Commonwealth Fusion Systems said it closed more than $1.8 billion in Series B funding on December 1, 2021. The company said it would use the money to build and run its SPARC reactor and begin work on a commercial power plant called ARC.
Tiger Global Management led the round. New investors included Bill Gates, Google, John Doerr and Senator Investment Group, among others. Existing backers such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Eni, Temasek and The Engine also joined.
CFS said the capital would let it construct, commission and operate SPARC, which the company called the world’s first commercially relevant net energy fusion machine. The money also supported work on ARC, including support technologies, design, site selection and assembling partners and customers.
SPARC and ARC
The company was founded in 2018 based on decades of fusion research at MIT. In 2020 it published a series of peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Plasma Physics, which CFS said verified that SPARC would achieve net energy from fusion. Construction of the campus for SPARC, manufacturing and headquarters began in 2021.
The same year, CFS and MIT built and tested high-temperature superconducting magnets that the company called the strongest of their kind. Those magnets were central to the compact tokamak design. CFS said SPARC would produce commercially relevant net energy from fusion in 2025. The first ARC plant was planned for the early 2030s.
Backers and rationale
CFS chief executive Bob Mumgaard said the funding showed a broad investor base saw fusion as part of the energy transition. “This diverse group of investors includes a spectrum of capital from energy and technology companies to venture capitalists, hedge funds, and university endowments that believe in fusion as a large-scale solution to decarbonize the planet,” he said.
Eni chief executive Claudio Descalzi said his company had backed CFS because the technology could accelerate emissions cuts. “Magnetic fusion can significantly increase the pace at which the world cuts its carbon emissions,” Descalzi said. He added that a commercial fusion plant was “soon going to be within reach.”
Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures said “economical fusion power would deliver massive benefits to the world,” helping to avoid dangerous climate change while preserving living standards. Fady Jameel, a member of the Jameel Family’s Investment Supervisory Board, said the group had backed CFS because it works on a technological solution to one of the world’s most pressing problems.
DFJ Growth partner Randy Glein said the CFS team had broken through longstanding technical barriers with an innovative design. John Doerr, chair of Kleiner Perkins, called the company one that “executes” and turns technical milestones into reality.
CFS has raised more than $2 billion since it was founded in 2018, according to the announcement.
Sources
- Commonwealth Fusion Systems Raises $1.8 Billion in Funding to Commercialize Fusion Energy | Commonwealth Fusion Systems
- Top 3 Fusion Energy Players: Investments, Partnerships, and the Path to Commercialization
