After hiring AWS exec and raising $107M seed round, Virginia startup plants flag in Seattle area

Virginia-based AI startup Trase is expanding its presence in the Seattle region, with plans to grow from about 20 employees in the area today to as many as 100 in the coming months.

The 56-person company this week publicly launched and raised a $107 million seed round to focus on highly regulated industries like healthcare. 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 AI adoption is stalling where it’s needed most.

“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 at Salesforce. The company’s CEO is 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. The expansion in Seattle was first reported by The Puget Sound Business Journal.
Update: The company confirmed its expansion plans in the region and provided this statement: “Seattle is one of the nation’s leading technology hubs, making it a natural market for Trase as it continues to scale its operations.”

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