A Virginia-based AI startup by the name of Trase is expanding its presence in the Seattle region, with plans to grow from about 20 employees today to as many as 100 in the coming months, reports The Puget Sound Business Journal.
The 55-person company, which raised a $107 million seed round this week to focus on highly regulated industries like health care, publicly launched this week. Arch Venture Partners led the seed round.
GeekWire previously reported on the company’s hiring of Baskar Sridharan — a longtime Microsoft, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services engineering leader — as president. It is now using the Seattle area as a key engineering hub, with plans to expand in the region with new offices to accommodate growth plans.
Sridharan, who is growing the Seattle area team, said the company is focused on helping highly regulated industries deploy AI agents that automate complex administrative work.
“AI adoption is faltering within sectors that need it most: complex, highly regulated enterprises overburdened with administrative tasks that are ripe for automation,” Sridharan wrote in a previous LinkedIn post. “The issue isn’t innovation, it’s implementation.”
He added: “The next era of technology will be increasingly defined by those willing to solve the messy, complex problems of real-world AI deployment at scale.”
Before joining Trase, Sridharan spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, where he helped build Azure storage technologies. He later became vice president of engineering for Google Cloud before joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of AI, machine learning services, and infrastructure.
The company also recently hired Srirama Koneru, the former general manager of Bedrock Agentic AI Infrastructure and GenAI Services at Amazon Web Services and former senior director of engineering at Google and Salesforce. The company’s CEO is CEO Grant Verstandig, the founder and CEO of Red Cell
Trase, incubated by the venture studio Red Cell Partners, is building an agentic platform that enables enterprises in healthcare, national security and energy to deploy autonomous AI agents within existing infrastructure while meeting security and compliance requirements.
Customers include Duke University Health System, which is using the specialized agents in its Division of Cardiology to automate the more than 5,000 faxes the clinic receives each month.
The expansion adds to Seattle’s growing reputation as a hub for enterprise AI talent, particularly among startups recruiting experienced cloud infrastructure leaders from Microsoft, Google and Amazon. GeekWire tracks a list of more than 100 engineering centers in the Seattle area.
We’ve reached out to the company and we’ll update this post as we learn more.
Read the full article here
