Northwood Blog

Northwood Raises $100M Series B to Accelerate Ground Infrastructure Delivery for High-Capability Space Missions

Today, Northwood announced that we have raised $100 million in Series B funding to support a new generation of high-capability space missions that need to operate on increasingly tight timelines. The financing follows millions in signed contracts, including a $49.8 million contract with the Space Force and the deployment of Northwood’s early network. The round is led by Washington Harbour Partners, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from Alpine Space Ventures, Founders Fund, Stepstone, Balerion, Fulcrum, Pax, 137 Ventures, and others.

By vertically integrating the ground infrastructure stack, Northwood is rethinking how quickly missions can move from concept to live operations.

Why this matters now:

Our appetite for space has never been stronger. 

Across government and commercial sectors, space investment is accelerating rapidly. The U.S. Government alone has spent over $11B on a single ground system to support a few hundred satellites, even as the next wave of missions is poised to deploy additional hundreds to thousands of satellites across multiple orbits. At the same time, a growing number of commercial builders are pursuing ambitious new architectures across communications, manufacturing, energy and more, each with unique networking and operational demands.

But while there are many concepts to push the boundaries of space, we are not moving fast enough from concept to fully realized missions. 

Perhaps unintuitively, one of the biggest obstacles to executing advanced space missions takes place on the ground. For years, the growth in space-side capabilities has outpaced the underlying ground infrastructure that supports it. It has reached the point where securing ground connectivity often takes longer than building and launching the spacecraft themselves. 

The problem:

Ground is really hard, and no one has been accountable to fix it.

Getting data to and from space is a multidisciplinary problem where physics, timing, software, networking, hardware, global operations, regulatory approvals, and security all collide at once. Most treat it as disconnected components and decisions; companies either build it themselves or cobble together parts and solutions from multiple vendors. The result is vendor sprawl, manual orchestration, hidden integration costs, and systems that break over time or when network demands change.  

The compounding consequence is that satellite operators end up running two businesses: the constellation or capability they wanted to build, and the ground infrastructure business they have to build to make it work. That steals time and capability from the space mission. 

Northwood’s approach:

We help space builders go further faster.

Northwood is an end-to-end ground infrastructure provider – from initial concept through deployment to live data delivery. By vertically integrating the entire ground stack, we can collapse what used to take years into months, and what took months into days. Our vision is building towards a ground infrastructure layer that works like cloud computing, where global capacity and routing scales on demand without the usual procurement cycles, vendor coordination, or integration challenges. 

Further: Capability

• We are designed to support diverse missions that push the boundaries of how humanity relates to space. In the same way cloud infrastructure was built to support an explosion of radically different applications, we believe space networking must enable the same kind of diversity. We design for this at every layer: how we craft solutions with spacecraft operators, how we design our hardware, and how we deploy and operate our network.

Faster: Accountability

• We are accountable for bringing links to spacecraft online and keeping them running, from end to end. We believe that vertical integration is how we can align ourselves best with this outcome. All parts of our stack have been designed to accelerate time to operations and to provide visibility into the network to drive reliability. 

What have we done so far:

Less than 2 years since our company was announced, Northwood has been trusted to solve some of the hardest problems in ground infrastructure. Northwood has been awarded a $49.8 million contract by the US Space Force (USSF) to support the Satellite Control Network (SCN). This is the critical infrastructure used for launches and early satellite operations, to track and control satellites, and to provide emergency support to tumbling and lost satellites. 

At the core of this work is an integrated approach to ground systems. Northwood has built a multi-beam phased array system, called Portal, which is designed to add capacity for functions like those needed by the SCN and other commercial missions.

The novel challenge in building Portal was enabling multiple simultaneous transmitting and receiving connections not just in one orbit, but across many. Portal supports connections across low Earth orbit (LEO), medium Earth orbit (MEO), and geostationary orbit (GEO). Unlike fixed-aperture systems, Northwood’s phased arrays electronically steer multiple beams in real time, enabling precise tracking and handovers without mechanical movement. These design features enable dynamic movement of spacecraft across orbits, a capability that is currently very costly and can take upwards of two years to deploy each ground antenna. 

