Nearly 20 years after starting her career as a child actress, Bridgit Mendler is now heading to the board room as the CEO of a new start-up company.

The 31-year-old started her career as a child actress at just 11 years old in 2004 with a voice role in the animated film The Legend of Buddha.

She also had roles on Jonas, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and The Secret World of Arrietty before her breakthrough role in Disney Channel’s Good Luck Charlie. 

While she was working fairly steadily through 2019, she has spent the last few years on her studies, earning degrees from USC, MIT and studying at Harvard Law School. 

Now she’s ready to break into the business world, serving as the CEO of the new space start-up Northwood Space, which landed $6.3 million in seed funding, via CNBC. 

Nearly 20 years after starting her career as a child actress, Bridgit Mendler is now heading to the board room as the CEO of a new start-up company

Now she’s ready to break into the business world, serving as the CEO of the new space start-up Northwood Space, which landed $6.3 million in seed funding, via CNBC 

She also took to X (formerly Twitter) to quote-retweet the CNBC story with an announcement of her own.

‘Expect the unexpected! So excited to announce our $6.3M seed led by @foundersfund and @a16z with participation from @CapitalAlso, @LongJourneyVC, @BoxGroup, @humbavc’ Mendler began.

‘At @NorhwoodSpace we have our sights on building a data highway between earth and space,’ she added.

‘We are designing shared ground infrastructure from first principles to expand access to space,’ she continued.

‘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,’ she concluded, with a link to Northwood’s careers page.

Mendler also recently spent some time at the Federal Communications Commission’s new Space Bureau, where she “completely fell in love with space law.’

‘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,’ she said.

The company won’t be focused on building rockets of satellites, but instead ground stations, which are described as, ‘typically large and often circular antennas that connect to satellites in space.’

She also took to X (formerly Twitter ) to quote-retweet the CNBC story with an announcement of her own

Mendler also recently spent some time at the Federal Communications Commission’s new Space Bureau, where she “completely fell in love with space law’

‘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,’ she 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,’ she said

Mendler co-founded the company with her husband Griffin Cleverly, who will serve as Chief Technology Officer, and Head of Software Shaurya Luthra

She revealed that the name of the company comes from a New Hampshire lake where the idea for the company first took root, while spending time with her family there during the COVID-19 pandemic

‘For me, why the ground-side matters is because it actually is about bringing the impacts of space home to people,’ she added

Mendler co-founded the company with her husband Griffin Cleverly, who will serve as Chief Technology Officer, and Head of Software Shaurya Luthra. 

She revealed that the name of the company comes from a New Hampshire lake where the idea for the company first took root, while spending time with her family there during the COVID-19 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 [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellites,’ Mendler said.

‘For me, why the ground-side matters is because it actually is about bringing the impacts of space home to people,’ she added.

Cleverly added that there is now a ‘colossal’ amount of data travelling to and from satellites and their company wants to make it more efficient to deliver the data.

‘We need an approach so that those companies can get the data down reliably and in the quantities that they need,’ he said.

They want to be able to deliver these ground stations, ‘within days, not months,’ with Luthra adding it takes 18 months for an antenna to be installed.

The company aims to be in the same vein as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, which provides server space so companies don’t have to build their own.

‘It allows space companies to be much more responsive to use cases and missions that pop up,’ Cleverly added, with the company hoping to conduct their first test to a spacecraft in orbit later this year.