Troy-based startup Vara Safety has reached profitability after a year of major growth.
Vara makes holsters and racks that lock a gun in place and unlock it with a fingerprint. Founded in 2019, its first product was a mounted holster for handguns, called Reach.
Co-founder/CEO Timmy Oh said in 2023 the company reached profitability and rolled out another product that drove sales growth.
In the first quarter, the company had $100,000 in sales. That number grew by five times in the fourth quarter. For the whole year, the company broke $1 million in revenue for the first time; in 2022, the company recorded $600,000 in revenue.
A big driver of those sales figures was the launch of the company's rack for shotguns and rifles, called Ract, which has been under development for about four years by Francine Pataray, Vara's director of operations.
"After we first launched the Reach handgun safe, we got a lot of questions from customers asking about if we can also make a similar design for law enforcement for rifles and shotguns," Oh said. "Francine started working on that, designing basically a new type of rifle lock for police vehicles. And through that process, she started to also work with our customer base and figured out she can make a system that's so much more versatile and more modular than anticipated."
Oh said the company didn't anticipate the level of demand there would be for that product.
"We sold out of three entire batches of the order," Oh said, which in total was about 800 safes.
In response, Vara is improving its systems to handle the number of orders. This is especially important this year, as Oh said the company anticipates having enough stock to fill orders on demand instead of having backordered product sold in batches.
"That means making sure our inventory systems are up to date, making sure our production plays out ... and as we work through the growing pains, we should be able to handle customer demand a lot easier, because right now we're definitely struggling," Oh said.
Vara is also close to raising nearly $1 million in new funding. Oh said about five investors have participated in the raise, which involves convertible notes, a form of debt. The note becomes equity when the company raises its next round of funding or sells an asset for more than its market value.
