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01 Oct 2024
Series B venture backers include Deutsche Telekom, with additional support from European Innovation Council.
Germany-headquartered Marvel Fusion, which is aiming to develop a commercial laser fusion process for energy generation, says it has raised a further €62.8 million in a series B round of venture finance.
The Munich-based company, co-founded in 2019 by CEO Moritz von der Linden, CTO Georg Korn, and others, has a close relationship with Colorado State University (CSU).
It has also collaborated with the French engineering giant Thales on an upgrade to the Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics facility in Romania.
100 J femtosecond lasers
Marvel’s latest financial support comes courtesy of HV Capital and b2venture, alongside existing investors Earlybird Venture Capital, Athos Venture, Primepulse, and Plural Platform.
The German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom also took part, while Marvel says that it has been selected by the European Innovation Council (EIC) to receive a blended finance option of up to €17.5 million through the EIC Accelerator program.
In the July 2024 EIC Accelerator round, Marvel gained support for a project entitled “Commercial Fusion Energy with Short-Pulse High-Intensity Lasers and Nanostructured Fuel Targets”.
Unlike most companies looking to commercialize laser fusion, Marvel’s approach is based around femtosecond pulses, which will be fired at a “nanostructured” fuel to enhance the fusion of protons and boron-11 isotopes.
Through its CSU collaboration the startup is due to build a new $150 million laboratory in Fort Collins, under a public-private partnership supported via the US Department of Energy’s “LaserNetUS” program.
According to reports, that demonstration facility will be based around two 100 Joule lasers, with groundbreaking on site construction scheduled to begin later this month and experiments expected to start in early 2027.
Silicon fuel
The latest funding round means that the firm has now attracted more than €120 million in equity investments, and over €150 million in public funding and cooperation projects since its inception.
“With the funding from our Series B and the commitment from the EIC, we can demonstrate the physics and the technology of our approach to meet powerplant requirements,” said von der Linden.
“In parallel to building our tech demo in Colorado, we can now invest in further innovation of the technology to drive down cost and to optimize performance.”
Gerrit Jurilj, a partner at b2venture, added: “Fusion energy has the potential to provide an abundant, clean, and baseload-capable energy supply without dependency on imports from autocratic regimes."
Speaking to TechCrunch, the CEO highlighted some critical advantages of the fuel that Marvel Fusion plans to use, when compared with the hohlraum targets that featured in the National Ignition Facility’s breakthrough experiments in December 2022.
The Marvel targets are said to be based on silicon nanostructures, meaning that they can manufactured in volume using relatively conventional semiconductor lithography techniques.
If the initial experiments at the CSU facility are a success, the plan is to increase both the number of lasers and their individual energy output inside a larger facility by the end of the decade, with prototypes based around kilojoule sources operating at 10 Hz after that.
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