Northwood Space closed a $49.8 million contract with the United States Space Force.

The funding round, announced January 27, was led by Washington Harbour Partners and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz. The financing came on the heels of a $49.8 million contract that was signed with the United States Space Force to help improve the “satellite control network,” which “handles a huge variety of consequential space missions for our government,” said Bridgit Mendler, founder and CEO. Northwood is an end-to-end ground infrastructure provider for space missions. In other words, it manufactures and deploys antennae systems, which are smaller than older models, that allow Earth to communicate with satellites in space. Northwood Space on a Fast Track The growth has been quick—Northwood was founded in 2022 and closed a $30 million Series A in April—but Mendler said it’s a chance for the company to capitalize on the current emphasis on tech. According to Crunchbase data, global venture funding in space tech reached over $14 billion last year, which was more than double the yearly totals in 2023 and 2024. “Yes, this is happening faster than we thought — you know, two fundraises in the same year and large sums of capital,” she said. Still, she added, “that’s really what we’re ready for from a production standpoint.” In fact, Mendler was starting to worry the company would face higher demand than it could manage. “We get customers coming to us all the time requiring a ground solution, wanting us to help think through a ground problem with them, and we don’t want there to be a resource constraint that blocks us from being able to support that mission,” she said. “And so the resources were very intentionally brought on at this point to support the missions that are coming forward for us.”

Future spacecraft could use a single propellant to perform both rapid movements and slow, highly controlled adjustments.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes fell on Tuesday as a rebound in technology shares faded.

Alphabet entered a cloud service agreement with SpaceX to pay $920 million per month for 200 megawatts of capacity from October 2026 through June 2029.