04 Apr EXOBIOSPHERE SECURES €2M SEED ROUND TO LAUNCH SPACE-BASED DRUG DISCOVERY PLATFORM
Luxembourg, April 4, 2025 – Exobiosphere, the world’s first contract research organization dedicated to drug discovery in space, has raised over €2 million in a seed round to scale its orbital high-throughput screening platform.
The round was co-lead by from Expon Capital (through its Digital Tech Fund), a premier Luxembourg-based firm investing in transformative technologies with the potential to reshape entire industries and Expansion Ventures, a €300M pan-European venture capital fund backing category-defining founders in aerospace and defence.
The round also attracted the backing of Boryung, one of South Korea’s most forward-looking healthcare groups and a driving force behind the Humans in Space Challenge; and Space Data, a cutting-edge Japanese company pioneering real-time digital twin technology for Earth and space systems.
Tackling the Bottlenecks of Pharmaceutical R&D
The funding will accelerate development of Exobiosphere’s Orbital High-Throughput Screeneer (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, feed uniquely relevant data to AI drug discovery models and accelerate the development of more effective therapies, ensuring better drugs reach patients sooner and at 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 funding 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,” said 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.”
Acierno, a seasoned executive in the commercial space sector, has led international teams across Asia, Europe, and North America focusing on lunar robotics and spacecraft. He brings 15+ years of leadership in space commercialization, technology strategy, and operations.
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.
Investor Confidence in Exobiosphere’s Vision
“Exobiosphere brings a fresh, high-impact perspective to biotech and space,” said 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.”
“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. “Their approach is deeply technical, commercially focused, and built on real-world demand from both pharma and space partners.”
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.
About Exobiosphere
Exobiosphere is pushing the boundaries of biotechnology in space, using microgravity to unlock the next generation of drug discovery and skincare. By harnessing high-throughput testing and space-based research, we’re developing game-changing formulations and therapies to solve the biggest challenges in pharma and beauty. It’s about innovation, scalability, and transforming industries, pushing the limits of what’s possible to create real-world solutions that impact both Earth and beyond.
#Biotech #Pharma #SpaceTech #DrugDiscovery #Exobiosphere