Northwood Space raises $375M Series C, co-led by a16z and DFJ Growth, for satellite ground stations with a Space Force contract

TLDR

• Northwood Space, a satellite ground-station company, raised a $375M Series C co-led by a16z and DFJ Growth.¹²
• Bloomberg Law reports a $2B valuation given by the company; Satellite Today reports a $49.8M Space Force contract.²³
• In-Q-Tel, Stepstone and Washington Harbour Partners also invested, alongside a separate HSBC credit facility.¹⁴

Torrance, California-based Northwood Space has raised a $375M equity Series C co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and DFJ Growth, according to the company release.¹ Washington Harbour Partners made what Washington Technology quotes Northwood as calling "substantial follow-on investment", and Alpine Space Ventures, Stepstone's Activate unit, In-Q-Tel and others also took part.¹⁴ Bloomberg Law reports a $2B valuation that Northwood gave in a statement; the release text does not itself contain that figure.¹² A separate multi-year credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking, of undisclosed size, sits alongside the equity.¹⁵ Payload puts total funding at more than $500M, following a $100M Series B in January 2026 and a $30M Series A; Bloomberg Law says Northwood did not disclose the Series B valuation at the time.²⁵⁶ The money will fund existing contracts, hiring and a global ground-network build-out, and Satellite Today adds faster antenna production and 400 hires over three years on top of 140 staff today.¹³

Northwood makes both the ground antennas and the network that connects satellites to them. Its Portal phased arrays handle command and control and can talk to six satellites at once, while Prism parabolic dishes carry high-throughput payload data; it sells capacity through an API and also sells hardware directly.¹³ The company says it runs six multi-orbit sites on two continents, that a new site takes three months, and that it built 29 units in the past year; these are company claims.¹³ Bridgit Mendler is chief executive and Griffin Cleverly chief technology officer.⁴⁶

The government link is the sharpest detail. The release says Northwood demonstrated a prototype for the US Space Force that delivered satellite command capacity as a service to geostationary orbit, and that it has "added new customers and contracts across U.S. government agencies," without naming them.¹ Satellite Today reports a $49.8M Space Force contract to support the Satellite Control Network, which provides tracking and command for Department of Defense satellites; Mendler said it uses Portal but she could not share more, while saying there is a "ton" of government interest.³ Mendler told reporters in January that the network handles "a huge variety of consequential space missions for our government," including GPS satellite control.⁶ Mendler also said the product serves "whether it be for a commercial mission or for a government mission."³

On investors, a16z has backed Northwood "in every round since seed," a16z's Katherine Boyle says in the release.¹ Its American Dynamism practice also backs Anduril, Hadrian, Apex and SpaceX, according to Space Ambition.⁷ Washington Technology calls In-Q-Tel the intelligence community's venture investment arm and notes it joined this round.⁴ TechCrunch said in January that Washington Harbour has been on a run of space investments, but no source here lists them.⁶ The release implies, without stating, that DFJ Growth is a new investor.¹

Why it matters: a ground-segment company with a Space Force satellite-control contract has reached a reported $2B valuation, with a defence-linked investor (In-Q-Tel) and a defence-focused venture practice (a16z American Dynamism) on its cap table.²³⁴⁷ The test is whether the 400 planned hires and faster antenna production turn the stated government interest into named contracts beyond the Space Force.¹³