Behind Sift's $42 million Series B is a founder story that has become almost a genre in commercial space: two operators leave SpaceX, look at the data infrastructure problem from the inside, and decide that the right answer is a new company rather than a new tool inside the old one.
CEO Karthik Gollapudi and CTO Austin Spiegel co-founded Sift in 2022, and the technical DNA of the company is unmistakably shaped by what they built before.
The SpaceX Years
Both Gollapudi and Spiegel were part of the team at SpaceX that built monitoring systems for rockets and spacecraft. As Spiegel described it to Tectonic Defense, that meant working at "the company that built the largest satellite constellation in the world, built the largest rocket in the world."
Two operational realities defined that environment:
- **Volume.** SpaceX produces and operates more rockets, more satellites, and more telemetry per second than effectively any other organization in commercial space. The data scales involved are categorically different from those at a typical aerospace company.
- **Velocity.** Reusable Falcon launches, Starlink production, and Starship development demand a manufacturing and operations cadence that leaves no room for fragile data infrastructure. Bad telemetry doesn't just slow things down — it can stop a launch or risk a mission.
[HIGHLIGHT]Few engineering organizations on Earth have firsthand experience operating the kind of telemetry, data ingestion, and validation pipelines that SpaceX runs daily. Sift's founding bet is that what was hard-won infrastructure knowledge inside one company should become a productized layer that the rest of the autonomous-hardware industry can buy.[/HIGHLIGHT]
The Insight
What Spiegel and Gollapudi saw from the inside was that autonomous systems — the rockets, the satellites, and increasingly the swarms of drones, ground vehicles, and maritime platforms being built across defense and commercial markets — share a common, unglamorous problem: the data they depend on is rarely as reliable as the engineers operating them assume.
As fleets scale up, ensuring the integrity of telemetry data becomes one of the dominant engineering challenges. Sensor errors, transmission glitches, calibration drift, and protocol mismatches all compound. For an autonomous system that's making real-time decisions, even brief gaps in data integrity can cascade into safety, performance, or mission-success problems.
[QUOTE]"We're just seeing a lot of demand for what we're building, and we have to scale this. A lot of my time has gone towards hiring a key layer that can actually scale the team." — Karthik Gollapudi, CEO and Co-Founder, Sift[/QUOTE]
The Decision to Start Sift
Founded in 2022, Sift was created specifically to take the data-infrastructure problem off the table for everyone else trying to build and operate autonomous hardware. The thesis was simple: if engineering teams at startups had to reinvent the same telemetry validation, ingestion, and querying tooling that SpaceX had spent years building, they would either underinvest (and ship unreliable products) or overinvest (and burn engineering time on a problem that has nothing to do with their actual differentiator).
By 2026, that thesis has been validated across a growing customer roster — ULA, Astranis, K2 Space, Parallel Systems, CX2, and additional defense and maritime customers — and reflected in a $42 million Series B led by StepStone.
Why the Background Matters
Founder pedigree is sometimes overstated, but in Sift's case it is functionally important to the product. Building data infrastructure for autonomous hardware is fundamentally different from building general-purpose data infrastructure. The protocols are different. The cadence of telemetry is different. The cost of a missed event is different. The integration patterns with embedded systems and onboard compute are different.
Engineers who have already shipped this kind of system at scale are extraordinarily rare. Sift's founding team is one of a handful in the world that has done so for both rockets and on-orbit constellations. That experience is exactly what makes a small company credible to customers like ULA and K2 Space — and what made it credible to the Series B investor syndicate.
The Next Chapter
With the Series B closed and an SF office in the works alongside the El Segundo headquarters, Sift is now in a different phase of company-building. The challenge shifts from "can the founders' insight become a product?" to "can a company that started with two SpaceX alumni become a 140-person infrastructure organization that supports the broader autonomous-hardware industry?"
If Gollapudi and Spiegel can repeat the build-fast pattern they helped run at SpaceX — but applied to a software product serving dozens of customers across multiple verticals — Sift has a credible path to becoming one of the default infrastructure providers of the autonomy era.