Satellite ground-network startup Northwood Space raises $375 million at $2 billion valuation

Northwood Space, a startup founded within the past few years that builds ground antennas linking satellites to the internet, said Monday it has raised $375 million in a Series C funding round at a $2 billion valuation, a sharp jump for a company that disclosed a $100 million Series B only nine months earlier. The round was co-led by venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth, Northwood said in a post announcing the raise, with Washington Harbour Partners, Alpine Space Ventures, Stepstone and the CIA-linked venture arm In-Q-Tel also participating.

The company, based in Torrance, California, separately arranged a multi-year credit facility with HSBC Innovation Banking to fund working capital and the buildout of its antenna network, according to the announcement. Northwood did not disclose a specific use-of-funds breakdown beyond saying the money would go toward delivering existing contracts, hiring and expanding its ground stations for commercial, U.S. government and allied military customers. TechCrunch, which first flagged the filing Monday morning, reported the same funding figures.

A traffic jam in orbit

Northwood sells access to a shared network of phased-array and dish antennas that let satellite operators send and receive data without building their own ground stations. The company makes two product lines: Portal, a phased-array antenna for sending commands to and tracking spacecraft, and Prism, a higher-throughput dish designed for downloading large volumes of payload data such as imagery. Customers book time on Northwood's antennas through an API, similar to the way cloud-computing customers rent server capacity, while a group the company calls "Mission Architects" helps new clients get set up.

The pitch rests on a widely cited shift in the satellite business: the number of active satellites in orbit has roughly quadrupled since 2020, from about 3,000 to more than 14,000 by the end of 2025, driven largely by low-Earth-orbit broadband and imaging constellations. Each new satellite needs somewhere to send and receive data, and ground infrastructure — antennas, radios and the software that schedules them — has increasingly been flagged by industry analysts as a bottleneck even as launch costs fall. Northwood is one of several venture-backed companies, alongside Amazon's AWS Ground Station and others, chasing that bottleneck as a business.

From a $6 million seed round to the Pentagon

Bridgit Mendler, Northwood's co-founder and chief executive, is better known to many Americans as a Disney Channel actress and pop singer before she pivoted to engineering and, later, to running a space infrastructure company. Northwood has climbed through funding rounds in quick succession: a seed round of roughly $6.3 million in 2024, a $30 million Series A, and then, in a $100 million Series B announced in January, a $49.8 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to help modernize the decades-old Satellite Control Network that tracks and commands government satellites, including some that have tumbled out of control or gone silent after launch.

Federal spending records corroborate that Northwood has been picking up defense work beyond that single contract. A procurement record in the government's own spending database, published by USASpending.gov, shows the Department of the Air Force awarded Northwood Space Corp. a contract tied to the Space Development Agency's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, the Pentagon's program to build a globally distributed constellation of optically interconnected satellites. Earlier Air Force small-business awards on the same database funded feasibility work on a mass-manufacturable Ka-band phased-array ground station and on resilient satellite communications for "adversarial environments."

In the nine months since the Series B, Northwood says it has deployed six multi-orbit-capable ground sites on two continents, demonstrated a geosynchronous-orbit command link from a commercial phased array for the first time, and arrayed ten Portal antennas together to match the signal-receiving performance of a 20-foot dish. In September the company opened a 185,000-square-foot headquarters and factory in Torrance that it says expanded its manufacturing capacity more than fivefold, enough at full production to build hundreds of antennas a year. Payload, a space-industry trade publication that covered the Series B round in detail, reported in January that Northwood had installed and activated a ground site within 12 hours of arriving on-site and had it operating the next day.

Investors bet on the ground segment

The round's size and valuation reflect how much venture capital has flowed into "new space" infrastructure companies this year, as investors look past launch providers and satellite manufacturers to the less glamorous plumbing that connects spacecraft to the ground.

"Northwood is building the ground network of the future," said Katherine Boyle, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner who is joining Northwood's board, in a statement announcing the round.

Mendler said in the same announcement that "the world is hungry for more data movement through space," while Randy Glein, a founder and managing partner at DFJ Growth, credited the company with "changing the game with innovation and speed of execution." None of the three executives' statements addressed questions about the sharp valuation increase or how quickly Northwood expects to turn its growing list of contracts into recurring revenue; Northwood's announcement did not disclose a valuation figure for the prior Series B round, making it difficult to calculate the exact multiple by which the new round increased the company's worth.

Who is affected, and what comes next

The immediate winners are Northwood's roughly 140 employees and its venture backers, but the company says the raise is meant to serve a wider list of customers: U.S. government agencies, traditional satellite operators and commercial "new space" companies that would otherwise have to build or lease their own ground stations. The Space Force, which has leaned on Northwood for a faster-responding alternative to parts of its aging Satellite Control Network, stands to benefit if the company's claims about rapid site deployment hold up at larger scale.

Northwood said it plans to add roughly 400 jobs over the next three years split between Torrance and Washington, D.C., concentrated in radio-frequency engineering, manufacturing, software and site operations, and that it is targeting ground sites capable of more than 100 gigabits per second in high-demand regions by the end of 2027. The company said it expects to announce additional site and network expansions in the first half of 2027. Neither Northwood nor its new investors set a timetable for profitability or further fundraising, and as a private company Northwood is not required to disclose financial results publicly.