Varda Space Industries Secures $251M Series D to Scale In-Space Drug Manufacturing

El Segundo-based Varda Space Industries closed a $251 million Series D fundraising round that values the company at $1.6 billion. The round was led by Lux Capital and Natural Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, 8090 Industries, Giant Step and Also Capital. It brings total capital raised by the microgravity-enabled life sciences company to $598 million.

“We started Varda with the conviction that the first product manufactured in space and consumed on Earth would be a pharmaceutical,” said Delian Asparouhov, Varda co-founder and president, in a statement. “This round gives us the resources to increase our cadence, deepen our pharmaceutical partnerships, get closer to delivering the first medicine made in space.”

Due to the absence of gravity, materials, such as the active pharmaceutical ingredients in medicines, can be crystallized in ways that are not possible on Earth, enabling novel drug formulations that can benefit patients. The company is transforming in-space pharmaceutical processing to be a normal, reliable part of the drug development pipeline.

“In-space manufacturing means building what space needs, in space, and making what Earth can’t. Varda is making life-saving drugs impossible to make under gravity. It’s the first and only company delivering a real cadence of launches and re-entries, with capsules built to manufacture the impossible and return it home,” said Shahin Farshchi, partner at Lux Capital, in a statement.

Since its first mission launched in 2023, Varda has rapidly increased its flight cadence, completing six successful reentry missions with over a dozen more launches and reentries planned through 2028. Varda’s W-Series vehicles, which reach Mach 25 on their reentry from orbit, offer government and commercial partners a reliable, repeatable and economical way to return materials and data from space to Earth. As launch cadence across the industry continues to increase, the ability to bring things back will become as foundational as the ability to send them up.

On October 1, it launched two spacecraft from the same rocket, a first for the company. The launch of its W-8 and W-9 vehicles aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX from Vandenberg Space Force Base marks a shift to fleet operations. The two vehicles will be managed in tandem from Varda’s newly expanded Mission Operations facility in El Segundo.

“We talk a lot about making reentry go from novel to normal. Flying two vehicles on the same launch vehicle is exactly that kind of normalization,” said Wendy Shimata, vice president of autonomous systems at Varda, in a statement.

Information for this story was provided by Varda Space Industries.