Most space startups sell the satellites. Northwood sells the part that makes them useful once they are in orbit, and investors just paid a premium for it.
The Torrance, California company closed a $375M Series C on Monday at a $2B valuation. Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth co-led the round, and HSBC arranged a financing agreement that rides alongside it. Northwood intends to spend the money accelerating antenna production and hiring roughly 400 people over the next three years.
Founded in 2022 by Bridgit Mendler, who is chief executive, Griffin Cleverly and Shaurya Luthra, the company builds phased-array antennas plus the scheduling software that stitches them into a shared ground network. Satellite operators buy access to that network instead of financing their own Earth stations, a shift that mirrors how cloud computing replaced private server rooms.
Demand is being pulled by the sheer number of spacecraft going up. Mega-constellations and a wave of Earth-observation providers all need downlink time, and booking a pass through a fixed government facility has long been slow and expensive.
The round follows a $100M Series B in January, also co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, and lands alongside a US Space Force contract worth nearly $50M to upgrade the military’s satellite control network. That mix of commercial backlog and defense work is what makes hardware companies financeable at this scale.
Northwood is not alone in the ground segment. Competitors and constellation operators themselves are all racing to add capacity, and the bottleneck is shifting from launch to the antennas that catch the data on the way down.
Northwood says the new capital covers antenna build-out and staffing commitments tied to existing deals, which means the next milestone to watch is delivered capacity rather than the valuation.
