Startorus Fusion, a Chinese startup focusing on the commercial application of nuclear fusion power, has secured 1 billion yuan ($143.3 million) in its Series A funding round as it looks to achieve commercial fusion power output in early 2030s.
The Series A round was jointly led by CICC Capital and three government-owned investment firms in Shanghai, including Shanghai STVC Group, Shanghai Future-Oriented Industries Fund, and Shanghai Jiading Technology Investment Group, according to a Monday statement by Startorus Fusion.
A large group of domestic institutional and individual investors participated, such as BOC Asset Management, Morning Star Capital, SummitView Capital, Flyfot Ventures, and Oriza Holdings’ Hua Capital, just to name a few. Shanghai STVC Group’s Intellectual Property Fund, which led Startorus Fusion’s Series pre-Series A round in March 2024, continued to invest in the latest financing.
The fresh capital will allow it to accelerate the construction of its next-generation fusion device, said the startup.
Startorus Fusion was launched in October 2021 by a team of founding members graduated from the Department of Engineering Physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It operates as a commercial fusion company in China, amid growing private and public sector efforts globally in moving beyond scientific experiments to generate clean, abundant electricity for the grid through commercial nuclear fusion power plants.
A shared goal of these commercial fusion companies is to build “an artificial sun,” which is essentially a nuclear fusion reactor designed to mimic the sun’s energy production by fusing light atoms under extreme heat and pressure, aiming to provide virtually limitless, clean energy for power grids.
With a team of over 140 people, Startorus Fusion is currently in the process of designing the next-generation fusion verification device, CTRFR-1, a device that will utilise high-temperature superconducting magnets to confine the plasma and employ magnetic reconnection heating to raise the plasma temperature to 100 million degrees Celsius, achieving fusion conditions and fully verifying Startorus Fusion’s fusion scheme.
It is actively working towards commercial nuclear fusion, with plans to commerce the construction of a commercial demo reactor around 2028 and to showcase commercial fusion power output around 2032, aiming for earlier commercialisation than the typical 2035 targets set by its peers globally.
