After recently raising $7.5 million in funding, Sift, a startup based in El Segundo, California, was founded by former SpaceX software engineers and is focused on growth.
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Sift was founded in 2022 to develop a closed telemetry layer that improves the way machine data is captured, visualized, and interpreted . With $7.5 million in funding from a recent round of investment, Sift, an El Segundo, California-based startup founded by former SpaceX software engineers, is focused on development.
Specifically, “to grow our team and grow our customer base,” Sift CEO Karthik Gollapudi told SpaceNews.
Sift was founded in 2022 by Gollapudi, former Dragon flight software lead, and Austin Spiegel, former Starlink Constellation Tools team lead. Potential customers include space companies and other businesses that build complex machines.
In the future, Sift also wants to help customers “automate a lot of tasks,” Gollapudi said. Especially for customers with large satellite constellations, “we’re trying to give people the tools to help an operator manage an entire satellite constellation,” he added.
Sift official website https://www.siftstack.com/ :
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Software Validation
Spacecraft tend to have complex software running on complex hardware.
“Part of the challenge is validating that the software is working properly before you make it live,” said Spiegel, Sift’s senior technologist.
At SpaceX, software changes are performed in a simulated environment before being transferred to hardware testbeds.
“At every stage, whether it’s simulated or hardware testing or vehicle testing, you collect telemetry and check the data in order to move on to the next stage,” Spiegel said.
The Original Idea
Gollapudi began thinking about the need for improved software tools after Boeing's CST-100 Starliner failed to dock with the International Space Station in 2019. A joint review by NASA and Boeing recommended improvements to how Boeing handles testing and simulation, software updates and knowledge capture.
In the following years, Gollapudi and Spiegel observed additional examples of accidents or problems caused by software bugs or procedural errors, such as the software error that prevented a vehicle from Japan's iSpace from landing on the Moon in April.
To examine whether these problems were widespread, they spoke to people at 17 companies.
“This just increases our belief that someone had to build this,” Gollapudi said.
Sift hired its first employee earlier this year. The company currently has a staff of 12.
Source: spacenews.com
