Varda Space Industries

Varda was incubated at the venture capital firm Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry: Delian Asparouhov and Trae Stephens of Founders Fund invited Will Bruey, an engineer who had worked at SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, to serve as chief executive. Like Founders Fund portfolio companies Palantir and AndurilAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry, the company takes its name from the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien; Varda is the Elf queen who created the constellations. Varda describes itself as founded in January 2021 by Bruey and Asparouhov; Bruey’s own biography gives November 2020.⁠[1][1][2][3]

On December 8, 2020, Varda announced a $9 million seed round co-led by Founders Fund and Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry, with participation from Also CapitalAlso CapitalAlso Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm headquartered in New York, founded and led as managing partner by Mike Annunziata, with Varda Space Industries chief executive Will Bruey as a co-founder. It makes concentrated investments in technical founders who choose “hard problems” and has invested in more than 30 companies since 2019, including Varda, Radiant Nuclear, Northwood Space and K2 Space.Open the full entry, Fifty Years, Raymond Tonsing, Justin Mateen and Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry; Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens and Lux Capital co-founder Josh Wolfe joined the board. The company’s focus at the time was scaling in-space manufacturing commercially, and Asparouhov said the company would not do 3D printing but would make products in space and bring them back to Earth.⁠[4][1][4][1]

On July 28, 2021, Varda announced a $42 million Series A co-led by Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry and Caffeinated CapitalCaffeinated CapitalCaffeinated Capital (known as Caffeinated) is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco and New York, founded by Raymond Tonsing in 2008. It mainly leads seed and Series A rounds and continues to invest throughout a company’s life; it originally operated as a single-partner fund, has invested in companies including Affirm, Airtable, Saronic and Virta Health, and led Varda Space Industries’ Series B.Open the full entry, with participation from Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and all existing investors, bringing total funding to more than $53 million. The company, then based in Torrance, California, planned to launch its first space factory in the first quarter of 2023 and return a first batch of product to Earth a month later.⁠[5][5][5][5]

Asparouhov said that by pairing a “free-flying” space factory with its own in-house reentry vehicle, Varda had a commercial solution for producing materials in zero gravity, and stressed that the company creates value by using space to benefit people on Earth rather than by sending people to space.⁠[5][5]

Rocket Lab announced a deal with Varda to produce three Photon spacecraft to integrate with Varda’s space factories: Photon would position the spacecraft in an operational orbit and provide station keeping, supply power, data and attitude control to Varda’s 120 kg manufacturing and reentry modules, and use its Curie engine to place the reentry capsule on a return trajectory to Earth. Target products included high-value materials such as fiber optic cables, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.⁠[6][6][6][6]

Varda signed Space Act Agreements with NASA’s Ames Research Center and Langley Research Center to jointly develop its Earth reentry vehicle and systems as well as new thermal protection systems for large-scale commercial reentry. By then the company had grown to more than 60 people and moved into a 61,000-square-foot facility in El Segundo, preparing to launch its first in-orbit commercial manufacturing satellite in 2023 on SpaceX’s Transporter-8 mission.⁠[7][7][7][7]

In March 2023, Varda secured a $60 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to test components and subsystems in a real flight environment; that year NASA also selected Varda for a Tipping Point award to begin production and flight testing of C-PICA, a NASA-developed thermal protection material.⁠[8][9]

On June 12, 2023, W-1 launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, with the capsule hosted inside a Rocket Lab Photon satellite bus. The pharmaceutical equipment on board grew crystals of Form III of the antiretroviral drug ritonavir as planned, and the experiments were completed within weeks.⁠[10][11][8][11]

The mission, planned to last about a month, was extended because of regulatory problems: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) denied Varda’s application for a commercial reentry license, and the U.S. Air Force, which operates the Utah Test and Training Range, also denied its request to land there. Bruey later explained that the range gave priority to military missions, so Varda’s landing windows were repeatedly bumped, and each change invalidated its FAA reentry license and forced the approval process to start over; the FAA had allowed the company to launch before its reentry license was finalized in order to encourage the nascent commercial reentry industry. In September 2023, Asparouhov said the product was awaiting approval from U.S. regulators to return to Earth.⁠[8][8][11][11][12]

