Interstellar Lab
Develops intelligent biospheric systems to grow life autonomously on Earth and in Space.
Website: https://interstellarlab.com/
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Interstellar Lab |
| Tagline | Develops intelligent biospheric systems to grow life autonomously on Earth and in Space |
| Headquarters | Merritt Island, Florida (Kennedy Space Center, Space Life Sciences Lab) |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | B2B |
| Industry | Agtech |
| Technology | Biotech / Life Sciences |
| Geography | North America (with French operations) |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Solo Founder |
| Funding Label | $10M+ |
| Total Disclosed | ~$15,000,000 |
Links
PUBLIC
- Website: https://interstellarlab.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/interstellar-lab
- Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/interstellar-lab
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Interstellar Lab is a biotech company building closed-loop biospheric units, branded BioPods and NUCLEUS, that grow plants and other organisms autonomously for both terrestrial agriculture and space habitation [Crunchbase]. The company was founded in 2018 by Barbara Belvisi, a French former venture investor who co-founded Hardware Club in 2014 before relocating to California to pursue space agriculture full time [TechCrunch, September 2015; Inc]. Its NUCLEUS system, a modular bioregenerative unit producing microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms, and edible insects, won the $750,000 grand prize in the finale of NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, a multi-year competition organized with the Canadian Space Agency [NASA; Deep Space Food Challenge, 2024]. On the commercial side, the company has signed agreements to fly its Eden 1.0 plant growth payload aboard Vast's Haven-1 station, with launch targeted no earlier than May 2026, and has reportedly contracted with Axiom and Voyager as well [Vast, April 2025; SatNews, April 2025; Inc]. Interstellar Lab has raised approximately $15 million to date, anchored by a $5 million seed round in March 2022 with backing from Kima Ventures, 7percent Ventures, E2MC, Auxxo, Seldor Capital, Issart Capital, Urania Ventures, and BPI [Tech Startups, March 2022]. The team numbers roughly 40 people across France, Texas, and Florida, headquartered at the Space Life Sciences Lab on Merritt Island [Inc; NASA; Space Coast Daily, August 2024]. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the questions worth tracking are whether Eden 1.0 reaches orbit on schedule, whether terrestrial revenue from beauty and natural-ingredient partners (Robertet has been disclosed) materializes at scale, and whether NASA grand-prize validation converts into recurring contracts with the commercial LEO station operators.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, NASA, Inc, Tech Startups, and Interstellar Lab primary materials.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | B2B |
| Industry / Vertical | Agtech / Space Life Sciences |
| Technology Type | Biotech / Life Sciences |
| Geography | North America (US HQ, French operations) |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Solo Founder |
| Funding | ~$15M total disclosed across seed and grants |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Interstellar Lab began in 2018 as a French-American venture organized around a single thesis: that the engineering required to grow food in space is the same engineering required to grow scarce botanical ingredients sustainably on Earth, and that one company can serve both markets from a shared technology stack [Crunchbase; Tech Startups, March 2022]. Founder Barbara Belvisi has described arriving in California with two suitcases and a concept rather than a prototype, then spending roughly a year embedded with NASA engineers before formally launching the company [Inc; The Org]. The company's U.S. headquarters now sits inside the Space Life Sciences Lab at Kennedy Space Center, 505 Odyssey Way on Merritt Island, with team members distributed across France, Texas, and Florida [Space Coast Daily, August 2024; NASA; Interstellar Lab].
The milestone progression is unusually external-validation-heavy for a seed-stage hardware company. NUCLEUS, the company's nutritional closed-loop eco-unit, won Phase 1 of NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, advanced to a Phase 2 win, and ultimately took the $750,000 grand prize in the finale [Interstellar Lab; NASA]. In March 2022 the company closed a $5 million seed round to extend its closed-loop systems work for both terrestrial and orbital deployment [Tech Startups, March 2022; Crunchbase, March 2022]. In 2023, Interstellar Lab announced a partnership with French fragrance and flavor house Robertet to apply its bio-farming platforms to plant-based natural ingredients [Interstellar Lab]. In April 2025, Vast confirmed that Interstellar Lab's Eden 1.0 plant growth unit would fly as a research payload on the Haven-1 commercial station, with launch no earlier than May 2026 [Vast, April 2025; SatNews, April 2025]. Mission Little Prince, a collaboration with the Antoine de Saint Exupéry Foundation to attempt growing roses on the lunar surface, was disclosed in 2026 [Whatfinger Business & Money, April 2026].
The legal entity structure spans both jurisdictions, consistent with the company's repeated description as a US-French operation, though specific entity names are not disclosed in public filings reviewed for this report [Tech Startups, March 2022].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, NASA, Vast, SatNews, and Tech Startups.
