HyImpulse raises €50M+ to put Europe's orbital rocket on a commercial schedule

HyImpulse (Neuenstadt am Kocher, Germany) has closed a Series A+ extension of more than €50 million, co-led by JOIN Capital and Ace Capital Partners — neither of which participated in the original Series A. The new capital brings total equity and public funding to more than €125 million.

New investors North Ventures, BW-Capital, Bayern Kapital, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) joined the round; Campus Founders Ventures continued as an existing shareholder. Founded in 2018 as a DLR spinout by Christian Schmierer (CEO), Konstantin Tomilin (COO), Ulrich Fischer (CTO), and Mario Kobald — all from the University of Stuttgart and DLR — HyImpulse has spent eight years building toward commercial launch operations.

Two rockets, two timelines

HyImpulse operates two parallel development programmes. The SR75 is a suborbital rocket in active flight testing: its second commercial mission, from SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland, Scotland, is scheduled before the end of 2026 and is intended to be the first to carry customer payloads. The SL1 is the orbital vehicle — a small-satellite launcher targeting its maiden flight later this year — and is the commercial prize this extension is principally funding.

Both vehicles use a hybrid propellant architecture combining paraffin (a solid-wax fuel) and liquid oxygen as oxidiser. The combination is simpler and safer to handle than the RP-1/LOX systems used by most commercial competitors, and avoids the hazardous hypergolic propellants common in older launch architectures. Lower ground-infrastructure requirements and less complex fuelling operations should in theory support more competitive pricing at scale. Theory meets pressure in 2026.

The order book sets the stakes

The number that frames this round is not the €50 million raised but the €350 million in signed orders already on HyImpulse's books across suborbital and orbital programmes. For a company yet to complete an orbital launch, a nine-digit backlog implies that satellite operators are betting on European sovereign launch capacity before it has been proven at altitude.

"While providers such as SpaceX offer a scheduled bus service to space," said Christian Schmierer, CEO, "our solutions allow us to develop a flexible taxi service so that our customers can choose individual launch solutions and flexibly plan their schedules." The dedicated-launch pitch carries weight as the smallsat market fragments: operators increasingly prefer mission-specific launch windows over rideshare manifests with shared schedules.

"With this injection of capital, we will accelerate the commercialization of our orbital rocket, making Europe more independent and competitive," Schmierer added.

DLR's inclusion as a new equity investor — separate from its existing public-funding relationships with HyImpulse — sends a secondary signal: Germany's national aerospace agency is converting its institutional backing into a commercial bet. The next 18 months will determine whether HyImpulse's order book and its flight schedule converge on the same trajectory.