EUROPE: Berlin-based night train start-up Nox Mobility has raised €2m in pre-seed funding to support its plan to create a pan-European overnight network focused on offering private rooms for solo travellers. Thomas Wintle explains how this latest night train venture fits into a challenging landscape for sleeping car services.
The fresh round of funding for the sleeper start-up, which is attempting to distinguish itself from other night train newcomers by focusing on providing private rooms for its passengers, is fronted by Berlin-based IBB Ventures. The venture capital arm of Berlin’s public development bank IBB, the firm focuses on early-stage investment in local start-ups and says it has invested more than €300m in over 300 Berlin-based companies, with its underwriting supported by the EU’s European Regional Development Fund.
The new capital is also backed by Italian investor Tommaso Lucca and other rail specialists, including HomeToGo Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Patrick Andrae. Nox said the financing would be used to help “accelerate the start-up’s team growth, full-scale mock-up construction and preparations for its first routes, launching in 2027″.
Another sleeper start-up
Nox Mobility was founded in 2025, targeting Europe’s night train market with a model centred on private rooms rather than shared compartments, which it says would combine “airline-grade reliability with a hospitality-first experience inspired by boutique hotels”. The founding team brings together several notable names in the mobility and payments industry, including Thibault Constant, founder of rail media platform Simply Railway, former FlixTrain and Bolt executive Janek Smalla, and Artur Hasselbach, who co-founded Berlin hospitality payments firm Orderbird.
Positioning overnight rail as an alternative to both short-haul flights and hotel stays, the start-up says its services are aimed at city-pair routes such as Paris – Milano, Amsterdam – Berlin, Zürich – Perpignan and Malmö – Stockholm, as part of a wider goal to connect more than 100 European cities by 2035.
“Berlin has created mobility companies that reshaped European travel,” said Roman Pimonov, a senior investment manager at IBB Ventures. “Nox has the team to do it again: financial backing, operational credibility and a community that’s already waiting. The infrastructure exists. What’s missing is a product people actually want to sleep in.”
The problem with night trains
Despite growing public support for the return of night trains in Europe — with services declining from around 1,200 per week in 2001 to roughly 450 by 2019 — several recent attempts to revive or expand sleeper services have illustrated the structural challenges facing the model. French start-ups Midnight Trains and Lunatrain both failed to launch similar services to those envisaged by Nox. Despite emphasising comfort and private cabins, these ventures ran up against the core economics of the sector: the difficulty of securing and financing suitable rolling stock, the high fixed costs relative to limited capacity per train, and the need to compete with heavily subsidised incumbents while operating under open-access conditions. Neither project progressed beyond the planning stage.
Even established, state-financed operators face constraints. ÖBB, Europe’s largest night train operator, cut back parts of its Nightjet network in 2025–26, including cancelling Paris routes after French subsidies were withdrawn. It also reduced its flagship overnight rolling stock order with Siemens from 33 to 24 sets, shifting investment towards procurement for higher-demand daytime services. ÖBB’s long-distance business lead Kurt Bauer went so far as to describe night trains as a “niche business”, warning that “the demand is there” but they are “increasingly difficult to operate”.
The case of European Sleeper, one of the few start-ups that has actually managed to launch services, still illustrates the operational barriers facing new entrants. Since launching its Brussels – Berlin service in May 2023, the operator has faced delays linked to late path allocation and the impact of night-time engineering works, particularly in Germany. Its planned Brussels – Venezia service was pushed back multiple times due to infrastructure works and difficulties securing stable paths across several networks. Its CEO Chris Engelsman said in a candid interview with Treinreiziger.nl in 2024 that the attitude of the French railway infrastructure manager SNCF Réseau was “partly understandable but also partly incompetent.”
Nox plans to overcome barriers
Nox’s approach attempts to address some of these constraints, particularly around rolling stock and operating costs. Its berth concept is designed to fit refurbished inter-city coaches, drawing on a pool of older vehicles being withdrawn from service across Europe, rather than relying on new-build rolling stock. At the same time, the layout prioritises single and double private cabins arranged along a central aisle, but at the cost of capacity: around 36 passengers per coach are envisaged, based on campaign group Back-on-Track’s analysis of the proposed configuration, compared with roughly 40 in the couchettes operated by ÖBB’s latest Nightjet trains.
To offset that imbalance, the company is proposing a lower-cost operating model, including reduced onboard service, no catering and simplified operations without train splitting. It is also focusing on routes of under 1,200 km with journey times of around 12 hours, a range generally seen as better suited to night train economics. Estimates based on German Transport Ministry analysis suggest that measures such as reduced staffing and simplified service could cut personnel costs by around 10%, potentially offsetting the lower seat density.
Whether those efficiencies can compensate for competition with subsidised operators remains an open question, but the Nox founders remain optimistic. “Night trains are one of Europe’s last big untapped mobility opportunities,” said Nox Mobility co-founder Artur Hasselbach. “The infrastructure already exists and the market is waiting. Raising this round shows that investors believe in our approach to create a loveable product with a business model that works.”