Atmos Space Cargo, a German startup building systems to transport assets to space and then return them for use and reuse, has closed a Series A of €25.7 million ($30.2 million).
The system, which includes both hardware and software, is designed to stay in Low Earth Orbit for as little as several hours to as long as several months before autonomously returning to earth. The technology can support research and applications in life sciences and biotechnology, materials development, and military use.
The funding comes on at the same time that Atmos is expanding, opening an office in Poland specifically to hone its defence tech capabilities. In the current geopolitical climate, space has become an increasingly important domain alongside air, land and sea, precisely for the unique capabilities that it affords.
“When you’re in space, you can pretty much reach any place on earth within 60 minutes,” Sebastian Klaus, Atmos’s founder and CEO, said on stage last week at the Resilience Conference in Warsaw. The company has not disclosed the names of customers to date.
Atmos said that the funds will be used in part for continued development of a three vehicle fleet using its current system, the Phoenix 2, for a launch in 2027; launching Atmos Works for government and defence customers; and R&D for the next generation of its system, Phoenix 3.
Balnord and Expansion, VCs with roots in Poland, are co-leading this round with participation also from Keen Defence and Security. Prior to this round, the company had raised around $20 million in seed, pre-seed and grant funding, per data in PitchBook.
Sources tell Resilience Media that the valuation of the company with this round is in the region of €100 million ($117 million).
Atmos spacecraft uses inflatable decelerators that look a little like round rafts. The technology was originally developed by NASA in the US, and it has been refined by the startup for its purposes. Atmos is “the very first company in Europe to use this type of technology,” said Klaus, noting that Atmos has made the tech “more scalable, even more lightweight and therefore more cost efficient than what NASA is doing.”
The material and design of the decelerators are meant to help preserve its payloads during re-entry so that they can be re-used in future.
Atmos is still very much an early-stage startup. The company has to date only had one launch into space — ridesharing on a SpaceX rocket to gather research data to develop its commercial product a year ago.
That launch — almost a year ago to today — was declared a success, although it wasn’t able to fill out the full intent of the mission after SpaceX altered the course of its launch at the last minute, which led to Atmos’s own hardware returning to one ocean instead of another.
The company plans several more launches in the coming years while it also continues to develop further technology. This will include both its own home-grown support for defence applications, which can include strike capacity and other rapid response capabilities. This work is currently on a 2-3 year timeline, Klaus said in Warsaw, adding that what ultimately gets deployed will be a question for defence ministries, not Atmos.
But space development is expensive, highly technical, and in some areas still to be proven viable.
Aleksander Dobrzyniecki, a partner at Balnord, noted that space startups need patient and committed investors as a result.
“It’s very important to have alignment between the founding team and the investor base,” he said on the panel in Warsaw last week.
That complexity also leads a lot of space tech companies to collaborate on solutions, both to bring down their own costs and those of would-be customers. Atmos’s partners have included Space Cargo Unlimited, propulsion specialist ISPTech, and the US company Voyager, whose European division, Voyager Europe, is Atmos’ integration and implementation partner, with Atmos in turn providing its free-flying orbital vehicles to Voyager.
These partnerships also extend to sales, with both companies intending to “mutually refer customers and mission opportunities across their networks.” It’s notable that Voyager is a public US company that has raised money specifically for M&A, to act as a consolidator across the space tech landscape. In Warsaw, Klaus categorically ruled out an acquisition by any American companies and emphasised sovereign European solutions for the space domain.
“It’s extremely important that we develop our own space transportation capabilities,” he said.
Others in this round include the European Innovation Council (EIC) by way of its accelerator programme, OTB Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), APEX Ventures, Seraphim, Faber, E2MC, Kirch Ventures, Lennertz & Co., Mätch VC, MBG Baden-Württemberg, and Tech Horizons.
