Disney star Bridgit Mendler launches satellite startup Northwood Space

Bridgit Mendler is no stranger to reaching millions of people; She now wants to change the way satellite data reaches Earth.

Mendler, a former Disney Channel star and singer (with a filmography that includes “Good Luck Charlie,” “Wizards of Waverly Place” and “The Clique”), has spent the last few years studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Faculty of Harvard Law.

Through her self-described “engineering family” and her time at the Federal Communications Commission's new Space Office, where she “completely fell in love with space law,” Mendler is launching a new career in the space industry as executive director of the startup Northwood Space. , based in El Segundo, California.

“Vision is a data highway between Earth and space,” Mendler told CNBC. “Space is getting easier in so many different dimensions, but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult. It's hard to find a hotspot to contact your satellite.”

Instead of building rockets or satellites, Northwood aims to mass produce ground stations. Also known as teleports, ground stations are typically large and often circular antennas that connect to satellites in space.

Northwood is already attracting high-profile venture investors, with around $6 million in seed funding raised from investors including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and Also Capital.

Mendler is building Northwood with two co-founders: the startup's chief technology officer and her husband, Griffin Cleverly, as well as chief software officer Shaurya Luthra.

Both Cleverly and Luthra spent time in Lockheed Martin as engineers. The former recently spent time at Miter Corporation working in communications, and the latter spent nearly four years building satellite imaging company Capella Space's network of ground stations.

Northwood's name comes from a lake in New Hampshire where Mendler said the idea for the company originated while spending time with his family during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“While everyone else was making sourdough, we were building antennas out of random junk we could find at Home Depot… and receiving data from [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellites,” Mendler said.

“For me, the importance of the Earth side is because it's really about bringing the impacts of space to people,” Mendler added.

He cleverly emphasized that the growth of the space industry means there is now a “cololossal” amount of data trying to travel to and from satellites.

“We need an approach so that those companies can get the data reliably and in the quantities they need,” he told CNBC.

Northwood aims to build satellite ground stations designed with rapid production and deployment flexibility in mind first and foremost. Luthra said Northwood wants to deliver ground stations “in days, not months,” so satellite operators don't waste time reconfiguring their networks to adequately support what's happening on Earth.

“If you want a dedicated antenna, you have to wait 18 months to have the antenna delivered, installed and built,” Luthra said.

The startup plans to initially focus on services for low-Earth orbit satellites, for companies that don't want to spend money building their own ground station networks. Northwood is looking to solve a bottleneck it sees at shared ground stations, making it difficult for customers to find availability at existing teleports.

“Traditionally, when I wanted to use an antenna or a site, I first had to ask, 'Do you have availability or is it already rented to everyone else in the world?' Many times the most important places were already rented,” Luthra said.

Northwood aims for its customers to have an experience similar to that of those who rent server capacity from Amazon web services or Microsoft Azure: avoiding the capital expenditure of building and operating your own servers.

“It allows space companies to be much more responsive to emerging use cases and missions,” Cleverly said.

The startup intends to carry out a first connection test with a spacecraft in orbit at the end of this year.