Torrance Satellite Startup Northwood Space Raises $375 Million at a $2 Billion Valuation

The Bridgit Mendler-led company, which builds antennas and ground stations for satellites, plans 400 new jobs as investors pour record money into Southern California space startups.

By Herald Staff · Nov. 2, 2026, 5:30 PM ET

A row of white satellite dishes and flat square antenna panels sits on a gravel hilltop at twilight, angled toward a violet sky with an orange glow on the horizon, above the glittering lights of a coastal city curving along a bay. — Northwood builds both dish antennas and flat phased-array panels at its new Torrance factory, which opened in September and can produce hundreds of antennas a year.

Northwood Space, a Torrance company that builds the antennas and ground stations satellites use to talk to Earth, said Monday it has closed a $375 million Series C round. The deal values the four-year-old startup at $2 billion, TechCrunch reported, and it is the latest large check written to the South Bay's growing cluster of young space companies.

Andreessen Horowitz and DFJ Growth co-led the round, with follow-on money from Washington Harbour Partners, which led the company's Series B, along with Alpine Space Ventures, Stepstone, In-Q-Tel and others, Northwood said in its announcement. A separate multi-year credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking will also fund working capital and network expansion. The new round brings Northwood's total funding to more than $500 million, Payload reported.

From $100 Million to $2 Billion in Ten Months

Northwood raised a $100 million Series B in January, also with Andreessen Horowitz, and around the same time won a contract worth nearly $50 million from the U.S. Space Force to upgrade the nation's satellite control network, according to TechCrunch. The company did not disclose a valuation at the time of the January round, Bloomberg reported.

The company is led by co-founder and CEO Bridgit Mendler, a former Disney actress, Axios noted. "The world is hungry for more data movement through space and that is what Northwood is building for with scalable network capacity for the most challenging use cases," Mendler said in the company's statement.

Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who sits on Northwood's board, said the firm has backed the company "in every round since seed because we believe ground infrastructure is essential to making space infrastructure more abundant."

What Northwood Builds in Torrance

Most attention in the space business goes to rockets and satellites. Northwood works on the other end of the link. It designs and manufactures two kinds of modular antennas: flat phased arrays it calls Portal, used to command and control spacecraft, and Prism, a high-throughput dish for pulling down large amounts of data. Rather than having each satellite operator build its own ground station, Northwood runs a shared network on which operators reserve passes through software, the company said.

The company says a new site can be stood up in about three months and that new antennas can go from truck delivery to a live link in three to four hours. In a recent test, it combined 10 Portal arrays to match the receiving performance of a 20-foot dish. It also demonstrated a full two-way link to a government satellite in geostationary orbit in a prototype for the Space Force.

Since its Series B, Northwood says it has deployed six sites on two continents and opened a 185,000-square-foot headquarters and factory in Torrance in September, expanding its manufacturing space more than fivefold. At full production, the plant can build hundreds of antennas a year. The company has more than 140 employees and plans to add 400 jobs in Torrance and Washington, D.C., over the next three years in engineering, manufacturing, software and site operations.

The pitch rests on demand. Active satellites grew from about 3,000 in 2020 to more than 14,000 by the end of 2025, Northwood said, citing projections of tens of thousands more by 2030. Mendler told reporters on a press call that the largest ground networks today have hundreds of sites. "In terms of what is immediately in the horizon for us: We plan to reach that and surpass that," she said, according to Payload.

A Busy Year for L.A.'s Space Startups

Northwood's raise lands the same day the Los Angeles Business Journal reported that Apex, a Culver City company that mass-produces satellite buses, is working on a $500 million round that would value it at about $4 billion, citing Bloomberg. That would roughly double the $2.3 billion valuation Apex reached with a $200 million round in April, and it would be the company's sixth raise in four years.

Both companies were founded in 2022, and both have drawn money from some of the same investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Washington Harbour. The Business Journal reported that California's aerospace and defense sector had raised about $21 billion this year through the end of October, far more than the industry's annual total in any of the last 10 years.

For the South Bay, which has been home to aerospace manufacturing for generations, the money is showing up as factories and payroll. Northwood says it will announce more sites and network expansions in the first half of 2027.

Original reporting by The Los Angeles Herald, drawing on Northwood Space, TechCrunch, Axios, Payload, Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Business Journal, as linked above.