Focused Energy, a member of EIC Scaling Club's Clean Fuels & Hydrogen group, has raised $240 million to support the next stage of its laser fusion technology, with backing from investors including Prime Movers Lab and strategic investor RWE. The round comes as the company is changing – founded as a spin-off from TU Darmstadt in 2021, it is now leaving the lab and moving towards industrial development.
That means progressing towards a demonstrator and eventually a first-of-a-kind power plant. It also raises the bar for fundraising.
“When it comes to the later stages of funding, you need more than a bold idea,” Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, says. “You need a credible path to achieve your goals. You need the team, and you need the infrastructure around it.”
For Focused Energy, that path is mapped through a series of milestones covering laser technology, fusion targets, and the infrastructure around them. The company has attracted public funding based on scientific evaluation, published peer-reviewed research, and participates in the US Department of Energy’s milestone programme.
“The milestones help to break down the idea,” Stark-Watzinger says. “It’s no longer an idea. It is a technological route we follow, and the milestones are important for derisking and to see what progress we make.”
Focused Energy has relied on both public and private funding throughout its development.
“We need the public funding, and we need the private funding. They are complementary because we need the public funding to decrease the risk of the technology in the early-stage phase,” Stark-Watzinger says. “And now, with the private money, we can do the scaling.”
The combination is particularly relevant in deep tech, where development cycles are long, infrastructure is expensive, and large funding needs narrow the pool of potential investors. Bringing the two sides together means navigating different expectations, from scientific and strategic considerations on the public side to market evaluation and speed on the private side.
Investors can bring different strengths too. Prime Movers Lab backed Focused Energy early on, while RWE joined as a strategic investor. RWE’s former nuclear power site at Biblis in Germany already has energy infrastructure, a grid connection, and an experienced workforce, giving the relationship value beyond the funding itself.
As Focused Energy moves towards industrial development, the organisation has had to grow alongside the technology.
“It’s no longer just about having the idea; it’s really about the team knowing what to do,” Stark-Watzinger says. “You have to have a strong CEO who understands technology, understands funding, and understands connection to industry. You need somebody who can actually bring the milestones to life.”
That strong CEO mentioned is Thomas Forner, under whose leadership Focused Energy expanded its technology development capabilities and brought in people with experience implementing complex technologies. As the company matures, the emphasis shifts towards delivery and regular progress against its milestones.
The technology itself also has to be communicated to people who may know the sector well without being specialists in every area.
“Investors can’t be experts in all the technologies, so you have to shift your perspective and understand what their needs are,” Stark-Watzinger says. “You have to communicate according to their needs – what they require to build the necessary trust to invest in you.”
Asked what other deep-tech founders should keep in mind when raising capital, Stark-Watzinger’s advice starts with the relationship between long-term ambition and the next concrete step.
“What really helps in fundraising is that ambition also needs prioritisation. You have to have a clear focus,” she says. “Have your ambition, but remain disciplined about the next milestones. Build the right team to show what you can do, choose the capital that matches your journey, and develop strong partnerships that create real progress.”
Those partnerships extend beyond investors. Deep-tech companies also rely on suppliers, industrial partners, scientific institutions and connections with others facing similar challenges – an area where networks such as the EIC Scaling Club can play a role.
“Deep tech is about money, but it’s also about having the industrial side, the supplier, the ecosystem to bring it all together,” Stark-Watzinger says. “Getting the connections, learning from each other, maybe getting advice from time to time – that’s invaluable.”
Europe already has many of the ingredients deep tech needs, Stark-Watzinger says: strong scientific talent, precision industrial capabilities, and public support mechanisms. The challenge is connecting them and helping companies bridge the gap between research, commercialisation, and scale.
That also means looking beyond individual companies and contributing to the wider ecosystem.
For Focused Energy, the latest round provides the resources for the next phase. The work now is to move through that roadmap and turn scientific promise into technology that works at industrial scale.
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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