Former Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler announced that she’s the co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, a startup that’s already scored $6.3 million in funding including from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz.
Mendler, known for her starring roles on popular Disney series “Good Luck Charlie” and “Wizards of Waverly Place,” has spent her days since the shows wrapped obtaining her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her law degree from Harvard.
At 31 years old, Mendler’s launching a new career in the space industry, CNBC earlier reported.
Mendler shared news of her new venture on X on Monday, where she told her followers to “expect the unexpected” and revealed “other news” in a subsequent post: That she adopted a four-year-old boy.
The vision for Northwood is for it to be “a data highway between Earth and space,” she told CNBC.
“Space is getting easier along so many different dimensions but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult. You have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite.”
Northwood is planning to build satellite ground stations that prioritize fast production and deployment flexibility.
Eventually, the goal is to masss product ground stations, also known as teleports — a solution to a bottleneck in the space industry where most satellite operators have to wait up to 18 months to get antennas delivered, which deliver mass amounts of information from satellites in space, according to CNBC.
With El Segundo, Calif.-based Northwood, customers would be able to rend an antenna at a moment’s notice — similar to Amazon Web Service’s or Microsoft Azure’s processes for renting out server capacity, CNBC reported.
The concept has caught the attention of venture capital and private equity firms like David Tisch-founded BoxGroup, Also Capital and Humba Ventures, among others.
Northwood’s name is a reference to a lake in New Hampshire, where Mendler was “building antennas out of random crap we could find at Home Depot… and receiving data from [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellites” while spending time with her family during the pandemic, CNBC reported.
She’s building the company with her husband, Griffin Cleverly, who is serving as Northwood’s chief technology officer, and head of software Shaurya Luthra.
Northwood is planning to conduct its first test with a spacecraft in orbit later this year, CNBC reported.
Cleverly and Luthra worked together as engineers at aerospace company Lockheed Martin, according to the outlet.
Representatives for Northwood did not immediately respond to noti.group’s request for comment.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
