Northwood Blog

Northwood announces $30M Series A

Led by Alpine Space Ventures and a16z, with Also Capital, Founders Fund, and Stepstone joining as major investors, Northwood will use this funding to expand into its 35,000 sqft manufacturing facility and deploy the first operational version of its global network of Northwood ground sites.

Space has never been more important or more underprepared

The space segment is no longer an accessory — it is core infrastructure. It powers everything from GPS and remote asset monitoring to missile warning and global communications. As General Bradley Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations of the US Space Force, recently put it: “We are no longer the icing on the cake – we’re the eggs in the batter.” Space isn’t a distant frontier, we feel its impact in every facet of our lives.

Yet all of these critical applications hang in the balance of limited and fragmented ground networks of over-capacity antennas that are trusted to keep space applications afloat. While dazzling rockets launch satellites that orbit the earth, their effectiveness is reliant upon these antennas on earth to send and receive the data the satellites produce. Without these ground antennas, there would be no space industry. And today’s infrastructure is reaching a breaking point.

Designed for an earlier era driven by science missions, these critical assets are costly, slow to build and deploy, and fragile. Often the outage of one ground site could jeopardize an entire mission, disrupting the essential communication needed to guide satellites and deliver timely data. And today these outages are common, as ground networks are drastically under capacity, leading operators to scale back their ambitions on what they can build, and to overbook, overpay, and over-engineer just to hit basic delivery timelines. Yet we are in a world where space is becoming more significant, not less. It’s time we stop treating satellite connectivity like booking a telescope for a science project and start treating it like what it is: core infrastructure for the 21st century.

Infrastructure for a new era

A reliable ground network deployed at scale is that missing core infrastructure – powerful enough to sustain the space capabilities of today and develop the next wave of capabilities to connect, inform, and protect people on earth.

We have many models for how this can be done. The internet is industrialized infrastructure made up of common networks to reliably route large volumes of data around the globe. We need that for space. We need to make scaling antennas as easy as scaling servers and network switches. And we need to make the network of those antennas as reliable as the internet as well. Running an app doesn’t mean coordinating routers or reserving fiber — the underlying infrastructure is abstracted and pooled across a large shared network that delivers the connectivity you need.

In this same way, a reliable ground network at scale can enable an industrialized space economy – this would give operators of all kinds the power to build with confidence without worrying if the network will scale with them or hold up under pressure. Because when the next wildfire hits, when supply chains are disrupted, when geopolitical events unfold — you can’t afford to ask whether your data will arrive.

Northwood – A new way to build

Northwood is building a new kind of network from the ground up. We are innovating on antenna hardware developed in-house and designed for cost efficiency and manufacturability. Our vertically integrated development enables us to rapidly iterate on new products and take advantage of price and timeline efficiencies – we plan to hit a rate of 2 sites deployed per month in our new facility with system costs at 10x less than comparable efforts.

We are aiming to build the largest shared network in throughput and link capacity. Our sites will be outfitted with the ability to scale up to 100 gbps backhaul and we are aiming to deploy multilink sites covering 6 continents by the end of 2026. This enables surge capacity, redundancy, and global reach that modern missions require.

And finally, we are building a software layer that abstracts the ground into a programmable interface to give developers flexibility and control. This opens the door to integrating space-based data movement into the broader digital economy—allowing developers to automate, spin up new services, and move mission data as easily as managing cloud compute resources.

Accelerated Progress

Northwood used its seed round funding to demonstrate the feasibility of a phased array prototype antenna, built on 5x reduced time and 10x reduced budget compared to similar prior efforts. We designed, built, deployed, and operated this system in four months, ultimately performing nominal operations with Planet Labs.

We have appreciated the opportunity to work in partnership with DARPA, Space Development Agency, and the Department of the Air Force as we continue our development work.

Today, Northwood is excited to announce a $30M Series A fundraise led by Alpine Space Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz with major investors in Founders Fund, Also Capital, and Stepstone and participation from Box Group, Balerion, Banter Capital and Humba Ventures. This funding will be used to scale production and deploy the first operational Northwood ground network, moving us one step closer towards a new industrialized space infrastructure for the 21st century. This will move us one step closer towards industrialized space infrastructure that scales as fast as the missions it supports.