Sift, an El Segundo, CA-based provider of an intelligence layer service for mission-critical machines, has raised $42 million in a Series B funding round led by StepStone.
The round also saw participation from GV (Google Ventures), Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV.
The funding round increased the company’s total financing to $67 million.
The company plans to use the funds to grow its engineering team, operations, and development activities.
Sift is the intelligence layer for mission-critical machines, bridging the gap between AI’s capabilities and its ability to control physical systems. As AI moves from processing text to operating rockets, satellites, defence systems, and autonomous vehicles, a key challenge arises. These machines generate millions of data points per second, but AI cannot make sense of them without a proper structure.
Sift solves this by automatically converting raw sensor data into structured, queryable information that both engineers and AI systems can use, enabling smarter, faster, and safer machine operations.
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Sift acts as a single source of truth for audio, video, logs, and high-frequency telemetry. Engineers use it to spot issues faster, check designs against real-world performance and track entire fleets from one platform.
The platform solves a major scaling problem: while manual monitoring works for one or a few machines, fleets of hundreds generating petabytes of data need automation—fleet-wide visibility, automated anomaly detection, and unified oversight across all systems.
Trusted by ULA, Astranis, K2 Space, Parallel Systems, and other defence programs, Sift is already the go-to system for next-generation machines. Since last year’s funding round, the team has focused on building the platform. With this new investment, Sift plans to nearly double its 70-person team, move to a larger headquarters in Marina Del Rey, and expand its platform to support more organizations using AI-controlled hardware at scale.
“We started Sift because the tools needed for AI-controlled hardware didn’t exist,” said Karthik Gollapudi, CEO of Sift. “Software observability has evolved over decades but hardware teams still rely on spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Sift provides the intelligence layer that lets AI interact with hardware as easily as it does with software.”
Gollapudi and co-founder Austin Spiegel, who built monitoring systems for rockets and spacecraft at SpaceX, saw that while software companies had strong data infrastructure, hardware companies lacked similar tools. This gap becomes even bigger as the industry moves from managing single prototypes to operating fleets of hundreds or thousands of machines.
“We’re not just building a single satellite to last 15 years—we’re building hundreds and running constellations for decades,” said Neel Kunjur, Co-Founder and CTO of K2 Space. “The data will be massive. Sift will be essential for smooth operations, automatically flagging unusual telemetry and helping us use real-world data to improve our designs.”
About Sift
Founded in 2022, by Karthik Gollapudi and Austin Spiegel, Sift provides an intelligence layer for the physical world. Its unified data platform helps engineers develop, test and operate advanced machines, ensuring reliability for everything from defence systems to commercial space exploration.
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