Dreamers, Doers, and Market Demand: How Our Series C is Accelerating Our Next Phase of Growth

Space is an industry where interest and enthusiasm can dramatically exceed actual opportunity. As kids, many of us wanted to be astronauts. When that didn’t pan out, some of us became engineers who wanted to build spaceships instead. Dreaming, building, and doing the impossible is in our DNA. This mentality and drive make us successful, but it has its bounds.

In aerospace, we’re often so excited by the possibility of the technology that we don’t stop to ask ourselves: is there a real business here? Worse, we can delude ourselves into thinking we’ve done the work to prove it, only to later realize we've been wearing (Star Trek-themed) rose-colored glasses. Making the tech is only half the battle; finding a real market for it is the other. But when you can successfully combine those two things, it can be industry-shifting.

The Business of Rocket Science

When I joined Impulse two years ago, it was because I believed we could take the legendary technical talents of Tom Mueller and his team and focus on market opportunities with real, paying customers. We could deliver the technical prowess and value they simply couldn’t find elsewhere.

What I didn’t wholly know two years ago was whether I was wearing the rosy sci-fi glasses. If my excitement about Impulse’s future in space was, in fact, dispassionate analysis.

Our Series C raise is the latest proof that Impulse was right about the market opportunity for in-space mobility—at least, mostly right.

What did we absolutely get wrong? We completely underestimated the pace and enthusiasm from the defense community for our highly maneuverable spacecraft, Mira. The surge in demand from the defense sector created the need and opportunity for this funding round, as well as showing the huge value of having diverse business lines in the space market. Focus is important, but the uncertainty around NASA’s priorities, back-and-forth over DoD budgets, and frequent flameouts in the commercial segment make putting all your eggs in a single basket a bad strategy.

Diversification Means Market Demand

To oversimplify, the space economy is basically three things: commercial, defense, and NASA. Across these verticals, one need keeps surfacing: in-space mobility. It’s a critical capability that’s been underbuilt and undervalued—until now.

In commercial, Starlink’s scale has challenged traditional players to rethink their game plan with its growing constellation, frequent launches, and global service. That’s where Helios comes in. Our high-energy kick stage rapidly delivers payloads to MEO, GEO, and beyond, helping operators get satellites to their final orbit faster, enabling quicker time to service and reducing design complexity.

Space mobility is also becoming a clear priority in defense, with real funding behind it. The world depends on critical but undefended space assets, like GPS satellites. These have historically been considered safe simply because their orbit was hard to reach, but that’s no longer the case. As space becomes more accessible, those assets are more exposed. We need to be able to reposition quickly, reinforce vulnerabilities, and stay ahead of evolving threats.

At the same time, government procurement is shifting away from traditional, cost-plus contracts via a small handful of providers and toward faster, more agile solutions. That shift drives real dollars and real demand toward platforms like Mira, our high-thrust, highly maneuverable space vehicle for payload hosting and deployment.

And on the civil side (primarily with NASA), even with budget uncertainty, there’s a clear push to use commercial providers more broadly. At Impulse, we’re built for something like a next-gen COTS program, where agile platforms like ours complement deep agency expertise in science and exploration. That’s the kind of mission that brought many of us into aerospace in the first place. From the Moon to Mars, the demand for fast, reliable, high-performance mobility is only growing—and we’re ready to meet it.

Mobilizing Space

Since 2021, we’ve flown Mira twice, executed two of the largest maneuvers ever done with a nitrous-based propulsion system, and signed over 30 government and commercial contracts totaling nearly $200 million. Helios is on track to fly in 2026, with our first GEO Rideshare Program mission launching in 2027.

We’ve shown we can move fast, stay precise, and deliver in orbit, and that momentum has created real demand. Turns out, when you move payloads like we do, people notice.

And so, we didn’t go chasing a Series C—it came to us. This $300 million round, led by Linse Capital with DFJ Growth and many returning investors joining, gives us what we need to meet our growing backlog of demand head-on.

Now, we’re hiring even more engineers, builders, and mission operators. We’re expanding R&D to support more vehicles, new propulsion systems, and longer-duration missions. And we’re staying vertically integrated for speed, cost, and control. Space isn’t static anymore; it demands mobility, adaptability, and speed. We’re building the tools to make space operable—not just to reach orbit, but to move freely in it. That’s how we accelerate our future beyond Earth.

Let’s get to work.

About Impulse Space

Impulse Space, the in-space mobility leader, is accelerating our future beyond Earth beginning with its fleet of cost-effective, high-performance space vehicles: Helios and Mira. The Helios kick stage unlocks high-energy orbits with its powerful Deneb engine, rapidly transporting payloads from LEO to MEO, GEO, heliocentric, lunar, and other planetary orbits. The flight-proven Mira enables precise maneuverability and rapid responsiveness for hosting, deployment, and rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) across any orbit. Founded by Tom Mueller and led by a team of industry pioneers, Impulse Space is transforming in-space mobility by reliably and rapidly getting customers where they want to go. And they're just getting started. For more information, visit www.impulsespace.com.