This Bhubaneswar-Based Startup Wants to Manufacture Medicines in Space

Bhubaneswar-based startup Serendipity Space is building autonomous pharmaceutical factories that can operate in microgravity. The company believes manufacturing drugs in space could help make some difficult-to-formulate medicines easier to administer.

The idea for Serendipity Space began when CEO and Co-Founder Antariksh Parichha started looking into why patients receiving Keytruda, Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug, had to spend four to five hours in hospital for each treatment. He discovered that the drug’s intravenous delivery was partly behind the long hospital stays and began exploring research into making it easier to administer.

Merck explored a subcutaneous version of the drug, which let patients receive it through an injection rather than an intravenous infusion. But making that formulation required producing drug crystals with the right characteristics.

That is where microgravity came in.

“I stumbled upon a paper in which they had tried to manufacture Keytruda in the International Space Station (ISS), and they got some stunning results,” Parichha says in an exclusive interview with AIM. The research showed that crystallising the drug in microgravity could help move it from an intravenous formulation towards a subcutaneous one.

The problem, however, was that most pharmaceutical research in space still depended on astronauts. Serendipity Space’s thesis was that humans themselves were one of the biggest bottlenecks.

“So the idea was naturally that at the root of the problems of why this has not happened at scale in space is the human,” Parichha says. The company therefore decided to build autonomous factories that could travel to space, manufacture the required drug material and return to Earth.

Serendipity Space raised its pre-seed round from Campus Fund in July 2025, although the company did not disclose the amount raised. The startup was founded by Parichha, Jivitesh Debata and Monica Ekal. 

Parichha also recently met Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with other space startups. He said the Prime Minister quickly understood the company’s work.

The broader policy environment is also catching up, according to Parichha. He points to the government’s efforts through IN-SPACe to establish re-entry guidelines as an important step towards allowing private companies to bring spacecraft back to Indian soil.

Why Some Drugs Need Microgravity

The company’s argument is not simply that space offers a better laboratory. Parichha believes some pharmaceutical processes cannot be properly replicated on Earth.

On Earth, gravity causes sedimentation, convection and buoyancy during crystallisation. Those forces can create defects and variations in the resulting crystals.

“Once you actually switch these things off, you end up getting much better drug crystals,” he says.

According to Parichha, laboratory equipment can reproduce many high-gravity conditions, but cannot create the sustained microgravity needed for the company’s target applications. For drugs such as cancer treatments and chronic-pain medicines, he says the meaningful change occurs at roughly the microgravity level, below what can practically be achieved on Earth.

The pharmaceutical opportunity is particularly interesting because crystal quality affects how drugs can be formulated and administered.

In microgravity, Serendipity Space expects to produce a much more uniform particle-size distribution. On Earth, a batch could contain crystals ranging from roughly 50–500 microns. In microgravity, the company expects the crystals to converge towards a much narrower size range.

“That has a good effect for two reasons,” Parichha says. Uniform crystal sizes are important for drug approval because different particle sizes can affect dosage. They can also reduce viscosity, potentially making formulations easier to inject subcutaneously.

What the Alchemy Proved

The company recently tested its Alchemy system during a near-space mission using a stratospheric balloon launched from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Balloon Facility in Hyderabad.

The flight tested the spacecraft’s core subsystems under conditions closer to those expected in space.

The prototype included heat-shield systems, deployment systems, avionics, telemetry and the pharmaceutical factory. Serendipity Space also placed commercial therapeutics on board, including proteins, small molecules and monoclonal antibody therapeutics.

The crystals produced during the mission were recovered after landing and analysed in the company’s laboratory. “We basically harvested the crystals out, and we analysed them in our labs, and they’re fine,” Parichha says.

The mission also demonstrated that the company could remotely control the factory through telemetry and telecommand, including changing temperatures, mixing rates and crystallisation rates during the flight. It also tested communications, materials, parachute deployment and soft-landing systems.

However, Parichha says a balloon-drop experiment can provide only a short period of free fall. It cannot reproduce the sustained microgravity of an orbital mission, where pharmaceutical crystallisation could continue for days or weeks.

The next step, he says, is to operate the system in orbit for much longer periods required for pharmaceutical processes.

Why Pharma

Microgravity research has been conducted for decades on the International Space Station across pharmaceuticals, fibre optics, semiconductors, metals and other materials. But Parichha believes not every space-manufacturing application makes economic sense.

The first commercially successful applications, he argues, need to involve products with an extremely high value per kilogramme.

“If you manufacture something in space, it has to have economic returns which are actually very high,” he says. Compared with semiconductors and metals, pharmaceuticals have a much higher dollar-per-kilogramme value, making them a more natural starting point for in-space manufacturing.

