Isar Aerospace, a space company spun off from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has achieved a company valuation of over a billion dollars and thus unicorn status. This brings the number of TUM unicorns to 22. Isar Aerospace has developed and built its own commercial rocket technology and will transport small and medium-sized satellites into space in the future. The start-up, founded by three graduates, received intensive support from TUM.

Dozens of new technologies require more and more satellites for data transmission – whether for communication networks, autonomous driving, or digital agriculture. To this end, companies want to launch entire swarms of satellites into space. These are comparatively small and are intended to move in low Earth orbits. Isar Aerospace wants to tap into this economic potential. The company, which was already honored with the TUM Presidential Entrepreneurship Award in 2023, completed its first test flight with a 28-meter-high launch vehicle from the Norwegian spaceport Andøya in March 2025.

The company’s founders, Daniel Metzler, Josef Fleischmann, and Markus Brandl, studied aerospace engineering at TUM. After founding the company in 2018, they built their first prototypes in the high-tech workshop MakerSpace at UnternehmerTUM, the center for innovation and entrepreneurship at TUM. They also received support from the XPRENEURS incubator. Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners invested in the start-up alongside several other investors. The company is based in Ottobrunn, near the TUM Department of Aerospace and Geodesy. In a recent financing round, Isar Aerospace raised an additional $150 million from investors, achieving unicorn status.

TUM President Thomas F. Hofmann is delighted: “Isar Aerospace is a great example of how things should work. The founders acquired their expertise at TUM, found each other as a team, and began to revolutionize rocket technology to tap the economic potential of aerospace for Germany! I would like to thank the founders and employees of Isar Aerospace for their pioneering spirit.”