ATMOS Space Cargo has closed a €25.7M ($30.2M) Series A to continue development of its orbital reentry vehicles, the company announced today.
Balnord and Expansion Venture Capital led the round for the European space transport company. Keen Defence and Security and the European Innovation Council also participated in the Series A, with the latter offering grant and equity funding through its accelerator program.
Threefold goals: ATMOS has laid out three priorities that the funding will support:
- Building three PHOENIX 2 spacecraft for orbital transfer and return missions;
- Establishing ATMOS WORKS, a unit of the company that will target business with European government and defense customers;
- Developing PHOENIX 3, which will offer 10x the payload capacity of PHOENIX 2.
“This financing allows us to move to regular operational service,” CEO and cofounder Sebastian Klaus said in a statement. “With ATMOS WORKS and PHOENIX 3, we are building the full architecture—commercial, institutional, and defense-capable—in parallel.”
What’s next: ATMOS has missions on its manifest before getting to those goals. The company announced in November that it would partner with Space Cargo Unlimited to launch a reentry mission this year.
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When Golden Dome was first announced (under a different moniker) in January 2025, companies immediately got to work, positioning themselves to compete for the ambitious missile defense program aiming to protect the US.
What is it: The Golden Dome is a missile-defense system modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome. It’s intended to be a four-layer system of terrestrial and space-based infrastructure to detect and intercept a range of missile types, before the rockets can do any damage.
Context: President Donald Trump first announced the program as the Iron Dome for America in a January 2025 executive order. He rebranded it to Golden Dome during a May 2025 event, where he also announced he would put Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein in charge of overseeing the $175B architecture.
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