Northwood hits $2B valuation: Ex-Disney star's ground station startup raises $375M from a16z and DFJ Growth. November 3, 2026 * Northwood Space raised $375 million at a $2 billion valuation, led by a16 and DFJ Growth. * This Series C follows a $100 million Series B in January, bringing Northwood's total raised to around $511 million. * Northwood plans to add 400 jobs over the next three years as it expands its shared satellite ground network. Northwood Space, a US-based spacetech startup co-founded by Bridgit Mendler, raised $375 million in a Series C round at a $2 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth, with Washington Harbour Partners, Alpine Space Ventures, StepStone, and In-Q-Tel also participating. HSBC Innovation Banking has provided a multi-year credit facility. The funds will fund existing contracts, hiring, and expansion of the ground network for commercial, US Government, and allied missions. Northwood raised $100 million in Series B in January and has a $49.8m contract with the US Space Force. Earlier, the company closed a $6.3 million seed round in 2024 and a $30 million Series A in April 2025, bringing total funding to around $511 million. From building antennas at a lake house to reaching a $2 billion valuation. Mendler took a very unusual route to becoming CEO. She left her acting and music career to attend MIT's Media Lab and Harvard Law School, and she interned at the FCC. During the 2020 lockdown, she and her husband, Griffin Cleverly, an aerospace engineer, built antennas from hardware-store parts to pick up weather satellite data. The couple realised Starlink and other large constellations would soon send back more data from orbit than ground networks could handle. Mendler, Cleverly and Shaurya Luthra founded Northwood in 2022. It started in El Segundo and now has its head office and factory in Torrance, which opened in September. The company employs over 140 people. Why investors are focusing on ground infrastructure. Northwood says ground infrastructure is now the major bottleneck. The number of active satellites has grown from around 3,000 in 2020 to over 14,000 by the end of 2025, increasing demand for ground capacity across more locations. The startup makes two types of antennas in Torrance: Portal phased arrays for command and control, each capable of supporting six satellites, and Prism dishes for high-speed data downlinks. Operators can book time on the shared network via the web, thus avoiding the cost of having their own ground stations. A new site can be up and running in three months, and a new antenna can be live within three to four hours of delivery. Unlike KSAT, AWS Ground Station, Leaf Space, and ATLAS Space Operations, Northwood focuses on speed and scale, so it builds its own antennas, sites, and scheduling software. Randy Glein, founder and managing partner at DFJ Growth, said that Northwood has grown from a raw startup into a leader that can "quickly surpass legacy incumbents," citing its phased-array technology and vertically integrated manufacturing. His firm backs SpaceX, Anduril and Impulse Space, and it earlier invested in Planet, whose North Dakota site hosted Northwood's first field test. Katherine Boyle, general partner at a16z, co-founder of the American Dynamism practice and on Northwood's board, added that the he firm has backed Northwood in every round since the seed round because ground infrastructure is fundamental to expanding space infrastructure. Its Growth fund has also invested in Databricks, OpenAI and SpaceX. Delivery is the real test. Since Series B, Northwood has got six multi-orbit sites deployed on two continents. It demonstrated it could command a geostationary satellite from a Portal array in a Space Force prototype and has launched Prism. It plans to have sites capable of handling over 100 Gbps in the hot spots by the end of 2027. The satellite ground station market is set to grow from $41 billion in 2025 to $82.7 billion by 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets. More investment is clearly going into space infrastructure: Cowboy Space, the orbital data centre startup founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, raised $275 million at the same $2 billion valuation in May, with 16z as one of the investors. Cailabs in France has secured €57 million for its optical ground stations. Northwood now has a factory, a Space Force contract and a $2 billion valuation. Site and network expansion is scheduled for the first half of 2027, and that will test Mendler's claim that Northwood has very little competition at scale. Operators will have to decide whether to book capacity on a network that's still being built.

Northwood closes $375M Series C raise for space network ambitions. Stay Connected Find opportunities - and win them. November 2, 2026 12:30 PM ET Washington Harbour Partners is staying involved in this two-year-old antenna maker, which also counts In-Q-Tel as an investor. 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.