By Lucia Maffei – Technology Reporter, Boston Business Journal
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, or CFS, an MIT spinoff seeking to commercialize fusion energy, said on Wednesday it closed more than $1.8 billion in funding.
The Series B round, possibly one of the largest single rounds of financing raised by a Bay State company this year, was led by Tiger Global Management LLC, which has a reputation as one of the biggest startup investors in the world.
CFS, which spun out of MIT in 2018, works with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center to bring to commercialization what many consider the Holy Grail of renewable energy: fusion, and its promise of clean, limitless energy.
“CFS is entering the next phase of the company where we will prove that fusion can work as a zero-carbon energy source for the first time in history,” CEO Bob Mumgaard wrote in an email to the Business Journal.
He added, “This funding comes from a broad group of investors that have high confidence in CFS’s approach to commercial fusion and our ability to execute on a timeline that will support global efforts to decarbonize.”
The lineup of investors in the round is a who’s who of high-profile tech and energy backers: Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), and Soros Fund Management LLC, the asset management firm founded by George Soros, participated.
Alphabet’s Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Time Ventures, the venture capital firm of Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), and Khosla Ventures also joined the round.
CFS now has 175 employees and plans to double in size by the end of 2022, a company representative said. The company did not disclose its current valuation.
CFS is now constructing what it bills as the world’s first commercially-relevant net fusion machine, called SPARC, in Devens.
“SPARC will be proof of concept that fusion can work as a clean, limitless energy source,” Mumgaard added. “This funding will also allow us to build the systems and capabilities as we shift towards commercialization and the first fusion power plant on the grid,”
Carmichael Roberts, co-chair of the investment Committee at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, another returning investor, said in a statement that the round further validates CFS’s potential.
“When we first started discussions with CFS, we knew that fusion energy had a great deal of technical risk but we quickly recognized that this team and their proposed pathway to commercialization were uniquely suited to solve these challenges,” he wrote.
CFS’s Series B round comes a couple of years after the closing of its $115 million Series A round.