German laser company Marvel Fusion recently raised 62.8 million euros in funding

Recently, Marvel Fusion, a private German company dedicated to commercializing fusion energy through its own laser technology, announced that it has recently raised 62.8 million euros in Series B funding. This round of investors includes HV Capital, b2venture, Earlybird Venture Capital, Athos Venture, Primepulse, Plural Platform, and Deutsche Telekom. Meanwhile, Marvel Fusion has also received additional support from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and will receive up to € 17.5 million in mixed financing options through the EIC Accelerator program.

As of now, Marvel Fusion has attracted over 120 million euros in equity investment, as well as over 150 million euros in public funds and collaborative projects.

Marvel Fusion is located in Munich, Germany and focuses on developing commercial laser fusion processes for power generation. It was co founded by CEO Moritz von der Linden, CTO Georg Korn, and others in 2019. Marvel Fusion and Colorado State University (CSU) are in a partnership to build a new $150 million laboratory in Fort Collins, supported by a public-private partnership under the US Department of Energy's LaserNetUS program.

In addition, the company is also partnering with French engineering giant Thales in 2022 to upgrade Romania's laser infrastructure - nuclear physics facilities.

As early as July this year, Marvel Fusion received support for a project called "Utilizing Short Pulse High Intensity Laser and Nanostructured Fuel Targets to Achieve Commercial Fusion Energy". Unlike most companies on the market seeking to commercialize laser fusion, Marvel Fusion's approach is based on femtosecond laser pulses. According to foreign media reports, the demonstration facility will be based on two 100J femtosecond lasers, and the on-site foundation construction is scheduled to begin later this month. The experiment is expected to start in early 2027.

In addition, the CEO of Marvel Fusion stated that the fuel the company plans to use has some key advantages over the black cavity target used in the national ignition breakthrough experiment in December 2022. It is reported that the Marvel Fusion targets are based on silicon nanostructures, which means they can be mass-produced using relatively traditional semiconductor lithography techniques.

If the initial experiments at Colorado State University facilities are successful, the plan is to increase the number of lasers and their individual energy output in a larger facility over the next decade, followed by the development of a prototype of a kilojoule light source operating at a frequency of 10Hz.

Source: OFweek