Northwood Space raised $375 million in a Series C round as it works to expand its ground network by accelerating antenna production and growing its team by 400 people over the next three years. The funding round announced Monday morning values the company at $2 billion.
Northwood CEO and co-founder Bridgit Mendler compared what Northwood is building for ground networks to cloud services — a common pool of shared infrastructure. While the largest ground networks have hundreds of sites, Northwood Space plans to surpass that scale, Mendler said during a media roundtable ahead of the news.
The company has two products — the Portal phased array designed for command and control (C2) use cases, which is capable of communicating with six satellites; and Prism — the high throughput, high data rate parabolic antenna designed to communicate with one satellite at a time.
Between the two products, the company built 29 units over the past year and aims to increase that to hundreds of units.
“In the time it typically takes for an antenna vendor to provide a quote to a customer, we produced a half dozen dishes. That’s the modernization we’re building as a company,” Mendler said.
Northwood’s service is differentiated from other ground station-as-a-service providers through scale and reliability, Mendler explained.
“We are targeting customers that are thinking of scaled constellations that need to be able to count on and rely upon that service, whether it be for a commercial mission or for a government mission,” she said. “We’ve found that when you get very specific on those customer engagements, there typically is not really competition.”
Mendler pointed to a recent example where the company fielded a 7.3 meter antenna “in a matter of days.”
“That kind of replacement is very different compared to the alternatives that you have today, which require months, if not years, to get that same capacity fielded,” she said. “It’s really relevant to resilience — being able to replace units and have that rapid response and replaceability, both from a hardware manufacturing [and] deployment [standpoint]. Our ability to to field these units quickly and plug them in efficiently is unique.”
Earlier this year, Northwood received a $49.8 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to support the Satellite Control Network (SCN), which provides telemetry, tracking & command (TT&C) for Department of Defense (DoD) satellites. Mendler said the SCN contract uses the company’s Portal product line. She was not able to publicly share more about Northwood’s work for the Space Force, but said there is a “ton” of government interest in what the company is doing.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and DFJ Growth co-led the Series C round, which also included participation from Alpine Space Ventures, Washington Harbour Partners, Stepstone Activate, In-Q-Tel (IQT), and others.
This is the second funding round in less than a year for Northwood Space, which also raised $100 million in its Series B in January.
The company also secured a separate, multi-year credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking to support working capital and network expansion.
Northwood Space recently opened a 185,000 square foot production facility in Torrance, California, built to support hundreds of antennas in production for both Portal and Prism units, Mendler said. The company currently has 140 employees and plans to add 400 jobs in Torrance, California and Washington, DC over three years across radio frequency (RF) engineering, manufacturing, software, and site operations.
