Northwood closes $375M Series C raise for space network ambitions

Northwood Space, a builder of satellite antennas and other hardware for space ground network infrastructure, has fetched $375 million in Series C capital from investors to accelerate its production and team expansion efforts.

For the two-year-old startup, this financing round follows its $100 million Series B raise completed in January to support product development work including the functionality of its offerings.

The Series C raise announced Monday will support Northwood’s work on existing contracts, talent acquisition and the further buildout of a global ground network for government and commercial space missions. Northwood employs 140 people and is pushing to hire an additional 400 staffers over the next three years.

Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth co-led the Series C round, while the Series B’s leader Washington Harbour Partners contributed what Northwood calls “substantial follow-on investment. Other participants included In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s venture investment arm, as well as Alpine Space Ventures and Stepstone.

Bridgit Mendler, the former actress-turned entrepreneur, and her husband Griffin Cleverly co-founded Northwood in 2024 with the goal of creating a vertically-integrated and end-to-end ground infrastructure network for space operations.

The Series B round coincided with Northwood’s capture 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.

“The world is hungry for more data movement through space and that is what Northwood is building for with scalable network capacity for the most challenging use cases.” Mendler said in a release. “We look forward to growing the business with new and existing capital partners as we scale production and expand the network.”

Also as part of the Series C, Northwood gained access to a multi-year credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking for supporting working capital and network expansion initiatives.

Northwood’s flagship products include Portal, a multi-beam phased array system built to communicate with six satellites at a time, and the Prism high-throughput dish for linking with one satellite at a time.

Since the Series B in January, Northwood has deployed six sites on two continents and demonstrated geosynchronous command capacity from a commercial phased array in live tests.

Northwood also developed and launched a new high-throughput antenna system, plus opened its new 185,000-square-foot headquarters and factory in Torrance, California as part of efforts to expand the company’s manufacturing footprint by at least fivefold.

The company’s longer-term goals include the ability to manufacture hundreds of antennas per year, as well as combine those antennas into larger apertures that also include Northwood’s own software.

The idea is for that software to help satellite operators search, reserve, update and cancel passes on the networks.