcement comes amidst significant progress in the field of nuclear fusion globally. Scientists at China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion energy reactor recently sustained plasma for 1,000 seconds, marking a substantial improvement from the previous record.
While the EAST reactor has yet to achieve ignition, the point at which nuclear fusion generates its own energy, this milestone represents an encouraging step forward in the quest to develop sustainable fusion energy technology. Helion’s advancements have the potential to help address the global energy crisis by providing a potentially limitless and clean energy source, setting a new precedent in the energy sector. The company has already secured a purchase agreement with Microsoft, a significant investor in Altman’s other venture, OpenAI.
