After The Funding Round: Atlanta’s Reditus Space Lands $7.1M to Advance Space Research Tech
Hypepotamus covers the innovators, startups, and technology trends shaping the business landscape across the Southeast region.
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The tech startup world is filled with acronyms like software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). But Atlanta-based space startup Reditus Space is building a new type of service model: Microgravity-as-a-service.
Microgravity, archived when an object is in freefall while in orbit, is crucial for experiments that can lead to the development of pharmaceutical drugs, biotechs, and semiconductor substrates and manufacturing, says Reditus Space co-founder Stef Crum.
There are “genuinely world changing technologies and applications” developed after microgravity experiments in space, Crum told Hypepotamus. But the problem? Launching such experiments into orbit is expensive and highly unsustainable, especially when it comes to re-entry. That’s where microgravity-as-a-service comes into play.
Preparing For Launch
Reditus, an aerospace and manufacturing startup, officially launched in October of 2024, after the team participated in Create-X on Georgia Tech’s campus. Co-founders Stef Crum (CEO) and Will Sherman (CTO) first came up with the initial concept for the company during their graduate research work at Georgia Tech.
After participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, the team went out on the fundraising circuit. This week, Reditus announced the close of its $7.1 million seed round. Though there was not a traditional lead investor, some of the larger investors in the round include Y Combinator and global VC firm Antler.
Payload Space was the first to break the funding news.
Crum said that the funding will help Reditus prepare for flight of its first full-scale, reusable spacecraft next summer.
Atlanta's SpaceTech Scene
Even after spending time on the West Coast with Y Combinator, Crum said that being headquartered in Atlanta provides strong strategic benefit to the early-stage startup. That is particularly true when it comes to access to talent.
“Atlanta has a giant aerospace industry, but the space part of that sentence is pretty aggressively underrepresented. Nearly all of it falls in the aeronautical industry,” Crum told Hypepotamus.
Aeronautical companies with a large presence in the Metro Atlanta area include Delta Air Lines, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Northrop Grumman. Such companies represent close to $60 billion in economic impact for the state, according to the Metro Atlanta Chamber.
Other aerospace startups in the state include Hermeus, Kencoa, and SynapseMX.
“That does mean that there is a very large population that has skills that are very easily transferable, particularly for us. Even though we are very much a space company in the sense that we operate in space, the innovative part about what we do actually doesn't happen on orbit. It happens on re-entry,” Crum added. That means that Reditus has been focused on hiring local talent with a background in hypersonics and aeronautical engineering. (And yes, they are hiring!).-Featured image from Reditus Space
