A company that seeks to disrupt the way in which data from space is received and transmitted has found some key investors and customers.
On Tuesday morning Northwood Space announced that it has closed a $100 million Series B round of funding to support a rapid ramp-up in the deployment of its phased-array radar system, known as Portal. The company also said it has received a $49.8 million contract from the US Space Force to augment the Satellite Control Network, which provides telemetry and tracking for the military’s satellites.
“We made our last fundraise announcement in April of 2025, so less than a year, but there’s been a lot of activity and progress on the Northwood side that reflects the importance of ground as an enabler for pushing forward more capable missions on shorter timelines,” said Bridgit Mendler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood, during a media roundtable. “That’s why we’re here, that’s why we’re building what we’re building, is because we believe that there’s a lot of important capability in space that needs to be built faster, and the way to do that is through a vertically integrated ground network.”
Deploying across continents
The funding announcements cap a busy year for Northwood, which emerged from stealth as a small startup in February 2024. The company was founded on the premise that there is a bottleneck in the capability of commercial ground stations to download increasing amounts of data gathered by satellites in orbit, and that this will only get worse. Northwood and its investors are betting that the existing network of commercial ground stations, many of which were deployed a decade or longer ago, cannot keep up with the pace of new satellites arriving in orbit.
In June the company demonstrated its second-generation phased-array antenna, known as Portal. Instead of needing to point directly at their target to collect a signal, like a parabolic dish antenna, phased-array antennas produce a beam of radio waves that can “point” in different directions without moving the antenna. It can also communicate with multiple satellites, in multiple orbits, at a single time.