Why we invested in Proxima Fusion

Under our “BPI Breakthrough” strategy, we spend our time looking for the companies that will define the next decade of European technology. Very few carry the weight that Proxima Fusion does.

As AI reshapes the economy, energy is becoming the binding constraint on everything built on top of compute. Every model trained and every industry rebuilt on it resolves to the same question: where does the power come from, and is there enough of it. Our investment in Proxima is a bet that the answer, over the coming decades, is fusion, and that the company to industrialise it can be built here in Europe.

The market: energy is the new constraint

Data centres already draw more electricity than many countries, and the curve is steepening. Electricity output has long been the clearest proxy for industrial capacity, and access to firm, abundant power is once again becoming a determinant of which economies lead and which fall behind. Renewables are essential, but on their own they cannot carry a load that is set to more than quadruple in the decades ahead.

Fusion is one of the few technologies that can change that equation: clean, high-density power that runs continuously and can be delivered where it is needed, on existing grid infrastructure. The company that industrialises it will not only win a share of a multi-trillion-euro power market. It will help underwrite the next century of economic growth. That conviction is why we invested.

Why stellarators

Magnetic confinement fusion has two main architectures: tokamaks and stellarators. Tokamaks are easier to design and build, but they rely on a strong induced plasma current that makes steady, continuous operation harder to achieve. Stellarators are current-free, inherently more stable, and for that reason widely considered the more promising path to a commercial power plant that has to run around the clock.

Proxima builds quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, an approach grounded in real experimental validation. The Wendelstein 7-X experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics established the credibility of QI stellarators as candidate power plants. In early 2025 Proxima published Stellaris, the first peer-reviewed integrated design for a commercial stellarator power plant. The remaining hurdles are largely engineering problems, not open questions in physics. For an investor, that distinction is everything.

A team that builds

We first met Francesco Sciortino and the founding team early in the company’s life during their time at UnternehmerTUM and have followed them closely ever since, including hosting Francesco on stage at various DLD events. We came away from every conversation with the same impression: this is a group that has what it takes to overcome the engineering challenges associated with their mission.

Proxima was conceived from the outset as an engineering company aimed at commercial power, not a research project hoping to become one. As the first spin-out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, it has grown to around 200 people across Munich, Zurich, and Oxford in under three years, and has moved from concept to a concrete industrial roadmap on a timeline that is hard not to be excited about. The rare combination here is scientific depth paired with genuine industrial execution.