Dear readers,

Our latest edition takes us from the small Croatian city of Čakovec to space, where Genesis Space Flight Laboratories is building autonomous capsules designed to carry biological experiments into microgravity and, crucially, bring them back to Earth. 

We look at how founder Bence Mátyás went from biology to aerospace, why Genesis chose Croatia as its base, and its plans to scale from tiny PocketQube-based missions to much larger reusable capsules.

Across the region, we cover three notable deals and in The Investor Take, RZLT’s Luka Sucic shares his take on where startup investing is heading in 2026, arguing that AI is rewriting traditional assumptions around team sizes, growth, unit economics and valuations.

Happy reading!
Bojan Stojkovski
Editor-in-Chief, IT Logs

Čakovec is not the first European city that comes to mind when talking about space technology. The small city in northern Croatia is far removed from the traditional aerospace centers of Europe, where governments, universities and large contractors have spent decades building rockets, satellites and spacecraft. 

Yet inside an innovation center in Čakovec, a small team is working on a very different kind of space hardware: autonomous capsules designed to carry experiments into microgravity and bring them safely back to Earth.

At the center of that effort is Bence Mátyás, a Hungarian scientist and entrepreneur who came to space technology through biology rather than aerospace engineering. His involvement in space-related research, however, goes back much further: in 2017, he contributed to the development and publication of methods and hardware connected to a NASA JPL-related research project, bridging biological research with technologies intended for space exploration. His company, Genesis Space Flight Laboratories, was incorporated in Čakovec in June 2025. 

Within a year, it had developed and launched its first capsule, completed a successful atmospheric re-entry mission, attracted 16 customers and raised around $1.5 million in venture capital, including a $1.2 million seed round from GapMinder and Fil Rouge Capital.

That may sound like a remarkable amount of progress for a company barely a year old. For Mátyás, however, the urgency comes from a much larger change taking place above Earth.

The International Space Station (ISS) is expected to be retired around 2030. For decades, the ISS has provided researchers with one of the world's most important platforms for studying biology, medicine, materials and other processes in microgravity.

Genesis is taking the opposite approach, and instead of trying to build another giant orbital platform, the company wants to make microgravity research modular: smaller capsules, more frequent missions and, crucially, the ability to return physical samples to Earth.

A biologist's route into space

Mátyás' background is unusual for a space startup founder. Before Genesis, his work focused largely on plant and soil biology. Between 2024 and 2025, he worked on a portable biological laboratory in Slovenia. His transition into aerospace was driven by the realization that biological research increasingly needed access to space, while space infrastructure remained difficult and expensive to use.

Genesis initially had its roots in Slovenia, but the company's hardware development eventually moved across the border. The reason was partly financial as the team had tried to secure funding in Slovenia and Hungary, but struggled to find the kind of investment needed to actually build an aerospace company. Fil Rouge Capital, which has offices in Zagreb, eventually asked whether Mátyás would consider establishing the company in Croatia.

The move turned into more than a financing decision, with Genesis becoming a Croatian company, while the original Slovenian entity remained an NGO focused on research. The hardware development and intellectual property moved to the Croatian operation.

“It was not a bad decision. Within one year we closed now our second investment round, and we are already preparing the next round. So it's a very good location, Croatia now, even if it's hard to say.” Mátyás says.

There are, however, certain limits as Croatia is not yet a full member of the European Space Agency. The country signed a five-year cooperation charter with ESA in 2023 aimed at developing its space industry, but full membership would give Croatian companies greater access to ESA tenders and programs.

That is particularly true because space companies face a cost structure unlike most startups.

“You have the launch cost, you have everything, and if you're doing in-space hardware, not to mention the people and the experts. I'm facing difficulties bringing people to Croatia. In the UK and Germany you have big aerospace startups.” he tells IT Logs.

The first capsule was almost absurdly small

Genesis' first spacecraft was not a spacecraft in the conventional sense. GEN-1 was based on the PocketQube standard and measured just 5.9 centimeters in diameter. It weighed roughly 250 grams.

Yet inside that tiny capsule, Genesis managed to conduct biological experiments and, more importantly, demonstrate the company's central capability: returning the payload.

The capsule flew on a suborbital mission in May 2026. It carried experiments involving fruit flies, microorganisms, fungi and algae, and the company successfully recovered the samples after re-entry.

The system is more sophisticated than its size suggests. Genesis places its capsules inside a larger host satellite. Once the system reaches space, the host provides communications and power support, including solar energy. The capsule contains the actual miniaturized laboratory.

When the mission reaches its re-entry trajectory, the capsule separates from the host system and uses its own recovery architecture, including an integrated GPS antenna in the parachute system, to allow Genesis to locate and recover it.

The biological experiments were not merely demonstrations that life can survive a trip to space. The fruit flies, for example, were selected because they provide researchers with a useful model for studying biological responses to space-related stress.

