Thea Energy, a fusion energy company based in Kearny, New Jersey, raised $100m in a Series B round announced on 27 May 2026. Thomas Tull's US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT) led the round, which the company described as oversubscribed. General Innovation Capital Partners and Linse Capital also took part.
The company's release listed further new investors: Calm Ventures, Climate Capital, Divergent Capital, Emerald Technology Ventures, Gaingels, Idemitsu Kosan, Overlay Capital, Timescale Ventures and Whatif Ventures. Existing investors Alumni Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Mercator Partners, Orion Industrial Ventures, Prelude Ventures and Starlight Ventures also participated. No valuation was disclosed.
“We built Thea Energy to take fusion out of the lab and onto the grid.”Brian Berzin, Co-Founder and CEO, Thea Energy
What Thea Energy does
Thea spun out of Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022 to commercialise the stellarator, a magnetic confinement design for fusion. ESG Today described stellarators as doughnut-shaped devices that hold and heat plasma using magnetic fields.
Earlier stellarators relied on complex three-dimensional magnet coils that were hard and costly to build. Thea instead uses arrays of flat, mass-manufacturable superconducting magnets, which it says moves the complexity into software and controls. It says this makes the system simpler to build, faster to construct and more tolerant of real-world conditions.
The company said it built and operated the world's first superconducting magnet array able to produce the precise fields commercial stellarators need, and de-risked its full-scale planar shaping magnets. These are company claims.
What the money is for
Thea said the funding will expand its magnet manufacturing, including a second facility in Northern New Jersey, and fast-track construction of its integrated fusion system. It will also support the siting and construction of Eos, a large-scale integrated stellarator meant to create power-plant-relevant, steady-state fusion.
A company spokesperson told POWER magazine that Thea is preparing to select a location for Eos later this year and expects to double its team. The company said it is in discussions with more than a dozen power offtakers, hyperscalers and utility partners.
Government milestones and plans
The round follows the US Department of Energy's certification of Thea's preconceptual design for Helios, its planned power plant. Thea said it is the first awardee of the DOE's Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program to receive that certification. It says it is progressing toward starting construction of the first Helios plant before the end of the decade.
The company is also supported by six DOE INFUSE awards and is working with national laboratories, universities and industrial partners.
Investor and founder comments
Co-founder and chief executive Brian Berzin said the company built Thea to take fusion out of the lab and onto the grid, and that its architecture is simpler to manufacture and faster to construct than other approaches.
Gaetano Crupi, managing director at USIT, said Tull wanted USIT to lead the round because he believes the stellarator is the right architecture for commercial fusion. Crupi said the US cannot cede leadership in fusion as energy security and power demand rise.
The reports did not give Thea's total funding, headcount or revenue.
Company website: thea.energy