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Actress and singer Bridgit Mendler known for her role in Good Luck Charlie, is now the CEO of her satellite data startup, Northwood Space. In an X post, the actress explained that her El Segundo-based company plans on producing ground infrastructure to help build a "data highway between earth and space." She wrote:
"At @NorthwoodSpace we have our sights on building a data highway between earth ans space. We are designing shared ground infrastructure from first principles to expand access to space."
Bridgit Mendler's acting journey
Born in December 1992, Bridgit Mendler hails from Washington, D.C. but she moved to San Francisco, California, when she was eight years old. She soon began expressing an interest in acting and when she was 13 landed a role on the daily soap, General Hospital.
Since then Bridgit Mendler has appeared as Kristen Gregory in the film, The Clique, Juliet Van Heusen in the Disney show, Wizards of Waverly Place, and Teddy Duncan in Good Luck Charlie. She starred in the lead role in the Disney Channel original movie titled Lemonade Mouth.
She also released two studio albums with singles like Hurricane and Ready or Not gaining commercial success. However, she soon took a break from the limelight, choosing to focus on school.
Bridgit Mendler was announced as one of the 2017 MIT Media Lab’s Director’s Fellows
Bridgit Mendler has spent the past several years studying. In 2018, Bridgit Mendler announced she started a graduate program at MIT with a focus on improving social media, stating:
"As an entertainer, for years I struggled with social media because I felt like there was a more loving and human way to connect with fans."
Completing her graduation in 2020, she began working on her Ph.D. at the MIT Center for Constructive Communications and Social Machines group. As of 2022, she is enrolled at both MIT and Harvard Law School.
Northwood Space is named after a lake in New Hampshire. As quoted in Yahoo! Finance, Bridgit said that the idea for her company came to her during the pandemic:
"While everybody else was making their sourdough starters, we were building antennas out of random crap we could find at Home Depot... and receiving data from satellites."
Mendler founded the company with two former engineers from Lockheed Martin, Chief Technology Officer, Griffin Cleverly, and Head of Software, Shaurya Luthra. In her discussion with CNBC, Bridgit Mendler explained that her startup will focus on quickly producing and deploying ground stations and antennas to facilitate the large amount of data being transferred to and from space.
Luthra elaborated that Northwood wants to deliver these ground stations "within days, not months." The company initially plans to target companies that don't want to build their own ground station networks. He compared it to renting server capacity from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft's Azure to avoid spending capital on building their own servers.
According to Bridgit Mendler's X post, Northwood Space is launching with initial funding of $ 6.3 million from investors, including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Also Capital.
As per a report by Michael Sheetz of CNBC, the company is set to conduct its first test connecting to a spacecraft in orbit later this year.
