California-based satellite data startup Northwood Space has secured $30 million in funding to fuel its operations.
Led by former Disney Channel starlet Bridgit Mendler, who is serving as CEO and employs husband Griffin Cleverly as CTO, Northwood intends to mass-produce large ground antennas for satellites.
“We’re really emphasising increased manufacturing capacity and lower cost,” Mandler told Bloomberg Live. “That comes from being a vertically-integrated company. … In our last demonstration with Planet Labs, we managed to hit a 10x cost reduction relative to existing phased array technology and a 5x reduction in time to actually field the technology.”
Financing was led by Alpine Space Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, with Also Capital, Founders Fund, and StepStone Group joining as major investors, and participation from BoxGroup, Humba Ventures, Balerion Space Ventures, Banter Capital, Long Journey, Aabid Razvi, Evan Loomis, and Adrian Aoun.
Post-protectivist US Industry
Northwood aims to build satellite ground stations that are designed with "fast production and deployment flexibility first in mind."
The company secured $6.3 million in seed funding last year from Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Also Capital, Long Journey Ventures, BoxGroup, and Humba Ventures.
Northwood intends to manufacture out of Torrence, California, with a 35,000 square foot (3,252 sqm) facility ready to begin production later this year, in a bid to build locally to steer clear of tariff-influenced supply chain vulnerability.
“In the hard tech sector, we see capital-intensive pressures,” Bridget said, answering a question about how quickly the company might exhaust $30m on California-based brick-and-mortar manufacturing. “[The company] is designed to be efficient with capital with a mind to produce in the near-term. It’s really important for us to get into the field quickly.”
With some of the highest land and labour costs in the world, California will be a challenging state to carve out cost advantages.
While Mendler was comfortable speaking to the realities of Northwood’s manufacturing challenges and the location of its operations, she avoided painting an economically nationalist vision.
“A lot of our parts have intentional optionality to them to give us the benefit of choice, and largely we do choose domestic companies in our supply chain, but we plan to be a company with international deployments friendly to other nations, which has proven positive so far,” she said.
“We have our sights set on building the largest shared network in throughput and link capacity,” Mendler said in a statement on the funding. “Our sites will be outfitted with the ability to scale up to 100 gbps backhaul, and we are aiming to deploy multilink sites covering six continents by the end of 2026. We’re building a global ground network — engineered to scale as fast as the missions it supports.”
According to Mendler, Norwood Space was inspired during the downtime of the COVID-19 lockdown.
“While everybody else was making their sourdough starters, we were building antennas out of random crap we could find at Home Depot,” Mendler said of the period. "The one-lane rickety road for space data needs to adapt to a ten-lane highway routing continuous traffic across the globe," Mendler explained in 2024.
Aside from Disney Channel acting credits, Mendler earned her PhD from MIT's Center for Constructive Communications and Social Machines group, and earned her JD from Harvard Law School.
Husband Cleverly, who is now CTO at Northwood, has previously held roles at Lockheed Martin, the Mitre Corporation, MIT, Space Vector Corporation, and others.
