RENAISSANCE FUSION

Renaissance Fusion, a DeepTech company founded in 2020, is developing solutions to unlock nuclear fusion. Renaissance Fusion focuses on the development of the first commercially viable stellarator reactor (planned within the 2030s) thanks to three key enablers developed internally: wide High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) tapes, simplified manufacturing magnet manufacturing through laser patterning of wide HTS tapes, and Liquid Metal (LM) shield. These three technologies have also their own market and uses in other sectors: small fission reactors (SMRs), medical imaging, energy storage.

This allows Renaissance fusion to be in the unique position to provide key enabling technologies as soon as 2028, while being at the forefront of the development of nuclear fusion thanks to its stellarator. When the latter will be operational, the intrinsic advantages of fusion for clean electricity production will allow Renaissance Fusion to sell stellarators to electricity producers (installation, testing, certification, ready for operation, including training, spare parts, assistance, maintenance, upgrading...).

The company's shareholders initially consisted of the founder, Francesco Volpe, and the first two investors, Damien Paccard & Martin Kupp. In June 2021, an initial (pre-seed) fundraising round is carried out with direct contributions from private investors and via an initial vehicle. In June 2022, several venture capital firms contribute capital in a second 15M€ seed round led by LowerCarbon LLC, followed by Positron Ventures, Norrsken, HCVC, Excellis, Exor Seeds, Unruly Werhouse SRL and two RE Fund I & II vehicles. Finally, in December 2024, the first tranche of the Series A round has been signed with Crédit Mutuel Impact and LowerCarbon Capital, with a capital increase of 32 M€.

The fundraising series have allowed Renaissance Fusion to achieve very important milestones from technical, business, and organizational perspectives:

• Technical: we are the first startup in fusion enabling technologies able to manage thick LM flows under magnetic field through in-house built systems; we have simplified magnets’ design through laser patterning and have been able to reproduce with extremely high precision the magnetic field of gyrotron and an MRI machine; we have designed and built machines for HTS deposition on wide surface, a first time worldwide.
• Business: we were the first EU-based fusion startup, and we aim at becoming the first provider of LM solutions worldwide and first French HTS provider; we have received important endorsement from investors (Crédit Mutuel Impact, LowerCarbon Capital...), collaborators (CEA), and large companies (GE)
• Organization: team high-rate growth (today we are 65+ employees) coming from 20+ different countries; doubled the capacity of our facilities.