Sift, from ex-SpaceX engineers, raises $7.5M to sell hardware teams a telemetry stack

Los Angeles startup selling an end-to-end telemetry stack (storage, real-time analytics, visualization) to companies building rockets, trains and other machines.

If SpaceX's internal telemetry software is what separates its hardware cadence from everyone else's, other hardware makers will pay for an off-the-shelf version of it.

Austin Spiegel spent nearly five years at SpaceX, building internal tools including Starlink's telemetry system. Karthik Gollapudi spent four years there and led Dragon flight software operations. They founded Sift in mid-2022, convinced that SpaceX's unseen internal software was a core part of its hardware success.

Sift's stack has three pillars: storage, real-time analytics and visualization. Engineers can time-align sensor data around one event and compare, for example, the last 100 engine firings against today's. Machine-behaviour rules are encoded up front so that field operators are only paged when something is critically wrong, and data sits in cheap object storage to suit smaller customers. In November 2023 the company announced $7.5M from Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, First Resonance, Datum and Duro, with Earthrise Ventures having written the first check.

At announcement Sift had 10 engineers and planned to double headcount within 12 months. It already had paying customers across industries, including autonomous electric train startup Parallel Systems, itself founded by ex-SpaceX engineers.

The founders saw at SpaceX that internal telemetry software was a hidden driver of fast hardware development, and most companies cannot build it.

Boeing's Starliner OFT-1 failure in 2019 showed software and test practice, not just hardware, can sink a mission.

Storing data in cheap object storage lets Sift price for smaller hardware teams that cannot afford heavyweight telemetry systems.

Sift's customers already included Parallel Systems, another startup founded by ex-SpaceX engineers.

A famous company's invisible internal tooling can be the product: sell the plumbing that made its hardware cadence possible to everyone who lacks it.

As of the 7 November 2023 report, Sift had 10 engineers, planned to double headcount over the next 12 months, and had paying customers across several industries. TechCrunch did not report revenue or customer counts beyond that.