Munich, Germany, June 1, 2026 – Proxima Fusion today announced that Sergei Galperin has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer.  

Sergei spent more than fifteen years at J.P. Morgan, rising to European Head of Financial Technology Advisory, where he led strategic and capital markets transactions for some of Europe's fastest-growing companies. He subsequently moved from advisor to operator as Chief Financial Officer of Alan, scaling the company through successive funding rounds and building the financial infrastructure to support its expansion across Europe and into Canada. Most recently at the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Ribbit Capital, he backed founders across the same European growth ecosystem he had helped nurture.

At Proxima Fusion, Sergei will lead the company's financial strategy as it advances toward commercial fusion. This includes scaling Proxima's capital base to deliver on the company's roadmap: the Stellarator Model Coil (SMC), which will de-risk high-temperature superconducting (HTS) technology for stellarators in 2027, and Alpha, the demonstration stellarator that will achieve net fusion energy gain in steady-state for the first time in the early 2030s – paving the way for the world's first stellarator fusion power plant, Stellaris, in the late 2030s.

"To build the world's first commercial fusion power plants, we need not only scientific and engineering excellence, but the financial strategy and discipline to scale an industrial enterprise at the frontier of energy," said Proxima Co-Founder and CEO Francesco Sciortino. "Sergei will help us build a great technology company – in the 2020s, not in some distant future. He brings a rare full-spectrum perspective, having advised the world's leading financial institutions, helped scale a European technology company as CFO, and most recently backed founders as an investor. That combination is exactly what Proxima needs. We're delighted to welcome him to the team!"

"The next decade belongs to fusion,” said Sergei. “The science has caught up, the technology is closer than ever, and Proxima is the company turning it into a commercial enterprise in Europe. Scalable and reliable clean energy is the defining problem of our time, and fusion is how we tackle it."

About Proxima Fusion
Proxima Fusion spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in 2023 to build fusion power plants using QI-HTS stellarators. Proxima has since assembled a world-class team of engineers, scientists and operators from leading companies and institutions, such as the IPP, MIT, Harvard, SpaceX, Tesla, and McLaren. By taking a simulation-driven approach to engineering that leverages advanced computing and high-temperature superconductors to build on the groundbreaking results of the IPP’s W7-X stellarator, Proxima is leading Europe into a fusion-powered future.