WORLDTECHAustrian Startup Tumbleweed Raises €6.9M for Reentry Vehicle Oasis Beta
Vienna-based startup Tumbleweed has closed a €6.9 million ($7.7 million) seed round to develop Oasis Beta, an in-orbit research vehicle able to reenter the Earth's atmosphere. The company says missions could begin in 2028.
Funding round led by Pact VC
Pact VC led the round, with participation from Vanagon Ventures, early backer Prototype Capital, EWOR and a group of angel investors that includes SES cofounder Candace Johnson. Tumbleweed describes the round as the largest spacetech seed round in Austria, and the reports say it follows four months after the company launched Austria's first commercial satellite.
Besides building Oasis Beta, the funding will also support at least three missions in 2027 for Tumbleweed's Pod payload.
First mission flew in July
Tumbleweed's first mission, Oasis Alpha, launched aboard SpaceX Transporter-17 on 7 July 2026. It carried experiments for four customers, all of them first-time users of space. The mission was fully booked a year before launch and paid for upfront, and the company says it has since seen growing demand from customers who want microgravity access without building their own satellite.
The company has three flights booked for 2027, including suborbital and orbital missions. On at least one of them, Tumbleweed plans to show it can integrate payloads late in the launch process, a step its founder describes as both a technical and a procedural challenge.
Company background and approach
Founded in 2024, Tumbleweed operates across Vienna and Delft. It develops modular laboratory Pods hosted aboard its free-flying Oasis orbital platform, and offers researchers, manufacturers and R&D teams microgravity access without requiring them to build space infrastructure of their own.
Cofounder Rothenbuchner traces the company's roots to a student project from his teenage years: a wind-driven Mars rover concept that won a competition and secured European Space Agency funding. By 2024 he had grown frustrated with the pace of academic research and the rising cost of the Mars work, and he brought two colleagues into the new venture.
Building its own reentry capability
Rothenbuchner said Tumbleweed is evaluating partnerships with other reentry vehicle providers but is building Oasis Beta in parallel to own more of the value chain. The pre-certified, application-specific Pods are meant to remove much of the specialist work that otherwise adds years to research projects, including payload preparation, launch approval and safety demonstration.
Open questions
- Will Oasis Beta meet its planned 2028 mission start?
- How many of the three 2027 flights will proceed as scheduled?