€1m · Grant · Healthtech · Luxembourg
Luxembourg-based Exobiosphere has secured €1m in non-dilutive funding through the country’s Jeune Entreprise Innovante (JEI) scheme. The company says the grant will support commercial expansion, operations, international business development and the scale-up of its Orbital High-Throughput Screener, an automated platform for running biological experiments in microgravity.
Turning orbital experiments into a repeatable service
Exobiosphere is building a compact laboratory that combines automated liquid handling, imaging and sample processing. The company says the system can run more than 2,000 experiments per mission, giving pharmaceutical, biotech and research partners a way to test how cells and disease models behave in microgravity. Those performance and biological advantages remain company claims; the commercial question is whether the platform can produce repeatable data that customers can use in terrestrial drug-development decisions.
The business model depends on infrastructure partners as much as laboratory automation. In May, Exobiosphere said Voyager Technologies Europe would integrate OHTS for an ISS mission, covering safety review, station integration and on-orbit operations. Reusable hardware with replaceable samples could let customers buy successive research campaigns without financing a new payload each time. That turns launch access and operational reliability into core parts of the service, rather than background logistics.
Public funding follows private validation
The JEI programme is designed for young, research-intensive Luxembourg companies and co-finances up to 70% of an estimated three-year funding requirement, capped at €1m. Applicants need a Luxinnovation certificate and must supplement the aid with private financing. For Exobiosphere, the award therefore adds growth capital without new dilution while preserving an external test of its innovation credentials.
This grant is separate from the company’s €2m seed round announced in April 2025. The earlier equity financed technical validation, hiring and mission preparation; the JEI award extends the runway for commercial work and platform scale-up. A separate agreement called for the University of Notre Dame to acquire and validate a ground-based version of the system, providing a route to compare terrestrial and orbital workflows. The next meaningful milestone is not another partnership announcement, but evidence that repeat missions and ground validation translate into usable customer programmes.
