defense-and-space
(3)
Bridgit Mendler
Bridgit Mendler is the co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, an El Segundo startup mass-producing phased-array ground stations to move data between satellites and Earth. A former Disney Channel lead (Teddy Duncan on Good Luck Charlie) and platinum-selling pop singer, she pivoted through the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School into deep-tech, and by early 2026 had raised more than $100 million and won a $49.8M U.S. Space Force contract to modernize the Satellite Control Network.
Josiah Gruber
Josiah Gruber is the CEO of Scout Space, a Reston, Virginia company building sensors and software to detect, track and characterize objects in orbit. An optical and RF remote-sensing engineer with more than 15 years of hands-on experience, he joined Scout in 2023 as an engineer, rose to VP of Engineering and then CTO, and took the top job in late 2025. Under his leadership Scout raised an $18M Series A in May 2026 and is putting its Owl optical payload on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft.
Baiju Bhatt
Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app that put stock buying on a phone screen and made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the US. In 2024 he walked away from finance to chase the idea he grew up with: power and machines in orbit. His company, founded as Aetherflux and rebranded in 2026 as Cowboy Space Corporation, started by trying to beam solar energy to Earth with infrared lasers and has since aimed higher - building rockets and AI data centers that live in low Earth orbit. The son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt is a physicist and self-taught product designer who keeps picking old, stubborn problems and bringing capitalism to them.