After hiring an AWS exec and raising $107M in seed, Virginia plants flag in Seattle area
A Virginia-based AI startup called Trase is expanding its presence in the Seattle area, with plans to grow from about 20 employees today to as many as 100 in the coming months, the Puget Sound Business Journal reports.
The 55-person firm, which raised $107 million in seed funding this week to focus on highly regulated industries like health care, went public this week. is backed by Arch Venture Partners.
GeekWire previously reported on the company’s hiring of Baskar Sridharan — an engineering lead for Microsoft, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services — as president. It now uses the Seattle area as its main engineering center, with plans to expand regionally 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 perform complex administrative tasks.
“AI adoption is lagging in the sectors that need it most: complex, highly regulated businesses that are burdened with automated management tasks,” Sridharan wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing his new role. “The problem is not innovation, it’s implementation.”
He added: “The next era of technology will increasingly be defined by those willing to solve the complex, complex problems of deploying AI in the real world at scale.”
Prior to joining Trase, Sridharan spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, where he helped build Azure storage technology. 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 recently hired Srimama Koneru, former general manager of Bedrock Agentic AI Infrastructure and GenAI Services at Amazon Web Services and senior director of engineering at Google and Salesforce. The company’s chief executive officer is CEO Grant Verstandig, founder and CEO of Red Cell
Trase, co-founded by business studio Red Cell Partners, is building an “agent platform” that enables businesses in healthcare, homeland security and energy to deploy autonomous AI agents within existing infrastructure while meeting security and compliance requirements.
Clients include Duke University Health System, which uses special agents in the 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 hiring experienced cloud infrastructure leaders from Microsoft, Google and Amazon. GeekWire tracks a list of over 100 engineering schools in the Seattle area.
We’ve reached out to the company and will update this post as we learn more.