Product and Technology
MIXED
Interstellar Lab's product line resolves into two adjacent families built on a shared bioregenerative-systems core. BioPods [PUBLIC] are AI-driven, controlled-environment growth modules deployed terrestrially to produce plant biomass for customers seeking high-purity botanical ingredients, with Crunchbase describing them as "AI-driven greenhouse systems" that grow plants autonomously [Crunchbase]. NUCLEUS [PUBLIC] is the orbital-grade variant: a modular system that, per the Deep Space Food Challenge documentation, produces "fresh microgreens, vegetables, mushrooms, and insects to provide micronutrients for long-term space missions" [Deep Space Food Challenge, 2024]. Eden 1.0 [PUBLIC] is the plant growth research payload designed for Vast's Haven-1 station to conduct experiments in microgravity [Vast, April 2025; SatNews, April 2025].
The shared technology stack appears to combine controlled-environment hardware with software for crop selection and life-support optimization. A staff-level disclosure on LinkedIn describes a 'Crop Selector' machine learning solution and the use of reinforcement learning for life support systems [PRIVATE] [LinkedIn], which is consistent with how the company publicly describes its platform as combining "automated farms, AI, and bioscience" [LinkedIn]. The terrestrial commercial wedge is concentrated in beauty and natural ingredients: the Robertet partnership announced in September 2023 was framed as a joint effort to scale plant-based natural ingredient production, and the SIRIUS unit was presented at Climate Week NYC in the same vein [Interstellar Lab].
What is publicly verifiable is that the company has built and demonstrated multiple physical prototypes, has won a NASA-administered technical competition judged on working hardware rather than slides, and has secured a manifest slot on a privately funded commercial space station. What is not publicly disclosed is unit economics, throughput per BioPod, or pricing to terrestrial customers; investors should treat any such figures as undisclosed rather than inferring them.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Interstellar Lab, NASA, Vast, SatNews, and Crunchbase.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
The market this company is positioned at sits across three live commercial waves: the build-out of commercial low-Earth-orbit stations to succeed the ISS, the search by beauty and flavor houses for traceable plant-derived ingredients, and the longer arc of crewed missions to the Moon and Mars where in-situ food production is a hard constraint rather than a preference.
On the orbital side, NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations program is the explicit demand signal: Vast is developing Haven-2 as "the proposed successor to the International Space Station (ISS), designed to serve NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) program as a micro-gravity laboratory in space" [Interstellar Lab]. Axiom Space and Voyager (operator of the Starlab consortium) are pursuing the same NASA-funded transition, and Inc reports that Interstellar Lab has signed agreements with all three [Inc]. The Deep Space Food Challenge itself was launched in 2019 by NASA in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency specifically to seed food production technologies for long-duration missions, signaling that food autonomy is treated as a mission-critical procurement category, not a science-fair side project [Interstellar Lab].
On the terrestrial side, the demand driver is traceability and supply-chain control over botanical ingredients used by fragrance, flavor, and cosmetics manufacturers. The Robertet partnership and the SIRIUS Climate Week NYC presentation both target this wedge, where customers are willing to pay premium unit pricing for closed-loop, climate-resilient ingredient production [Interstellar Lab].
The regulatory and macro forces cut in the company's favor on both sides. NASA's CLD procurement timeline creates a discrete window in which station operators must select payload partners, and the European and U.S. push for sustainable ingredient sourcing in cosmetics creates a similar pull on the terrestrial side. The principal headwind is timeline: orbital revenue depends on commercial stations actually flying, and the first Haven-1 launch window is no earlier than May 2026 [Vast, April 2025].
| Sizing claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Deep Space Food Challenge grand prize | $750,000 | [NASA] |
| Interstellar Lab seed round | $5,000,000 | [Tech Startups, March 2022] |
| Total disclosed funding | ~$15,000,000 | [Inc] |
Analyst takeaway: the directly cited dollar figures available are program-level rather than market-level, which is itself informative. The addressable market for orbital food systems today is effectively the procurement budgets of NASA, ESA, and the three commercial LEO operators, and that buyer set is small enough to name on one hand. The terrestrial ingredient market is larger but not yet sized in the public record reviewed here.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Program-level figures confirmed by NASA and Tech Startups; broader market sizing is not present in cited sources.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
Interstellar Lab competes in a segment where named, public-stage rivals are scarce, and where the more pressing competitive question is whether station operators build payloads in-house or outsource to specialists like Interstellar Lab.
