How To Startup Part 8: Exits

🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, Los Angeles.

The next major pharmaceutical factory may not be built in Boston, New Jersey or Switzerland.

It may be orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth.

El Segundo-based Varda Space Industries raised a $251M Series D this week to advance an ambitious idea: manufacturing medicines in microgravity and returning them to patients on Earth.

The round was led by Lux Capital and Natural Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, 8090 Industries, Giant Step and Also Capital. It brings Varda’s total funding to $598M and reportedly values the company at $1.6B.

That is a considerable amount of capital for a company whose factories periodically fall out of the sky.

Then again, that is the point.

Varda builds compact spacecraft that serve as laboratories and manufacturing facilities in orbit. Its W-Series capsules carry pharmaceutical materials into microgravity, process them in space and return the results to Earth through the atmosphere at roughly 25 times the speed of sound.

Why travel that far to make medicine?

Without gravity pulling molecules downward, certain active pharmaceutical ingredients can crystallize in structures that are difficult or impossible to reproduce on Earth. Those differences could eventually enable drug formulations with improved stability, effectiveness or delivery methods.

The science is not entirely new. Researchers have studied pharmaceutical crystallization aboard the International Space Station for decades. Varda’s challenge is turning that research into something considerably less glamorous but far more valuable: a dependable commercial process.

In other words, the company does not merely want to prove that medicine can be made in space. It wants pharmaceutical companies to treat orbit as another step in the development and manufacturing pipeline.

That requires solving the less cinematic half of the space economy.

Rockets have made it increasingly routine to send cargo into orbit. Bringing commercially useful materials safely and repeatedly back to Earth remains much harder. Varda is building both sides of that equation, pairing microgravity processing with capsules capable of surviving hypersonic reentry.

Varda

Since launching its first mission in 2023, Varda says it has completed six successful reentry missions and has more than a dozen additional launches and returns planned through 2028. This week, the company also launched two W-Series spacecraft aboard the same rocket for the first time, marking another step toward operating multiple orbital factories at once.

The new funding will help Varda increase that flight cadence, expand its pharmaceutical partnerships and move closer to delivering what it hopes will become the first medicine manufactured in space for use by patients on Earth.

There is also a second business descending through the atmosphere.

Because Varda’s capsules encounter extreme hypersonic conditions during reentry, they double as research platforms for government customers testing heat shields, navigation systems and other defense technologies. That gives the company a near-term source of demand while its longer-term pharmaceutical market develops.

The combination is distinctly Southern Californian: part aerospace company, part biotechnology startup and part defense contractor, all operating from a city where building hardware for space has become almost commonplace.

But Varda’s larger opportunity depends on making the extraordinary feel routine.

A single successful space experiment is scientifically interesting. A repeatable network of orbital factories could become an industry.

With $598M raised, six reentries completed and a growing mission schedule, Varda has moved beyond asking whether manufacturing in space is technically possible. The more important question now is whether it can become economical, reliable and useful enough for pharmaceutical companies to adopt at scale.

For decades, Los Angeles helped build the machines that carried people and satellites into space.

Varda is betting the region’s next aerospace industry will be built around what those machines bring home.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

🤝 Venture Deals

Download the dot.LA App

🔦 Spotlight

Hey Los Angeles.

Last year, we introduced you to an El Segundo startup that had raised $25M to make it rain.

This year, rain is apparently just the beginning.

Rainmaker raised a $100M Series B to expand its cloud-seeding technology and pursue a much larger ambition: building the scientific and technical infrastructure to understand, influence and eventually mitigate extreme weather.

In startup parlance, it is a pivot from “make it rain” to “solve the weather.” Subtle.

The round included NOA VC, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, Dream Ventures and LA-based Upfront Ventures.

When we covered Rainmaker last year, the company was preparing to expand its drone fleet, atmospheric research and commercial partnerships.

It now says it has generated more than 145M verified gallons of precipitation during a four-month period. During a summer research program near Homer, Alaska, Rainmaker says one operation produced 19M gallons in three hours.

Those are eye-catching numbers. The company’s ambitions are considerably larger.

Rainmaker is working to build what it calls a “Weather Prime,” combining atmospheric science, autonomous aircraft, sensors and predictive software into an infrastructure platform capable of responding to water scarcity and extreme weather.

The idea is to make cloud seeding cheaper, more measurable and easier to deploy at scale. Rainmaker’s drones deliver specialized particles into carefully selected clouds, while radar and software help determine where to operate and measure how much additional rain or snow may have been produced.

The new funding will help Rainmaker hire more atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, chemists and engineers while expanding its research and data-collection capabilities. The company also plans to move toward increasingly autonomous operations, allowing more missions to be conducted at a lower cost.

Rainmaker expects its cost per acre-foot of water to fall below alternatives such as desalination and agricultural fallowing in the Colorado River Basin during the upcoming water season. If that projection holds, cloud seeding could begin looking less like an experimental intervention and more like another piece of water infrastructure.

