Varda Space Industries, which is leveraging reusable rockets to manufacture drugs in low Earth orbit, has received more fuel for its endeavors in the form of a $187 million series C fundraising haul.
The round brings the total capital raised by the El Segundo, California-based startup to $329 million. The latest fundraise was led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital. Other participants in the round included the Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lux Capital and Also Capital, Varda said in a July 10 press release.
To date, Varda has completed three successful launch and return missions and currently has a fourth in orbit, with a fifth planned for launch later this year.
“With this capital, Varda will continue to increase our flight cadence and build out the pharmaceutical lab that will deliver the world's first microgravity-enabled drug formulation,” Will Bruey, Varda’s chief executive, said in the release.
Varda, which launched its inaugural mission in 2023, asserts that its orbital labs are the first to process materials outside of the International Space Station (ISS). In a microgravity environment, materials like active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) crystallize differently than on Earth, paving the way for novel drug formations that are impossible to achieve on the ground.
Varda has also been expanding its frontiers outside of space, recently opening an office in Huntsville, Alabama, which is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Additionally, the company recently debuted a new 10,000-square-foot lab in El Segundo that will focus on developing processes to crystallize biologics like monoclonal antibodies.
The lure of space in the drug and medical device industries isn’t new. Healthcare-related science has been conducted on the International Space Station for years and has included testing of items from hand-held scanners that can scan any part of the body to astronauts using CRISPR to help discover how cells repair DNA that may be damaged by cosmic radiation.
In 2023, both Bristol Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly took part in missions to space. Lilly’s journey was part of a partnership with Redwire Corporation to test the infrastructure company’s in-space drug manufacturing platform PIL-BOX.
The BMS mission that year was a follow-up to its space project from 2020 that studied the crystallization of select BMS biotherapeutics in microgravity in order to improve biomanufacturing.
And in early 2024, Virtual Incision sent its MIRA robotic surgery systems to the ISS. The robotic tech only weighs two pounds and is touted as being 1,000 times lighter than other surgical robots, allowing it to be transported and used more easily.