Space

Former Disney Star’s Northwood Raises $375 Million for Satellite Ground Stations

co-produced by AI03. November 2026, 07:40

A satellite in orbit above Earth. © NASA / Unsplash

There will soon be plenty of satellites, but not enough antennas on the ground: The American start-up Northwood Space has closed a $375 million (about €337 million) Series C round to expand its global network of satellite ground stations. The deal values the California company at $2 billion (about €1.8 billion), according to Payload, and brings its total funding to more than $500 million (about €450 million).

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and DFJ Growth co-led the round, with follow-on investment from Washington Harbour Partners, which led the Series B, as well as Alpine Space Ventures, Stepstone and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community. HSBC Innovation Banking is also providing a multi-year credit facility.

From the Disney Channel to Space

Northwood is led by one of the most unusual founders in the industry. Bridgit Mendler, its chief executive, starred as a teenager in the Disney series “Good Luck Charlie” and released pop albums. She later did research at the MIT Media Lab and earned a law degree from Harvard. She founded Northwood with her husband, Griffin Cleverly.

The pace has been remarkable. Less than nine months ago, Northwood raised a $100 million (about €90 million) Series B and landed a three-year, $49.8 million (about €45 million) contract with the U.S. Space Force for its Satellite Control Network. Before that came a $30 million (about €27 million) Series A. “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,” Ms. Mendler said.

The Bottleneck Is on the Ground

The bet behind it: According to Northwood, the number of active satellites grew from about 3,000 in 2020 to more than 14,000 by the end of 2025, with tens of thousands more expected by 2030. Each of them has to send data to Earth and receive commands. Ground capacity is not keeping pace, Northwood argues, and traditional ground stations are expensive and take years to build.

Northwood is betting on standardization. The start-up builds two types of antennas in Torrance, California:

Portal: Phased-array antennas for satellite command and control. Several can be combined through software; in a recent test, 10 Portals matched the receive performance of a 20-foot dish.
Prism: Parabolic dishes for multi-gigabit data links.
Deployment: The systems ship by standard freight and need only flat ground, power and fiber. According to Northwood, a new site takes three months, and an antenna goes live three to four hours after it arrives.

Satellite operators book capacity on a shared network through a software interface instead of spending millions on their own ground stations. Select customers can also buy the antennas directly. “What goes up must come down,” said Randy Glein, founder of DFJ Growth, adding that Northwood had gone from a raw start-up to a new-generation leader in a year, quickly surpassing legacy incumbents.

Six Sites and 400 New Jobs

Since its Series B, Northwood has brought six sites on two continents online and, for the Space Force, demonstrated a link to a satellite in geostationary orbit for the first time, after focusing on low Earth orbit. In September, the company opened a new 185,000-square-foot headquarters and factory designed to produce hundreds of antennas a year. By the end of 2027, some sites are expected to handle more than 100 gigabits per second.

The team has grown to more than 140 employees, and Northwood plans to add 400 jobs in Torrance and Washington over the next three years. Its customers include U.S. government agencies, new-space companies and traditional satellite operators.

The market for ground stations as a service is crowded, however. The Norwegian incumbent KSAT runs one of the largest networks in the world, alongside Amazon’s AWS Ground Station, Sweden’s SSC, Atlas Space Operations in the United States and the Milan-based start-up Leaf Space.

When the Big Players Build Their Own

Whether ground stations can scale as a business to the extent the valuation suggests remains to be seen. Large constellations like Starlink run their own ground stations, and laser links between satellites could eventually replace some direct contacts with Earth. Microsoft offers an example of how tough the business is: The company reportedly shut down its Azure Orbital ground station service last year.

Valuations are also under scrutiny. According to Fortune, venture investors poured a record $19.8 billion (about €17.8 billion) into defense tech in the first quarter of 2026, per PitchBook, with some early-stage start-ups valued at 17 to 50 times revenue. Even Brian Schimpf, the chief executive of Anduril, has said, “I do think there’s a bit of a bubble.” Northwood does not disclose its revenue.