Former Disney star Bridgit Mendler has founded outer space comms start-up
You don't have to be an ambitious entrepreneur to start a business nowadays, anyone can do it if they put their minds to it.
Bridgit Mendler - whom you might recognise from Disney's 'Good Luck Charlie' or 'Wizards of Waverly Place' - has turned her goals away from stardom to space.
Founded in 2023, Northwood Space has based its HQ in El Segundo, California, with Mendler as its CEO.
The space communications project will focus on mass-producing ground stations, also known as teleports, which connect to satellites in space via antennas.
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'For me, why the ground-side matters is because it actually is about bringing the impacts of space home to people,' the 31-year-old added.
Furthermore, the project will offer services to satellites in low Earth orbit for companies that don’t want to spend money building their own ground station networks.
Northwood wants to provide its customers a similar experience to those that rent server capacity from services such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure.
With the help of her husband, Griffin Cleverly as chief technology officer and engineer Shaurya Luthra as head of software, Northwood Space has already received $6 million in funding. Additionally, investments from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz and Also Capital have all made contributions.
Both Cleverly and Luthra bring professional experience too as they are veterans of Lockheed Martin, a respected aerospace and arms company.
It wasn't a spontaneous move on Mendler's part either. She reportedly grew up in a self-described 'engineering household.'
Now, since her departure from acting, she's earned multiple degrees from the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Law School.
The former Disney star said: 'The vision is a data highway between Earth and space.
'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.'
The start-up expects to conduct its first test connecting to a spacecraft in orbit later this year.
Mendler also called out to anyone who would be willing to join her program, tweeting: 'We have a lot of work ahead of us but that’s the fun part. If you like building quickly and seeing your work deployed in locations around the globe with real impact, we want you at Northwood.'