Nuclear Fusion Startup EternaFusion Raises $1.5M Seed Round to Advance Fusion Current-Drive Technology

South Korean nuclear fusion startup EternaFusion has raised roughly $1.49 million (KRW 2.3 billion) in a seed round. Company K Partners, Bluepoint Partners, and Seoul Techno Holdings participated in the round. 

The proceeds will go toward proof-of-concept work and early-stage validation of EternaFusion’s proprietary current-drive technology, called Tokamak Injection.

Nuclear fusion recreates the reaction that powers the sun, offering a path to large-scale, carbon-free electricity generation. But conventional fusion approaches have struggled with a structural bottleneck: they can’t sustain the round-the-clock operation a commercial power plant requires.

EternaFusion is targeting that exact problem. Its Tokamak Injection technology continuously feeds plasma current into a tokamak from an external source, keeping the current stable with high efficiency and enabling the uninterrupted, continuous operation that commercial-scale plants need.

The company plans to apply Tokamak Injection to a spherical tokamak — a configuration well suited to compact reactor design — as the basis for COSMOS, a compact modular fusion reactor designed to run continuously around the clock. EternaFusion is positioning COSMOS as a potential game-changer for the next generation of energy markets.

The founding team comes out of the VEST Lab at Seoul National University, where researchers have built and operated South Korea’s only spherical tokamak experimental device, VEST, since 2011. Because the team designed and ran its own hardware rather than working purely on theoretical research, it brings hands-on experience in generating and interpreting real experimental data — an edge the company points to as it moves toward technical validation.

EternaFusion has been developed since 2024 through a deep-science startup support program run jointly by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT and the Commercializations Promotion Agency for R&D Outcomes (COMPA), which aims to translate advanced scientific capabilities in high-difficulty technology fields into market-ready innovation.

Demand for stable, carbon-free power has been climbing as AI data centers, semiconductor fabs, and electric vehicle adoption drive up electricity consumption. Against that backdrop, the fusion industry itself is shifting quickly from large, government-led research programs toward competition among private startups. Global players such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion Energy have each raised trillions of won in funding, and South Korea’s science ministry is now moving to build out a private-sector-led ecosystem for commercializing fusion power domestically.

“Fusion power is a quintessential deep-science field that needs to be approached from the standpoint of long-term technological sovereignty and energy security, rather than short-term commercial viability,” said Namgi Min, Principal at Bluepoint Partners. “We invested in EternaFusion because, drawing on the only spherical tokamak experimental experience in Korea, the team is tackling continuous operation head-on — the central challenge standing in the way of commercial fusion power.”

“With this investment, we plan to validate our core technology early to build global competitiveness and accelerate our development toward commercializing fusion energy in the 2030s,” said Taekyung Kim, CEO of EternaFusion.