Sift Names Co-Founder Austin Spiegel as CEO and Opens San Francisco Office

Senior leaders from Meta, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Grafana Labs, SpaceX, and Palantir join Sift's 80-person team scaling across aerospace, defense, and autonomy.

MARINA DEL REY, Calif., May 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Sift, the data infrastructure platform for physical AI, today announced that co-founder Austin Spiegel has been named Chief Executive Officer. The company also announced the opening of a second office in downtown San Francisco and the addition of senior leaders from Meta, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Grafana Labs, SpaceX, and Palantir to its 80-person team. Co-founder Karthik Gollapudi will shift his focus to product vision and industry evangelism.

Sift's platform supports aerospace, defense, autonomy, rail, and advanced manufacturing programs at companies including Impulse, K2 Space, and Parallel Systems. The platform ingests up to 20 million data points per second at nanosecond precision across millions of sensors. Since 2022, the company has tripled revenue year over year and expanded into some of the most mission-critical programs in the country.

As AI moves from screens into machines, the data infrastructure underneath those systems has to scale with it. Sift is building the platform to close that gap.

"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 leadership expansion includes six senior hires:

• Mike Russell joins as VP of Engineering from Meta, where he led technology for Supernatural VR through its acquisition and previously scaled engineering at Riot Games.
• Noah Lucas joins as VP of Product from Anduril, where he led the geospatial platform deployed across autonomous air, land, sea, and subsea defense systems.
• Ben Schmidt joins as Head of Sales after running North America sales at Applied Intuition, which he helped scale from an individual contributor role to more than 1,400 employees.
• Russ Parrish joins as Head of Design after 18 years at SpaceX, Intuitive Surgical, and IBM, designing tools used in operating rooms and on spacecraft.
• Quynton Johnson joins as Director of Product Marketing from Grafana Labs, where he led go-to-market for the company's observability platform.
• Bill Raj-Derouin, a Founding Engineer who built time-series visualization tools at Palantir and SpaceX, is relocating to anchor the San Francisco engineering team.

The San Francisco office reflects a deliberate geographic strategy: hardware builders cluster in Los Angeles, while software, distributed systems, and AI talent concentrate in San Francisco. Sift is expanding in both cities to meet customers and builders where they are.

"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."

Every rocket that launches. Every satellite in orbit. Every autonomous vehicle on a rail corridor or a public road. Every defense system that has to work the first time. The market is the physical economy, significantly larger than the world on a screen.

Sift has raised $67 million since its founding and is hiring across engineering, product, design, and go-to-market in both Los Angeles and San Francisco.

About Sift:
Sift is the data infrastructure platform for physical AI, providing a unified solution that lets engineers develop, validate, and operate the machines of the future. From next-generation defense to commercial space exploration, Sift powers reliability across the world's most complex systems. Learn more at www.siftstack.com.

SOURCE Sift