Northwood Space co-founders (from left): Shaurya Luthra, Bridgit Mendler, and Griffin Cleverly. Photo: Northwood Space

Ground tech startup Northwood Space has raised $100 million in a Series B round and a more than $50 million award from the U.S. Space Force to support the Satellite Control Network (SCN). 

The Series B funding announced Tuesday comes less than a year after Northwood raised $30 million a Series A. Washington Harbour Partners co-led the round alongside existing investor Andreesen Horowitz. Alpine Space Ventures, Founders Fund, Stepstone, Balerion, Fulcrum, Pax, 137 Ventures, and others participated in the round. 

The company is working to improve satellite ground infrastructure, building a vertically integrated, end-to-end ground service designed to be deployed quickly. Northwood has deployed a multi-beam phased array system called Portal, as well as a proprietary technology stack including narrowband and wideband modem products and a networking backbone. 

The company announced it has currently deployed operational Portal units on two continents, reporting that one site was installed in 12 hours and began communicating with satellites the next day. 

Northwood said this funding will support building more infrastructure and expanding its capabilities to support emerging mission sets. By the end of the year, the company plans to be able to produce over a dozen arrays for Portal per month. It is targeting deployment of over 82 beams by the end of year across 18 global ground sites.

“Our appetite for space has never been stronger but ground is really hard, and no one has been accountable to fix it. Northwood is a vertically integrated, end-to-end ground infrastructure partner – supporting everything from concept to deployment to live data delivery. By owning the full ground stack, we collapse timelines from years to months, and months to days for boundary-pushing space missions,” CEO Bridgit Mendler said in a LinkedIn post about the round. 

Also on Tuesday, the company announced it has a $49.8 million from the Space Force to support SCN, which provides TT&C for Department of Defense (DoD) satellites. Northwood said it provided communication links within three months of receiving the contract, and worked with the USSF Program Executive Office for Battle Management, Command, Control, Communications, and Space Intelligence (BMC3I). 

“We co-led Northwood’s Series A because we saw a team that understood the critical bottleneck holding back the space industry. Since then, their execution has been exceptional—delivering operational capability in months, not years,” commented Bulent Altan, founding partner of Alpine Space Ventures. “Their multi-orbit approach, from LEO through MEO to GEO, reflects what the industry actually needs: a ground layer that can scale with the full diversity of space missions being deployed today.”