Exobiosphere, the world’s first contract research organization dedicated to drug discovery in space, has raised €2 million in a seed round to scale its orbital high-throughput screening platform.
Exobiosphere
The round was led by Expansion Ventures, a €200M pan-European venture capital fund backing category-defining founders in aerospace and defence. Significant participation came from Expon Capital, a premier Luxembourg-based firm investing in transformative technologies with the potential to reshape entire industries. The round also attracted the backing of Boryung, a Life Science infrastructure company founded in 1957 with a focus on the pharmaceutical business that is now expanding its portfolio into the Space Healthcare industry; and Space Data Inc., a cutting-edge Japanese company pioneering real-time digital twin technology for Earth and space Systems.
The funding will accelerate development of Exobiosphere’s Orbital High-Throughput Screener (OHTS), an autonomous, standardized lab automation platform built for microgravity. With drug failure rates exceeding 90% and development timelines often surpassing a decade and costing billions, pharmaceutical R&D remains expensive and inefficient. OHTS offers a powerful alternative—leveraging space conditions to enhance disease modelling, reduce false positive results, increase success rates, and feed valuable data to AI based drug discovery models which will further accelerate the development of more effective therapies, ensuring better drugs reach patients sooner and at a lower cost.
This raise builds on key momentum for the company, including the launch of its R&D hub at the House of BioHealth Incubator in Luxembourg, and a grant by the Government of Luxembourg through an ESA contract in the Luxembourg National Space Programme, LuxIMPULSE.
“Space is not just the next frontier for exploration—it’s the next frontier for medicine. We’re building critical infrastructure that lowers the barrier to entry for pharma and biotech companies. This investment marks a pivotal step in making microgravity drug discovery accessible, scalable, and commercially viable.” - Kyle Acierno, CEO of Exobiosphere.
Acierno, a seasoned executive in the commercial space sector, has led international teams across Asia, Europe, and North America focusing on robotics and lunar spacecraft. He brings 15+ years of leadership in space commercialization, technology strategy, and operations.
“Exobiosphere brings a fresh, high-impact perspective to biotech and space. It’s not just about taking experiments to space—it’s about redefining how we design and validate therapies on Earth.” - Ted Elvhage of Expansion.
Exobiosphere’s platform is the first high-throughput drug screening system purpose-built for space. Compatible with industry-standard well plates, the system integrates automated robotics, real-time data transfer, and AI-enhanced bioinformatics, enabling thousands of simultaneous tests in orbit. These capabilities provide pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, academia, and research institutions with new tools to understand disease processes and accelerate drug development while reducing risk and cost.
“We invested in Exobiosphere because they’re unlocking an entirely new dimension for biotech innovation. Their platform not only accelerates the discovery and validation of transformative therapies but also bridges critical gaps faced by pharma through microgravity-enabled insights that are simply unattainable on Earth,” said Jérôme Wittamer, Founding Partner at Expon Capital.
With the funding in place, Exobiosphere will complete technical validation of its OHTS system, grow its customer pipeline, expand its engineering and bioinformatics teams, launch the platform to space, while at the same time expanding into the US.
