The Exploration Company raised 450 million dollars in a Series C round led by the Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and EQT. Balderton Capital, Plural, Cherry Ventures and Red River West also participated in the round. This brought the company’s total funding to approximately 680 million dollars, while Bessemer partner Alex Ferrara will join the board. The investment will be allocated to the Nyx reusable capsule’s International Space Station mission, the Storm rocket engine and engineering and manufacturing capacity. Founded in 2021 by Hélène Huby and engineers from Airbus and ArianeGroup, the French-German company operates in Munich and Bordeaux. Nyx is designed to carry cargo and return, with human transportation planned for the future.
Why it matters
This round reveals a funding structure that will enable the company to advance not only the development of a capsule, but also Nyx, Storm and its manufacturing operations within the same framework. While the International Space Station mission is becoming the stage where the reusability goal will be tested in practice, the ability to carry cargo and return constitutes a threshold for the goal of human transportation. The investors’ participation in the company’s governance is creating a new stakeholder influence in its decision-making processes, in addition to providing financial support. The development of engineering and manufacturing capacity in Munich and Bordeaux concerns the transition of the projects from design to implementation, while the conditions under which the transition to human transportation will take place remain an open question.
Background
The Company is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 4 news stories mentioning the name in the past 90 days; the latest was dated September 6, 2026.