Sift Secures $42M Series B to Modernize Hardware Engineering Data Infrastructure

Sift announced a $42 million Series B funding round on March 25, 2026, to scale its observability platform for complex hardware systems. Led by StepStone Group with major backing from GV, this capital injection brings the total funding to $67 million. The El Segundo-based startup aims to eliminate the reliance on manual spreadsheets and fragmented scripts that currently plague engineering teams.

Founded by veterans of SpaceX, Sift provides a unified telemetry layer that centralizes high-frequency sensor data, audio, and video into a single structured schema. While software developers use tools like Datadog for real-time monitoring, hardware engineers often struggle with data trapped in disparate silos. Sift bridges this gap by offering sub-second query speeds across petabytes of historical test data.

The platform serves as a critical foundation for artificial intelligence in the physical world by making raw telemetry machine-readable. By automatically organizing data from over 11 hardware-native formats, Sift allows engineers to train anomaly detection models on real-world test data rather than synthetic sets. This structured approach enables automated alerting through tools like PagerDuty, significantly reducing investigation times.

Industry leaders such as Astranis and Impulse Space already utilize Sift to manage fleet operations and conduct complex thermal testing. Impulse Space uses the platform to monitor satellites with a lean four-person team, relying on over 100 live alert rules to detect anomalies in seconds. Similarly, K2 Space reported reducing investigation times from eight hours of MATLAB scripting to less than sixty minutes.

With plans to double its headcount from 70 employees, Sift is currently moving its headquarters to Marina Del Rey to support its rapid expansion. The company remains focused on becoming the primary intelligence layer for the entire hardware lifecycle, from prototype testing to on-orbit operations. Its technology is increasingly vital as the industry moves toward faster development cycles and massive satellite constellations.