That “if” is doing some serious atmospheric lifting.

Cloud seeding has existed for decades, but measuring its precise effects remains scientifically difficult. A successful operation requires the right type of cloud at the right moment, and proving exactly how much precipitation would have fallen without intervention is no simple task.

Rainmaker’s next challenge, therefore, is not merely to produce more rain. It must make the results measurable, repeatable and credible enough for governments, farmers and communities to trust.

That responsibility becomes even more important as the company expands its vision beyond water. Rainmaker describes cloud seeding as the first step toward eventually mitigating hail, heat and other weather-related threats.

It is a grand ambition, even by startup standards. Most founders promise to disrupt an industry. Rainmaker wants to influence the atmosphere.

The company’s location makes the mission particularly fitting. El Segundo has become a center for startups tackling physical problems with drones, satellites, factories and defense systems. Rainmaker is applying that same aerospace-minded approach to one of the West’s oldest constraints.

For Los Angeles, this story is about more than another substantial funding round. Rainmaker has progressed from proposing that cloud-seeding technology could be modernized to claiming it has produced rainfall at a meaningful scale.

Now, with four times the capital it announced last year, the company must prove that those results can become dependable infrastructure.

California has never been shy about reshaping nature to support its growth. Rainmaker is betting that the next great water project will not be built across the landscape.

It will fly into the clouds.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

🤝 Venture Deals

Download the dot.LA App

🔦 Spotlight

Happy Friday, Los Angeles.

Space may not have roads, but it still has a transportation problem.

Rockets have become remarkably good at carrying satellites beyond Earth. Once those satellites reach space, however, getting them from one orbit to another can still be slow, expensive or impossible.

Redondo Beach-based Impulse Space wants to change that, and investors are giving it considerably more fuel for the journey.

The company raised a $308M extension to its Series D, bringing the round’s total to $808M. The new financing comes just over three months after Impulse announced the initial $500M raise and pushes its total capital raised above $1.3B.

Existing investors 137 Ventures, BANNER VC, DFJ Growth, Linse Capital, Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners participated in the extension. Impulse did not disclose a valuation, but convincing existing backers to commit another $308M so soon after an already substantial round is a strong signal of confidence in both the company and the market it is pursuing.

Founded by former SpaceX propulsion executive Tom Mueller, Impulse is building vehicles designed to move satellites and payloads after they have already reached space. If rockets are responsible for getting cargo off the ground, Impulse wants to handle what happens after delivery.

Impulse Space

Its Mira spacecraft is built for precise maneuvering, payload deployment and proximity operations in orbit. Helios, scheduled for its first flight in 2027, is a high-energy kick stage designed to move payloads from low Earth orbit to destinations such as geostationary orbit in less than a day. The company has also introduced an electric propulsion system called Electra and a rideshare service aimed at making higher-energy orbits more accessible.

Together, those products represent something larger than a collection of spacecraft. Impulse is attempting to build a transportation network for an economy that increasingly needs one.

That need is becoming harder to ignore. More satellites are reaching orbit, governments are prioritizing responsive space capabilities and commercial operators want greater flexibility after launch. A satellite that can change position, reach a different orbit or respond quickly to a new mission is significantly more useful than one permanently tied to its original destination.

The U.S. government is already putting Impulse’s thesis to work. Helios was selected for the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program, making it the first upper-stage prime awarded a position in the program. Impulse also received a $28M contract extension to provide two Mira spacecraft for additional Space Systems Command missions.

The company says its headcount has more than doubled over the past year as it expanded its facilities in Redondo Beach, Mojave, Boulder and Washington, D.C. The new capital will support further hiring, product development and facility growth as Impulse works to serve commercial, civil and defense customers.

It also recently appointed its first chief financial officer, Adam Townsend, who previously helped guide Vizio through an IPO and its eventual sale to Walmart. The hire is another sign that Impulse is preparing for a more complex chapter, one defined not only by engineering milestones but also by a growing capital base, government contracts and large-scale operations.

That is where this announcement becomes more interesting than its considerable price tag.

Impulse has already shown that Mira can operate in space. Now it must prove that it can turn several ambitious vehicles into dependable infrastructure. The difference between a promising spacecraft company and a transportation network is repetition: more missions, more customers and systems that work reliably enough to become part of how the space economy operates.

An $808M round gives Impulse the resources to pursue that vision. It also raises the expectations attached to it.

For Southern California, the financing reinforces the region’s role in the new space economy. Los Angeles helped build the original aerospace industry, and a new generation of companies is now developing the vehicles, factories and infrastructure intended to support life beyond the launchpad.

Impulse Space is tackling what may be the next big bottleneck. Getting to space is only the beginning.

Someone still has to get you where you are going.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

🤝 Venture Deals

Download the dot.LA App