Renaissance Fusion: How to Raise €300M When Your Product Won’t Exist for 15 Years

Renaissance Fusion: How to Raise €300M When Your Product Won’t Exist for 15 Years

Venture capital operates on a simple premise: fund companies that can return capital within 7-10 years. Francesco Volpe broke that rule and raised over €300 million anyway.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Francesco Volpe, Founder of Renaissance Fusion, explained how he convinced investors to fund a nuclear fusion company that won’t deliver its core product until 2040. His approach reveals a fundraising playbook that inverts conventional wisdom about deep tech investment.

The Fundamental Mismatch

Most founders worry about demonstrating product-market fit within 18 months. Francesco faces a different challenge entirely: his product won’t exist for 15 years, and meaningful revenue won’t materialize until possibly 2035 or later.

“It’s really hard to scale revenues in like a fusion company when your core product is going to be selling electricity, probably starting like in 2040 or something,” Francesco explains. This creates an acute mismatch with traditional venture fund structures, which expect portfolio companies to exit or generate significant returns within a decade.

For Renaissance Fusion, this means the entire fundraising strategy must be rebuilt from first principles. You can’t just find better investors; you need fundamentally different investors.

The Investor Filter

Francesco’s first insight: investor qualification matters more than investor acquisition. While most founders focus on getting meetings and perfecting pitches, Francesco focuses on disqualifying investors before they waste anyone’s time.

“You have to target those kinds of investors that are able to hold that kind of long term risk, that understand the reason why we’re going to need that much time and money, and to understand the reasons why we have to invest so much upfront before we actually reach revenues,” he says.

This isn’t about finding rich investors or famous venture firms. It’s about finding investors whose fund structure, LP commitments, and portfolio strategy can accommodate a 15-year hold period. That eliminates the vast majority of traditional venture capital.

Francesco looks for specific investor characteristics. First, financial capacity to participate in multiple subsequent rounds: “We definitely want investors that are going to be able to reinvest in subsequent rounds and not have kind of like a very short timeline to exit.”

Second, genuine interest in the technology and mission, not just financial returns: “And that especially for the early stages, actually care about the technology and the problem that we’re trying to solve, and not purely just, you know, returns on investments.”

This creates a highly selective fundraising process. Renaissance Fusion doesn’t spray pitch decks across Sand Hill Road. They identify a small universe of qualified investors and invest months building relationships with each one.

Reframing the Industry Narrative

Nuclear fusion faces a credibility problem that makes fundraising even harder. As Francesco notes: “Fusion has been 30 years away for 70 years now. And so a lot of people are very skeptical that any fusion company will actually reach the goal of producing electricity.”

Rather than fight this skepticism head-on, Francesco observed a crucial market shift: “I think at this point, the private sector has kind of understood that fusion works and we’re going to get there. The question is going to be who and when.”

This shift transforms the fundraising conversation. Renaissance Fusion isn’t selling investors on whether fusion is possible—that battle has been largely won among sophisticated deep tech investors. They’re selling on why Renaissance Fusion will be the company that delivers it first.

This repositioning allowed Francesco to shift conversations from defending fusion science to discussing team capabilities, technical approach, and execution milestones. It’s the difference between selling a category and competing within an established category.

The Transparency Strategy

Most deep tech companies operate in stealth mode, protecting their intellectual property and avoiding scrutiny. Renaissance Fusion took the opposite approach: radical transparency about their technology, timeline, and challenges.

“We try to be as transparent as possible. We publish a lot. Our scientists are very eager, obviously, to publish stuff. And we try to do that not only in scientific circles, but also in the general media,” Francesco explains.

This transparency serves multiple fundraising purposes. It allows sophisticated investors to conduct thorough technical diligence, building confidence that Renaissance Fusion’s approach is scientifically sound. It differentiates Renaissance Fusion from fusion companies that make unrealistic promises about near-term commercialization. And it demonstrates intellectual honesty about the challenges ahead.

Francesco extends this transparency to revenue projections: “We might reach revenues by 2030. And, you know, probably really scale up in the 2035, 2040 timeframe.” This honesty prevents the classic startup trap of overpromising timelines to close funding rounds, then missing milestones and losing investor confidence.

Managing the Capital Deployment Timeline

Raising over €300 million requires more than just finding patient capital. It requires a clear story about how that capital will be deployed over 15 years and what milestones will validate continued investment.

Renaissance Fusion’s funding has come from multiple sources, including the European Innovation Council and institutional investors focused on climate technology and deep tech. This diversification across funding sources reduces dependency on any single investor or funding mechanism.

The company has scaled to over 230 people, building capabilities across physics, engineering, and operations. This rapid team growth demonstrates to investors that Renaissance Fusion is executing against their technical roadmap, even though commercial products remain years away.

Each funding round must advance Renaissance Fusion closer to technical proof points that validate the underlying science and engineering. These milestones—demonstrating key technologies, building prototype systems, validating plasma performance—serve as progress markers for investors who won’t see revenue for years.

The Alternative Revenue Problem

Every deep tech founder faces pressure to generate early revenue that validates market demand and reduces funding dependency. Francesco is realistic about the limitations for fusion companies.

The company explored selling components or engineering services to other fusion companies, but Francesco acknowledges the challenges: “It’s really hard, especially now that most fusion companies are also facing some difficulties fundraising. It’s difficult also to sell very expensive items to them.”

This honesty prevents Renaissance Fusion from building unrealistic bridge revenue projections into their financial models. Many deep tech companies fail because they promise early revenue that never materializes, burning through runway on sales efforts with low probability of success.

Instead, Renaissance Fusion accepts that they’re building a company that will require sustained external funding until commercial operations begin. This acceptance allows them to focus resources on technical execution rather than chasing low-probability revenue opportunities.

The Deep Tech Fundraising Playbook

Francesco’s approach reveals core principles for raising capital for extreme long-horizon ventures. Qualify investors ruthlessly by fund structure and time horizon, not just by check size or brand. Reframe category-level skepticism by identifying market belief shifts. Use radical transparency to build credibility and differentiate from overpromising competitors. Set realistic revenue expectations that prevent milestone misses and investor disappointment. Accept that some business models require sustained external funding until commercial operations.

These principles won’t help you raise a seed round for a SaaS product. But if you’re building technology that could take a decade or more to commercialize, they provide a roadmap for finding and securing patient capital.

As Francesco frames the opportunity: “I think climate change is definitely the defining challenge of our generation. And probably, I would say the technology that is going to be able to solve that is going to be fusion.”

For founders tackling challenges at that scale, the fundraising timeline is a feature, not a bug.