- Shanghai-based startup says investors are backing its bet on deuterium-helium-3 fusion
- The latest investment comes as China accelerates support for commercial fusion and venture capital pours into competing reactor technologies
Nuclear fusion startup SunUp Fusion (东昇聚变) has raised several hundred million yuan in a new funding round led by Huawen Qingneng (华文清能), a zero-carbon venture fund under CMC Capital, alongside several institutional and strategic investors.
The latest follow-on round, announced on July 1, came less than a month after the Shanghai-based firm secured a $100 million pre-Series A round on June 8.
This back-to-back fundraising underscores continued investor confidence in its technological roadmap as China’s private fusion sector attracts increasing amounts of capital.
Founded in July 2025 and headquartered in the Future Valley C8 Innovation Hub, a high-tech park jointly developed by Fudan University and Shanghai’s Yangpu District, SunUp Fusion is developing compact, modular, high-magnetic-field fusion power plants based on deuterium-helium-3 (D-He3) fuel.
Future industry
The company says its engineering and research team is composed of veterans with more than a decade of experience working on large-scale fusion projects.
Fusion has increasingly been viewed as a long-term solution for decarbonizing global energy systems, with the industry shifting from proving scientific feasibility toward engineering commercialization.
China has also elevated fusion as a strategic priority, identifying it as a future growth industry in its 15th Five-Year Plan (2025-2030).
The country’s Atomic Energy Law, which took effect in January 2026, explicitly encourages the development of controlled thermonuclear fusion.
A different bet
Although dozens of fusion startups have emerged in China, most are pursuing deuterium-tritium (D-T) technology. SunUp Fusion says it is the country’s only major startup focused specifically on the D-He3 route.
The company argues that D-He3 fusion produces little to no neutron radiation and avoids the use of tritium, potentially reducing shielding requirements, easing regulatory hurdles and lowering construction costs.
Those characteristics could allow future fusion plants to become more compact, making it easier for them to be deployed closer to cities, industrial parks and data centers.
Founder Xu Min (许敏), a professor of physics at Fudan University, has said the company deliberately chose the D-He3 pathway to complement, rather than compete directly with, China’s mainstream fusion programs.
SunUp Fusion’s technology centers on two key areas: high-temperature superconducting magnets that generate stronger magnetic fields while enabling more compact reactor designs, and AI algorithms that optimize plasma control for longer, more stable operation.
A five-year timeline
Xu has previously said the company aims to generate its first electricity from an experimental small modular reactor within about five years, adding that China is well positioned to achieve that milestone.
Construction of the company’s first-generation experimental device, named HOPE (晨光), or high-field operational plasma experiment, is underway.
Gu Xiaoli (顾晓立), partner at CMC Capital and head of the Huawen Qingneng fund, said the D-He3 approach could significantly lower both regulatory barriers and construction costs while making fusion reactors safer to deploy near urban areas.
“The company’s choice of a neutron-free deuterium-helium-3 technology route has the potential to substantially reduce the regulatory threshold and construction costs for commercial fusion,” Gu said. “It also makes safe deployment near cities feasible, opening up entirely new possibilities for bringing fusion energy to a broad range of industries.”
