Sift

The Black Flag 100 reaffirms what the next generation of builders looks like. The teams on this list are solving the world's hardest problems across defense, aerospace, robotics, and energy. Real systems, real physics, real consequences. Sift exists to enable the most capable teams in the world to build, test, launch, and scale the most challenging hardware. Proud to be a BlackFlag partner. If you're on this list, reach out. We'd love to support the work.

The judgment your engineers build today should still be working for the team five years from now. Right now, most of it lives only in their heads. The thermal signature one engineer learned to read at 3am. When they leave, it leaves with them. It doesn't have to. Picture the engineer joining next month inheriting that judgment, not just a spec. Tests running faster because review isn't the bottleneck. A senior engineer moving on without their judgment going with them. Sift makes that real. Annotations live next to the telemetry. One engineer's insight becomes a rule that runs on every future test. Every test campaign should leave the team smarter than the last. The next vehicle starts where the last one ended. Read more on our blog in the comments.

Announcing Plantd as a Sift customer. A new future is growing. Plantd is turning the world's fastest-growing grasses into carbon-built products, starting with building materials. Their structural panels go where wood goes, outperforming it on cost, carbon, and performance. D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in America, signed a multi-year contract for 10 million Plantd panels. 90,000 American homes. 165,000 metric tons of CO2 sequestered. 1.2 million trees saved. Plantd's engineers use Sift to monitor every machine in their factory, tie anomalies to specific panel batches, and catch problems before they cause downtime. Home grown. American made. Carbon built.

Congrats to the K2 Space Corporation team on the Golden Dome partnership with Anduril Industries. Hosting Space Based Interceptors on Mega-class satellites is the kind of upper-bound work that defines what comes next. The scale unlocks missions that aren't possible on smallsats. We're still very early for where space is going. The orbital architecture five years out will look almost nothing like what's flying today. K2 is writing that chapter.

The clock is ticking on a failed propulsion test, and a GNC engineer needs answers fast. The problem? They're digging into a different team's subsystem, which means battling unfamiliar naming conventions and a new schema version from last night's software update. You shouldn't have to learn another team's naming rules or master SQL/Flux syntax just to debug a critical failure, but on most platforms, that's exactly what's required. We built Sift differently. Sift delivers sub-second search results across over 200 million channels of sensor data, empowering engineers to find exactly what they need instantly, even in subsystems they've never touched. Read more on our blog: https://lnkd.in/g6SVgder

Sift, the data platform for mission-critical machines, on the Nasdaq tower in Times Square. Follow along on our blog to see what we're building next: https://lnkd.in/gqmrnRKM

Thanks to Jordan Rose and the ProtoPod for having our co-founder, Karthik on the podcast. The conversation landed on a question Karthik keeps coming back to: modern hardware is software-rich, but the workflow around it hasn't caught up. Most hardware testing today happens in cycles. Build, test, learn, iterate. The teams that compound fastest are the ones that shorten that loop. Testing earlier in the design process, running more tests per cycle, checking new code against the full history of real sensor data. That's been the standard in software for years. The same patterns are possible for hardware once the data layer is there. Velocity is the metric that keeps hardware companies alive. Sift enables that velocity. Full episode below.

You don't outgrow Grafana. You outgrow the database underneath it. The problem is that InfluxDB or Prometheus start to break down the moment you're correlating thousands of channels across a year of test data. Dashboards take 30 seconds to load and engineers start making calls from memory instead of the dashboard. Our new Grafana plugin keeps the UI your team already knows and swaps the backend for something built for hardware telemetry. Millions of channels, low-latency queries, FFTs and derivatives in the browser, no more CSV-exporting to Python to find a root cause. K2 Space Corporation, and Astranis Space Technologies already run this way. https://lnkd.in/gZmgASDW

Your exhaust is your alpha. People are waking up to the fact that that their sensor data is the key to compounding. Today it’s fragmented across tools, locked in formats no one can query, and re-derived from scratch every campaign. Sift changes that. It's a structured record of how your hardware behaved under load, heat, vibration, and flight. It's what makes the next vehicle better than the last.

Our Head of Design, Russ Parrish builds for the same high-stakes environments our customers operate in. That starts with the brand. International Orange isn't just a style choice, it's a technical heritage.