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Delian Asparouhov is a Bulgarian investor and entrepreneur who is a partner at the VC firm Founders Fund and cofounder/president of space research company Varda Space Industries. Before joining Founders Fund, Asparouhov was a principal at Khosla Ventures, head of growth at Teespring, and founder of a healthcare company called Nightingale. Asparouhov attended the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology in 2011, studying computer science, but dropped out in 2013 before graduating. He writes a newsletter called Operators, which is available via Substack. Asparouhov maintains a portfolio of investments he was a key part of while at Founders Fund and Khosla, as well as his angel investments.
From May 2012 to August 2012, during his time at MIT and while studying computer science, Asparouhov worked at Square as an Android developer.
In January 2013, Delian cofounded Nightingale, a mobile application and clinical decision-support solution for evidence-based interventions. The application gave practitioners a suite of tools for HIPAA-compliant data collection, reporting, and analytics; the app could be customized depending on curriculum and setting. Asparouhov acted as CEO of Nightingale until he left the company in 2016.
After leaving Nightingale, Asporouhov worked at Teespring, first in the role of GM of marketplace from July 2016 to December 2016 and then as GM of music and entertainment from January 2017 to May 2017.
Asparouhov worked at Khosla Ventures from 2017 to 2019. He started at Khosla Ventures as chief of staff to Keith Rabois, a general partner at Khosla Ventures, before he was promoted in August 2018 to principal. As a principal, he focused on investments in financial technology, healthcare technology, consumer hardware, and aeronautics and astronautics. Key investments Asparouhov was involved with while at Khosla include the following:
- Sword Health
- Eight Sleep
- Akash Systems
- Truework
After leaving Khosla Ventures, Delian Asparouhov went on to work as a principal for Founders Fund in March of 2019. His focus at Founders Fund has been on investments in financial technology, healthcare technology, consumer hardware, influencer, media & apparel companies, real estate, and aeronautics/astronautics companies. Partner investments Asparouhov was involved with while at Founders Fund include the following:
- Stealth
- Aerospace
- Hgen
- Balanced
- Stenon
- Zinite
- Nucleus
- Rushdown Revolt
- Giraffe 360
- Lula
- Regent
- Hadrian
- Varda
- Magdrive
- Sprout Therapy
- Seso
- Tend
- Cover
- Hype & Vice
- Orbiit
- Sword Health
- Up&Up
- Vise AI
- Tempo Series
- Ramp Financial
- AirGarage
- Akash Systems
In August 2020, Delian Asparouhov cofounded Varda Space Industries, where he is the president and chairman. Varda Space Industries is a space manufacturing company focused on creating products in space for terrestrial applications and manufacturing things that can benefit from low-gravity manufacturing. The company also intends to create infrastructure for in-space material sourcing and harvesting through asteroid mining.
Asparouhov has made two personal angel investments, participating in seed rounds for Eaze and Naytev.
