Industry News

Fund-raising by private startups has skyrocketed this year but Cambridge energy company Commonwealth Fusion Systems just sent the trend into orbit.Commonwealth on Wednesday announced that it had raised $1.8 billion, the largest funding round ever by a Massachusetts company, exceeding the $1.2 billion brought in by Waltham health insurance startup Devoted Health in October.The deal was led by Tiger Global Management and included a who’s who of startup investors, ranging from Bill Gates and John Doerr to Google and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective.

Spun out of MIT in 2018, Commonwealth is at the forefront of a bevy of companies racing to build a fusion reactor, which generates power by joining atoms together, creating pollution-free energy without producing long-term nuclear waste. Rival Helion Energy in Washington state raised $500 million last month, and California-based TAE Technologies raised $280 million in April. Government-backed efforts such as the ITER project in France are also ongoing.