In February 2026, the European Commission committed €330 million to fusion energy through the Euratom 2026 to 2027 Work Programme, with €222 million allocated specifically to advancing fusion from laboratories to the power grid. That same month, two of Europe's most ambitious fusion energy startups in 2026 were securing agreements that signal the continent's industrial ambitions are no longer hypothetical. The announcements arrived within weeks of each other. That is not a coincidence.

Private capital has been building toward this moment for several years. Since 2021, more than $7 billion in private investment has flowed into fusion globally, across 53 companies now active in the space. European companies hold a disproportionately small share of that total: less than 5% of global private fusion funding, or roughly €712 million across eight companies, according to ScienceBusiness.

That gap is significant. Europe's response, in capital, policy, and industrial coalition-building, is accelerating.

No question: fusion will happen. The real question is who will build it first, and whether Europe will be a maker or a buyer of that future.

Two Munich-based companies are placing the most ambitious European bets in 2026. Their approaches could not be more different. Understanding those differences is understanding what the next decade of fusion investment actually means for the European energy sector.

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The Stellarator Bet: Why One Path to Fusion Is Harder, and Why That Matters

Every fusion reactor must solve the same core problem: how do you confine a plasma hot enough to fuse atomic nuclei, over 100 million degrees Celsius, long enough for it to produce more energy than you put in?

The dominant answer since the 1950s has been the tokamak. A tokamak uses two types of magnetic fields simultaneously: fields generated by external coils, and a field generated by a strong electric current running through the plasma itself. That current is essential; it helps shape and stabilise the plasma. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the €20 billion international megaproject under construction in Cadarache, France, is a tokamak.

A stellarator takes a different route entirely. It uses only external coils, with no plasma current at all. Those coils are twisted into complex three-dimensional geometries that provide all the necessary confinement on their own. The absence of plasma current is the key differentiator: it is the source of the instabilities, known as disruptions, that can suddenly terminate a tokamak experiment and release enormous energy onto the reactor wall in milliseconds.

Stellarators are disruption-free by design. They also run continuously; tokamaks must periodically re-establish their plasma current.

The trade-off is engineering complexity. Those twisted coil geometries are extraordinarily difficult to design and manufacture. For decades, the consensus held that the geometry problem made stellarators impractical at commercial scale.

Two things have changed that calculus. First, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics completed Wendelstein 7-X in Greifswald in 2015, the world's largest stellarator, demonstrating steady-state plasma operation in 2016 and 2018. Second, computational design tools including AI-assisted coil optimisation have made it possible to find geometries that are not only physically correct but actually manufacturable.

This is the stellarator bet. If you can solve the geometry problem, you get a reactor that is more stable, more continuous, and less prone to catastrophic failure modes than a tokamak. Proxima Fusion is built on the conviction that the geometry problem is now solved. That confidence is relevant context for anyone tracking Europe's energy resilience startups across the transition.

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Proxima Fusion: Munich's Stellarator Pioneer

Proxima Fusion | Munich, Germany

Francesco Sciortino did not build Proxima Fusion in a vacuum. The company emerged as a spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, specifically from the team behind Wendelstein 7-X, giving it a direct scientific lineage that most fusion startups can only claim as an aspiration. Sciortino, Co-Founder and CEO, is speaking at Deep Tech Momentum 2026 this May in Berlin.

The technology is a specific variant called the quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarator. QI stellarators are optimised for particle confinement: they minimise the energy losses that occur when charged particles drift out of the magnetic field. Where Wendelstein 7-X demonstrated the stellarator concept at research scale, Proxima is engineering it for commercial power production.

On 26 February 2026, Proxima signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Free State of Bavaria, RWE, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. The agreement outlines a two-stage roadmap: first the Alpha demonstrator, a net-energy-gain stellarator to be built in Garching near the Max Planck IPP campus, targeting operational status in the early 2030s; second, Stellaris, the world's first commercial stellarator fusion power plant, planned for the site of a former RWE nuclear fission facility in Gundremmingen.

Bavaria has indicated a potential state contribution of up to €400 million. Proxima plans to finance approximately 20% of total project costs through private international investors. Alpha alone requires €2 billion. That figure reflects the scale of industrial ambition, not a research grant.

The Alpha Alliance, announced simultaneously with the MOU, brings together more than 30 European and international industrial companies to collaborate on Alpha's delivery: from magnet systems and advanced materials to construction and electrical engineering. Proxima plans to build a magnet factory projected to create up to 1,000 jobs, with thousands more projected across construction and supply chains for Alpha and Stellaris combined.

Sciortino's framing is deliberately industrial: "With Alpha in Garching and Stellaris in Gundremmingen, we are, for the first time in Europe, connecting world-class research, privately financed and publicly supported high-tech innovation, and its industrial implementation at a single location."

Proxima raised €200 million in a Series A round. Its total backing now includes the state of Bavaria, one of Germany's largest utilities, the world's leading stellarator research institute, and a growing industrial consortium. For VCs and energy corporates assessing where European fusion capital is concentrating, that coalition is the data point.

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Marvel Fusion: The Laser Alternative from Munich

Marvel Fusion | Munich, Germany

Moritz von der Linden is building a fundamentally different machine. Marvel Fusion, which he founded and leads as CEO, pursues laser-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF): a physics pathway with no tokamaks, no stellarators, and no magnets at all. Von der Linden is also speaking at DTM26, where the energy track brings Europe's fusion founders into the same room.

