WASHINGTON – Sift, a Southern California startup developing tools to help engineers make sense of hardware sensor data, raised $42 million in a Series B investment round.
With the funding, Sift plans to expand its staff of engineers building the infrastructure layer that underpins devices controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms.
“Modern rockets, satellites, defense systems, and autonomous vehicles are computers wrapped in steel, generating millions of data points per second from hundreds of sensors, but AI cannot interpret any of it without structure,” according to the March 25 news release. “Sift automatically transforms raw sensor data into structured, queryable data that both engineers and AI systems can work with.”
“We started Sift because the infrastructure needed for AI-controlled hardware didn’t exist,” Sift CEO Karthik Gollapudi, said in a statement. “Software observability matured over two decades, but hardware companies still rely on spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. Sift provides the intelligence layer that lets AI interact with hardware as fluently as it interacts with code.”
Companies and government agencies continue to propose constellations of tens or hundreds of thousands of satellites.
“The amount of data will be enormous,” Neel Kunjur, Sift co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Sift will be critical in making operations seamless, automatically flagging out-of-bounds telemetry, and helping us close the design loop by using real-world data to improve.”
StepStone Group led the round, announced March 25. Google Ventures, which led Sift’s $17.5 million Series A round, participated alongside Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures and CIV.
Sift was founded in 2022 by Gollapudi, former Dragon flight software lead, and Austin Spiegel, former Starlink Constellation Tools team lead.