MCLEAN, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Red Cell Partners, a venture studio building rapidly scalable, technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in national security and healthcare, today announced the public launch of Trase, an agentic platform that tactically delivers and implements end-to-end AI agent applications and edge-deployed specialized language models. Designed for regulated industries, Trase empowers organizations to safely and securely automate their complex workflows and processes. In addition to launching the company, Red Cell has also welcomed Baskar Sridharan, PhD, former vice president and GM of AI/ML services and infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, as Trase’s President.

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“AI adoption is failing. That’s because implementing AI at scale is exceptionally hard, messy, and its value, to date, has been difficult to prove. Trase was built to solve for the last mile of adoption by delivering agentic solutions that enable organizations to successfully deploy AI and unlock its full promise," said Grant Verstandig, founder of Red Cell Partners and co-founder and CEO of Trase. “Since our inception, we’ve been relentlessly refining our proprietary platform for orchestration and reinforcement learning, building turnkey autonomous agents for healthcare, defense, and energy industries.”

The development of Trase’s platform, which emerges from stealth with $10.5 million in pre-seed funding from Red Cell and Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC)’s Virginia Venture Partners, began in September 2024. Since then, the company’s researchers have continually topped hyperscalers on Hugging Face’s GAIA leaderboard—a benchmark that tests AI systems on multi-step reasoning, multimodal data handling, real-time web browsing, and proficiency in general tool usage—and have continued to outperform other researchers in both performance and cost. Today, the team of more than 30 technical staff members deploys agents for Duke Health and is on contract with the Department of the Navy. Deployable on the cloud, on-prem, and edge devices, the platform creates turn-key agents, specialized language models, and a set of enterprise-grade APIs with self-service capabilities.

Prior to joining Trase, Dr. Sridharan spent decades working in Big Tech. In addition to serving as vice president and GM of AI/ML services and infrastructure at AWS—where he oversaw the strategic direction and development of AWS's biggest AI products, including Bedrock and Sagemaker—Dr. Sridharan previously worked as vice president of engineering in the Google Cloud Platform, managing the engineering team, among others, for Google Compute Infrastructure. He also spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft in various roles, including Partner Director of software engineering for Azure Data Lake and Cosmos, and served as the principal engineer and architect for the Azure Data Lake store service. Dr. Sridharan holds a Master of Science and a doctorate in Computer Science from Purdue University.

“The last mile for successful AI transformation, especially in mission-critical and highly regulated enterprises, is about integrating turn-key Agents across data, systems, processes, and human expertise and then deploying them at scale. Today, generic AI infrastructure remains disconnected from the end-users they’re meant to serve. To complete the last mile of AI deployment, we’ll need to do more than aimlessly develop APIs and visual builders. We’ll need to work hand-in-hand with the end users to give them AI solutions they actually need and can use effectively,” said Dr. Sridharan. “After more than two decades in Big Tech, I’m joining Trase to take on the hard, but necessary work of driving widespread enterprise AI transformation. This requires looking beyond the hype to deeply understand where and how the Agents truly fit into enterprise use cases, and embedding them into the critical workflows to bring about much higher, and measurable, efficiency gains. At Trase, we’re not only ready for this challenge, we’re uniquely positioned to define how the next era of technology will be adopted across America’s most critical industries. I’m thrilled to be part of such a talented team that’s helping to shape the future.”

Verstandig added, “We’re excited to welcome Baskar to the Trase team. His deep expertise and visionary leadership as one of the architects of the cloud era will be invaluable to Trase as we build the new frontier of compute.”

About Trase

Trase is an agentic platform that delivers and operationalizes end-to-end autonomous Agents and Agent applications at scale. Trase’s initial focus is on complex, highly regulated industries, enabling enterprises in healthcare, national security, and energy to create and deploy autonomous turn-key agents into existing infrastructure in a compliant, safe, secure and cost-effective manner. Visit us at trase.ai and follow us on LinkedIn.

About Red Cell Partners

Red Cell Partners is a venture studio building rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems. Visit us at redcellpartners.com and follow us on social media (LinkedIn, X, Instagram).

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Source: Red Cell Partners