In inertial confinement fusion, a tiny pellet of fuel is compressed and heated by powerful laser pulses so rapidly that fusion occurs before the plasma has time to expand. The engineering challenge is scale: laser systems powerful enough, efficient enough, and repeatable enough to drive a commercial power plant do not yet exist. Marvel Fusion is building them.

The fuel choice is significant. Where most ICF approaches use deuterium-tritium fuel, Marvel targets a proton-boron cycle, also called aneutronic fusion. Proton-boron fusion produces far fewer neutrons than deuterium-tritium reactions, which means less radiation damage to reactor materials over time and a meaningful reduction in long-term maintenance complexity.

In March 2025, Marvel Fusion extended its Series B round by €50 million, bringing the total round to €113 million. New investors were EQT Ventures, Siemens Energy Ventures, and the European Innovation Council Fund. The EIC Fund investment was its first equity stake in a fusion energy company anywhere in Europe.

Existing investors Tengelmann Ventures and Bayern Kapital contributed again. Total company funding now stands at €385 million: €170 million in private investment and €215 million in public cooperation projects, making Marvel Fusion the best-funded European fusion company.

Capital is funding two parallel tracks. The first: a $150 million laser facility currently under construction at Colorado State University, giving Marvel access to the advanced laser physics community it needs to progress toward commercial laser specifications. The second: an industrial partnership with Siemens Energy to jointly develop the conceptual design for a fully integrated fusion power plant, including heat transfer and power generation systems.

Von der Linden on the EIC investment: "Welcoming the EIC Fund, EQT Ventures and Siemens Energy to our shareholder board gives us the financial and operational backing for executing the required milestones towards building the world's first fusion prototype."

The European Commission has identified fusion as "an industrial challenge with immense potential for Europe's industry, competitiveness, and strategic autonomy." Marvel Fusion's investor list, a mix of European venture capital, industrial energy leadership, and public innovation funding, is the closest thing to that statement made tangible in a cap table.

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Beyond Munich: The Wider European Fusion Field

Munich holds two of Europe's most capitalised fusion companies, but the field is broader. From Grenoble to Oxford, a cluster of European startups is pursuing fusion along distinct technical pathways.

Renaissance Fusion in Grenoble, France, is developing a simplified stellarator design using additively manufactured high-temperature superconducting coils, a manufacturing approach aimed at reducing the cost of building complex geometries. The company has raised over €60 million, including a €32 million Series A from Lowercarbon Capital, HCVC, and Crédit Mutuel Innovation. Located within the ITER industrial cluster, it has direct access to Europe's deepest fusion supply chain.

Tokamak Energy in Oxfordshire, UK, raised $125 million in a Series C in November 2024, co-led by East X Ventures and Lingotto Investment Management. Its platform combines compact spherical tokamak reactor design with high-temperature superconducting magnets, technology with commercial applications in industrial magnet markets beyond fusion.

First Light Fusion, also in Oxford, uses projectile-based inertial fusion: a hypervelocity projectile compresses a fuel target rather than lasers. The company raised £45 million in a Series C in 2022, with a further £10 million convertible note in March 2025. Focused Energy in Darmstadt, Germany, pursues laser-based ICF with a deuterium-tritium fuel cycle, connecting German plasma science with insights from the US National Ignition Facility. Total funding exceeds $175 million.

Five technical pathways across four countries. Five different risk profiles. For energy corporates evaluating fusion partnerships, the diversity is portfolio logic for a technology whose winning approach is not yet decided. The broader picture of European energy corporate strategy after Draghi informs how those positioning decisions are being made.

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Europe's Energy Sovereignty Argument

The case for European fusion investment is not only technological. It is structural.

Fusion fuel is extraordinarily dense and geographically diversified. Deuterium can be extracted from seawater in effectively unlimited quantities. Lithium, needed for breeding tritium, is globally distributed and far less concentrated than oil or gas reserves. If Europe industrialises fusion, it shifts its energy position from resource-dependent to engineering-capability-dependent: that is a fundamental change in strategic autonomy.

European electricity prices rose 43% between 2019 and 2024. The Draghi competitiveness report identified energy costs as a core structural problem undermining the continent's industrial base. Fusion will not solve that problem in the 2020s. But the countries and companies that build the engineering capability now will hold a position in the 2030s and 2040s that no import contract or long-term supply deal can replicate.

The EU's €330 million Euratom commitment and the Bavaria-RWE-Proxima MOU both arrived in February 2026. Policy and industrial coalition-building arrived at the same moment. That is what an inflection point looks like.

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Hear Both Founders at DTM26: European Fusion Energy at Deep Tech Momentum 2026

Francesco Sciortino of Proxima Fusion and Moritz von der Linden of Marvel Fusion are both speaking at the energy track at DTM26. Deep Tech Momentum 2026 takes place on 20 to 21 May 2026 at Wilhelm Studios Berlin, with more than 3,000 attendees including VCs, energy corporates, deep tech founders, and corporate innovation leaders from across Europe.

The energy track is where Europe's fusion investment conversation moves from research paper to conference room. Both founders will be there to take questions, take meetings, and make the case for their respective bets on how Europe gets to commercial fusion first.

If you are making decisions about fusion partnerships, capital allocation, or supply chain positioning for the 2030s, the conversation is in Berlin in May.

Secure your place at DTM26.