The new enterprise, named Northwood after a lake in New Hampshire where Mendler first conceived the idea, has raised $6.3 million in a funding round that has attracted Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and Also Capital.
Northwood will aim to significantly reduce the time to market for new ground stations, which are required to transmit and receive downlink signals from satellites.
“If you want a dedicated antenna, you have to wait 18 months to get the antenna delivered, installed and built out for you,” Luthra said in an interview with CNBC.
Northwood aims to reduce this to a period of days rather than months.
On its newly launched website, the company claims increasingly data-intensive space applications are now constrained by a bottleneck in throughput capacity on the ground.
“Many key aspects of ground architecture haven’t changed much since the 1960’s,” it says. “The industry standard is bespoke manufacturing processes (and) lengthy construction and fine-tuning, only to deliver a system with limited capacity and frequent failures.”
To combat this problem, the three co-founders claim to have rethought satellite backhaul from the ground up. Northwood will aim to build gateways that are designed for volume manufacturing with iterative development enabling proactive deployments.
It also wants to create scalable and dynamic capacity provisioning through horizontally scalable architecture, and finally boost resiliency by eliminating single points of failure while anticipating irregularities and disruptions.
Reacting to the news, Christopher Baugh, partner at NSR, a satellite consultancy boutique acquired by Analsys Mason, said “Ground Segment as a Service (GSAAS) is definitely a segment to watch as satellite operators refocus capex/opex and lag on ground buildout”.
Who are the co-founders?
Mendler is a former regular on the Disney Channel, having made appearances on shows such as Wizards of Waverly Place, Lemonade Mouth, and Good Luck Charlie. She is also a decorated musician, with her debut album “Hello My Name Is…” released in 2012 and reaching number 30 on the Billboard 200.
Following a stint with the FCC’s space bureau in 2022 she “fell in love with space law” and has spent the past couple of years working on a PHD from Harvard Law School.
Mendler is married to CTO Cleverly, who alongside Luthra spent time working for Lockheed Martin and has a background in mechanical engineering.
“We need an approach so that companies can get data down reliably and in the quantities that they need,” he told CNBC, a need he considers to be growing considerably alongside the boom in the space industry’s growth.
Luthra join as head of software development from Capella Space, where he worked in a number of ground station technical support roles between co-founding Northwood and his time at Lockheed Martin.