The segment-by-segment map breaks into three groups. First, the orbital incumbents and adjacent payload providers: NASA's own Veggie and Advanced Plant Habitat experiments aboard the ISS established the technical baseline for plant growth in microgravity, and any commercial LEO operator could in principle choose to develop food systems in-house rather than contract Interstellar Lab. Second, the terrestrial controlled-environment-agriculture players (vertical farming operators serving leafy greens and produce markets) overlap on hardware and software but target a different customer (grocery and foodservice) at lower unit margins than the botanical-ingredients buyers Interstellar Lab is courting. Third, contract growers and biotech ingredient producers serving fragrance and flavor houses compete on the terrestrial wedge but typically without space-grade closed-loop technology.
Where Interstellar Lab has a defensible edge today, three factors stand out from the cited record. The NASA grand-prize validation is durable in the sense that the procurement evaluation has already been done by the buyer that matters most for orbital contracts [NASA]. The signed payload agreements with Vast, plus reported agreements with Axiom and Voyager, create distribution lock-in across the three plausible commercial successors to the ISS [Inc]. The founder's prior career in deep-tech venture capital, including Hardware Club, gives the company an unusually deep network for hardware-startup capital formation [TechCrunch, September 2015]. Each of these is perishable: validation can be matched by a competitor that wins the next NASA challenge cycle, payload slots are not exclusive contracts in the public record, and network advantages decay as the category matures.
Where the company is most exposed: a deep-pocketed station operator could vertically integrate food systems, particularly if NASA CLD funding flows directly to the operator rather than the payload supplier. The terrestrial beauty-ingredients wedge is also exposed to specialized contract biomanufacturers (cell-culture and precision-fermentation players such as those funded in the synthetic biology category) who can produce ingredient classes Interstellar Lab's plant-growth approach cannot. The most plausible 18-month competitive scenario: winner if Eden 1.0 launches successfully on Haven-1 in 2026 and produces publishable plant-growth results, in which case Interstellar Lab becomes the default specialist payload partner for the CLD cohort; loser if the Haven-1 timeline slips materially and a competing food-production challenger banks the next NASA contract cycle while Interstellar Lab is still pre-flight.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Subject-side facts confirmed by NASA, Vast, and Inc; competitor mapping is analyst-constructed because no direct competitors are named in the cited source set.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
If Interstellar Lab executes against the manifest it has already signed, the prize is to become the default plant-and-food-systems supplier to the post-ISS commercial space economy, with a parallel cash-generative business in premium botanical ingredients on Earth.
The headline opportunity. The single largest plausible outcome is that Interstellar Lab becomes the standard bioregenerative payload across the commercial LEO station cohort succeeding the ISS, and that the same hardware platform anchors lunar and eventual Mars surface food production. The cited evidence supports rather than merely aspires to this outcome: NUCLEUS has already won the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge grand prize [NASA], Eden 1.0 is contracted to fly on Haven-1 [Vast, April 2025], and Inc reports signed agreements with Axiom and Voyager in addition to Vast [Inc]. That is a near-monopolistic share of the named buyer set for orbital food systems in the 2026 to 2030 window, conditional on execution.
Growth scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default CLD payload partner | Interstellar Lab becomes the food-systems supplier across Haven, Axiom, and Starlab | Successful Eden 1.0 flight on Haven-1 (NET May 2026) producing publishable results [Vast, April 2025] | Already contracted with all three operators per [Inc] |
| Premium botanical-ingredients platform | Terrestrial BioPod revenue scales through fragrance and cosmetics customers | Expansion of Robertet-style partnerships and SIRIUS unit deployments [Interstellar Lab] | Robertet partnership already disclosed in September 2023 |
| Lunar and deep-space food standard | NUCLEUS-derived hardware is selected for Artemis-era surface missions and Mars precursor missions | NASA contract award following Deep Space Food Challenge grand prize [NASA] | Grand-prize win positions the platform as the validated baseline |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel here runs on dataset and validation rather than network effects. Every flight payload generates microgravity plant-growth data that is itself a moat: the next station operator selecting a food-systems partner will weigh whose hardware has actually flown, and Eden 1.0 on Haven-1 puts Interstellar Lab on that list early [Vast, April 2025]. On the terrestrial side, the 'Crop Selector' machine learning system improves with every BioPod deployment, and ingredient customers like Robertet generate proof points that lower the customer-acquisition cost for the next fragrance-house contract [LinkedIn; Interstellar Lab]. The shared hardware base across orbital and terrestrial deployments means R&D investment amortizes across two revenue streams rather than one.
