By Austin Spiegel, Co-Founder & CEO, Sift

Karthik and I founded Sift to actualize the science fiction future we were promised as kids. Reusable rockets. Flying cars. Humanoid robots. The way to build that future is by giving engineers a tool to understand what their hardware is actually doing. We had that tool at SpaceX. Most teams don't. They lose weeks to disjointed, siloed tools: the kind of problems software teams solved for themselves a decade ago. We raised $67M to fix that. But capital doesn't bring AI to the physical world. People do.

Karthik, my co-founder, was responsible for Dragon flight software operations at SpaceX. Leading missions, building simulation infrastructure, and shipping the software that flew crew to the ISS. When a customer tells us their workflow is broken or a data problem is mission-critical, we don't need to spend weeks with them to understand it. We lived this problem and assembled a team that is executing to solve it. 

At this critical juncture, I am excited to share what we are doing to accelerate our vision. Today, I will be stepping into the CEO role. Karthik will continue as co-founder, focused on product vision and industry evangelism. We're opening a second office in San Francisco, anchored by four leaders. We're joined by a stellar senior leadership team, and I can't be prouder of the domain expertise, vision, and ambition we've assembled:

Mike Russell is our new VP of Engineering. Mike comes from Meta, where he served as the Head of Technology for Supernatural VR, the industry's leading virtual reality app on Meta Quest. Mike scaled Supernatural's engineering team prior to their Meta acquisition and continued to lead the team post-acquisition while executing Supernatural's technical integration with Meta's infrastructure. Prior to Supernatural, Mike was at Riot Games, where he developed features for League of Legends, serving tens of millions of players worldwide. Mike knows how to build engineering organizations that quickly and reliably ship solutions to hard problems. That is exactly what we need.

Noah Lucas is our new VP of Product. He brings 15+ years of building and operating AI-native platforms in the physical world. Most recently, he led the geospatial platform at Anduril, deploying autonomous systems across simulation, air, land, sea, and subsea defense operations. Before that, he worked on DoD-funded AI-native sensor-fusion research, launched the early-autonomy entrant Serve Robotics, and led Postmates' developer and B2B products from concept to acquisition by Uber. Noah knows exactly how to help builders and operators of advanced machines leverage high-grade telemetry to build the next big thing.

Ben Schmidt is our new Head of Sales, based in SF. Ben was the former Head of Sales for North America at Applied Intuition, where he first started as an IC reporting directly to the CEO and helped scale it to over 1,400 people. Before that, he spent years at ON Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, with extensive experience in semiconductor and automotive sales. Ben is a proven sales leader who has seen both sides of complex hardware sales and knows how to bridge them.

Russ Parrish is our new Head of Design, based in SF. Russ has spent 18 years designing for aerospace, robotics, and AI, while working at SpaceX, Intuitive Surgical, and IBM. Russ' work has won numerous design awards, and he has designed tools used by teams in mission-critical situations – operating rooms and spacecraft. He knows how well-designed products help operators succeed when working under pressure, and the margin for failure is zero.

Quynton Johnson is our new Director of Product Marketing, based in SF. Quynton spent the last several years at Grafana Labs, where he led product marketing for their observability platform, owning go-to-market strategy and new product launches. Before Grafana, he held product marketing roles at Carta and LinkedIn. Quynton knows how to take complex, deeply technical infrastructure products and translate them into positioning that resonates with technical buyers. That is exactly the muscle we need as we bring Sift to the broader market.

Bill Raj-Derouin is one of our Founding Engineers who is relocating to SF. Before Sift, Bill worked at Palantir and SpaceX, where he built time-series data visualization and analysis tools used by some of the most impactful organizations worldwide. Bill saw firsthand what happens when engineering teams don't have the data infrastructure to match the complexity of their work. He came to Sift to make sure hardware teams never have that problem again.

We believe the best teams are built in person, where ideas compound and culture is real. Much like how the best hardware builders are in Los Angeles, some of the best talent in software, distributed systems, and AI is in San Francisco. For those who feel deeply about bridging the gap between software and the physical world, we are coming to you.

80 people, 2 cities, and we are just getting started. Every rocket that launches. Every satellite that orbits. Every autonomous vehicle on a rail corridor or a public road. Every defense system that has to work the first time. The physical world doesn't get a hotfix. It doesn't get a rollback. The machines around us are getting smarter, faster, and more autonomous every year, and the data infrastructure underneath them is decades behind.

That is the market. And it is so much bigger than just the world on your screen.

We're hiring, and let’s get building.

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