By Harshita Mary Varghese and Akash Sriram
(Reuters) -Varda Space Industries said on Thursday it has raised $187 million in a funding round led by venture capital firms Natural Capital and Shrug Capital to boost the technology for robotic drug manufacturing in space.
The latest round, which included participation from Lux Capital, billionaire Peter Thiel, Founders Fund and Vinod Khosla’s eponymous investment fund Khosla Ventures, brings the total capital raised by Varda to $329 million.
“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,” said Varda CEO Will Bruey.
Materials such as active pharmaceutical ingredients in medicines crystallize differently in space due to the lack of gravity, creating drug formulations that would otherwise be impossible, the company said.
Its current space vehicles can also be used to mass manufacture drugs in space at a later date, the company said.
“When you think about mass manufacturing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to like scale up by like 1000x in terms of size of vehicle,” said Delian Asparouhov, cofounder of Varda Space Industries.
“Our current vehicles can bring back on the order of 50 kilograms of active pharmaceutical ingredient.
For the sets of drugs that we’re working on, for some of them, that can be like a full batch size — that is quarterly production.”
The company has expanded its footprint with a new office in Huntsville, Alaska, and a lab in El Segundo, California, where it aims to crystallize biologic drugs into structured solids for research and to improve formulation.
Since launching its first space capsule, W-1, in 2023, Varda has completed three successful launch and return missions, with a fourth currently in orbit and a fifth expected to launch before the end of the year.
During its first W-1 mission, Varda grew crystals of anti-HIV drug ritonavir while flying in Low Earth Orbit, and successfully recovered the original form of the drug after re-entering Earth, with no signs of conversion.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese, Bhanvi Satija and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Shilpi Majumdar)
