Varda raises $90 million to fuel space manufacturing efforts

(Reuters) – Varda Space Industries, a startup that is developing technology to produce drugs autonomously in space, said on Friday it has raised $90 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm Caffeinated Capital.

The California-based Varda’s Series B funding round saw participation from science and technology investor Lux Capital, billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Vinod Khosla’s eponymous investment fund Khosla Ventures, among others.

The latest funding takes Varda’s total investment to $145 million since its inception in 2021.

“We plan to use the proceeds to transition from our initial demonstration mission to serving our several publicly traded biopharma and government customers,” Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, told Reuters.

The funding comes more than two months after the startup recovered its W-1 capsule that it had sent to space, a step in its pursuit of commercializing drugs and other materials manufacturing in space.

The capsule’s payload included an experiment to reformulate Ritonavir, a well-known antiretroviral drug primarily used to treat HIV.

Varda said that microgravity – a condition that simulates weightlessness – offers a unique environment for processing pharmaceuticals and other materials, which is not available on Earth.

Microgravity can help Varda’s partners develop “unique pharmaceutical formulations not otherwise possible,” said co-founder and CEO Will Bruey, a former Space X employee for nearly six years.

Varda said its second vehicle, W-2, is scheduled to launch this summer. The company aims to eventually launch capsules each month and it said that its modular capsules can also carry payloads for users such as the U.S. government.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)