From Disney Star to Space CEO: Bridgit Mendler Raises $100M for Space Startup Northwood

Two years ago, when Bridgit Mendler quietly stepped into the space industry, the story wasn’t about splashy valuations or government contracts. It was about antennas, ground stations, and a belief that the hardest part of space wasn’t getting rockets off the ground, but getting data back down to Earth.

That belief just earned $100 million.

Northwood Space, the satellite ground infrastructure startup co-founded by Mendler, has raised a $100 million Series B round led jointly by Washington Harbour Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg reported. The company declined to disclose its valuation. The new capital will fund manufacturing scale-up as Northwood races to meet demand from commercial satellite operators and government customers working under tight mission timelines.

“Northwood, a maker of critical ground infrastructure for space satellites, raised $100 million in a new funding round led jointly by Washington Harbour Partners and Andreessen Horowitz,” Bloomberg wrote.

TechStartups first covered Northwood in early 2024, shortly after its launch and seed round. Back then, Mendler described the company’s goal in plain terms: remove the bottlenecks between satellites and the people who rely on their data.

“The vision is a data highway between Earth and space,” Mendler said at the time. “Space is getting easier along so many different dimensions but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult. You have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite.”

That thesis hasn’t changed. The scale has.

Former Disney Actress Bridgit Mendler Raises $100M to Build Critical Space Infrastructure

Founded in 2023 by Mendler, her husband, and now CTO Griffin Cleverly, and Shaurya Luthra, Northwood focuses on a part of the satellite stack that rarely grabs headlines. The company designs and mass-produces phased-array ground stations, branded internally as “Portals,” that communicate with satellites in low Earth orbit. These systems are built to deploy faster and at lower cost than traditional ground infrastructure, which often becomes a choke point as satellite constellations multiply.

In 2024, Northwood was still proving the idea. The company had raised $6.3 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Also Capital, and other early backers. Mendler even traced the company’s origins to improvised antenna experiments during the pandemic.

“While everybody else was making their sourdough starters, we were building antennas out of random crap we could find at Home Depot … and receiving data from [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellites,” she said.

What looked unconventional at the time now reads as an early signal.

Since then, Northwood has moved quickly. A $30 million Series A in 2025 helped the company expand manufacturing capacity and deploy initial network sites across multiple continents. The latest round takes that effort into industrial territory, positioning Northwood as a supplier for both commercial constellations and national security missions that can’t afford ground-side delays.

Alongside the funding, Northwood disclosed a $49.8 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to support upgrades to the Satellite Control Network, a core system that manages GPS satellites and other critical assets. Mendler said the work addresses resource constraints that have limited support for high-priority missions.

The timing lines up with broader shifts in orbit. Launch costs keep falling. Satellites keep multiplying. Data volumes keep rising. The pressure has landed squarely on Earth-based infrastructure, where older ground systems struggle to keep pace.

For Mendler, the appeal of that challenge was always practical.

“For me, why the ground-side matters is because it actually is about bringing the impacts of space home to people,” she said.

That focus, rather than celebrity, has defined Northwood’s rise. Mendler stepped away from acting years ago, earned advanced degrees, including a JD from Harvard Law School, and built a company around a problem most people never see but depend on daily. GPS navigation, weather forecasting, disaster response, and defense communications all hinge on the quiet reliability of ground stations.

With fresh capital, government backing, and manufacturing ramping up, Northwood now sits at a different point on the curve. The early question was whether the idea would work. The current question is how far it can scale.

The former Disney star isn’t chasing orbit for novelty. She’s building the infrastructure that makes orbit useful.

The startup’s co-founders, from left: Chief Technology Officer Griffin Cleverly, CEO Bridgit Mendler and Head of Software Shaurya Luthra.