Seattle – November 11, 2021– Cooley advised Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, on its $500 million Series E financing round, which also includes an opportunity for an additional $1.7 billion tied to Helion reaching key performance milestones. Lawyers Sonya Erickson, Colleen Badgley, Ashley Brown, Justine Chiu and Jasjit Grewal led the Cooley team advising Helion.
Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, led the round. Existing investors, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital and notable sustainable tech investor Capricorn Investment Group, also participated in the round. Helion will use the new funding to commercialize fusion energy.
"By focusing on getting to electricity as soon as possible, we should be able to count on fusion as part of the natural conversation we're having about climate change and about carbon free electricity generation," David Kirtley, co-founder and CEO of Helion, said in a news release. "We're really excited we've secured this funding, and the amount we raised should be able to get us all the way there."
Based in Everett, Washington, Helion's mission is to build the world's first commercial fusion powerplant. The company is scaling up its latest plasma accelerator prototype to make its vision of a world with clean, reliable and affordable energy a reality.