By Lucia Maffei – Reporter, Boston Business Journal
In one of the largest venture-capital rounds of the year, Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $863 million from old and new investors including NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm.
The Massachusetts-based company, also known as CFS, said Wednesday that the new round brings the total capital raised to date to almost $3 billion.
CFS did not share its current valuation. The B2 round, which had a target of $800 million, has no lead investor and comes about four years after CFS raised a $1.8 billion Series B.
CFS plans to use the money to complete its fusion demonstration machine based in Devens, called SPARC. It will also use the money to make progress developing its first ARC power plant in Virginia, which seeks to sell energy obtained through nuclear fusion.
The B2 fundraise’s approach “is similar to how we handled our Series A and A2 rounds,” CFS explained.
“The Series A funded our magnet prototype work, while the Series A2 round let us start tackling SPARC,” CFS said. “Likewise, our Series B funded SPARC, while the B2 investment helps us start devoting resources to ARC.”
News of the fundraise came about two months after existing investor Google committed to buy 200MW from the ARC power plant, which is slated to deliver its first energy amounts to the grid in the early 2030s.
At a press briefing Wednesday, CEO Bob Mumgaard said that the new influx of funding doesn’t change the timeline for ARC to deliver energy.
Mumgaard was also asked about the possibility of an IPO.
“We can still do this in the private markets, and that allows flexibility, and also allows us to bring along stakeholders,” he said at the briefing. “It’s pretty clear that someday a company like CFS — a big fusion company — probably has to be public, but we’re not, at this juncture, really spending time on that.”
New investors in CFS include Brevan Howard, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley) and NVentures. A consortium of 12 Japanese companies led by Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and Mitsubishi Corporation also participated.
Returning investors included Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Emerson Collective, Eni, Future Ventures, Gates Frontier, Google, Khosla Ventures and Tiger Global.
The company didn’t say how many people it plans to hire following the round. Its overall Bay State campus in Devens spans almost 60 acres of land, with between 600 and 800 workers in on a given day; the company employs around 1,000 staffers.