The Exploration Company’s Series C round has landed $450 million, with the Franco-German scaleup now sitting on a war chest large enough to finance both its cargo capsule programme and a push into rocket propulsion. Which leaves the obvious question: what does a European space company actually do with that kind of firepower right now?
Who is behind the Exploration Company Series C
According to TechFundingNews, the round is jointly led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico, and the Scaleup Europe Fund. That last name is worth a moment’s attention: the Scaleup Europe Fund is a new €5 billion vehicle that the European Commission assigned to EQT to manage in May 2026, making its involvement here a signal of how seriously European institutional capital is now treating the continent’s space sector. The round also drew in the EU’s Orbital Strike Force, according to the report, alongside investors from the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
The Series C takes The Exploration Company’s total funding to roughly $680 million since 2021, per the company’s own announcement as reported by Sesamers. That follows a €150 million Series B closed in late 2024, meaning the company has more than quadrupled its cumulative raise in less than a year.
Nyx Earth: the capsule at the centre of it all
The near-term product is Nyx Earth, a reusable cargo capsule that Tech Times reports is targeting a 2028 docking with the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule is designed to carry 4,000 kilograms to orbit and return 3,000 kilograms to Earth, which would make it a genuinely useful logistics vehicle rather than a technology demonstrator.
The timing of the funding matters here. Days after the Series C closed, the European Space Agency (ESA) awarded The Exploration Company a €760 million contract to build and fly Europe’s first commercial cargo capsule to the ISS. The deal was signed at the International Space Summit in Paris, according to 24/7 Wall St. Put the Series C and the ESA contract together and The Exploration Company has secured, in the space of days, more committed capital and revenue than most European space startups see across their entire lifetimes.
The company was founded in France in 2021 and has offices in Munich and the United States. Its capsule development sits in a broader moment: governments and agencies across Europe have been accelerating commercial partnerships in space logistics, partly in response to reliance on non-European launch and cargo infrastructure.
The rocket engine ambition
Beyond the capsule, the company is pursuing its own propulsion capability. The report places this in the context of developing a Raptor-class engine outside the United States, which is a considerable engineering ambition and a logical extension of the reusability focus. Funding at this scale makes that kind of parallel-track development conceivable, though the capsule programme remains the nearer-term milestone.
Investors named in the round include Bessemer, Atomico and the Scaleup Europe Fund, alongside the EU’s Orbital Strike Force and backers from the US and UAE. The company’s headquarters are in France, with presence in the United States and Germany.
The ESA contract signed in Paris sets a concrete near-term proving ground: if Nyx Earth docks with the ISS in 2028 as planned, The Exploration Company moves from funded promise to operational European cargo provider. That is the milestone the next few years will be measured against.
