Northwood Raises $375 Million at a $2 Billion Valuation

Northwood has raised $375 million at a $2 billion valuation to expand the ground network that connects satellites. CEO Bridgit Mendler said the financing comprises $300 million in equity, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth, and $75 million in debt financing from HSBC.

Mendler said the money will go toward building out the network and extending Northwood’s performance and functionality across more of the networking stack. That means expanding the company’s work across hardware, deployment sites around the world, and the software that stitches the network together. She described the goal as bringing more industry on Earth into space.

The ground segment, she said, has not benefited from disruption at the same pace as other parts of the space industry. It remains fragmented across vendors and divided along the value chain, making it difficult to change how the infrastructure is built and deployed. Northwood’s approach is to take on that chain end to end: designing and manufacturing hardware, putting sites in locations around the world, and providing software to connect it all. The company is currently building and deploying sites across nine countries.

That integrated scope links the fundraising to Northwood’s manufacturing plans. The capital is intended to build the network and broaden the company’s capabilities; its new factory is meant to produce more antenna systems so Northwood can ship them around the world and bring more capacity online. Mendler described the work as different from launching and building a rocket, but also difficult: Northwood is taking responsibility for infrastructure that has traditionally been split among many vendors.

Northwood uses phased-array technology for its Portal product line and parabolic technology for its Prism high-throughput product line. Mendler said both approaches have changed what it takes to build and deploy antenna capacity. The company designed modular units that can be recombined, shipped and deployed quickly.

Mendler said Northwood had demonstrated deployment of capacity equivalent to a 20-foot dish—nearly two stories high—in a matter of days. A traditional parabolic installation of that scale, she said, would require months to complete the associated construction work. She said Northwood had tested the capabilities with customers on real missions.

The technology is dual-use, Mendler said, serving both commercial and government applications. She declined to name the customer involved in the demonstration, saying Northwood expected to share more later.

Mendler spoke from Northwood’s new 185,000-square-foot facility. She said it will allow the company to scale up production and produce more antennas for shipment around the world. The aim is to get more capacity live and online, supporting the network expansion funded by the company’s latest raise.

The facility also reflects a change in Northwood’s manufacturing approach. As an early-stage company, Mendler said, Northwood revisited the space industry’s supply chain, found vendors it could work with, and got creative about how to build the product. At its current stage, the company can deepen those supplier partnerships while bringing more work in-house.

The factory has space for incoming inventory, along with machining, circuit-board production and assembly, other in-house components, and testing equipment. Mendler said the testing capacity allows Northwood to send systems into the field ready to go. In her account, greater production volume and in-house testing support the same objective as the modular antenna design: putting more network capacity in place on an aggressive deployment timeline.