Former Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler is now a CEO. The actress, who rose to fame for her roles in Disney’s Good Luck Charlie and Wizards of Waverly Place, is now a founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based startup Northwood Space.
Mendler founded Northwood along with her husband, Griffin Cleverly, and engineer Shaurya Luthra in October 2023. The former actress announced on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday that the organization has now received $6.3 million in funding.
Per its website, the organization’s mission is to build “a data highway between earth and space.” It goes on to say that “to meet the needs of today’s space industry, the one-lane rickety road for space data needs to adapt to a ten-lane highway routing continuous traffic across the globe.”
Following years of success as an actress and singer as a teenager and young adult, Mendler graduated from University of Southern California in 2016. She then received a master’s and doctorate of philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020 and 2024, respectively, and a doctorate of law from Harvard Law School in 2024. While in school, she spent time at the Federal Communications Commission’s new Space Bureau, where she told CNBC this week that she “completely fell in love with space law.”
“Space is getting easier along so many different dimensions but still the actual exercise of sending data to and from space is difficult,” she said. “You have difficulty finding an access point for contacting your satellite.”
Both Cleverly and Luthra spent time at Lockheed Martin prior to doing work at the Mitre Corporation and Capella Space, respectively.
