Will Bruey

Bruey was fascinated with space and running his own business from a young age. He holds a bachelor’s degree in applied physics and a master’s degree in systems engineering from Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

He began his career at SpaceX, where he spent six years (by another account, seven) as a hardware engineer working on the Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft: first on the Falcon and Dragon video systems, then on most of the actuators and controllers in the avionics of the crewed Dragon capsule; as lead of the Dragon spacecraft, he also flew eight missions to the International Space Station from mission control. He recalls that the first rocket he worked on at SpaceX was the third flight of Falcon 9.⁠[2][1][3][4][5]

After SpaceX, he served as a Director of Global Equities Technology at Bank of America and ran his own angel syndicate, gaining a grounding in finance and startups.⁠[2][1]

Delian Asparouhov and Trae Stephens of 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 invited Bruey to run Varda; Asparouhov considered his SpaceX engineering background and his finance and startup experience ideal for leading the new company being incubated at Founders Fund. Bruey’s biography says he founded Varda in November 2020 and serves as CEO; Varda describes itself as founded in January 2021 by Bruey and Asparouhov.⁠[1][1][2][6]

When the company announced its seed round in December 2020, Bruey said manufacturing was the next step for commercialization in space and that success in the launch business was the primary driver of Varda’s economics; the company would first manufacture products with high value per unit mass and expand from there.⁠[1][1]

When Varda announced its Series A in July 2021, Bruey said many high-performance products can only be made in zero gravity, a manufacturing capability no factory on Earth can replicate, and that the team, stacked with aerospace talent in the prime of their careers, was focused on getting working hardware to orbit as quickly as possible. When Varda signed Space Act Agreements with NASA in August 2022, he said the company wanted its reentry vehicles eventually to make daily return trips to Earth from its in-space manufacturing satellites.⁠[3][3][7][7]

Varda’s first mission, W-1, launched in June 2023; the in-orbit drug experiments were completed within weeks, but the capsule remained in orbit for about six months because it could not obtain approval to land. Bruey recalled that 80 people in the office had spent two and a half years on it without knowing whether it could come home; the company considered a water landing and a landing in Australia, but he decided against half measures: for Varda to succeed it had to land on land regularly, so it pushed to resolve the regulatory problem. In the meantime the company kept building the next capsule and kept hiring. W-1 finally landed in Utah on February 21, 2024.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][8]

When Varda closed its Series B in April 2024, Bruey said access to microgravity lets Varda help partners develop drug formulations not otherwise possible, potentially reducing healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes.⁠[9]

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Bruey predicted that within 10 years people could stand at a landing site and watch multiple spacecraft per night streak back to Earth like shooting stars carrying space-made pharmaceuticals, and that within 15 to 20 years it would be cheaper to send a working-class employee to orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth. He likened Varda’s business to a “magic oven” that makes formulations impossible elsewhere and said the company is not in the space industry but in “in-space industry.”⁠[5][5][5][5]

He says he now meets frequently with members of Congress, to whom he pitches what he calls the “seven domino theory”: reusable rockets are the first domino, manufacturing drugs in orbit and returning them is the second, and getting a space-made drug into clinical trials is the third, which would mean perpetual demand for launches; after that, growing scale and falling costs make more drugs viable, creating a cycle that drives down launch costs.⁠[5][5][5]

Bruey is a co-founder of the early-stage venture firm Also Capital and serves as a venture partner there; Also Capital invested in Varda’s seed round, Series C and Series D. In his free time he maintains and flies a Cozy Mark 4 experimental aircraft.⁠[2][2][10][1][11][12][2]

Varda Space Industries: Official website: https://www.varda.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Also Capital: Official website: https://www.alsocapital.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/WillBruey (opens in a new window)⁠[13][14]