Northwood Space Raises $375M Series C for Ground Network

Bringing circuit-board assembly inside a satellite-ground-network company changes who has to answer when a component runs late. Northwood Space is making that choice in Torrance, California, where its new headquarters and factory bring more of the work behind a live satellite connection under one roof. The business sells customers access to a network while carrying the industrial responsibilities that make access possible.

Northwood's $375M Series C, announced November 2, 2026, finances the expansion of that model. Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth co-led the round, with Washington Harbour Partners, Alpine Space Ventures, Stepstone and In-Q-Tel among the participants. The company says the proceeds will support existing contracts, hiring and the buildout of its global ground network for commercial, U.S. government and allied missions.

Co-founder and CEO Bridgit Mendler is building the company with co-founder and CTO Griffin Cleverly and co-founder and Head of Software Shaurya Luthra. Their assignment reaches from antenna design to the software coordinating contacts with spacecraft. For satellite operators, buying that work as a service changes how much infrastructure they must finance and manage before their missions can operate.

A network purchase carries a manufacturing obligation

Northwood's factory announcement describes a 185,000-square-foot headquarters and production facility, including 135,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Those figures describe different parts of the same expansion. The company is adding dedicated antenna lines, circuit-board assembly, machining and radio-frequency testing so more design changes can move through its own operation.

That decision has a commercial consequence. A service provider selling network capacity depends on the equipment available to deliver it, so a production delay can reach far beyond the factory floor. Bringing work inside the company gives Northwood more control over that sequence, while putting the associated staff, facilities and execution demands on its own organization.

The customer still has a mission to run. Northwood's proposition is that an operator can buy shared ground access while Northwood manages the work across hardware, sites and software. The $375M financing helps fund that responsibility at a larger scale, including capacity that must be developed before all of its eventual customers and contact requirements are known.

Portal and Prism serve different parts of the mission

Northwood's product architecture combines 2 antenna families with a distributed software layer. Portal uses phased arrays to support command-and-control work, including simultaneous contacts and electronic beam steering. Prism is a parabolic antenna designed for high-throughput data movement. Treating both products as the same antenna would obscure the different jobs a satellite mission needs the ground to perform.

The coordinating software matters because an antenna at a useful location is only part of a usable service. In its Prism introduction, Northwood describes software that schedules contacts, routes traffic, monitors assets and coordinates the network. Spectrum permissions, site availability and customer requirements enter that operation. An operator's booking therefore has to fit a physical and regulatory geography, alongside the spacecraft's needs.

This is where the company's shared-network approach becomes useful to examine. A customer can reserve capacity through software, while Northwood manages the equipment and operations behind the interface. That division can simplify the customer's task, but it concentrates a substantial coordination job inside the provider. The service earns its place each time those separate responsibilities come together for the requested contact.

The financing follows deployments and a government award

Northwood reports 6 multi-orbit-capable sites across 2 continents in its latest announcement. The company also describes a live demonstration linking a government satellite in geostationary orbit through a Portal site. These are issuer-reported operating milestones; the announcement does not provide an independently audited availability record, network utilization figure or revenue breakdown.

The new round follows a $100M Series B, which Northwood discussed in a February 18 company release after a prior $30M Series A. That release also describes a $49.8M U.S. Space Force contract supporting the Satellite Control Network. An award puts delivery obligations on the calendar; its face value should not be read as revenue already earned or as money raised from investors.

A separate multi-year facility from HSBC Innovation Banking will support working capital and network expansion, according to the Series C announcement. Northwood did not disclose its size in that release, so it remains separate from the $375M equity figure. Keeping those funding sources distinct helps readers understand how the company is financing an operation with physical production, deployment and continuing service costs.

Shared capacity brings the customer's calendar into the factory

DevCuration's coverage of Muon Space's satellite manufacturing expansion and Hubble Network's satellite connectivity financing follows adjacent parts of the same space economy. Northwood's ground network addresses the infrastructure that spacecraft depend on after deployment, placing more of the industry's operating workload on Earth.

The investment logic predates this round. In its 2025 Northwood investment explanation, Andreessen Horowitz described a company integrating design, fabrication, site deployment and network orchestration. The Series C brings more capital to the same organizational choice: take ownership of the ground layer so satellite builders can purchase its capabilities without assembling every part themselves.

That model also shifts the economic problem. A shared network must place capacity where customers need it and coordinate demand across mission requirements and contact windows. How productively that capacity gets used will matter to the business, although Northwood has not disclosed the utilization and margin data needed to assess those economics. A larger factory increases the ability to supply equipment; the network still has to turn equipment into useful service.

Northwood says its team now exceeds 140 employees and plans to add 400 jobs over 3 years in Torrance and Washington, DC. Its current careers page spans engineering, production, site operations and mission management, showing how many disciplines sit behind a connection. As those teams expand the network, a customer's next reservation will carry another small claim on the factory, the field crews and the people keeping the link available.