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.

The bottleneck for space is here on Earth.

Over the last decade, we’ve watched as the space industry has expanded dramatically, while our critical ground infrastructure has not kept pace. Ground stations today were designed for a different era, where it was acceptable for connectivity to be sparse and unreliable, or for companies and organizations to devote enormous resources to build their own capabilities. As space applications mature and expand, we need to set a new baseline that expects always-on satellite connectivity for a large, robust, and industrialized space economy.

Our mission is to serve Earth by industrializing space. To deliver on this mission, we are building the most efficient solution for reaching always-on satellite connectivity. Northwood is building the first shared network of phased array ground stations — like cell towers, for satellites.

Today I am proud to share that we have achieved the first major milestone towards this mission.

Rethinking satellite communications capacity from the ground up

We’ve spent the last four months designing, building, and testing a new kind of all-digital phased array antenna for commercial ground station service — and as of this week, we know it works.

A few days ago, Northwood achieved a major milestone by completing the first-ever live sky test of our phased array antenna. We successfully connected to the satellites of our partner Planet Labs, a leading provider of data about Earth, with hundreds of satellites imaging the planet every day. Our multi-beam system achieved bidirectional communications links over the full duration of a pass, running nominal operations for Planet. Unlike traditional parabolic antennas, which are limited to tracking one satellite, our phased array can seamlessly connect with multiple satellites at the same time. The digital nature of our system also removes mechanical wear-and-tear and single points of failure in the RF chain that are present in parabolic systems. The implications for satellite operators are substantial — unprecedented spacecraft access, reliable communications for critical missions, and new dynamic capabilities.

In the past four months we have designed, built, and tested our phased array system. Similar examples of phased array projects have taken years to develop. Thanks to the unique combination of expertise on our engineering team, we were able to challenge this timeline. Every aspect of this antenna, from the beamforming software to the custom electronics, was designed in-house to optimize for efficiency. This will continue to be a critical aspect of Northwood’s manufacturing approach as we set out to replicate our phased array systems, called Portals, at new site deployments beginning in 2025.

Deployment similarly introduced a new standard of speed. From the moment the antenna arrived in North Dakota, it took less than six hours to deploy and begin live testing. This is a contrast to traditional parabolic antennas, which often require large concrete foundations and weeks of preparation. The ability to deploy quickly means greater ground responsiveness, resilience, and access to satellite communications, opening up opportunities to connect more spacecraft and deliver the critical data that impacts life on Earth.

Our live sky milestone validates both the technical capability and rate of deployment that will unlock the ability to rapidly scale a global ground network. This moment is all thanks to Northwood’s world-class engineers across every function that have devoted many long nights and applied their tremendous talent to make this work possible!

And this step is the first of many. Looking ahead, we are preparing for the deployment of Northwood Portals across strategic locations around the world starting in 2025.

If you’d like to learn more or get involved, visit our careers page or contact us at contact@northwoodspace.io