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

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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, 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 streame