With Sift Stack, two ex-SpaceX engineers are bringing the software that helped launch rockets to the factory floor | TechCrunch

The cry of “atoms, not bits!” — a phrase capturing Silicon Valley’s growing obsession with physical manufacturing over digital products — reached a fever pitch last week with word that Jeff Bezos is putting together a $100 billion fund to roll up and automate factories. But automating factories isn’t purely a hardware problem. It increasingly depends on sophisticated software and AI tools, and that shift is reshaping the companies building the infrastructure of the physical manufacturing world. Karthik Gollapudi, the CEO of Sift Stack, an El Segundo, California, company whose tools support the design and manufacturing of complex machines like spacecraft and cars, is feeling the ground shift underfoot. He says these changes have reshaped his company’s focus in the last six months. Gollapudi and his co-founder, CTO Austin Spiegel, started the company in 2022 after working on software tools at SpaceX that managed the huge amount of telemetry data — real-time performance information streamed from sensors on physical components — during testing, manufacturing, and launch. Most companies building advanced machines use off-the-shelf database tools or cook up their own Python scripts, but Sift saw the opportunity to provide companies with a best-in-class tool. Customers range from United Launch Alliance, a major US rocket builder, and other defense contractors, to robotics and power grid management startups. However, Gollapudi says that the arrival of AI tools for data analysis fo...