Northwood closes $100M Series B round, books $50M Space Force contract
Gettyimages.com / Yuichiro Chino
By
Ross Wilkers
This space startup co-founded by Bridgit Mendler, the former actress-turned entrepreneur, is pushing a smaller-form alternative array to traditional means as a way to scale out ground infrastructure.
Northwood, a startup that makes phased-array antennas for communicating with satellites, has collected $100 million in Series B capital from investors to expand both production capacity and functionality of its products.
Bridgit Mendler, the former actress-turned entrepreneur, co-founded Northwood in 2024 with her husband Griffin Cleverly to create a more vertically-integrated and end-to-end ground infrastructure for space operations. The company calls its flagship product Portal, a multi-beam phased array system, and also offers modem products and a networking backbone.
Washington Harbour Partners co-led the Series B round announced Tuesday alongside existing investor Andreesen Horowitz. Alpine Space Ventures, Founders Fund, Stepstone, Balerion, Fulcrum, Pax, 137 Ventures and other unnamed investors participated in the round.
Northwood is pushing to produce at least a dozen arrays per month and deploy 82 beams by the end of this year across 18 global ground sites. The company is pushing its arrays as a smaller-form alternative that requires no mechanical movement, as opposed to older and larger dish antennas.
Today, Northwood has two sites ready for operations and five sites in-build. A third set of eight sites are in progress across five continents. Northwood’s idea behind adding these sites and production capacity is to help ensure ground infrastructure can help manage the ever-growing numbers of satellites in-orbit and data generated by them.
In conjunction with the raise, Northwood also announced its booking of a $49.8 million contract to work with Space Force on adding capacity to the service branch’s main Satellite Control Network. The SCN also tracks launches and provides emergency support to malfunctioning spacecraft.
“By owning the full ground stack, we collapse timelines from years to months, and months to days for boundary-pushing space missions,” Mendler wrote in a LinkedIn post Tuesday. “This comprehensive approach enabled a 3-month turnaround time from contract execution with US Space Force to communication links ready for operations.
Northwood completed this Series B round less than a year after its $30 million Series A raise.