Northwood raises $30 million to establish ground station network

SAN FRANCISCO — Northwood Space raised $30 million in a Series A round to establish a global network of phased array ground stations.

Alpine Space Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz led the investment round. Additional funding came from Also Capital, Founders Fund, Box Group, Balerion, Banter Capital and Humba Ventures.

Northwood, co-founded in 2022 by former actress Bridgit Mendler, will produce software-defined phased array antennas in a 3,252-square-meter facility in Torrance, California. The firm seeks to establish a ground station network that hits “the performance levels that support the majority of space missions at a price point where you can proliferate a network,” Mendler said in October at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.

Also in October, Northwood demonstrated its phased-array technology by linking a prototype antenna to a Planet Earth-observation satellite.

Through vertical integration, Northwood aims “to rapidly iterate on new products and take advantage of price and timeline efficiencies,” according to an April 22 news release. “We plan to hit a rate of 2 sites deployed per month.”

Each site could be expanded to offer backhaul capacity as high as 100 gigabits per second. Northwood intends to establish sites on six continents by the end of 2026 to enable “surge capacity, redundancy and global reach that modern missions require,” according to the news release.

With $6 million raised in a 2024 seed round, Northwood designed, built, deployed and tested its phased-array antenna prototype.