Space is an increasingly crowded place thanks to the constant influx of new satellites and it’s only to get more cramped as the cost to get to orbit falls.
Those dynamics have brought attention to startup Northwood Space, which has spent the last few years developing more modern and efficient ground-based communications infrastructure. The startup capitalized on that interest in two ways this week.
The El Segundo, California-based company announced on Tuesday it has closed a $100 million Series B funding round, led by Washington D.C.-based firm Washington Harbour Partners (which has been on a run of space investments) and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Northwood has also secured a $49.8 million contract with the United States Space Force to help upgrade what’s known as the “satellite control network,” which “handles a huge variety of consequential space missions for our government” including tracking and controlling GPS satellites, founder and CEO Bridgit Mendler said on a call with reporters.
The funding round and government contract are major milestones for the company, which is just a few years old and only closed its $30 million Series A less than a year ago.
But with so much interest in funding space tech, hard tech, and defense tech right now, Mendler said this was an opportunity for her company to grow responsibly and quickly.
“Yes, this is happening faster than we thought — you know, two fundraises in the same year and large sums of capital,” she said. But, she pointed out, “that’s really what we’re ready for from a production standpoint.”
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Mendler also said the fresh capital will help Northwood keep pace with growing demand, marking an “inflection point in the business.”
“We get customers coming to us all the time requiring a ground solution, wanting us to help think through a ground problem with them, and we don’t want there to be a resource constraint that blocks us from being able to support that mission,” she said. “And so the resources were very intentionally brought on at this point to support the missions that that are coming forward for us.”
Part of the attention on Northwood has to do with the fact that what it’s doing — making smaller phased-array antenna systems meant to support or replace older systems that rely on larger dish antennas — remains novel, especially as a vertically-integrated play.
But with the volume of data being transmitted to and from satellites likely to keep growing, it’s an advantage Mendler is keen to press.
“It’s a hard thing to do. It requires a lot of risk, a lot of capital. It requires a lot of diverse skill sets to come together, to be able to really wrap your head around the entire ground [station] problem,” Mendler said. “And so yeah, it’s a big undertaking for us to take, and our bet is that if we can actually do that, if we can really think about ground holistically under one roof, then that produces a ton of value for the industry, and that’s really the right model to have.”
This pitch has made sense for prospective commercial customers for a while now. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon, which have massive satellite internet networks in the works, build and operate their own ground stations. But capacity is constrained for other players who typically have to rent space from third-party providers that may not always have availability.
Northwood CTO Griffin Cleverly expects the expanded capacity — that the new fundraising will help create — will be most valuable to customers who are “scaling into large constellations, so that may be going from like one or two satellites to dozens or more.”
Right now, Northwood’s “portal” sites can handle eight satellite links, he said. By the end of 2027, though, he expects the next-generation of Northwood’s ground stations to handle 10 to 12, with the company’s overall network capable of communicating with “hundreds” of satellites.”
With the Space Force contract, what Northwood is selling has clearly become an attractive option for the government.
It’s not surprising the newest armed forces branch is starting with the satellite control network (SCN), though. In 2023, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that the Department of Defense has been aware of capacity issues with the SCN since 2011.
“Satellite users who rely on the SCN and whom GAO interviewed said that this increased demand, and resulting limits on system availability, could compromise their missions in the future,” the report stated.