Space is an increasingly crowded place thanks to the constant influx of new satellites and it’s getting even more crowded as the cost of getting into orbit falls.

These dynamics have brought the attention of the Northwood Space startup, which has spent the last few years developing a more modern and efficient ground-based communications infrastructure. The startup capitalized on that interest in two ways this week.

The El Segundo, California-based company announced Tuesday that it closed a $100 million Series B funding round, led by Washington DC-based firm Washington Harbor Partners (which BECOMES to run on investment in space) and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Northwood also won a $49.8 million contract with the United States Space Force to help upgrade the so-called “satellite control network,” which “manages many different outcomes of the space mission for our government” including tracking and controlling GPS satellites, founder and CEO Bridgit Mendler said in a call with reporters.

The funding round and the government contract are major milestones for the company, which is only a few years old and only closed a $30 million Series A less than a year ago.

But with so much interest in funding space tech, hard tech, and defense tech today, Mendler said this is an opportunity for his company to grow responsibly and quickly.

“Yeah, it happened faster than we thought — you know, two fundraisers in the same year and a lot of capital,” he said. But, he pointed out, “that’s what we’re ready for from a production point of view.”

Mendler also said the new capital will help Northwood keep up with growing demand, marking an “inflection point in the business.”

“We get customers coming to us all the time that need a solution on the ground, we want to help figure out a problem on the ground with them, and we don’t want to have a resource constraint that prevents us from being able to support that mission,” he said. “And so the resources are very deliberately brought to this point to support the missions that are coming for us.”

Part of Northwood’s attention has to do with the fact that what it does – the creation of smaller phased-array antenna systems intended to support or replace older systems that rely on larger dish antennas – remains novel, especially as a vertically integrated game.

But with the amount of data being transmitted to and from satellites likely to continue to grow, it’s an advantage Mendler wants to maintain.

“It’s a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of risk, a lot of capital. It takes a lot of different skill sets to come together, to really wrap your head around the whole ground (station) problem,” Mendler said. “And so yes, it’s a big task for us to do, and our bet is that if we can really do that, if we can really think about the land under one roof, then that creates a ton of value for the industry, and that’s the right model to have.

This pitch has been making sense for prospective commercial customers for a while now. Companies like SpaceX and Amazon, which have massive satellite internet networks in the works, are building and operating their own ground stations. But capacity is restricted for other players who often have to rent space from third-party providers who don’t always have availability.

Northwood CTO Griffin Cleverly expects the expanded capacity — which the new fundraising will help create — will be most valuable to customers who are “scaling out to large constellations, so it can go from one or two satellites to a dozen or more.”

Currently, Northwood’s “portal” sites can handle eight satellite links, he said. By the end of 2027, however, he expects that the next generation of Northwood ground stations will manage 10 to 12, with the company’s total network capable of communicating with “hundreds” of satellites.

With the Space Force contract, Northwood’s sales clearly became an attractive option for the government.

It’s no surprise that the newest branch of the armed forces started with the satellite control network (SCN), though. By 2023, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that the Department of Defense has been aware of SCN capacity issues since 2011.

“Satellite users who rely on the SCN and who were interviewed by the GAO said that this increase in demand, and the resulting limitations on system availability, could compromise their missions in the future,” the report said.