- The Exploration Company is negotiating to raise at least $300 million at a valuation of more than $2 billion, according to a Financial Times report.
- The EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, is expected to join the funding round, which has not been finalised.
- Premier Alternatives, a secondary-market tracker, estimated the company’s value at about $470 million in December 2024.
Hélène Huby applied to Airbus in 2013 with little knowledge of satellites or rocket technology, by her own account. She had studied economics, applied mathematics, and public administration, and worked at the French research ministry. At the time, she had four children and had just moved to Germany for her husband’s job.
13 years later, the company she started is now negotiating to raise at least $300 million at a valuation above $2 billion, according to the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the matter.
The gap Europe has never closed
Europe does not currently have its own hardware to bring cargo back from orbit. While it can send cargo to space on American rockets, returning it means renting capsules from other countries. For instance, a European pharmaceutical company running experiments on the International Space Station cannot use a European capsule to bring samples back to Earth.
The Exploration Company aims to solve this problem. Founded in July 2021, the startup designs and builds a reusable capsule and its subsystems itself. It provides transport services and sells components through an open-interface catalogue. This lets other companies use existing hardware instead of creating their own from scratch.
Huby started the company with engineers Artur Koop, Sebastien Reichstadt, Pierre Vinet, and Jon Reijneveld. They had all worked together before on European projects at Airbus and ArianeGroup, including the Orion European Service Module.
Today, The Exploration Company has about 400 employees in Munich, Bordeaux, Oberpfaffenhofen, Italy, France, Houston, and the MENA region.
A capsule that did not come back
In June 2025, the Mission Possible demonstrator re-entered Earth’s atmosphere but lost contact just before splashdown, which led to the loss of customer payloads. The company called the flight partially successful, saying it met several goals before the loss.
13 months later, the valuation under discussion is roughly four times the $470 million that Premier Alternatives reported in December 2024. The round has not closed, and the company has not confirmed the figure.
Who is paying
Sierra Space raised $550 million in March 2026 at an $8 billion valuation, according to SpaceNews, even though its Dream Chaser spaceplane has not yet had a demonstration flight. Vast also raised $500 million that month. Both companies sell to NASA and the Pentagon, which have bought commercial cargo services for more than ten years and understand how to value a failed test.
The Exploration Company is moving into a European market that has not used private suppliers for these services before. In November 2024, it raised about €150 million in a Series B round led by Balderton Capital and Plural. Other investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, EQT Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Bpifrance, Bayern Kapital, NGP Capital, Omnes Capital, Promus Ventures, Red River West, and French and German state funds through French Tech Souveraineté and the DeepTech and Climate Fonds.
The new funding will support the capsule for the ISS and its planned replacement. Huby says she has signed contracts worth €850 million, compared to about €225 million raised. Most of these orders come from the European Space Agency and station operators, not commercial customers.
Spacecraft manufacturers raised $2.36 billion in 26 deals in the 12 months before July 2026, making up 43% of all investment in the space sector. Most of this money went to companies solving strategic needs, not those with the longest track records.
Huby is one of the few women leading a European space company of this size, though TFN has not confirmed if she is the first.
Even though the capsule was lost, the valuation being discussed has gone up. If Europe values sovereignty more than delivery, that price holds until the next flight. If not, the result of the next mission will decide its value.
