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Helion’s facility in Everett, Wash. (Helion Photo)
Helion Energy announced a $425 million funding round that will help the Seattle-area fusion company chase the “Holy Grail” of clean energy.
The company’s new investors include SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners and an unnamed university endowment. Sam Altman — OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, as well as Helion’s longtime board chair and a past investor — also participated in the round with others.
Helion’s valuation topped $5.4 billion with the latest funding round. The company has raised more than $1 billion to date.
Founded in 2013, Helion is part of the increasingly buzzy fusion sector that’s garnering attention as tech companies seek new ways to fuel data centers powering AI services and applications. Fusion is desirable because it is an essentially limitless source of carbon-free power waiting to be unlocked.
“We’re really excited for what we’re building,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley. “This round is a testament to the progress we’ve made, all the hardware we’ve built, and the milestones we’ve hit. And so we’re excited to keep going, to be building in the Pacific Northwest, to be building in America.”
OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle made headlines this month for a partnership called Stargate that plans to invest $500 billion in the construction of AI infrastructure — including new power plants. President Trump last week met with leaders of the effort, which got its start last year.
There have also been rumors that Helion and OpenAI are working on a deal in which the AI company “would buy vast quantities of electricity to provide power for data centers,” according to Wall Street Journal reporting from June.
Kirtley on Monday said he didn’t have “any new customer announcements.”
But, he added, “when we founded the company, it was to build generators that provide base-load, always-on clean power, which is for things like data centers.”
Progress and targets
Helion’s Polaris device, its seventh-generation fusion prototype. (Helion Photo)
Helion is one of more than 45 companies internationally that are pursuing fusion — a highly sought after and long elusive source of power that is created by smashing together light atoms.
The fusion field has notched significant scientific achievements in recent years, with physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory repeatedly achieving fusion ignition, which is when a fusion reaction releases more energy than went into it.
But there are still giant technical hurdles to overcome before fusion power is commercialized. Critics say Helion is too secretive about its progress to give a sense of future success. Skeptics predict it will be decades before anyone’s fusion reactor plugs into the electrical grid.
Helion’s team is much more optimistic.
At its Everett, Wash., facility, the company is building its seventh fusion prototype, a reactor called Polaris. The device began operating last year and has created the plasmas that are essential to producing fusion. The team will keep amping up the power flowing into the device to trigger fusion reactions. The company ultimately expects to capture electricity from Polaris.
At the same time, Helion is working on a project to build what it hopes will be the world’s first commercial fusion reactor.
In May 2023, Helion and Microsoft announced a groundbreaking agreement in which the Redmond, Wash., tech giant agreed to buy electricity from a facility that Helion is planning to build and get running by 2028. Kirtley said Helion is looking at multiple locations in Washington for the facility — including Eastern Washington’s Chelan County — but has not settled on a spot.
Helion also has an agreement with Nucor to build a fusion reactor to power a steel-making facility owned by the industrial manufacturer. The goal is to start operations by 2030.
More cash, more development
Helion CEO David Kirtley, left, with Gov. Jay Inslee at Helion’s facility during a July 2024 tour. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler)
Helion will use much of the new funding to ramp up its internal supply chain operations, which will speed its ability to build fusion devices.
“As we built Polaris, we saw some of the things that took a long time to get — literally supply chain [items], getting parts in the door,” Kirtley said.
So Helion is expanding its ability to build the capacitors that power its reactors. It’s starting to manufacture high-powered magnets used to contain fusion reactions. And it’s bolstering its research and development on semiconductors specially designed for its purposes.
The company hired about 125 employees last year and has grown to about 450 workers. Kirtley expects to add an additional 100 employees this year.
But even with Helion’s impressive funding, two U.S.-based fusion competitors have netted more cash.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which spun out of MIT, has raised more than $2 billion from investors, while California’s TAE has landed more than $1.3 billion.
Zap Energy, another Seattle-area company located just minutes from Helion’s site, has raised $330 million to fund its fusion operations, with a $130 million round disclosed in federal filings in July.
In addition to its three new investors and Altman, existing investors Mithril Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dustin Moskovitz through Good Ventures Foundation, and Nucor all participated in Helion’s Series F round.
Sam Altman previously invested $350 million in the company. He became the board chair in 2015 — just two years after Helion launched and shortly after Altman recruited the company to participate in the Y Combinator accelerator, which he was leading at the time.
Particularly back in Helion’s early days “Sam’s focus is on hyper growth,” Kirtley said. “Sam has always pushed us, how do we grow faster? How do we test more? And how do we stay focused?”
“That’s the constant drumbeat that I hear that I think aligns with a lot of Sam’s other missions,” he added. “How do we go fast and get the world a product that it needs?”
