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From Disney star to space CEO: Bridgit Mendler raises $100M for space startup Northwood. Two years ago, when Bridgit Mendler quietly stepped into the space industry, the story wasn't about splashy valuations or government contracts. It was about antennas, ground stations, and a belief that the hardest part of space wasn't getting rockets off the ground, but getting data back down to Earth. Northwood Space, the satellite ground infrastructure startup co-founded by Mendler, has raised a $100 million Series B round led jointly by Washington Harbour Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg reported. The company declined to disclose its valuation. The new capital will fund manufacturing scale-up as Northwood races to meet demand from commercial satellite operators and government customers working under tight mission timelines. "Northwood, a maker of critical ground infrastructure for space satellites, raised $100 million in a new funding round led jointly by Washington Harbour Partners and Andreessen Horowitz," Bloomberg wrote. TechStartups first covered Northwood in early 2024, shortly after its launch and seed round. Back then, Mendler described the company's goal in plain terms: remove the bottlenecks between satellites and the people who rely on their data. "The vision is a data highway between Earth and space," Mendler said at the time. "Space is getting easier along so many different dimensions but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult. You have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite." Former Disney actress Bridgit Mendler raises $100M to build critical space infrastructure. Founded in 2023 by Mendler, her husband, and now CTO Griffin Cleverly, and Shaurya Luthra, Northwood focuses on a part of the satellite stack that rarely grabs headlines. The company designs and mass-produces phased-array ground stations, branded internally as "Portals," that communicate with satellites in low Earth orbit. These systems are built to deploy faster and at lower cost than traditional ground infrastructure, which often becomes a choke point as satellite constellations multiply. In 2024, Northwood was still proving the idea. The company had raised $6.3 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Also Capital, and other early backers. Mendler even traced the company's origins to improvised antenna experiments during the pandemic. "While everybody else was making their sourdough starters, we were building antennas out of random crap we could find at Home Depot... and receiving data from [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellites," she said. What looked unconventional at the time now reads as an early signal. Since then, Northwood has moved quickly. A $30 million Series A in 2025 helped the company expand manufacturing capacity and deploy initial network sites across multiple continents. The latest round takes that effort into industrial territory, positioning Northwood as a supplier for both commercial constellations and national security missions that can't afford ground-side delays. Alongside the funding, Northwood disclosed a $49.8 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to support upgrades to the Satellite Control Network, a core system that manages GPS satellites and other critical assets. Mendler said the work addresses resource constraints that have limited support for high-priority missions. The timing lines up with broader shifts in orbit. Launch costs keep falling. Satellites keep multiplying. Data volumes keep rising. The pressure has landed squarely on Earth-based infrastructure, where older ground systems struggle to keep pace. For Mendler, the appeal of that challenge was always practical. "For me, why the ground-side matters is because it actually is about bringing the impacts of space home to people," she said. That focus, rather than celebrity, has defined Northwood's rise. Mendler stepped away from acting years ago, earned advanced degrees, including a JD from Harvard Law School, and built a company around a problem most people never see but depend on daily. GPS navigation, weather forecasting, disaster response, and defense communications all hinge on the quiet reliability of ground stations. With fresh capital, government backing, and manufacturing ramping up, Northwood now sits at a different point on the curve. The early question was whether the idea would work. The current question is how far it can scale. The former Disney star isn't chasing orbit for novelty. She's building the infrastructure that makes orbit useful.

Northwood, a satellite startup co-founded and led by CEO Bridgit Mendler, has secured a contract with the Space Force and closed $100 million in Series B funding. Mendler discussed these developments in an interview with CNBC's Morgan Brennan. The funding and government contract mark significant milestones for the company as it expands its operations in the satellite sector.

Northwood Space secures a $100M Series B and a $50M Space Force contract. Space is an increasingly crowded place thanks to the constant influx of new satellites and it's only to get more cramped as the cost to get to orbit falls. Those dynamics have brought attention to startup Northwood Space, which has spent the last few years developing more modern and efficient ground-based communications infrastructure. The startup capitalized on that interest in two ways this week. The El Segundo, California-based company announced on Tuesday it has closed a $100 million Series B funding round, led by Washington D.C.-based firm Washington Harbour Partners (which has been on a run of space investments) and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz. Northwood has also secured a $49.8 million contract with the United States Space Force to help upgrade what's known as the "satellite control network," which "handles a huge variety of consequential space missions for our government" including tracking and controlling GPS satellites, founder and CEO Bridgit Mendler said on a call with reporters. The funding round and government contract are major milestones for the company, which is just a few years old and only closed its $30 million Series A less than a year ago. But with so much interest in funding space tech, hard tech, and defense tech right now, Mendler said this was an opportunity for her company to grow responsibly and quickly. "Yes, this is happening faster than we thought - you know, two fundraises in the same year and large sums of capital," she said. But, she pointed out, "that's really what we're ready for from a production standpoint." Disrupt 2026 tickets: one-time offer. Mendler also said the fresh capital will help Northwood keep pace with growing demand, marking an "inflection point in the business." "We get customers coming to us all the time requiring a ground solution, wanting us to help think through a ground problem with them, and we don't want there to be a resource constraint that blocks us from being able to support that mission," she said. "And so the resources were very intentionally brought on at this point to support the missions that that are coming forward for us." Part of the attention on Northwood has to do with the fact that what it's doing - making smaller phased-array antenna systems meant to support or replace older systems that rely on larger dish antennas - remains novel, especially as a vertically-integrated play. But with the volume of data being transmitted to and from satellites likely to keep growing, it's an advantage Mendler is keen to press. "It's a hard thing to do. It requires a lot of risk, a lot of capital. It requires a lot of diverse skill sets to come together, to be able to really wrap your head around the entire ground [station] problem," Mendler said. "And so yeah, it's a big undertaking for us to take, and our bet is that if we can actually do that, if we can really think about ground holistically under one roof, then that produces a ton of value for the industry, and that's really the right model to have." This pitch has made sense for prospective commercial customers for a while now. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon, which have massive satellite internet networks in the works, build and operate their own ground stations. But capacity is constrained for other players who typically have to rent space from third-party providers that may not always have availability. Northwood CTO Griffin Cleverly expects the expanded capacity - that the new fundraising will help create - will be most valuable to customers who are "scaling into large constellations, so that may be going from like one or two satellites to dozens or more." Right now, Northwood's "portal" sites can handle eight satellite links, he said. By the end of 2027, though, he expects the next-generation of Northwood's ground stations to handle 10 to 12, with the company's overall network capable of communicating with "hundreds" of satellites." With the Space Force contract, what Northwood is selling has clearly become an attractive option for the government. It's not surprising the newest armed forces branch is starting with the satellite control network (SCN), though. In 2023, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that the Department of Defense has been aware of capacity issues with the SCN since 2011. "Satellite users who rely on the SCN and whom GAO interviewed said that this increased demand, and resulting limits on system availability, could compromise their missions in the future," the report stated. Sean O'Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane. You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal. Tickets are live at the lowest rates of the year. 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