Sift (Sift Stack)

Sift, also known as Sift Stack, is a software company founded in 2022 and headquartered in El Segundo, California. The company was co-founded by Karthik Gollapudi (CEO) and Austin Spiegel (CTO), both former SpaceX engineers who built internal tools to manage the enormous volumes of telemetry data generated during rocket testing, manufacturing, and launch operations. Sift brings that same infrastructure to a broader market of hardware-intensive industries.

Sift's core offering is a unified observability platform designed specifically for physical systems and mission-critical machines. The platform ingests, stores, visualizes, and analyzes high-rate hardware telemetry in real time, supporting data formats common across aerospace and robotics workflows including ROS, CSV, TDMS, HDF5, Parquet, CAN, and ULOG. It is purpose-built to handle high-cardinality time-series data — the kind generated by dense sensor arrays on rockets, drones, autonomous vehicles, and robotic systems — far more efficiently than general-purpose data platforms.

Key platform capabilities include stateful anomaly detection pipelines that evaluate patterns across ongoing time windows and generate intelligent alerts; automated compliance reporting for standards such as AS9100 and FAA requirements; and flexible deployment options spanning on-premises, private cloud, GovCloud, and air-gapped classified environments. In 2025 Sift achieved FedRAMP High authorization in partnership with Knox Systems, enabling federal and national security agencies to adopt the platform.

Sift serves customers across commercial space launch, satellite operations, defense contracting, drone development, robotics, and power grid management. Notable customers include United Launch Alliance, K2 Space, Astranis, True Anomaly, Astrolab, Mach Industries, and Parallel Systems.

The company raised a USD 17.5 million Series A, followed by a USD 42 million Series B in 2025 at a post-money valuation of USD 274 million, led by StepStone with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV. Total funding stands at approximately USD 67 million across three rounds. As of mid-2026 the company employs approximately 82 people.