Austrian SpaceTech startup Tumbleweed has raised €6.9 million, four months after placing Austria’s first commercial satellite in orbit. The company says the seed round was led by PactVC, with participation from Vanagon Ventures, Prototype Capital, EWOR and international investors and angel backers. More than one-third of Tumbleweed’s 25-person team also invested personal funds.
Founded in 2024, Tumbleweed provides modular payload containers, known as Pods, for laboratories, manufacturers and research and development teams seeking to run experiments in orbit. The containers manage power and data, and are delivered pre-certified. Customers send their payload to Tumbleweed and receive data during the mission. Prices start at €15,000, according to the company.
Tumbleweed’s Oasis spacecraft carries and operates the Pods, then returns them to Earth. The company says its customers can ship experiments five times faster and at one-tenth the cost of comparable work conducted through the International Space Station.
The company’s first spacecraft, Oasis Alpha, was built in nine months and launched on July 7, 2026, aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-17 mission. It carried four customers, and the mission had sold out a year before launch, with customers paying upfront.
Tumbleweed plans to use the new capital to fund three missions in 2027, carrying more than 10 customers, and to accelerate work on Oasis Beta. The next-generation orbital platform is scheduled for 2028 and is designed to support larger payloads and return experimental samples to Earth.
Tumbleweed CEO and co-founder Julian Rothenbuchner said the funding would help the company expand access to microgravity for industrial use. The round was described in the source announcement as potentially the largest SpaceTech seed financing in Austria, though that ranking was not independently confirmed there.
Sources: EU-Startups.