17 fusion startups have now raised over $100M each, and the total keeps climbing

The number of fusion startups that have raised more than $100 million has reached 17, according to a TechCrunch tally published Thursday, with total private investment in the sector now exceeding $13 billion. Two of the most recent rounds, Helion Energy’s $465 million raise and Focused Energy’s $240 million Series A, both closed in June 2026.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems leads the pack with roughly $3 billion in total funding and a tokamak reactor called SPARC that the company says is about 75% complete at its facility in Devens, Massachusetts. Behind it sits TAE Technologies at $1.79 billion in pre-merger funding, Helion Energy at $1.5 billion, and Pacific Fusion and Shine Technologies each at around $1 billion.

The scale of capital flowing into fusion has accelerated sharply. The Fusion Industry Association reported that 53 companies raised $2.2 billion in 2025 alone, and cumulative private investment crossed $8 billion that same year. The June 2026 rounds suggest the pace is not slowing down.

Helion’s latest raise, confirmed by BusinessWire, valued the company at $15.5 billion. The Sam Altman-backed startup has a power purchase agreement with Microsoft and says it will deliver electricity by 2028. That timeline would make it the first private fusion company to reach commercial power generation, though fusion timelines have a long history of slipping.

Several of the largest raises come with caveats worth noting. TAE Technologies completed a merger with Trump Media’s technology arm that valued the combined entity at roughly $6 billion, but Trump Media reported less than $2.7 million in revenue during the first nine months of 2025. Pacific Fusion’s roughly $1 billion in funding is structured in milestone-based tranches rather than arriving as a single cheque.

General Fusion, which has raised $612 million, nearly ran out of cash in 2025 before securing additional capital. The funding figures paint an impressive picture, but they do not all represent cash in the bank.

The European contingent is growing fast. Germany’s Focused Energy raised $240 million, combining $400 million in private funding with $200 million in government grants. Proxima Fusion in Munich has raised €185 million, and Marvel Fusion pulled in $162 million.

In the UK, Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion have raised $336 million and $108 million respectively. Europe’s push into fusion reflects a broader strategic bet on energy independence and climate goals.

The fundamental challenge remains unsolved. No private fusion company has demonstrated net energy gain at commercial scale. The US National Ignition Facility achieved scientific breakeven in December 2022, but that measurement compared the energy delivered by lasers to the fuel against the energy released by the fusion reaction, not the total energy consumed by the facility, which was roughly 100 times greater.

CFS has said it expects SPARC to achieve a burning plasma in late 2026 or early 2027, which would be a significant scientific milestone but still far from a commercial power plant. The company’s planned commercial reactor, ARC, is not expected to deliver electricity until the early 2030s at the earliest.

The remaining companies on the $100 million-plus list include Inertia Enterprises at $450 million, Zap Energy at $327 million, Type One Energy at $269 million, Kyoto Fusioneering at $191 million, and Thea Energy at $130 million. Xcimer, which is working on laser-driven inertial confinement fusion, sits at the threshold with exactly $100 million raised.

What separates this generation of fusion ventures from their predecessors is the diversity of technical approaches. CFS and Tokamak Energy use tokamaks, Helion uses a field-reversed configuration, Focused Energy and First Light pursue inertial confinement with lasers or projectiles, and TAE employs a beam-driven field-reversed approach. The variety means the sector is not placing a single bet, but it also means no consensus has emerged on which path will work.

Investors are clearly betting that at least one approach will. The $13 billion in private capital represents a level of conviction that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when fusion was still largely the domain of government-funded research labs. Whether that conviction is vindicated depends on whether any of these companies can move from scientific demonstration to a machine that puts power on the grid at a price utilities will pay.

For now, fusion remains a technology where the engineering breakthroughs are real but the commercial ones are not. The money is there. The physics, at commercial scale, is not, at least not yet.