From SpaceX to Startup: How Two Engineers Turned Internal Telemetry Tools into a $274M Company

The story of Sift begins with a failure — but not their own. In December 2019, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft launched on its first uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station. Within minutes, a software timing error caused the spacecraft to burn through its fuel reserves, miss its rendezvous with the ISS, and return to Earth having accomplished almost nothing. Subsequent investigation revealed additional software defects that, if uncorrected, could have destroyed the vehicle.

At SpaceX, two engineers watched the Starliner failure with a mix of professional sympathy and growing conviction. Karthik Gollapudi, who led flight software operations for the Dragon spacecraft, and Austin Spiegel, who had spent years building test automation and telemetry systems including the data pipeline for Starlink, recognized something that the public analysis missed: the Starliner failure was not primarily a coding error. It was a data infrastructure problem.

The SpaceX Advantage Few Talk About

SpaceX is widely admired for its reusable rockets, rapid iteration, and aggressive launch cadence. Less discussed — but arguably just as important — is the company's internal software infrastructure. SpaceX built custom tools for ingesting, storing, and analyzing the massive volumes of sensor data generated during manufacturing, testing, and flight. These tools allow engineers to compare data across hundreds of test firings, detect subtle anomalies before they become failures, and trace any in-flight issue back to its root cause in the manufacturing or test data.

Gollapudi and Spiegel experienced this infrastructure advantage daily. When something went wrong on a Dragon mission, the telemetry tools let them pinpoint the issue within minutes. When Starlink needed to scale from dozens of satellites to thousands, Spiegel's telemetry systems had to scale with it — ingesting data from an ever-growing constellation while maintaining real-time analysis capability.

The Gap They Saw

The Starliner failure crystallized an insight that had been forming for years: SpaceX's telemetry infrastructure was a competitive advantage that most of the aerospace industry could not replicate. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the growing wave of NewSpace startups all faced the same data challenge — millions of sensor readings, multiple data formats, disparate storage systems — but none had SpaceX's decade-long head start in building internal tools to manage it.

The problem was particularly acute for the new generation of space companies. A startup building a satellite constellation does not have the resources to build custom telemetry infrastructure from scratch. But the commercial tools available — general-purpose time-series databases, industrial IoT platforms, legacy aerospace data systems — were not designed for the specific demands of mission-critical hardware: sub-millisecond time resolution, hundreds of concurrent data streams, real-time anomaly detection, and the ability to trace any issue across the full lifecycle from manufacturing through flight.

The Founding

Gollapudi and Spiegel left SpaceX and founded Sift in 2022 in El Segundo, California — a few miles from SpaceX's Hawthorne headquarters and in the heart of the Los Angeles aerospace corridor. The founding thesis was direct: build the telemetry infrastructure that SpaceX had created internally, make it available as a commercial platform, and sell it to every hardware company that needed it.

The seed round, closed in November 2023, raised $7.5 million from more than 50 SpaceX alumni — a signal of confidence from the people who understood the problem most intimately. The investor base was not just former colleagues writing small checks; it included senior SpaceX engineers and leaders who had personally used the internal tools that Sift was commercializing.

The SpaceX-to-Startup Pipeline

Sift is part of a broader pattern of SpaceX alumni founding companies that commercialize capabilities first developed inside SpaceX. The company joins a growing roster of SpaceX spinouts building enterprise products for the broader aerospace industry — from manufacturing software to mission planning tools to ground station networks. The pattern mirrors what happened in the early days of cloud computing, when engineers from Google, Amazon, and Facebook left to build commercial versions of internal tools that their former employers had pioneered.

What makes the Sift founding story particularly compelling is the specificity of the founders' experience. Gollapudi did not just work at SpaceX; he led flight software operations for the spacecraft that carries astronauts to the ISS. Spiegel did not just work on data tools; he built the telemetry system for the largest satellite constellation in history. That level of domain expertise — combined with the engineering ability to translate it into a commercial product — is rare and difficult to replicate.

The $274 million valuation, achieved just three years after founding, suggests the market agrees. In an industry where credibility and technical depth matter enormously, Sift's SpaceX pedigree is not just a marketing asset — it is a genuine competitive moat.

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