Realta Fusion has secured a $9.5 million growth capital facility from Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, to advance its magnetic mirror fusion technology toward commercialization.
The financing will support continued development and derisking of Realta’s compact, scalable, and modular CoSMo fusion™ energy system. The company is focused on delivering on-site industrial heat and power for applications including data centers, chemical processing, metal recycling, remote mining, and other heavy industrial operations.
Realta’s system is based on the compact magnetic mirror concept, which uses extremely strong magnets to trap superheated hydrogen gas between two ends of a cylindrical chamber. Within the cylinder, hydrogen atoms collide and fuse, releasing carbon-free energy that can be delivered as either heat or electricity.
The company spun out of a large fusion experiment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy. That experiment was the first to use high-temperature superconducting magnets in a magnetic mirror configuration and achieved the first plasma confinement at a magnetic field strength of 17 Tesla.
Realta recently announced a $36 million Series A funding round led by Future Ventures, with additional backing from Khosla Ventures, which led the company’s 2023 seed round.
Silicon Valley Bank provides commercial banking services to companies in the technology, life science, healthcare, private equity, and venture capital sectors. Its parent company, First Citizens BancShares, Inc., is a top 20 U.S. financial institution with more than $200 billion in assets.
KEY QUOTES
“While our approach promises to be a lower capital path to fusion energy than some other concepts, we are still a deep tech company with significant capital needs. This debt financing made available to us by SVB is a powerful tool we can put to good use on the way to safe, clean, and reliable commercial fusion energy.”
Kieran Furlong, CEO and Co-Founder, Realta Fusion
“Realta has the potential to transform energy use across data centers, manufacturing, and other heavy industries. SVB is thrilled to support Realta as it grows and scales its fusion energy platform as a future source of heat and power.”
Dennis Grunt, Managing Director, Technology and Healthcare Banking, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank
