Big week for the nuts and bolts side of defense.
Yesterday, Sift—an El Segundo-based startup building the data infrastructure layer for autonomous machines—announced that it’s raised a $42M Series B led by StepStone with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV.
The company says it’ll use the new cash money to “expand [its] engineering team to build the infrastructure layer that AI-controlled hardware systems will depend on across space, defense, manufacturing, and autonomy.”
“What we want to double down on is our data infrastructure,” Austin Spiegel, CTO at Sift, told Tectonic. “When we came to this problem, we really saw it as a big data problem, because we were working at the company that built the largest satellite conservation in the world, built the largest rocket in the world. Obviously, in order to build those things and operate them, data is constrained, essentially.”
Spaced out: If that quote didn’t tip you off, both Spiegel and CEO Karthik Gollapudi are SpaceX alumni—they built monitoring systems for rockets and spacecraft.
While there, both realized that, essentially, autonomous systems had a bit of a data problem—basically, as fleets of things like drones and satellites scale up, it’s pretty hard to ensure the integrity of data.
Sift was founded back in 2022 to solve this problem.
- Spiegel and Gollapudi experienced firsthand how tricky it was for autonomous things to sort through and rely on things like telemetry data at scale.
- The team has built software that essentially validates whether the data feeding AI is reliable—and flags when it isn’t. Per the company, it “automatically transforms raw sensor data into structured, queryable data that both engineers and AI systems can work with.”
- Think of it as a trust layer for autonomy—it makes sure your drone or isn’t making decisions based on bad data.
- Spiegel and Gollapudi’s bread and butter is space (for obvious reasons), but this kind of data infrastructure is useful for pretty much anything autonomous—drones, USVs, and the like.
“As people iterate faster, they can build things more reliably,” Gollapudi told Tectonic. “They get things to market faster. And that’s that’s very much what we see. Because if you have limited capital and you have something that there’s already so many risks, but building your hardware, we can take on that software risk off the table.”
The company is already working with ULA, Astranis, K2 Space, Parallel Systems, and “undisclosed enterprise defense programs.” Gollapudi also said they’re working with CX2 and other “companies that build drones” and some maritime customers.
“As we’ve gone out to the market, we realized that customers continually purchase our software because we have the best in class data infrastructure for this problem with real-time data ingestion, querying and cost effectiveness,” he added.
Build up: With this new funding, Sift is laser-focused on expansion—which will make that data infrastructure even better.
- The company is opening an office in San Francisco and plans to double their team to about 140 people, per Gollapudi.
- He added that they have actually already doubled the team since they closed the round “a few months ago.”
“We’re just seeing a lot of demand for what we’re building, and we have to scale this,” he said. “A lot of my time has gone towards hiring a key layer that can actually scale the team.”