Today Northwood has raised $100M in Series B funding led by @WashingHarbour and co-led by @a16z to support a simple objective – take space missions further faster. This financing follows millions in signed contracts including a $49.8 million contract with the Space Force to support the Satellite Control Network – critical infrastructure used for launches and early satellite operations, to track and control satellites, and to provide emergency support to tumbling and lost satellites.

Making galactic scale ambitions a reality is notoriously hard. Hence the famous, "the best way to become a millionaire in the space industry is to start as a billionaire" quote. But I find the strategic sequencing one of the most fun challenges. When you have a big vision for space, how do you break that goal it into the right size chunks to actually make sustaining revenue while moving along the most critical derisking points in the operational path? That has led us to "unsexy" problems that matter enough to build a 185,000 sqft factory around! It's gratifying to feel the momentum of this flywheel reward us with more scope and more resources to run even faster. Thanks for coming by for a first look at the factory @MollySOShea !

Thanks for the chat @itsmoislam !

Why does networking for space matter? How you send data between earth and space determines the use cases you can unlock, the market you can capture, and how you maximize your return on investment. We want to see more space missions introduced and become viable on economic terms. That’s how you move from science fiction to reality.

Spacecraft are generating more data than ever. The infrastructure receiving it was built for a different era. On Valley of Depth, Northwood CEO @bridgitmendler spoke with @itsmoislam about how Northwood is building the network for the next generation of space missions.

It’s exciting to finally announce what Northwood has been working on behind the scenes – the newest addition to our network, Prism, which will support high throughput comms through space. When we first founded Northwood, the pressing problem in front of us was the sheer volume of spacecraft that needed to be coordinated and successfully operate in a new dynamic environment. This led to our first offering, Portal, which has changed spacecraft link access on many important dimensions. We can now fit the equivalent of ten 7.4 meter dishes, providing multi-orbit link capacity, into a single 20ft ISO shipping container that can be manufactured in weeks, shipped over air freight, and stood up in hours. A capacity shortfall that looked like it would take years to resolve now has a solution for how to hit scale. Our second offering is about envisioning the next set of challenges for space. As more of our economy moves to orbit, we need to design networking that meets or beats terrestrial performance. Prism is designed for the next step in expectations around throughput, latency and reliability. This is true industrialization of space networks. Our solution here was also baked from first principles — a mixture of old and new. Northwood’s vision for high throughput networking is high frequency RF (today meeting customers in S/X/Ka, and in next version will be 100gbps+), a standard 2.4 meter building block that deploys in hours and can be digitally combined to adjust for different orbits and resiliency conditions (need to keep piping data to customers when it’s raining? We got you). The real thing I want to celebrate is the pace of development that Northwood continues to set. In 2.5 years, we have: - Sprinted through three block changes of Portal - Gone from clean sheet to deployed Prism unit in 6 months - Deployed a total of 14 antennas across 2 continents, at 5 sites with another 13 sites across 8 countries underway These accomplishments are our data points that there’s no space networking problem too big for us and the best is yet to come! Huge shoutout to Mariko McMurty and Kiran Raj who each lead a portion of our Prism product and the whole of company effort across digital, RF/EE, mechanical, manufacturing and production, supply chain and logistics, sites and network operations. Let’s keep building!

thank you for your support it really means so much <3 i'm sorry we had to take the music down, we'll find a way to do it the right way

Congratulations @ambrosiaenergy and @sara_spangelo !!

Bridgit Mendler on why the space economy is like the early internet: "I get really inspired by the analogy especially thinking about, you know, for folks that were early with the internet." "There's no way they would've foreseen what the internet is today." "But they were betting on a direction and they were setting up a model that would basically unlock a lot of innovation." "A year ago today, would we think that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers? No way." @bridgitmendler of @NorthwoodSpace with @eriktorenberg

Thanks for having me @eriktorenberg 🫡

Go @ILIVETWICE !! @CapitalAlso just got a rockstar

Woohoo go Mike!

Thanks @MorganLBrennan and @CNBC !

Thanks @BloombergTV for a great discussion

Thanks @TechCrunch and @sokane1 !

thank you @payloadspace and @jacqfeldscher !