Bridgit Mendler first found fame playing Teddy Duncan on the Disney Channel sitcom "Good Luck Charlie". Today she runs a space company worth $2 billion.
Northwood Space, the satellite ground-infrastructure startup Mendler co-founded and leads as chief executive, has raised $375 million in a Series C round at a $2 billion valuation, the company announced. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and DFJ Growth co-led the round, with participation from Alpine Space Ventures, Washington Harbour Partners, StepStone Activate and In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm that works with US national security agencies.
Northwood also secured a separate multi-year credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking. The amount was not disclosed and is not included in the equity figure.
The round was announced on Monday, November 2, and drew wide coverage on November 3. It comes only about nine months after Northwood raised a $100 million Series B in January. Tech Funding News estimates that the company has now raised around $511 million in total.
The problem Northwood is solving
Satellites are useless unless they can talk to Earth. Every satellite, whether it is beaming internet connectivity, capturing images for agriculture or defence, or relaying scientific data, relies on ground stations: large antennas that send commands and receive data as the spacecraft passes overhead.
The number of satellites has exploded. Active satellites grew from about 3,000 in 2020 to more than 14,000 by the end of 2025, driven by mega-constellations and a boom in commercial space companies. Ground infrastructure has not kept pace. Traditional ground stations rely on large dish antennas that are expensive and can take years to build, and many operators construct their own dedicated facilities.
Northwood argues that the ground has become the bottleneck. "Without modern infrastructure, the ground will limit what we can do in space," the company said in its funding announcement, pointing to applications from satellite communications and Earth observation to national security missions and cislunar exploration.
A cloud model for the ground
Northwood's answer is to build ground infrastructure the way cloud computing companies build data centres: as shared capacity that customers rent rather than own. Instead of each satellite operator building its own stations, operators book time on Northwood's network through software, paying for access without the capital cost of owning antennas.
Its core technology is a phased-array antenna system called Portal. Unlike traditional dishes that physically move to track satellites, phased arrays steer their beams electronically and can communicate with several satellites at once. Northwood says a new site takes about three months to build, and a new antenna can go from truck arrival to live links in three to four hours.
Mendler compared the approach to cloud services during a media briefing ahead of the announcement, Via Satellite reported. While the largest ground networks have hundreds of sites, she said Northwood plans to surpass that scale. The company says six ground stations are now live across two continents. Its customers include US government agencies and commercial space companies alongside traditional satellite operators.
Scaling the factory
Much of the new money will go into manufacturing and hiring. Northwood built 29 antenna units over the past year and aims to increase that to hundreds. In September, it opened a 185,000-square-foot headquarters and factory in Torrance, California, expanding its manufacturing capacity more than fivefold. It plans to grow its team by 400 people over the next three years across Torrance and Washington, D.C.
