This week was about the step from prototype to production. Besi booked a record year for hybrid bonding, and NEURA showed a humanoid it says is designed for series production.
Space Rider went the other way: ESA lost a full-scale test model when its parafoil came off over Sardinia.
Lead
Besi's Hybrid Bonding Orders Pass Double Last Year's Total
Besi took EUR 342.6 million in orders in the third quarter, up 96 per cent on a year earlier and well above the EUR 298 million analysts expected. Hybrid bonding orders for the first nine months already exceed twice the total for all of 2025, from 23 customers with more than 215 systems ordered.
Most of the demand comes from logic chiplets, co-packaged optics, and the first edge AI devices. Memory is the soft spot: shortages have pushed back hybrid bonding in high-bandwidth memory, and Besi expects fourth-quarter revenue to stay flat.
CEO Richard Blickman also answered a SemiAnalysis report that ASML may build a rival tool. "We do not view ASML as a hybrid bonding competitor," he said; the two work together on placement precision.
Two weeks ago Besi moved engineers into Applied Materials' California lab. It now works with both of the larger Western toolmakers.
(Bits&Chips; Reuters via Global Banking & Finance)
Biotech & Life Sciences
EMA Backs Ascendis' Weekly Growth Drug for Children
EMA's human medicines committee recommended approval of Yuviwel (navepegritide) on 15 October for children aged two and over with achondroplasia whose growth plates are still open. Ascendis Pharma's drug is injected once a week; the existing treatment is daily.
In the main ApproaCH trial, treated children grew 5.89 cm a year against 4.41 cm on placebo. Ascendis expects the Commission's decision this quarter and plans to launch first in Germany in early 2027.
Then comes pricing, country by country, which is where access usually slows.
(EMA)
Arctic Therapeutics Raises $21.5 Million in Iceland
Arctic Therapeutics enlarged its round to $21.5 million on 21 October after investors asked for more. Three Icelandic investors, Pekron, Kaldbakur, and Landvættir, led with the Danish trial group Sanos.
The money takes two new candidates for autoimmune disease toward the clinic. AT-003 targets CLEC16A, a gene founder Hakon Hakonarson linked to type 1 diabetes in 2007, and AT-002 is an eye drop for uveitis.
Its older programmes in acne and a rare inherited dementia have reached Phase 2 milestones, but Arctic has published no efficacy numbers for either.
Quantum & Photonics
QuantrolOx Raises EUR 12 Million to Tune Qubits Automatically
QuantrolOx, an Oxford spin-out now headquartered in Espoo, raised a EUR 12 million Series A on 22 October. IW Capital led, with the EIC Fund and Transpose Capital joining.
Its software tunes and controls qubits across hardware types, a step the company calls a bottleneck. It says its machine learning tuned devices in under 70 minutes, faster than the best human benchmark.
Coherence Quantum, also in Espoo, raised EUR 2.78 million for qubit wiring this month. Finland now has two young companies selling tools for other people's quantum computers.
(Tech.eu)
Space
ESA Loses a Space Rider Test Model Over Sardinia
ESA confirmed on 22 October that the parafoil of a full-scale Space Rider model detached during a 6 October drop test from about three kilometres over a military range in Sardinia. The drogue chute worked, and the model then hit the ground.
A May attempt was aborted during the climb, so this was the second interruption this year. An investigation board has not yet found the cause.
ESA's director of space transportation, Géraldine Naja, said the remaining tests are off the critical path. The first flight on Vega C now targets the first half of 2028 instead of the first quarter, and the schedule will be reviewed once the board reports.
Materials & Manufacturing
Airbus Netherlands Takes 880 Kilograms Off Ariane 6
Airbus Netherlands shipped the first lightweight Vulcain aft bay for Ariane 6 Block 2 to ArianeGroup on 21 October. The structure, which carries the main engine's thrust into the rocket, is 880 kg lighter than before, beating an 800 kg target set in 2024.
Airbus now delivers the whole integrated assembly instead of a bare structure, and it still weighs 400 kg less. The part is due to fly in 2027.
ESA has ruled out a Block 3, so Block 2 changes like this are the last planned upgrades.
Robotics & Automation
NEURA Opens a Munich Gym and a Humanoid Built for Series Production
NEURA Robotics and TUM opened the TUM RoboGym at LabCampus near Munich Airport on 22 October, a 2,300 square metre centre where companies train robots on their own tasks. The partners are putting about EUR 17 million into it over three years, EUR 11 million of it from NEURA.
Companies from more than ten industries have trained workflows there since September. NEURA also showed 4NE1 Gen 4, 20 per cent lighter than the last version and designed for series production.
A second German gym, with RWTH Aachen, was announced in July on the back of NEURA's $1.4 billion Series C. NEURA gave no price or production date for the new robot.
Körber Buys Into NAiSE's Fleet Software
Körber has taken a stake in NAiSE, a German company that has funded itself since 2017. Its software runs mixed fleets of automated vehicles and mobile robots from different makers, plus manual forklifts, on one control layer.
Warehouses rarely buy every robot from one vendor, and without that layer each fleet works alone. NAiSE stays open to other integrators, and the two plan to add humanoids.
(Tech.eu)
One to Watch
What ESA Takes to Rome on 15 December
ESA's Council met in Paris on 21 and 22 October to prepare the Intermediate Ministerial Meeting in Rome on 15 December. Director General Josef Aschbacher is the actor to follow.
Watch whether ministers move the space station studies Airbus and OHB lead, covered here on 2 October, beyond paper, and how Space Rider's schedule review lands. Italy's artificial gravity consultation, flagged here last week, had not visibly opened by Friday.
(ESA)