The Exploration Company has collected €387M, roughly $450M, in a Series C that its backers call the largest round ever raised by a European space startup.
Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund co-led the deal, with Balderton, Plural, Cherry and Red River West returning. Bessemer partner Alex Ferrara takes a board seat. The Munich company, founded in 2021 by former Airbus and ArianeGroup engineer Hélène Huby, has now raised about $680M in total.
Nyx, its reusable cargo capsule, is being prepared for a journey that would see it dock with the International Space Station and come back down, an end-to-end round trip no European company has completed alone. Work also continues on Storm, a high-thrust engine running liquid oxygen and methane through a full-flow staged combustion cycle, the same demanding architecture SpaceX uses in its Raptor, intended to power a future heavy launcher.
Signed contracts and commitments now exceed $2B, the company says, spanning European Space Agency work, cargo agreements with commercial station operators, and a NASA Space Act Agreement that makes TEC the first European space startup to hold one.
The round arrives as Europe tries to keep more of the space economy at home. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly cheered the deal, and the Scaleup Europe Fund, a €5B vehicle the commission assigned to EQT in May, is becoming a visible force across the continent’s biggest tech financings.
