Tumbleweed has secured €6.9M in seed funding for a service that flies experiments into orbit for universities, hospitals and companies that do not have spacecraft of their own. PactVC led the round, and Vanagon Ventures, early backer Prototype Capital, EWOR and a group of international angel investors also took part. The round has been reported as the largest seed investment in Austrian spacetech, and the startup has not yet said how it will spend the money.
Chief executive Julian Rothenbuchner founded Tumbleweed in 2024 with Leonhard Goliasch and Guillaume Brault, and the company now has 25 staff across Vienna and Delft in the Netherlands, more than a third of whom have invested their own money in the business. Rothenbuchner has worked on space projects since the age of 16, when he and two friends designed a low-cost, wind-driven Mars rover that won a space competition and funding from the European Space Agency.
“The traditional funding routes were simply too slow for the pace at which I wanted to build,” he said.
Pods Built For Orbit
Tumbleweed sells modular lab containers it calls Pods. Each Pod comes already certified for spaceflight and supplies the power, data links and basic hardware an experiment needs, and the company describes the Pods as fault-isolated. Customers install and test their equipment at their own sites, then hand the Pod to Tumbleweed for launch.
The Pods then fly on Oasis, a platform Tumbleweed operates that orbits Earth on its own rather than docking with a space station. Researchers can watch and control their experiments from the ground, much as they would manage a remote computer server. Tumbleweed’s standard package costs €15,000 and covers the Pod, development support, launch and operations, with lead times of two to three months. Organisations with no space experience usually pay about €30,000 and reach orbit within three to four months, according to the company.
Early customers have used the Pods for materials science, protein production and two kinds of lab-grown tissue model, organoids and organs-on-chips. Other experiments examine immune ageing, wound healing and the weakening of the heart and blood vessels in space.
Missions And Customers
Tumbleweed’s first platform, Oasis Alpha, launched on 7 July on Transporter-17, a SpaceX rideshare mission that carries payloads from many different customers on one rocket. Oasis Alpha held experiments from four customers, none of whom had sent work into space before. The company says it built the platform in nine months and that every place on board was booked and paid for a year before launch.
Tumbleweed plans three more missions in 2027 and expects them to carry more than ten customers. A second platform, Oasis Beta, is due in 2028 with a return capsule that the company says will let customers get physical samples back.
Talks are under way with launch providers in the United States, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Early testing relies on suborbital flights, short hops that reach space and fall back to Earth without completing an orbit. In June the company agreed a partnership with French launch company HyPrSpace to develop such flights for its systems.
The startup says about two-thirds of its customers came to it through their own enquiries, and it reports a customer conversion rate of about 40%. Universities and hospitals make up most of its business so far. Tumbleweed now wants to sell to national research institutes, industrial companies and contract research organisations, the firms that run research and testing for drug makers and other businesses.
Why Researchers Go To Space
Protein crystals tend to grow larger and more uniform in microgravity, the near-weightless conditions of orbit, and cells can grow in more natural three-dimensional shapes. Drug makers have put both effects to use for years. Merck sent its cancer drug Keytruda to the International Space Station in 2017 to study how the drug crystallises, and early results showed the space-grown crystals were easier to inject than those grown on Earth. American company Varda Space Industries grows drug crystals in orbit and returns them to Earth in capsules.
Tumbleweed’s investors expect its model to bring space research to many more organisations. “Now every lab and manufacturer can use space without becoming a space company first,” said Daniel Dippold, chief executive of EWOR.
Andreas Klinger, founder of Prototype Capital, said Tumbleweed “completely rethinks how R&D for industry and science in space should be done.” Austrian innovation and infrastructure minister Peter Hanke said companies such as Tumbleweed help create value and skilled jobs in Austria.
The new funding arrives as the startup moves from its first flight to a busier launch schedule, having flown customer experiments within two years of its founding. Researchers prepare their work on the ground, and Tumbleweed takes care of the launch and the running of their experiments in orbit.
