Sweden’s Novatron Fusion raises €5m seed funding

Stockholm-based Novatron Fusion Group has closed its seed funding with €5 million (US$5.4 million) in a round led by Climentum Capital.

Other investors are Industrifonden and Santander InnoEnergy Climate Fund, along with previous investors KTH Holding and EIT InnoEnergy.

The funding is intended to build pre-commercial prototypes of the company’s technology, towards a path to achieving economically viable fusion energy in the 2030s.

Commenting on the funding support, Peter Roos, CEO of Novatron Fusion Group, said: “This will enable us to further deliver on our mission of transforming the energy landscape and accelerating the transition to a more sustainable future. We are now one step closer to enabling fusion energy at scale.”

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Novatron Fusion Group, founded in 2019, is pursuing an open-field line plasma confinement solution that is claimed to provide the desired stability features lacking in previous plasma confinement designs – and one of the key challenges in delivering fusion energy – and to be conceptually simpler due to the large amount of symmetry.

In essence, it involves the implementation of a concave magnetic field that becomes stronger moving outwards from the centre of the plasma confinement region in the reactor, thereby enabling the stability of the plasma in order to ensure that fusion can occur.

Novatron Fusion states that its magnetic field design guarantees confinement and allows for continuous power production without the need to ramp currents to produce the magnetic fields.

Due to the symmetry, it has low design complexity, which should result in capital and operating cost efficiencies and deliver a competitive cost of energy produced, comparable with wind and solar power.

Moreover, there is the possibility of further cost efficiencies if conventional copper electromagnets can be used instead of the cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets.

Novatron Fusion Group’s lab is housed within the former Alfvén Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which also supports the venture with access to academic research and its international network.