At HyImpulse, one question still follows the company into conversations with regulators:
You really build rockets with paraffin wax?
Launch Licensing Manager Vittorio Di Pietrantonio jokes that even after years of development, people still struggle to believe it. Yet the unusual fuel has already moved far beyond an experiment. HyImpulse has flown it, scaled the propulsion system and is now building an orbital launcher around it.
The next test is considerably harder.
HyImpulse has secured more than €50 million in new financing to scale its commercial suborbital and orbital launch operations, moving the German company from proving that its technology works toward proving that customers can depend on it repeatedly.
The round brings fresh backing to a company whose history stretches back to 2006, when research began on hybrid rocket propulsion using paraffin. Twelve years later, Dr. Christian Schmierer, Dr. Mario Kobald, Konstantin Tomilin and Ulrich Fischer founded HyImpulse after years spent developing hybrid rockets, propulsion systems, lightweight structures and launch vehicles at the University of Stuttgart and the German Aerospace Center.
Their decision was to keep the technology that had made the research unusual in the first place.
HyImpulse combines solid paraffin fuel with liquid oxygen. The company says the hybrid architecture offers lower system complexity, inert fuel grains that are easier to handle and transport, and propulsion performance comparable with liquid fuels. Its motors can also be shut down, restarted and configured for different vehicle sizes.
The idea has already survived its most important early test: flight.
In 2024, HyImpulse successfully launched its SR75 suborbital rocket using a 75 kN paraffin-and-LOX motor. That milestone followed years of propulsion work and gave the company something far more valuable than another test result: proof that the architecture could leave the launch pad.
Now the funding has to turn that proof into cadence.
HyImpulse is developing SR75 for commercial suborbital missions while pushing its larger SL1 vehicle toward orbital launch. The company’s wider strategy also reaches beyond getting payloads off Earth, combining launch services with in-space mobility as it tries to reduce three problems it sees in today’s market: high launch costs, long waiting times and limited availability.
That transition is visible inside the company itself. HyImpulse is hiring across avionics, commercial development, quality management, structures, system design, logistics and manufacturing. Those are the functions a rocket company needs when the challenge changes from building one successful vehicle to building many of them consistently.