Munich-based Marvel Fusion says it has raised a further €62.8m ($70m) in a series B round of venture finance. The company cofounded in 2019 by CEO Moritz von der Linden, CTO Georg Korn, and others, has a close links with Colorado State University (CSU). It has also collaborated with the France’s Thales on an upgrade to the Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics facility in Romania.
Marvel’s inertial confinement fusion approach is based around femtosecond pulses, which will be fired at a “nanostructured” fuel to enhance the fusion of protons and boron-11 isotopes. The startup is looking to build a demonstration facility in collaboration with CSU, where it hopes two 100-Joule lasers will prove its core technology. Construction is expected to start on 16 October to be operational by early 2027.
The lasers will fire in the femtosecond range, one-billionth of second, bombarding a nanostructured target with photons that blast away its electrons and scatter the remaining positively charged ions. Those ions will then hit Marvel’s fuel, igniting a fusion reaction. Marvel Fusion is using a mix of mainly hydrogen and boron but is keeping its options.
Marvel’s latest financial support comes from HV Capital and b2venture, alongside existing investors Earlybird Venture Capital, Athos Venture, Primepulse, and Plural Platform. German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom also took part. Marvel says that it has also been selected by the European Innovation Council (EIC) to receive a blended finance option of up to €17.5m through the EIC Accelerator programme.
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 later prototypes based around kilojoule sources operating at 10 Hz.
