Bridgit Mendler

Disney star by 17. Ph.D. student at Harvard by 27. Space CEO by 31.

Bridgit Mendler was once the face of Disney Channel hits like Good Luck Charlie and Lemonade Mouth.

But while she was topping the charts with “Ready or Not” and starring on TV, she was dreaming of something much bigger: space.

Fast forward a decade, and Bridgit is the founder of Northwood Space, a startup tackling one of the most overlooked challenges in the space industry: ground infrastructure.

“To fulfill the benefits of space, you have to invest in unsexy problems like building a ground network,” she said.

Backed by $6.3M in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, Bridgit’s company is building a “data highway” between Earth and orbit, enabling faster, cheaper, and more reliable satellite communications.

Her path to CEO was anything but typical.

After leaving Hollywood, Bridgit earned a master’s degree at MIT and started a Ph.D. in AI ethics at Harvard, where she co-led the university’s space society.

“As a teenager, I loved the creativity of acting,” she explained. “But I always felt like my impact could be elsewhere... something bigger, something meaningful.”