Proximal, a year-old startup that provides coding data to the labs, has raised at a $300m valuation from General Catalyst. In the last 10 months, it's surpassed $200m in annualized revenue, highlighting the labs' neverending appetite for data:

Google and RWE Back German Nuclear Startup Proxima Fusion at €2.4 Billion Valuation German startup Proxima Fusion has raised €411 million ($469 million) from a range of investors, including national energy firm RWE AG and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, to develop a nuclear fusion plant it hopes will be operational in the 2030s. XTX Ventures, the investment arm from Alex Gerko’s algorithmic trading firm XTX Markets Ltd, led the financing round with London-based firm East X Ventures. The deal gives the three year-old energy firm a valuation of €2.4 billion, Proxima Fusion said on Tuesday. (Bloomberg)

Today, @proximalhq is announcing its $15M seed round led by @generalcatalyst, and @Chemistry is proud to be part of the round. Some founding teams you meet and immediately start rooting for. Proximal is one of those. We back people first, and this team made that easy. @calvinchen had already built and sold a company, and continues to be one of the highest velocity builders we know. @MatternJustus led RL research at Prime Intellect and is well recognized as one of the experts in the space. But what stayed with us was how they work together. They brought research depth, systems chops and product instinct to one founding team, and they moved so fast that the bar went up every time we met. Proximal builds systems that automatically evaluate AI models, find where they fall short, and create the post-training data to fix them. We think closing that loop is one of the last unlocks for models that recursively self-improve, for faster progress across science and engineering, and for enterprises actually putting AI to work. And they're just getting started. Calvin, Justus: we're thrilled to be on this journey with you since day one. At $200M runrate revenue, it's been an incredible 10 months.

Fusion isn't just a science experiment anymore. Francesco Sciortino from @proximafusion saw stellarator reactors overcome their biggest physics hurdles just as real-world tests hit every target. That proof was the signal he and his co-founders needed to launch the company.

The race is on to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant — and one of Europe’s leading contenders in the field has just received a boost. Munich-based Proxima Fusion signed memoranda of understanding with two Japanese industrial partners, Fujikura and Kyoto Fusioneering, in Tokyo on Oct. 28. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — who was visiting in a bid to deepen trade ties — were both in attendance. Read more: