The Exploration Company raises $450M Series C to fly Nyx to the ISS

The Exploration Company has raised a $450 million Series C co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and the Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT) to bring its reusable Nyx cargo capsule to the International Space Station and accelerate its Storm high-thrust engine.

Raising for space hardware in Europe has always meant explaining to investors why the returns will not look like SaaS – and yet this week a Munich company closed the largest Series C ever raised by an EU-headquartered startup led by a female founder and CEO, per the announcement. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it is chasing, and what a cheque this size signals about where European growth capital is finally going.

A $450 million cheque with a 2028 deadline attached

The Exploration Company announced the $450 million Series C on 8 September 2026, co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, with existing investors Balderton, Plural, Cherry and Red River West all returning. The round takes the company’s total funding to roughly $680 million since 2021, per the company’s announcement, following a €150 million Series B closed in late 2024.

The money has a job and a date. “This financing will allow us to execute with urgency: to bring Nyx to the International Space Station and safely back to Earth, while accelerating Storm, the high-thrust propulsion capability,” said founder and CEO Hélène Huby in the announcement. Nyx’s first demonstration flight to the ISS is expected in 2028, and the Storm programme moves into subscale thrust chamber, pre-burner and full engine testing over the coming years.

Bessemer partner Alex Ferrara joins the board. The company says it holds more than $2 billion in contracts and commitments from public and private customers – mostly the European Space Agency and commercial space station operators, and a mix of firm and conditional business, as the announcement itself concedes.

Five countries, 550 people, one capsule

The Exploration Company builds Nyx, a reusable capsule designed to ferry cargo to low Earth orbit and back, with crewed versions for LEO and the lunar surface on the longer roadmap. Storm, the second programme, is a reusable high-thrust engine burning liquid oxygen and biomethane, intended for a future European super-heavy launcher capable of lifting 40 tonnes to LEO in reusable configuration.

Huby founded the company in July 2021 with engineers who had built Orion’s European service module and the ATV resupply vehicle at Airbus and ArianeGroup – the exact heritage a station-logistics company needs. Five years on, the team counts more than 550 people across Germany, France, Italy, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, with headquarters in Munich.

We have covered European space hardware raising serious money before – EnduroSat’s €95.7 million Series B for satellite production is the closest comparable on our books – but nothing at this altitude. A $450 million private round for orbital logistics is simply a different category for Europe.

The logistics layer is where the growth is

The segment The Exploration Company sells into is space logistics – getting cargo to orbit, keeping stations supplied, bringing things home. Mordor Intelligence sizes that market at $8.82 billion in 2026, growing to $20.9 billion by 2031, an 18.82% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, 2026). Behind the figure sits a hard deadline: the ISS retires around 2030, and the commercial stations replacing it will need supply lines that do not yet exist.

The US proved the model when NASA handed cargo contracts to a young SpaceX and got Dragon in return. Europe never ran that play at scale. The good news is that the customer side has moved: ESA is now buying services rather than owning vehicles, and TEC’s contract book shows commercial station operators doing the same.

Growth capital is staying home this time

So what does this round tell us beyond one company’s trajectory? For years the pattern was painfully consistent: Europe funded the seed, San Francisco wrote the growth cheque, and the value moved with it. This round breaks the pattern only halfway – Bessemer is a US firm – but Atomico and EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund anchor European capital at a stage where it used to be absent.

Worth watching: the Scaleup Europe Fund co-led this round and Mistral AI’s €3 billion Series D in the same week. One fund, two of the largest European rounds of the year, both in sovereignty-critical infrastructure. That is not a coincidence; that is a thesis being executed in public.

Every round we track lands in our fundraising database, and the deep-tech share of Europe’s biggest cheques keeps climbing. A capsule that has not yet flown to the ISS just raised more than most European unicorns did in their entire growth phase. The bet is that orbital logistics becomes boring, regular, European infrastructure. Watch the 2028 Nyx demonstration flight – that is the moment this thesis gets tested in public. Let’s see it fly!