(Bloomberg) -- General Fusion Inc. raised $130 million from investors including billionaire Jeff Bezos to help develop a commercial reactor. 

The Series E funding round included the Business Development Bank of Canada, the hedge fund Segra Capital Management and several family-office investors, the Vancouver-based company said in an emailed statement Tuesday. 

General Fusion is part of a growing wave of technology companies seeking to generate electricity using nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars. The company said in June it would begin construction next year on its first pilot plant, in the U.K.

Conventional nuclear plants use fission, the process of splitting atoms, to generate energy. Fusion is the opposite, capturing energy that’s produced when atoms slam together and fuse into heavier elements. 

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