Europe’s ambition to stop hitching rides on someone else’s spacecraft now has a rough price tag. The Exploration Company, the Munich-based startup building what it bills as Europe’s first reusable space capsule, is in talks to raise at least $300mn, according to the Financial Times.
The round would value the six-year-old firm at more than $2bn, a figure picked up by Bloomberg from the FT’s reporting on July 26, 2026. Neither number is locked in. People familiar with the discussions cautioned that the financing has not been finalised, and the terms could still move, or the deal could fall away entirely.
The comparison to Elon Musk’s company is not idle. The Exploration Company is developing Nyx, a reusable capsule pitched as a European answer to SpaceX’s Dragon, designed to carry cargo, and eventually crew, to the International Space Station and the commercial outposts meant to replace it. That is precisely the niche SpaceX has spent a decade cornering.
Europe currently has no sovereign way of bringing cargo back from orbit, a gap that has left its agencies dependent on American, and previously Russian, hardware. Founded in 2021 by Hélène Huby, a former head of Airbus’s space exploration business, The Exploration Company has framed Nyx as the fix: a capsule that launches, comes home, and flies again, with a crewed version further down the roadmap.
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The timing is not accidental. The ISS is due to be retired around 2030, and the commercial stations meant to replace it will need a way to ferry supplies up and experiments down. That is the market The Exploration Company is building for.
It is also a crowded moment for European launch ambitions. Isar Aerospace, the German rocket-maker, raised €270mn late last year, and private space investment on the continent has, for the first time, overtaken the United States. Sovereignty, the argument runs, means not being able to be cut off from orbit by a foreign supplier.
Among the suitors for the new round is the EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund, a vehicle managed by the Swedish investment group EQT, said to be nearing a commitment. The presence of an EU-linked fund fits the company’s pitch neatly: a European capsule, backed by European capital, flying European cargo.
The Exploration Company is not starting from nothing. In November 2024 it closed a $160mn Series B led by Balderton Capital and Plural, with backing from French Tech Souveraineté and Germany’s DeepTech & Climate Fonds, sovereign-flavoured money from the two governments the firm straddles. It has since said it holds a contract backlog of roughly $770mn, with customers including Axiom Space, Vast, Starlab, and the European Space Agency.
What it has not yet done is bring a capsule home in one piece. Its most recent test flight, Mission Possible, launched on a SpaceX rideshare from Vandenberg Space Force Base on June 24, 2025. The vehicle reached orbit and survived reentry, then lost contact with the ground a few minutes before its planned splashdown. The company called the mission a “partial success”, which is the sort of phrase that carries a lot of weight in this business.
An earlier attempt, Mission Bikini, flew on the debut of Ariane 6 in July 2024, but an anomaly on the rocket’s upper stage left the demonstrator stranded and prevented the reentry it was meant to test. Two flights, in other words, and neither has yet closed the loop that reusability actually depends on.
That is the tension a $300mn round would be asked to resolve. The capital, if it lands, would fund the jump from sub-scale demonstrators to an operational cargo vehicle, a leap measured less in engineering diagrams than in the ability to fly something, recover it, and fly it again. The valuation implies investors believe the company can. The flight record, so far, has been more equivocal.
Neither the company nor EQT had commented publicly on the talks at the time of the FT’s report. Whether the round closes at the reported size and valuation, and which other investors join, should become clearer in the coming weeks.
