Disney star Bridgit Mendler launches space startup with $6M in funding
Former Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler introduced that she’s the co-founder and CEO of Northwood House, a startup that’s already scored $6.3 million in funding together with from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz.
Mendler, identified for her starring roles on standard Disney sequence “Good Luck Charlie” and “Wizards of Waverly Place,” has spent her days because the exhibits wrapped acquiring her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how and her legislation diploma from Harvard.
At 31 years previous, Mendler’s launching a brand new profession within the area business, CNBC earlier reported.
Mendler shared information of her new enterprise on X on Monday, the place she instructed her followers to “anticipate the sudden” and revealed “different information” in a subsequent post: That she adopted a four-year-old boy.
The imaginative and prescient for Northwood is for it to be “an information freeway between Earth and area,” she instructed CNBC.
“House is getting simpler alongside so many various dimensions however nonetheless the precise train of sending knowledge to and from area is tough. You’ve issue discovering an entry level for contacting your satellite tv for pc.”
Northwood is planning to construct satellite tv for pc floor stations that prioritize quick manufacturing and deployment flexibility.
Ultimately, the purpose is to masss product floor stations, often known as teleports — an answer to a bottleneck within the area business the place most satellite tv for pc operators have to attend as much as 18 months to get antennas delivered, which ship mass quantities of knowledge from satellites in area, in accordance with CNBC.
With El Segundo, Calif.-based Northwood, clients would have the ability to rend an antenna at a second’s discover — much like Amazon Internet Service’s or Microsoft Azure’s processes for renting out server capability, CNBC reported.
The idea has caught the eye of enterprise capital and personal fairness corporations like David Tisch-founded BoxGroup, Additionally Capital and Humba Ventures, amongst others.
Northwood’s identify is a reference to a lake in New Hampshire, the place Mendler was “constructing antennas out of random crap we might discover at Residence Depot… and receiving knowledge from [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellites” whereas spending time along with her household through the pandemic, CNBC reported.
She’s constructing the corporate along with her husband, Griffin Cleverly, who’s serving as Northwood’s chief expertise officer, and head of software program Shaurya Luthra.
Northwood is planning to conduct its first take a look at with a spacecraft in orbit later this yr, CNBC reported.
Cleverly and Luthra labored collectively as engineers at aerospace firm Lockheed Martin, in accordance with the outlet.
Representatives for Northwood didn’t instantly reply to The Put up’s request for remark.