Former Disney Star Bridgit Mendler Launches Outer Space Communications Startup

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. “We have our sights on building a data highway between earth and space,” she wrote. “We are designing shared ground infrastructure from first principles to expand access to space. We have a lot of work ahead of us but that’s the fun part.”

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 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.

Mendler played Teddy Duncan on Disney’s Good Luck Charlie from 2010 to 2014 and appeared as recurring character Juliet on Wizards of Waverly Place from 2008 to 2012. Mendler also starred as Kristen in the 2008 film The Clique, based on the novel by Lisi Harrison, and played Olivia in the hit Disney Channel Original Movie Lemonade Mouth in 2011.

Mendler released a studio album, Hello My Name Is…, in 2012, and is also a featured artist on the Lemonade Mouth soundtrack. She has not dropped new music since the release of several singles in 2017.