The economics of reaching orbit have also changed. Parichha said launch costs that were around 20,000–25,000 per kilogramme 10 to 15 years ago have fallen to roughly 3,000–5,000 per kilogramme.

That decline, combined with growing pharmaceutical interest in microgravity research, convinced him that the timing was finally right. Over the past four to five years, several pharmaceutical companies have repeatedly sent drug candidates to the ISS for crystallisation experiments, according to Parichha.

Building an Autonomous Factory

Serendipity Space is developing what Parichha describes as an autonomous factory capable of operating without human intervention in orbit.

The system has to monitor the crystallisation process, determine what is being produced and control the manufacturing conditions remotely.

The company is approaching the problem through redundancy and passive design.

“If one fails, the other can take over, and we can have the process continuing as well,” Parichha says, describing the redundant systems being built into the payload.

The company is also trying to make the payload as passive as possible. Hence, even if sensors or electrical systems fail, the physical design should continue maintaining critical conditions such as temperature without requiring active intervention.

But autonomy is only one part of the engineering challenge.

A returning spacecraft can reach speeds of around Mach 25, generating temperatures of roughly 1,500–2,000°C. Serendipity Space has already tested whether the crystals can survive the acceleration forces associated with re-entry. 

The company is now working to make its heat shields capable of withstanding these extreme temperatures.

Monoclonal Antibodies are a Key Target

Serendipity Space is working across both biologics and small-molecule drugs.

Parichha sees a particularly strong opportunity in biologics, including monoclonal antibodies. These drugs are notoriously difficult to crystallise on Earth, and even when crystals form, controlling the process can be difficult.

Microgravity could provide a way to control that process more precisely, potentially helping pharmaceutical companies develop formulations that can move from intravenous administration to subcutaneous injections.

That could reduce the time patients spend in hospitals while also lowering some of the costs associated with administering complex drugs.

The company is exploring formulations across cancer, psoriasis and other therapeutic areas where monoclonal antibody drugs are already widely used.

More than a space company

Parichha describes Serendipity Space as a formulation-development company.

Pharmaceutical companies have drug candidates that can encounter problems involving solubility, bioavailability and other properties before reaching clinical trials. Serendipity Space wants to give those companies access to microgravity as another environment in which to develop and optimise their drugs.

“We actually end up almost acting like a Contract Research Organisation (CRO) or a Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation (CDMO) would do,” Parichha says.

The company develops the crystallisation process on Earth, determines what can work in space and then takes it into orbit. Its business model is based on contracts to develop pharmaceutical formulations, with pharma companies in India and overseas as its initial customers.

Why Build the Spacecraft In-House?

Serendipity Space is also building the vehicle that carries the factory into orbit and brings it back.

There are currently no readily available autonomous orbital factories that Serendipity Space can simply lease on the cadence it needs. “We can't rent a commodity that doesn’t exist,” Parichha says.

The ISS offers access to microgravity, but repeated access and the limited cadence do not solve the company’s core manufacturing problem.

The company wants to control the entire chain, from crystallisation and formulation to the spacecraft, re-entry and recovery. “If we don't own the entire chain of this entire process, we also don’t end up capturing the entire value,” Parichha says.

India Wants a Place in the In-Space Manufacturing Race

Parichha believes India has a chance to lead one of the emerging segments of the space economy rather than trying to compete head-on in areas where the US already has a substantial lead.

He points to in-space manufacturing as one such opportunity.

“There are not a lot of companies doing this around the world,” he says, estimating that only four or five companies are seriously pursuing the area.

India also has the expertise needed for re-entry. According to Parichha, only four countries have successfully re-entered a space capsule and landed it safely, with India among them. Serendipity Space’s strategy is to combine that existing capability with a new commercial application.

The company wants India to go beyond building its own spacecraft and create an ecosystem in which foreign companies can also bring vehicles back to Indian soil. Parichha argues that such a policy could create a new market for testing, analysis, recovery and other services around re-entry.

VCs Did Not Dismiss the Idea

Building a pharmaceutical factory for orbit might sound like an idea that would struggle to find investors. Parichha says the opposite happened.

He believes India’s venture capital ecosystem has become more willing to take risks on deep-tech companies since the country’s space sector was opened to private participation.

“I was expecting a lot of ridicule,” he says. Instead, investors treated the concept as a serious business proposition and wanted to understand how the company planned to execute it.

Parichha says India still needs more capital for deep-tech hardware because the US and Europe have far larger pools of funding available for companies that require years of engineering before reaching commercial scale.

Serendipity Space’s bet ultimately rests on a simple proposition that some medicines may be easier to manufacture when gravity is removed. If that works,  the startup would not simply be sending experiments to space. It would be trying to make low Earth orbit part of the pharmaceutical supply chain.

And that, Parichha believes, could give India a chance to build an entirely new category of space manufacturing before the market becomes crowded.