Thea Energy lands $20M ARPA-E grant to scale fusion magnet production
What's the deal? Thea Energy has won a $20 million award from the US Department of EnergyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-EDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →) to build the first domestic production line of modular high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. The grant comes through ARPA-E's SCALEUP program, which funds previous awardees to move technologies toward market adoption.
What's the endgame? Thea Energy is commercialising fusion power using a planar coil stellarator architecture. It plans to use roughly 300 planar shaping coils in "Eos," its first large-scale integrated stellarator system, and will spend the money to scale manufacturing and test capabilities.
Why now? Over the past two years, the company developed and validated its HTS magnet technologies, iterating the coils more than 100 times. "We've iterated these coils over a hundred times, finalized the design, and derisked this core technology," said co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Berzin.
The award follows Thea Energy's $100 million Series B raise, an HTS magnet validation campaign, and its "Helios" power plant design review.
By the numbers: Among all-time deep tech grant rounds in the US, this $20 million award ranks in the 95th percentile by size across a sample of 3,964 deals.
ARPA-E selected awardees on technical maturity and commercial scalability, prioritising innovations that strengthen domestic energy supply chains. Thea Energy spun out of Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022; its planar coil technology was developed under ARPA-E's earlier BETHE program.
The signal: "Modular, factory-built magnet components will enable the rapidly growing fusion power industry to create power at unprecedented scale," said Dr. Dave Nye, SCALEUP federal lead. Beyond fusion, Thea Energy says the same magnet technology is aimed at adjacent industries that need compact, high-performance HTS systems — positioning manufacturing scale, not just physics, as the next competitive frontier.
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