After the FAA approved the reentry on the preceding Thursday, the W-1 capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range at around 4:40 p.m. Eastern Time on February 21, 2024, after more than eight months in space. Varda says W-1 was the first commercial spacecraft to land on a military test range and the first to land on U.S. soil, as well as the first spacecraft approved to reenter under an FAA Part 450 license. The ritonavir samples were then sent to Improved Pharma for analysis, and flight data were shared with the U.S. Air Force and NASA under existing agreements.⁠[8][8][8][10][8][8]

In April 2024, Varda closed a $90 million Series B led by Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to $145 million. Chief executive Bruey said access to microgravity lets Varda help partners develop drug formulations not otherwise possible; Caffeinated Capital founder Raymond Tonsing said Varda was one of the few companies that actually carries out its plans.⁠[13][13][14][14][14]

W-2 launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 rideshare mission on January 14, 2025, and after six weeks in orbit returned on February 27 at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, operated by Southern Launch. In addition to Varda’s expanded pharmaceutical reactor, the capsule carried a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and used a thermal protection system developed in collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center.⁠[15][15][15]

W-3 launched on March 14, 2025, with a payload funded through the Prometheus program, a partnership between AFRL and Varda that uses a low-cost, high-cadence commercial flight testbed to accelerate testing of high-hypersonic systems and reentry technologies. The capsule carried an inertial measurement unit developed by the U.S. Air Force and Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated, tested at reentry speeds it was designed to withstand but had never encountered. W-3 landed at the Koonibba Test Range in May 2025.⁠[16][16][16][16][16]

W-4 launched on June 23, 2025, the first mission to use a satellite bus designed and built by Varda at its El Segundo headquarters; the bus provided the capsule with power, communications, attitude control and propulsion in orbit. The mission also marked the first use of a heat shield produced entirely in Varda’s factory, tested a new approach to processing pharmaceuticals, and came with an FAA vehicle operator license under Part 450 permitting reentries through 2029. After nearly a year in orbit, W-4 performed a final deorbit maneuver on May 10, 2026, completing its mission.⁠[17][17][17][17]

The W-Series is a commercial satellite and reentry vehicle built specifically by Varda to return materials from orbit: it is a free flyer, independent of space stations, and the entire spacecraft is built in-house in El Segundo. After the pharmaceutical equipment completes heating, mixing, cooling and other steps in orbit, the capsule separates from the satellite, reenters the atmosphere at more than 18,000 miles per hour and above Mach 25, and lands by parachute on land, where the payload is recovered.⁠[18][18][18][18][18]

Varda’s premise is that in microgravity, sedimentation and other gravitational effects that interfere with crystal growth essentially disappear, allowing more precise control of crystallization to produce uniformly sized crystals or new polymorphs that can improve a drug’s stability, purity and shelf life. Bruey stresses that the company does not discover new drugs or create new molecules but expands the range of formulations possible for existing approved drugs; it started with pharmaceuticals because only drugs worth thousands of dollars per dose can absorb the transportation costs. Because the Mach 25 reentry environment is difficult to reproduce on the ground, the capsules are also used as a hypersonic test platform by the U.S. Air Force and other defense agencies.⁠[11][11][11][11][11][11]

Bruey has put forward what he calls the “seven domino theory”: reusable rockets are the first domino, manufacturing drugs in orbit and returning them is the second, and the third is getting a space-made drug into clinical trials, which would mean perpetual demand for launches; as scale grows and costs fall, more drugs become economically viable, creating a cycle that drives down launch costs. As of November 2025, no space-manufactured drug was on the market.⁠[11][11][11]

Varda Space Industries: Official website: https://www.varda.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

X: Public account: https://x.com/VardaSpace (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/varda-space-industries (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@vardaspaceindustries (opens in a new window)⁠[20]