Sift has raised $42 million in Series B funding to expand its platform for AI-driven hardware systems. The round was led by StepStone, with participation from GV, Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV, bringing the company’s total funding to $67 million.
The company is focused on building an infrastructure layer that enables artificial intelligence to operate complex physical machines, including rockets, satellites, defense systems, manufacturing equipment, and autonomous vehicles. As AI capabilities advance beyond software into the physical world, Sift is addressing a major gap in how machine-generated data is structured and utilized.
Modern hardware systems generate massive volumes of data from sensors, but much of it remains unstructured and difficult for AI systems to interpret. Sift’s platform transforms this raw telemetry into structured, queryable data that engineers and AI models can use to monitor performance, detect anomalies, and improve system design.
Founded by former SpaceX engineers Karthik Gollapudi and Austin Spiegel, the company is building what it describes as an “intelligence layer” for physical systems. Their experience highlighted a disparity between software and hardware industries, where software has mature observability tools while hardware teams still rely heavily on manual processes.
Sift’s platform aggregates data across multiple sources, including audio, video, logs, and high-frequency telemetry, providing a centralized system for analyzing and operating fleets of machines. This becomes increasingly critical as organizations move from managing individual prototypes to deploying large-scale fleets that generate vast amounts of data.
The company is already working with customers across aerospace, defense, and industrial sectors, including ULA, Astranis, K2 Space, and Parallel Systems. These organizations are building increasingly complex systems that require automated monitoring and scalable data infrastructure.
With the new funding, Sift plans to nearly double its workforce from about 70 employees, expand into a larger headquarters in Marina del Rey, and continue developing its platform to support the growing adoption of AI-controlled hardware systems.
The investment reflects a broader industry shift toward integrating AI with real-world machines, where reliable data infrastructure is becoming essential for scaling operations and maintaining performance across large fleets.
KEY QUOTES
“We started Sift because the infrastructure needed for AI-controlled hardware didn’t exist. 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.”
Karthik Gollapudi, CEO of Sift
“We’re not building one satellite to operate for 15 years. We’re building hundreds and running constellations for decades. The amount of data will be enormous. 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.”
Neel Kujur, Co-Founder And CTO At K2 Space
