Proxima Fusion

At Proxima, we envision a cleaner, brighter future powered by the stars. 🌟 We laid out our plan to achieve that vision in a new video from the American Physical Society, featuring interviews with CEO Francesco Sciortino, Chief Engineer Martin Kubie, Chief Scientist Jorrit Lion, Chief Manufacturing Officer Barrington D'Arcy, and Stellarator Optimization Engineer Nicolò Foppiani. 🎥 Check it out at the #APSSummit25 in Anaheim this week, or watch the full WebsEdge feature on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gFiS3J2Q

It’s time for Europe’s deep tech companies to go big. Germany in particular has a wealth of research, design, and manufacturing expertise to draw from… and as Airbus and Warburg Pincus LLC Europe Chairman René Obermann told the Financial Times’ John Thornhill at Proxima’s lab opening event this week, “Innovation is best done by startups that can take risks.” We’re proud to be among Munich’s leading #deeptech startups, backed by a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and a greatly supportive Bavarian government. Together, we can lead Europe to the forefront of a fusion-powered future. https://lnkd.in/e32vSNKM 

You’re looking at the future of fusion! Thanks to Florian Herrmann for joining us to celebrate the official opening of our Munich lab, where we’re taking the first steps on our journey toward building the world’s first commercial fusion power plant: Stellaris. It’s heartening to know that the Bavarian Government is supporting us on that journey. But this moment isn’t only about the ambitions of Proxima Fusion, or even the ambitions of Bavaria and Germany. It’s about the ambitions of all of Europe. We hosted over 150 friends, partners, and investors in the lab for an evening of celebration and inspiration, culminating in a panel discussion on how to build €1 trillion companies in Europe – moderated by Isabelle Körner and featuring Chairman of Airbus and Chairman of Warburg Pincus LLC Europe René Obermann, Helsing Co-Founder and Co-CEO Torsten Reil, and Technical University of Munich Professor Ann-Kristin Achleitner alongside Proxima CEO Francesco Sciortino. As Francesco said onstage last night: “Today, Europe needs abundant clean energy; it needs energy security; it needs resilience and grid balance; but it also needs lighthouse projects. We need to remind Europe that we can build stellarators and other things that truly matter. We choose to climb the highest mountain… and prove to the world that Europe intends to lead in a new era of fusion power.” That era starts here, in Munich.

Our First Episode is up: PROXIMA FUSION – Europe's Most Ambitious Startup 🇪🇺✨ Teaser attached. Full Video on Youtube to have the algorithm there pick it up. Every industry in the world will be redefined once we reach energy abundance – there is one company in Europe hell bent to make that happen as soon as possible. I went to visit them in their office and their lab – and I am taking you, with my camera, along. Let's make this series together: Let me know what you like? – what you don't? – what can i do better? – and who I should interview next! 🔥

𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐟𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 In yesterday’s interview with Tom Mackenzie of Bloomberg Daybreak Europe I highlighted the opportunity for Europe in fusion and the key milestone that Proxima Fusion and its partners have now reached with Stellaris. ✔️ The Stellaris publication (https://lnkd.in/dtQq-V3q) is anything but hype or sensation: it is an extensive peer-reviewed paper displaying the world’s first coherent fusion power plant concept that can operate continuously and reliably, thanks to the QI-HTS stellarator concept. ✔️ Europe is at the forefront of the fusion race, standing on the shoulders of decades of public research, and thanks to leading institutions such as the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics , which we are fortunate to work with. ✔️ The W7-X experiment in Germany is a truly visionary prototype of what a QI stellarator power plant will look like. Now, Stellaris tells us that the vision of W7-X’s ideators can be extended to include all systems needed for a power plant. Next, we need to build an HTS stellarator model coil (2027) and a net-energy steady-state demo stellarator (Alpha, 2031). The journey is neither quick, nor easy, nor cheap … moonshots never are. But, as Europeans, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and take our spot in the fusion race. 👉 Read yesterday’s press release (https://lnkd.in/dyy6F_23) and reports from the The Wall Street Journal (https://lnkd.in/dtHhHKaR) and TechCrunch (https://lnkd.in/dpxK6xjJ). 👉 Find the full Bloomberg interview here: https://lnkd.in/dFNkfnQp

