Sift Appoints New CEO, Expands Leadership Bench and Footprint to Accelerate Physical AI Growth

New updates have been reported about Sift.

Sift has elevated co-founder Austin Spiegel to chief executive officer as the physical AI data infrastructure company scales its platform across aerospace, defense, autonomy, rail, and advanced manufacturing. Co-founder Karthik Gollapudi will shift to focus on long-term product vision and industry evangelism, aligning leadership roles with the company’s next phase of growth.

The company is opening a second office in downtown San Francisco to complement its Marina del Rey base, pursuing a dual-hub strategy that places hardware-centric customers and builders in Los Angeles and software, distributed systems, and AI talent in San Francisco. Founding engineer Bill Raj-Derouin will relocate to anchor the SF engineering team, underscoring the firm’s commitment to building a strong technical presence in both markets.

Sift’s platform ingests up to 20 million data points per second at nanosecond precision across millions of sensors, and is already deployed in mission-critical programs at customers including Impulse, K2 Space, and Parallel Systems. Since 2022, the company has tripled revenue year over year and expanded into some of the most sensitive aerospace and defense programs in the U.S., positioning itself as core infrastructure for the emerging physical AI ecosystem.

To sustain that trajectory, Sift has added a slate of senior leaders from major technology and defense innovators: Mike Russell joins as VP of Engineering from Meta and Riot Games, and Noah Lucas becomes VP of Product after leading geospatial platforms at Anduril for autonomous defense systems. Ben Schmidt, formerly a key sales leader at Applied Intuition, will head sales, while Russ Parrish, with nearly two decades at SpaceX, Intuitive Surgical, and IBM, will lead design.

Rounding out the leadership expansion, former Grafana Labs executive Quynton Johnson will serve as director of product marketing, bringing observability and go-to-market experience to Sift’s data-intensive platform. Spiegel framed the strategic hires as essential to closing the gap between modern software capabilities and lagging hardware infrastructure, noting that rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, and defense systems must work correctly on first deployment with no rollback options.

Gollapudi emphasized that Sift was founded after its leaders faced these data challenges firsthand at SpaceX and that the company’s mission is to extend reliability tooling across the broader physical economy, which it views as significantly larger than purely digital markets. Sift has raised $67 million to date and is hiring across engineering, product, design, and go-to-market roles in both Los Angeles and San Francisco as it targets further expansion into high-stakes physical AI applications.

Management sees rising demand as AI moves from screen-based applications into machines that operate in real-world, safety-critical environments, increasing the need for scalable data infrastructure that can capture, analyze, and operationalize massive sensor streams. With fresh executive talent, a bi-coastal California footprint, and accelerating revenue growth, Sift is positioning itself as a foundational layer for companies building next-generation rockets, satellites, autonomous systems, and defense platforms.

The company’s focus on nanosecond-level precision and large-scale time-series data processing aims to reduce test cycles, accelerate root-cause analysis, and improve reliability across complex hardware programs. For executives in aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing, Sift’s latest moves signal a push to become the default infrastructure for physical AI, integrating development, validation, and operations into a unified data environment.