Helion, a 12 -year -old startup supported by Sam Altoman, Peter Tiel, and Lead Hoffman, invades himself among the heavyweights of Silicon Valley, who is eager to release the commercial possibilities of nuclear fusion energy I did. The ambitious promise has attracted a deep investor and raised concerns among nuclear experts who pay attention to the company’s aggressive timelines.
The startup announced today that the Helion has been evaluated as $ 5.4 billion from the 420 million dollar series F financing round. David Kirtley, a co -founder and CEO of the company, stated that huge capital is the key to promoting its mission. “This will accelerate the construction of the world’s first fusion plant, and then all our plants will come,” he said.
Nuclear fusion technologies that use the energy generated when the two atoms bind and form a larger thing have not yet been commercialized. Helion believes that it can reach this milestone within the next three years, but other fusion companies have proposed a 10 -year timeline. Scientists are not optimistic. “I think 10 years are very ambitious,” said Sascia Maldi Juk, a physics professor at William & Mary University.
Helion has attracted a considerable amount of attention of the people mainly for the involvement of Altoman. In 2021, Openai CEO invested $ 375 million in the company. This is the largest personal investment so far. In a blog post at the time, Altman explained Helion as “the most promising approach to the fusion I have ever seen.”
Two years later, Helion announced a power purchase agreement with Microsoft (MSFT), the largest supporter of Openai, with the aim of starting to supply power to the Big Tech giant by 2028. 。
Helion’s latest financing rounds have seen the participation from repeated investors, such as Altman himself and Facebook’s co -founder Dustin Muskovitz. The new participants included the LightSpeed Venture Partners and the Vision 2 Fund of SoftBank (SFTBF). “I’m very excited about this funding,” Kirtley said, and the capital injection was useful for Helion to build a capacitor, magnet, and semiconductor. Such a device is the key to Helion’s Polaris Reactor, the 7th generation prototype of the company, which is the center of fusion energy dreams.
How real is Helion’s promise?
Helion’s lofty promise has been filled with skepticism from the science community. “They do not share information, do not disclose information, do not provide data, do not share scientific progress,” said Mordijck, saying that such a secret was really challenging where to evaluate it. Are they developing the system?
However, the excitement of nuclear fusion has at least financially recorded. According to the Fusion Industry Association report, investors provide a huge amount of clean energy in the possibility of nuclear fusion and provide a total of $ 7.1 billion of nuclear fusion companies as of last summer. Year.
Despite the optimism surrounding today’s fields, scientists warn that there are narrow boundaries between depriving enthusiasm and managing expectations. “You should have a lot of responsibility when you give the date,” said MordiJCK. “I am worried that it is not only Helion when all of these companies promise a specific date and promise that these dates are not satisfied.
