Luxembourg’s Exobiosphere raises €2M to accelerate drug discovery in space; here’s why and how

Luxembourg-based Exobiosphere, the world’s first contract research organisation dedicated to drug discovery in space, has raised €2M in a seed funding round.

The round was led by Expansion Ventures, with participation from Expon Capital, Boryung, and Space Data Inc.

Expansion Ventures is a €200M pan-European venture capital fund backing category-defining founders in aerospace and defence.

“Exobiosphere brings a fresh, high-impact perspective to biotech and space,” says Ted Elvhage of Expansion. “It’s not just about taking experiments to space—it’s about redefining how we design and validate therapies on Earth.” 

The company will use the funds to accelerate the development of Exobiosphere’s Orbital High-Throughput Screener (OHTS), an autonomous, standardised lab automation platform built for microgravity.

Additionally, the company will use the funds to grow its customer pipeline, expand its engineering and bioinformatics teams, and launch the platform to space, while at the same time expanding into the US. 

Why drug discovery in space?

Pharmaceutical R&D is costly and inefficient, with over 90 per cent of drugs failing and taking over a decade to develop.

OHTS improves disease modeling by using space conditions, reducing false positives, and increasing success rates.

This approach also generates valuable data for AI in drug discovery, helping more effective therapies reach patients faster and at a lower cost.

Exobiosphere: High-throughput testing and drug discovery in space

Led by Kyle Acierno, Exobiosphere combines space-grade lab automation, microgravity research, and analytics to help researchers, pharmaceutical, biotech, and beauty partners enhance scientific discovery.

This will also help accelerate product development, reducing late-stage failures.

The company’s automated orbital platform delivers new insights into disease modelling and compound efficacy that are difficult to obtain on Earth.

Through this work, it aims to shorten R&D timelines and bring safer, more effective treatments and formulations to market. 

“Space is not just the next frontier for exploration—it’s the next frontier for medicine,” says Kyle Acierno, CEO of Exobiosphere. “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.”