Northwood has already hit several technical milestones against this effort and to support our broader offering: 

• In October 2024, eight months after the company was announced, the first iteration of the product successfully ran Telemetry, Tracking, and Command (TT&C) operations with commercial space company, Planet Labs.
• In June of 2025, Northwood demonstrated that a second, higher power, iteration of Portal can deliver 1 kilowatt (1kW) of transmit power and receive sub-picowatt signals within the same face. These faces can be arrayed in modular configurations to support higher power levels such as 6- or 8-array configurations supporting 6- or 8-kW power to GEO at site. This feat made Portal the highest power commercial communications phased array ever built.
• In December of 2025, we hit the production volume of 8 Portal units produced in a single month. Within 4 weeks we built and tested 8 full arrays composed of 256 different PCBAs and hundreds of subcomponents. 
• As of January 2026, Northwood has deployed operational Portal units across two continents. At the latest site, all arrays were installed and powered in 12 hours and began live contacts the next day. As a result, Northwood’s Portal system was built, shipped, installed, and taking satellite passes in the same time it typically takes other antenna systems that are already built and shipped to just install. 
• While developing advanced antenna systems, Northwood simultaneously built the complete service backbone and operational capabilities needed to run its network. Northwood’s core network spans a broad technology stack: distributed cloud infrastructure and event orchestration, custom narrowband and wideband modem products, networking backbone, telemetry systems, and software interfaces, that allow customers to communicate with their spacecraft. Every single piece of Northwood hardware is accompanied by custom developed firmware and software, allowing Northwood to offer unparalleled insights into the network and its performance. 
• On the infrastructure side, Northwood has two sites ready for operations, five sites in build, and an additional eight sites in progress across five continents.

This comprehensive approach enabled a 3-month turnaround time from contract execution with US Space Force to communication links ready for operations. Developing this new capability end-to-end with strong partners like the USSF Program Executive Office for Battle Management, Command, Control, Communications, and Space Intelligence (BMC3I) has been a useful case study of Northwood’s approach. We partner with boundary-pushing space missions to bring them online faster and, along the way, build commercial capabilities that the rest of the industry can benefit from next.

“Northwood provides the only viable approach capable of scaling ground station capacity to match expected satellite proliferation with the pace and security required.” said Mina Faltas, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Washington Harbour Partners. “For example, the US Government has issued Executive Orders mandating commercial, scalable, solutions deployable at speed and scale and Northwood is the only commercial offering in the market meeting these requirements. Its phased array and digital beamforming technology is uniquely suited to handle high-throughput, multi-orbit operations, and cannot be replicated using legacy dish-based systems. Equally important, Northwood’s vertically integrated manufacturing and deployment model enables sites to be produced, shipped, and installed at a speed and cost structure no other provider can achieve. Together, these capabilities make Northwood the only solution capable of expanding ground station infrastructure fast enough to support the next generation of U.S. space architectures.”

“Northwood is entrusted with missions where failure isn’t an option and scale is non-negotiable.” Says Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “The team brings rare technical depth across hardware, software, and national security programs, and they’ve translated that heritage into operational systems supporting real missions today. With this Series B, we’re doubling down on our conviction that Northwood has both the long-term backing and the execution discipline to become the ground infrastructure partner that the most serious missions are built around.”

"We co-led Northwood's Series A because we saw a team that understood the critical bottleneck holding back the space industry." Says Bulent Altan, Founding Partner at Alpine Space Ventures. "Since then, their execution has been exceptional—delivering operational capability in months, not years. The LEO economy is booming and driving unprecedented demand for ground infrastructure, but Northwood's vision extends beyond any single orbit. Their multi-orbit approach, from LEO through MEO to GEO, reflects what the industry actually needs: a ground layer that can scale with the full diversity of space missions being deployed today. That's the kind of foundational infrastructure that unlocks the next generation of capabilities across the entire space ecosystem."

With $100M of new capital less than a year after our $30M Series A, funds will support both direct investment in Northwood’s operational infrastructure for scaled production as well as the expansion of capabilities to support emerging mission sets. By the end of 2026, Northwood will have capacity to consistently produce over a dozen arrays per month for its Portal product, in addition to production volumes on yet-to-be announced additional ground products. Northwood is targeting the deployment of over 82 beams ready for operations by the end of year across 18 global ground sites. Scaling up is critical to fulfill demand we're seeing in key areas of growth in the space industry enabling high power, dynamic beams for space operations, high throughput, low latency links for satellite communications constellations, and rapidly deployable antennas for proliferated space sensing.