Northwood Space wins $100M Series B contract and $50M Space Force contract

Space is becoming an increasingly crowded place thanks to the constant influx of new satellites, and it’s getting tighter as the cost of getting into orbit declines.

These dynamics have drawn attention to startup Northwood Space, which has spent the past few years developing a more modern and efficient terrestrial communications infrastructure. The startup capitalized on that attention in two ways this week.

The El Segundo, California-based company announced Tuesday that it has closed a $100 million Series B funding round, led by Washington, D.C.-based Washington Harbor Partners (which has been making investments in the space) and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Northwood also secured a $49.8 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to help upgrade what’s known as the Satellite Control Network, which “handles a wide variety of our government’s downstream space missions” including tracking and monitoring Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, founder and CEO Bridget Mendler said on a call with reporters.

The funding round and government contract are major milestones for the company, which is only a few years old and only closed a $30 million Series A less than a year ago.

But with so much interest in funding space technology, hard technology and defense technology 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, fundraising twice in the same year and significant amounts of capital,” she said. But she noted, “This is really what we’re prepared for from a production standpoint.”

Mindler also said the new capital will help Northwood keep up with growing demand, marking an “inflection point in the business.”

“We get clients who come to us all the time and ask for a ground solution, and they want us to help them think through a land problem, and we don’t want to have resource constraints that prevent us from being able to support that mission,” she said. “And so resources have been deliberately pooled at this point to support the missions ahead of us.”

Part of the interest in Northwood has to do with the fact that what it does — creating smaller phased array antenna systems intended to support or replace legacy systems that rely on larger dish antennas — remains novel, especially as a vertically integrated play.

But as the volume of data being transferred to and from satellites is likely to continue to grow, it’s a feature Mendler is keen to enhance.

“It’s a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of risk, a lot of capital. It takes a lot of diverse skill sets to come together, to be able to get around the whole Earth.” [station] “Big problem,” Mendler said. Yes, it’s a big undertaking for us, and our bet is that if we can really do that, if we can really think about the land holistically under one roof, it creates huge value for the industry, and that’s really the right model.”

This offer has been making sense to potential business customers for a while now. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon, which have massive satellite internet networks in the works, are building and operating their own ground stations. But capacity is constrained for other players who usually have to rent space from third-party providers that may not always be available.

Northwood CTO Griffin Cleverly expects the expanded capacity — which the new fundraising will help create — will be more valuable to customers who are “expanding into large constellations, so they may go from one or two satellites to dozens or more.”

Northwood’s “gateway” sites can now handle eight satellite links, he said. However, by the end of 2027, Northwood’s next generation ground stations are expected to handle 10 to 12 stations, with the company’s overall network capable of communicating with “hundreds” of satellites.

With the Space Force contract, it became clear that what Northwood was selling was an attractive option for the government.

It is not surprising that the newest branch of the armed forces began with the Satellite Control Network (SCN). In 2023, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that the Department of Defense had been aware of capability issues with the SCN since 2011.

“Satellite users who rely on the SCN interviewed by GAO said that this increased demand, and the resulting constraints on system availability, could jeopardize their missions in the future,” the report stated.