The size of the win. A precise comparable is hard to name from the cited record because the public-market cohort of pure-play space-agriculture companies is effectively empty. The directionally relevant comparables are commercial space station operators and specialized payload providers, where private valuations have moved into the multi-billion-dollar range as CLD procurement crystallizes. If Interstellar Lab captures the food-systems layer across two of the three named CLD operators and builds a meaningful terrestrial ingredient-supply business alongside, the company occupies a category position that does not currently have a public-market analogue (scenario, not a forecast). The downside framing of these scenarios, what has to go right, what could go wrong, and on what timeline, is treated in the private half of this report.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenarios anchored in confirmed contracts and grand-prize validation [NASA; Vast, April 2025; Inc]; valuation comparables are analyst-constructed.
Sources
PUBLIC
[Interstellar Lab] Interstellar Lab homepage | https://interstellarlab.com/
[Interstellar Lab] Our space program | https://interstellarlab.com/space
[Interstellar Lab] An Eden in Haven-1: Interstellar Lab partners with Vast | https://interstellarlab.com/news/an-eden-in-haven-1-interstellar-lab-partners-with-vast-to-integrate-its-plant-research-payload
[Interstellar Lab] Interstellar Lab's NUCLEUS wins NASA challenge | https://interstellarlab.com/news/interstellar-labs-nucleus-wins-nasa-challenge/
[Interstellar Lab] Robertet and Interstellar Lab join forces | https://interstellarlab.com/news/robertert-and-interstellar-lab-join-forces-to-rework-production-of-plant-based-natural
[Interstellar Lab] Mission Little Prince: collaboration with the Antoine de Saint Exupéry Foundation | https://interstellarlab.com/news/mission-little-prince-a-groundbreaking-collaboration-between-interstellar-lab-and-the-antoine-de
[Interstellar Lab] SIRIUS at Climate Week NYC | https://interstellarlab.com/news/cultivating-the-future-of-beauty-interstellar-lab-s-sirius-at-climate-week-nyc
[Interstellar Lab] Interstellar Lab wins NASA Deep Space Food Challenge | https://interstellarlab.com/news/interstellar-lab-wins-nasa-deep-space-food-challenge-with-revolutionary-nucleus-system
[Crunchbase] Interstellar Lab company profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/interstellar-lab
[Crunchbase, March 2022] Seed Round - Interstellar Lab | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/interstellar-lab-seed--c91a0f68
[Crunchbase] Barbara Belvisi person profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/person/barbara-belvisi
[Tech Startups, March 2022] US-French space tech startup Interstellar Lab raises $5M | https://techstartups.com/2022/03/07/us-french-space-tech-startup-interstellar-lab-raises-5m-build-closed-loop-sustainable-living-systems-earth-space/
[Inc] How Interstellar Lab's Founder Barbara Belvisi Turned a Moonshot Into a Business | https://www.inc.com/elizabeth-gore/how-interstellar-labs-founder-barbara-belvisi-turned-a-moonshot-into-a-business/91310464
[PitchBook] Interstellar Lab 2026 Company Profile | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/463550-23
[LinkedIn] Interstellar Lab company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/interstellar-lab
[TechCrunch, September 2015] Hardware Club coverage referencing Barbara Belvisi | https://techcrunch.com/
[Space Coast Daily, August 2024] Interstellar Lab on Merritt Island coverage | https://spacecoastdaily.com/
[Vast, April 2025] Vast announces Eden 1.0 payload on Haven-1 | https://www.vastspace.com/
[SatNews, April 2025] Interstellar Lab Eden 1.0 to fly on Haven-1 | https://news.satnews.com/
[NASA] Deep Space Food Challenge results | https://www.nasa.gov/
[Whatfinger Business & Money, April 2026] This startup is about to grow plants in outer space | https://money.whatfinger.com/2026/04/05/this-startup-is-about-to-grow-plants-in-outer-space/
[Reuters, December 2023] Top photos of the week | https://www.reuters.com/pictures/photos-of-the-week/our-top-photos-week-2023-11-30/
[Business Insider, January 2020] Mars settlement prototype in California | https://www.businessinsider.com/mars-settlement-california-train-astronauts-2020-1
[Fortune] Ladies who launch: Women powering the private space industry | https://fortune.com/longform/women-space-tourism-industry-rockets-satellites-launches/
[Yahoo Finance, February 2026] Meet the CEO whose startup is on a mission to grow plants in space | https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/video/meet-ceo-whose-startup-mission-200015232.html
[The Org] Barbara Belvisi profile | https://theorg.com/
[Deep Space Food Challenge, 2024] NUCLEUS technical description | https://www.deepspacefoodchallenge.org/
Articles about Interstellar Lab
- Interstellar Lab Is Sending a Plant Growth Box to Vast's Haven-1 Space Station — Barbara Belvisi's biospheres won NASA's $750,000 food challenge. Next stop: microgreens in low Earth orbit.