Move Over, Ground Stations: This Startup Just Raised $30M To Build The Internet For Space

Northwood Space, a satellite technology startup, has raised $30 million in Series A funding to help boost the development of its business model. The startup, which launched in 2022, has a unique business model that “is expanding access to space by rethinking shared infrastructure for satellite backhaul.”

Northwood Space To Expand Its Manufacturing Facility

Taking to its official blog, Northwood Space announces its new Series A funding, summing up to $30 million. Leading this funding round were Alpine Space Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Also on the funding train were Capital, Founders Fund, and Stepstone as major investors. The funds from this funding round will help in the expansion of the Northwood Space 35,000 sq ft manufacturing facility.

Additionally, the satellite technology startup will also channel this funding towards the deployment of its global network of ground sites. With this funding, the satellite technology startup hopes to play a vital role in the ever-growing space industry, which is now a core infrastructure around the world.

The firm hopes to use its satellite ground network to help “sustain the space capabilities of today and develop the next wave of capabilities to connect, inform, and protect people on Earth.” With this network, Northwood Space hopes to replace traditional satellite ground stations, as their operation is often unreliable.

A major issue that these traditional ground stations face is outage, and this can jeopardise an entire mission. The growth in the space industry might need more reliable ways to communicate with satellites in space other than ground stations.

Northwood Space likens its new technology or network to the internet, referring to it as an “industrialised infrastructure made up of common networks to reliably route large volumes of data around the globe.” With satellite ground stations being upgraded to operate like the internet, a lot of challenges the current models face can be eradicated.

Northwood Space Is Building A New Way To Communicate With Satellites In Space

The new technology that the satellite technology startup is developing will innovate “on antenna hardware developed in-house and designed for cost efficiency and manufacturability.” With the Series A funding, the firm will work to deploy 2 sites that use this new technology on its site per month.

They aim to make the development and usage of their system much more affordable than what is currently available. From their official blog, we learn that they aim “to build the largest shared network in throughput and link capacity.”

The firm goes on to claim that its “sites will be outfitted with the ability to scale up to 100 Gbps backhaul.” Additionally, it plans to deploy the technology to 6 continents by the end of 2026 to meet satellite connectivity needs on a global scale.

To control this system, Northwood Space will develop a software layer for easier and more flexible controls. Over the coming months, we might get to see the antenna that the satellite technology startup is working on in action.