“We chose fruit flies because their DNA matches human DNA by around 70%, a little bit higher, and obviously it's a much cheaper trial to send up the fruit flies first,” Mátyás explains.

Genesis used RNA sequencing to examine stress-related biological responses following the flight. The team also tested whether different environments inside the capsule could influence the flies' response.

One compartment contained a green, leaf-like environment intended to mimic something closer to nature, while another used a plain laboratory-white environment. The capsule therefore became both a spacecraft and a miniature biological laboratory.

The company now wants to scale that architecture dramatically. GEN-2 is significantly larger than the original capsule, with an 11-centimeter external diameter and roughly eight times the internal volume. The mission is targeting launch on October 1, 2026, followed by re-entry and recovery, with its primary scientific objective focused on crystallizing proteins in space during the microgravity phase of the flight.

But the company's real ambition is GEN-5. The planned capsule will be around 40 centimeters in diameter and weigh approximately 55 kilograms with its subsystems. It is designed to carry payloads of up to 12 kilograms or 12 liters and reach an apogee of around 400 to 450 kilometers, close to the altitude of the ISS.

It will also have something its predecessors do not: its own propulsion system, which drastically changes the role of the capsule. Rather than simply being a passive payload attached to a larger spacecraft, GEN-5 is intended to operate more independently, performing its own maneuver to increase the trajectory before eventually returning to Earth.

That propulsion system is being developed by a team that includes engineers with experience in European rocket programs.

Genesis is targeting a first test launch for the system in the fourth quarter of 2027. One objective will be testing the propulsion system on a suborbital trajectory while increasing the duration of microgravity by around 30%.

The larger capsule should also make Genesis useful to a much wider range of researchers. In October, the company plans to fly a significantly larger capsule capable of carrying up to 1.5 milliliters of agar or other liquid experiments, alongside a more advanced camera system that can record insects during the mission. Eventually, the goal is to make the platform useful for more than biological experiments.

The real product is the return

Genesis is entering a market where there is no shortage of companies capable of sending payloads into space. The more difficult proposition, however, is bringing them back.

A satellite may spend years in orbit collecting data before eventually becoming debris. Genesis' capsules are designed around a much shorter but more repeatable mission cycle: launch, experiment, re-entry and recovery.

The company already has 16 customers, primarily institutional customers from Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and Austria. Many of its larger customers have returned for subsequent missions.

That customer base is particularly important because Genesis cannot afford to rely exclusively on venture capital. “It's not like we are selling candy,” Mátyás continues. “You have to go after customers in the beginning. But 90% of these 16 customers are institutional customers who already received grants, are already doing something and already received some recognition.”

Genesis has also started experimenting with a consumer product. Its MySpaceCapsule allows individuals to send small objects into space, with packages starting at around €400. The payload capacity is extremely limited, but the idea is to turn access to space into something that does not require a university laboratory or aerospace company.

That could eventually give Genesis another revenue stream while expanding the cultural appeal of its technology. For Mátyás though, Genesis is not only a Croatian company story, but rather a European infrastructure story.

European space startups can raise money in Europe, hire European engineers and develop European technology, but much of the money still leaves the continent when those companies need to launch.

Genesis initially used SpaceX for precisely that reason, with Mátyás arguing that Europe's emerging launch infrastructure could eventually change the economics. Sweden and Norway are becoming increasingly important for northern European launch operations, while European companies are working to expand orbital launch capabilities.

“If you think about it, Europe or the EU or the European Space Agency or a European venture is actually supporting your journey here, but you're spending the money in the US. Majority of your budget, which is the launch and integration cost, is going to SpaceX.” Mátyás notes.

For a company with $1.5 million in total venture funding, those costs can become existential. “I don't have room for mistakes,” he says. “I don't have money to develop. That's how we are surviving: from customers and venture. Both. One is not enough.”

Genesis is still a small company competing in an industry dominated by organizations with vastly greater resources. But Mátyás is comfortable with that asymmetry: “We are David, they are Goliath,” he says.

The company's overall strategy is not to replicate the largest space companies, but to find a narrow part of the market where a smaller, reusable system can compete.

The timing could help - if the ISS retires around 2030 as expected, researchers will still need access to microgravity. New commercial stations may eventually provide some of that capacity, but their development is taking time.

Genesis is betting that there will also be demand for something much smaller: just a capsule.

For now, Genesis remains a small team in Čakovec, building spacecraft far from Europe's traditional aerospace capitals, but with a trajectory that’s becoming increasingly ambitious. The first capsule was small enough to hold in one hand, and the next generation is intended to carry kilograms of research toward the altitude of the ISS and then bring it home. And if Mátyás succeeds, the road from Čakovec to the stars may be about building the spacecraft that brings a piece of the stars back to Earth.

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