Varda Space Raises $9 Million Seed Round for Space Manufacturing

Varda Space Industries has raised $9 million in a seed round to advance its goal of manufacturing products in space.

Varda said that Founders Fund and Lux Capital were the co-leads on the round. Other participants in the round included Also Capital, Fifty Years, Raymond Tonsing, Justin Mateen, and Naval.

Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens and Lux Capital managing partner Josh Wolfe joined the Varda Space board of directions as part of the raise.

Varda Space was co-founded by Delian Asparouhov, who is a principal at Founders Fund, and former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey.

“There are a wide number of products that would improve quality of life for people on Earth significantly that can only be produced in space. Varda’s focus will be on commercially scaling in-space manufacturing, which we believe will significantly accelerate humanity’s expansion to the stars,” the company said in its blog post.

One of Varda’s backers, Fifty Years, described the company’s manufacturing plans in a blog post.

“Over the long-term, Varda can build the infrastructure needed to enable humanity to industrialize space. How? First, make profitable unmanned in-space factories manufacturing product #1 (more to come soon). Next, manufacture other important things in-space that benefit from low G. Then, build the first platform infrastructure that can easily harvest the source materials for those and other products in-space via asteroids and the like,” the post said.