Space Factory’ Startup Varda Space Raising $25 Million at $500 Million Post-Money Valuation

The new space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries is raising another $25 million, which would give it a post-money valuation of $500 million.

As the costs related to aerospace tech gets cheaper, private space companies have become more and more viable. The industry is growing faster than ever now and innovative new startups are bringing in massive investments almost every day.

Varda is one of the most cutting edge, ambitious companies in the recent blossoming cohort of space startups. While other startups like Vast are looking to launch a private international space station, Varda wants to launch entire space factories into orbit.

Why Manufacture in Space?

At first glance, the notion of space manufacturing, given its presumably high cost, might seem impractical if not absurd. However, certain types of products require a microgravity environment for their manufacture. Microgravity could also be useful in developing products that would then be produced on Earth.

One of the first things the startup will focus on is developing pharmaceuticals with gravity-sensitive manufacturing processes. Many new (and proposed) pharmaceuticals are extraordinarily sensitive to factors like convection currents and sedimentation, which are caused by gravity. This makes many of them nearly impossible to produce on Earth with science’s current techniques.

Protein and biologic-based drugs represent one of the most promising avenues in drug development right now but they are often hard to synthesize. Protein crystallization, a necessary step in protein drug development, is particularly finicky. When manufactured in microgravity, they come out as uniform crystals, which would make them much more viable as treatments.

Varda is also planning on targeting other products with gravity-sensitive manufacturing processes. This will likely include tech like fiber-optic cables and semiconductors.

It’s easy to see why Varda was able to secure so much funding. A single major development in fields like pharmaceuticals or semiconductors could easily be worth billions of dollars. However, it still has to worry about getting their spacecraft into orbit first.

This funding round came at the perfect time as the startup is preparing to launch its first spacecraft on a SpaceX Transporter-8 in June. The craft will have small modules for manufacturing and reentry.

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