Sift names co-founder CEO & opens San Francisco office

Sift has appointed co-founder Austin Spiegel as chief executive officer and opened a San Francisco office.

The moves come as the company adds senior staff from Meta, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Grafana Labs, SpaceX and Palantir to its 80-person workforce, while co-founder Karthik Gollapudi shifts to a role focused on product vision and industry evangelism.

Sift sells data infrastructure and observability software for hardware systems in aerospace, defence, autonomy, rail and advanced manufacturing. Its platform can ingest up to 20 million data points per second at nanosecond precision across millions of sensors.

Sift says it has tripled revenue year over year since 2022 and has raised USD $67 million since its founding. Customers include Impulse, K2 Space and Parallel Systems, along with undisclosed defence programmes.

Leadership hires

The recruitment drive adds six senior leaders with backgrounds in software, autonomy, design and commercial operations.

Mike Russell joins as vice president of engineering from Meta, where he led technology for Supernatural VR. Noah Lucas joins as vice president of product from Anduril, where he led a geospatial platform used across autonomous defence systems.

Ben Schmidt becomes head of sales after leading North America sales at Applied Intuition. Russ Parrish joins as head of design after roles at SpaceX, Intuitive Surgical and IBM.

Quynton Johnson takes the role of director of product marketing from Grafana Labs. Bill Raj-Derouin, a founding engineer with experience building time-series visualisation tools at Palantir and SpaceX, is relocating to help anchor the San Francisco engineering team.

The expansion reflects Sift's effort to position itself between two California talent pools: hardware builders in Los Angeles, and software, distributed systems and artificial intelligence talent in San Francisco.

That split helps explain the two-city strategy as Sift pursues staff and customers in industries where machines must operate with little margin for failure. Its products are aimed at engineering teams that need to monitor and analyse streams of information from physical systems rather than conventional business software.

Sift argues that the spread of AI into machines, vehicles and industrial systems is exposing a gap in the tools available to observe hardware in operation. Unlike consumer and enterprise software, physical systems cannot easily be patched or rolled back after a failure in the field.

Spiegel linked that problem to Sift's origins and market focus.

"Software solved these problems a decade ago. Hardware hasn't," said Austin Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Sift. "Every rocket, satellite, autonomous vehicle, and defense system has to work the first time. There is no rollback. The infrastructure underneath the physical economy is decades behind where it needs to be, and we're thrilled about the team we've assembled to tackle this challenge."

The appointment also shifts responsibilities at the top of the company. Gollapudi will now concentrate on product direction and external market engagement.

His comments pointed to the founders' experience in space systems and the scale of the industrial markets they are targeting.

"We started Sift because we lived this problem at SpaceX, and much work remains to solve it across the physical world," said Karthik Gollapudi, co-founder of Sift. "I'm excited to continue building Sift and bringing our story to the market."

Sift's pitch is that the rise of AI-enabled hardware is creating demand for observability tools that are common in software but less developed in industries such as launch systems, satellites, autonomous transport and defence. The latest executive appointments suggest it is building out product, engineering, sales and design while expanding its presence in San Francisco.

Sift is hiring across engineering, product, design and go-to-market roles in both Los Angeles and San Francisco.