Red Cell Partners announced the launch of Trase, a new agentic platform designed to deliver and implement autonomous AI agents and specialized language models within regulated industries. The company aims to address the challenge of enterprise AI adoption by providing solutions that automate complex workflows securely and at scale. Alongside the launch, Red Cell appointed Dr. Baskar Sridharan, former Vice President and General Manager of AI and Machine Learning Services and Infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, as President of Trase.
Trase was developed to help organizations deploy operational AI systems in critical sectors such as healthcare, national security, and energy. The platform has been built to operate across environments, including cloud, on-premise systems, and edge devices. Its capabilities include the deployment of specialized agents and models, orchestration frameworks, and enterprise APIs that can integrate into existing infrastructures.
The development of the platform began in September 2024, coinciding with a $10.5 million pre-seed investment from Red Cell and the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation’s Virginia Venture Partners. Since its inception, Trase has consistently demonstrated strong technical performance, as evidenced by benchmarks such as Hugging Face’s GAIA leaderboard, where its systems have outperformed hyperscaler models across tasks involving multi-step reasoning, real-time data processing, and tool use efficiency. The company currently deploys agents at Duke Health and maintains a contract with the U.S. Department of the Navy. Trase is supported by a technical team of more than 30 researchers and engineers.
Dr. Sridharan has worked in senior engineering and leadership roles at AWS, Google, and Microsoft, where he led the development of high-scale cloud and AI infrastructure products, including Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure Data Lake, and Cosmos. He holds a Master of Science and a PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University.
The launch of Trase marks the latest venture from Red Cell Partners, a company that develops businesses focused on advancing national security and healthcare. The studio is building technology-driven platforms intended to address structural gaps in highly regulated markets.
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“AI adoption is failing. That’s because implementing AI at scale is exceptionally hard, messy, and its value, to date, has been difficult to prove. Trase was built to solve for the last mile of adoption by delivering agentic solutions that enable organizations to successfully deploy AI and unlock its full promise. Since our inception, we’ve been relentlessly refining our proprietary platform for orchestration and reinforcement learning, building turnkey autonomous agents for healthcare, defense, and energy industries.”
Grant Verstandig, Founder of Red Cell Partners and Co-Founder and CEO of Trase
“The last mile for successful AI transformation, especially in mission-critical and highly regulated enterprises, is about integrating turn-key Agents across data, systems, processes, and human expertise and then deploying them at scale. Today, generic AI infrastructure remains disconnected from the end-users they’re meant to serve. To complete the last mile of AI deployment, we’ll need to do more than aimlessly develop APIs and visual builders. We’ll need to work hand-in-hand with the end users to give them AI solutions they actually need and can use effectively. After more than two decades in Big Tech, I’m joining Trase to take on the hard, but necessary work of driving widespread enterprise AI transformation. This requires looking beyond the hype to deeply understand where and how the Agents truly fit into enterprise use cases, and embedding them into the critical workflows to bring about much higher, and measurable, efficiency gains. At Trase, we’re not only ready for this challenge, we’re uniquely positioned to define how the next era of technology will be adopted across America’s most critical industries. I’m thrilled to be part of such a talented team that’s helping to shape the future.”
Baskar Sridharan, President of Trase
“We’re excited to welcome Baskar to the Trase team. His deep expertise and visionary leadership as one of the architects of the cloud era will be invaluable to Trase as we build the new frontier of compute.”
Grant Verstandig, Founder of Red Cell Partners and Co-Founder and CEO of Trase
