Red Cell Partners, a venture studio focused on rapidly scalable technology in national security and healthcare, has announced the public launch of Trase. Trase is an agentic platform designed to deliver and implement end-to-end AI agent applications and edge-deployed specialized language models, with a focus on securely automating complex workflows for regulated industries.
Simultaneously with its launch, Red Cell Partners has appointed Baskar Sridharan, PhD, a former vice president and general manager of AI/ML services and infrastructure at Amazon Web Services (AWS), as Trase’s President. Dr. Sridharan brings over two decades of experience from major technology companies.
Trase emerged from stealth with $10.5 million in pre-seed funding from Red Cell Partners and Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC)’s Virginia Venture Partners. Development of the platform began in September 2024. Since then, Trase’s researchers have consistently outperformed hyperscalers on Hugging Face’s GAIA leaderboard, a benchmark assessing AI systems on multi-step reasoning, multimodal data handling, real-time web browsing, and general tool usage, demonstrating superior performance and cost efficiency.
The platform is deployable on the cloud, on-premise, and edge devices, offering turn-key agents, specialized language models, and a suite of enterprise-grade APIs with self-service capabilities. Trase currently has a team of over 30 technical staff members, deploys agents for Duke Health, and is operating under contract with the Department of the Navy.
Grant Verstandig, founder of Red Cell Partners and co-founder and CEO of Trase, stated, “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. 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.”
Prior to joining Trase, Dr. Sridharan’s career included overseeing the strategic direction and development of major AWS AI products such as Bedrock and Sagemaker. He also served as vice president of engineering for the Google Cloud Platform, managing the engineering team for Google Compute Infrastructure, and spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft in various roles, including Partner Director of software engineering for Azure Data Lake and Cosmos, and 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.
Dr. Sridharan commented on his new role, saying, “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. 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.” He added, “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.”
Verstandig further remarked on Dr. Sridharan’s appointment, stating, “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.”
