Analysis
NorthStar Medical Technologies has secured a multi-year growth capital facility of up to $185 million from Hercules Capital, with $100 million available upfront, to expand production of no-carrier-added Actinium-225 and build out its radiopharmaceutical manufacturing campus in Beloit, Wisconsin, according to Pulse 2.0. The company says it already supplies more than 30 pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers under existing agreements and plans to bring a higher-capacity production line online later in 2026.
From molybdenum shortage fix to actinium supplier
NorthStar was founded in Madison in 2006 to solve a different nuclear-medicine supply problem: molybdenum-99, the parent isotope for the most common nuclear imaging test. In February 2018, its RadioGenix System won FDA approval as the first new US source of Mo-99 in more than 25 years, according to BioSpace. Rising costs and subsidized foreign competition pushed NorthStar to exit Mo-99 production at the end of 2023 and bet its manufacturing base on therapeutic isotopes instead -- specifically Ac-225, used in targeted alpha therapy drugs that deliver radiation directly to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue.
“That financing structure is itself a data point for VCs watching the radiopharma space.”
At the start of 2026, NorthStar became the first company to produce commercial-scale, no-carrier-added Ac-225 using electron accelerators rather than nuclear reactors -- the method most incumbent producers rely on. That distinction matters because reactor-produced Ac-225 is capacity-constrained by a small number of government and research reactors worldwide; an accelerator-based process can scale with equipment investment instead of competing for reactor time.
The competitive and financing landscape
NorthStar's most direct competitors in isotope supply include Eckert & Ziegler, Niowave, and Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, while Lantheus -- the dominant player in diagnostic radiopharmaceuticals -- lists NorthStar among the companies encroaching on adjacent therapeutic markets. Unlike Lantheus, which is publicly traded and funds expansion from cash flow and equity markets, NorthStar remains privately held and is instead turning to venture debt: Hercules Capital is a specialty lender that has built a business financing growth-stage life sciences and tech companies against revenue and contracts rather than unproven science.
That financing structure is itself a data point for VCs watching the radiopharma space. A $185 million facility sized against 30+ existing customer contracts reads as a bet on execution risk -- can NorthStar build capacity fast enough -- rather than scientific risk, which is largely retired once a company has paying pharma customers waiting on supply.
What the headline misses
The deal is debt, not equity, and debt has to be repaid regardless of how fast demand materializes; a facility sized at $185 million with only $100 million available immediately suggests Hercules built in milestones NorthStar still has to hit before unlocking the rest. NorthStar also hasn't disclosed revenue or a valuation alongside this raise, which makes it hard to benchmark against reactor-isotope peers or the handful of alpha-therapy drug developers, like Eli Lilly's Point Biopharma unit, that depend on exactly the kind of isotope supply NorthStar is racing to scale.
Watch whether NorthStar's new production line clears regulatory and operational milestones on the timeline it has set for later this year -- any slip would test how patient Hercules' underwriting assumptions were.