Stellaris is to stellarators what ARC has been to tokamaks. For his piece in today's The Wall Street Journal, Yusuf Khan interviewed Dennis Whyte, professor at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT - a key figure of the field who inspired me and my co-founder Lucio M. Milanese during our PhDs at MIT. "Whyte said the paper published on Wednesday marks the biggest development in fusion technology since the tokamaks breakthrough a decade ago, when a team from MIT showed for the first time how a commercial fusion plant could be built." Congrats to the Proxima Fusion team led by my co-founder Jorrit Lion and to all our partners at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, without whom this work would have not been possible. The entire Proxima team is especially grateful to Per Helander, Frank Jenko, Gabriel Plunk, Alan Goodman, Bob Davies, Michael Drevlak, Joachim Geiger, Sophia Henneberg, Heinrich Laqua, Alejandro Bañón Navarro, Alessandro Di Siena, Torsten Stange, Felix Wilms, Pavlos Xanthopoulos. Many thanks also to Francisco A. Hernández González and John Jelonnek of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Rogerio Jorge of University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Eduardo Neto of Instituto Superior Técnico. Read about Stellaris in today's WSJ: https://lnkd.in/dtHhHKaR

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐬: 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚'𝐬 𝐟𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 ⭐ Today, Proxima published our peer-reviewed stellarator power plant concept, Stellaris, in Fusion Engineering and Design. This is the world’s first integrated concept for a commercial fusion power plant designed to operate reliably and continuously. In collaboration with our partners at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), we've built on the record-breaking results of the IPP’s Wendelstein 7-X experiment—the most advanced stellarator prototype in the world—to leverage recent advances in high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets and computational optimization, resulting in a first-of-a-kind stellarator power plant concept that balances physics performance and engineering constraints for power production for the first time. The path to commercial fusion power plants is now open. ➡️ Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eXh5QWaS ✨ Explore our interactive online visualizer: https://lnkd.in/eKHU3Vaq 📖 Read the paper: https://lnkd.in/eKWizEyA

Take a look inside the PSI Paul Scherrer Institut Magnet Lab in Switzerland, where the Proxima magnet team is busy working alongside Bernhard Auchmann’s CHART-MagDev group to bring the next generation of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets to life. This is where the future of HTS magnets for fusion is taking shape.

Stellarators have only recently emerged as a leading contender in the race to commercial fusion, but their economic viability as power plants depends on one critical factor: high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. Here’s a rule of thumb worth remembering: fusion power approximately scales with the magnetic field to the fourth power. That means: ➡️ Double the field = 16x more power ➡️ Triple the field = 81x more power Now imagine quadrupling the field of W7-X… the potential is enormous! That’s why Proxima is developing its own HTS magnets, beginning with our Stellarator Model Coil (SMC): operating at higher fields, temperatures, and current densities than previous superconductors, we can both simplify and power up our magnets compared to previous stellarator designs. Together with our partners at the PSI Paul Scherrer Institut, we’re pushing the limits of HTS magnet technology to unlock the future of stellarators, particle accelerators, and more.

This past week at Visionaries Tomorrow in Paris, Proxima Co-Founder and Head of Engineering Martin Kubie joined Allen Zhao and SirenOpt's Jared O'Leary onstage with Visionaries Club's Thong Le Hoang to talk about how AI is supercharging #deeptech innovation in Europe. Martin explained how simulation-driven engineering is enabling Proxima to design stellarators beyond what was imaginable just a couple years ago. Geometric machine learning allows us to explore new representations of old problems—finding new trade-offs between physics, engineering, and economics to bring fusion to the grid in the 2030s. The road ahead isn’t easy or quick, but the computational tailwinds behind us are enormous.