Sift Raises $42M Series B to Build Intelligence Layer for Mission-Critical Machines

Engineers don’t panic when systems get loud. They get suspicious when things look quiet. Because buried under that silence is usually a storm of signals no one has properly wired together. Sift stepped into that tension, not to admire the noise, but to make it speak in full sentences.

Sift, out of El Segundo, just pulled in $42M in Series B funding, led by StepStone with GV, Riot Ventures, Fika Ventures, and CIV all leaning back in like they’ve seen this movie before and already know how it ends. That brings the total to $67M. Not bad for a company that looked at spreadsheets, duct-taped tooling, and tribal knowledge and said, yeah… we can do better than that.

Karthik Gollapudi, CEO, and Austin Spiegel, CTO, didn’t just leave SpaceX with résumés. They left with a perspective most people never get access to. When you’ve lived inside systems where failure is measured in fire and headlines, you start to see data differently. You stop treating it like exhaust and start treating it like oxygen. That mindset is baked into Sift’s DNA, turning raw machine signals into something engineers can actually use before things go sideways.

And here’s where it gets interesting. Sift isn’t selling dashboards. It’s building the intelligence layer for mission critical machines. Space, defense, manufacturing, autonomy. The places where “close enough” gets expensive fast. Their platform ingests, structures, and makes sense of telemetry at a scale that would make most systems tap out early. Less guesswork, more signal. Less reaction, more control.

The customer pull tells the real story. When companies dealing with satellites, launch systems, and autonomous infrastructure choose to plug into your stack instead of building their own, that’s not convenience. That’s trust under pressure. And pressure is the only environment that tells the truth.

From a business lens, this round is a masterclass in earned conviction. Start with a problem you’ve personally felt at the highest level. Validate it in the wild before writing code. Land a design partner who lets you build in real time. Then scale with investors who understand that the future isn’t just software eating the world, it’s software finally understanding the physical one.

StepStone stepping in at this stage signals something bigger than capital. GV, Riot Ventures, and Fika Ventures doubling down reinforces it. CIV’s presence ties it to a macro thesis that doesn’t blink when you say words like infrastructure, defense, or industrial transformation.

Sift isn’t chasing noise. It’s organizing it. And in a world where machines are getting smarter by the second, the companies that win won’t be the ones with the most data. They’ll be the ones who can actually hear it.