China’s NovaFusionX, a nascent nuclear fusion startup based in Shanghai, on Friday announced the completion of its angel round at 500 million yuan ($69.4 million), shortly after its US-based predecessor Helion Energy broke ground on what could become the world’s first commercial fusion power plant.
NovaFusionX, founded in April 2025, said in a statement that its angel round is by far the biggest financing in a privately run nuclear fusion company in China. With the new funding, the startup said it aims to “promote the commercialisation of fusion technology and help lay the foundation for China’s first commercial fusion power plant.”
Its angel round received support from Legend Capital, Lightspeed China Partners, Gaorong Ventures, TH Capital, and Future Capital.
State capital investors, including the Lingang Science and Technology Innovation Investment Fund in Shanghai, and the Social Security Zhongguancun Innovation Fund, which was launched in 2023 by China’s national pension fund with an initial 5 billion yuan ($694.4 million), also invested in the deal.
The sizeable angel investment came shortly after Helion Energy, a Washington-based startup backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s venture capital (VC) arm, started construction on a site for a planned nuclear fusion power plant that will supply power to Microsoft data centres by 2028. The plant is poised to be the world’s first commercial fusion power plant.
In China, investors’ interest in commercial nuclear fusion development is growing, with first movers including HHMAX, Startorus Fusion, and Energy Singularity having received backing from VCs like HongShan (formerly Sequoia Capital China), NIO Capital, MiraclePlus, and LightSilver Capital.
China was only behind the US, with $2.79 billion of total equity investments into China-based nuclear fusion companies in the years from 2010 to July 14, 2025, according to data from industry researcher Fusion Energy Base. US nuclear fusion companies gathered $6.28 billion in total equity investments during the same period.
China’s July launch of a new national fusion energy company, China Fusion Energy, with 15 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) in registered capital, is set to further accelerate the industry’s growth.
Gavin Zhu, a partner of Lightspeed China Partners, said that NovaFusionX follows the same FRC (field-reversed configuration) technical route as Helion, featuring lower-cost, modular fusion generators that allow for flexible integration into various energy systems.
“It [This technical route] can potentially lead to faster commercialisation of nuclear fusion,” said Zhu. He added that NovaFusionX’s innovation will create clean, highly efficient, and sustainable energy solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) data centres.
