Startup profile: Trase

  • Founded by: Grant Verstandig and Joe Laws
  • Year founded: Emerged from stealth in 2025
  • Headquarters: McLean, VA
  • Sector: AI
  • Funding and valuation: $10.5 million raised; valuation undisclosed
  • Key ecosystem partners: Red Cell Partners, Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation, US Navy

Trase, a Northern Virginia agentic AI startup that only charges companies if its platform actually makes them more efficient, emerged from stealth this week with a $10.5 million pre-seed round.

Headquartered in McLean, Trase is focused on sectors where AI could be a big help, but complexities make it difficult to implement, like healthcare and national security, according to president Baskar Sridharan, who recently joined the firm after a career at AWS and Microsoft.

“These are the most complex industries,” Sridharan told Technical.ly, “and they are really overburdened with a lot of administrative tasks.”

The startup enters a booming field. Bethesda’s E:cue emerged from stealth in March and houses an agentic artificial intelligence platform designed to help go-to-market teams to better comprehend consumer data. Palantir, a national security-focused government contractor, also houses an AI agent platform for users to build assistants. 

“[Trase] removes a barrier for enterprises which want to try to adopt AI but they don’t know if it’ll succeed or fail.”

Baskar Sridharan, president

Sridharan said Trase is unique for several reasons, including its business model. The startup doesn’t charge for services up front, and instead bills companies based on how operations become more efficient to make revenue. This is measured in a few ways, including hours saved, he said. 

“That basically removes a barrier for enterprises which want to try to adopt AI but they don’t know if it’ll succeed or fail,” Sridharan said. 

One customer, Duke Health in North Carolina, has used Trase’s tech to streamline prescription refills. The turnaround time for it is three times faster, per Sridharan, which results in $193,000 cost savings per year and 5,490 hours saved.  

Axing barriers to embedding agentic AI 

Trase, with a current staff of 30 employees, started developing its platform in the fall of 2024. It began by deploying its own engineers within other companies to have a full understanding of what was needed to improve operations, per Sridharan. 

“We didn’t start with the platform,” he said. “We started with … understanding how humans interact with the systems in these industries, and then walk backwards from there.”

The pre-seed funds will go toward building out its platform that implements AI agents for clients, and attracting more customers, per president Baskar Sridharan. The round was led by the local venture studio Red Cell Partners and Virginia Venture Partners out of the state-affiliated Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation. 

With the cash, Trase will explore breaking into other industries outside of health and national security that are less regulated, Sridharan said. He and the team are also looking into providing technology for customers to create agents themselves. 

The startup is cofounded by Joe Laws and serial entrepreneur Grant Verstandig. Verstandig is also the founder of Red Cell Partners (the venture entity backing Trase) and is similarly involved in several Red Cell-incubated startups including the data center energy startup Claros and cyber firm Andesite, among others. 

Tech that can be used across cloud providers, and smart glasses

Trase also has a contract with the Navy. Sridharan declined to disclose the number of Trase’s clients and other names of customers. 

The agentic technology can be used in various systems, Sridharan noted, which distinguishes it from other agentic AI firms. Trase’s platform can work with setups “on-prem” (when data is stored and managed on-site in its own network and infrastructure) or if it’s in a cloud. It also works in any cloud system or LLM, with or without an internet connection and on different physical devices like a laptop or smart glasses. 

The startup was incubated at Red Cell Partners, where Trase got financial support for research and development, per the venture studio’s communications director Ryan Whittle. 

Sridharan joins Trase after an extensive career in Big Tech, most recently the vice president of AI, ML, data services and infrastructure at AWS. He also spent 16 years at Microsoft. 

In those roles he saw engineers struggle to translate an AI prototype into a viable product, he said. So, he wanted to join a startup figuring out how to make it happen, he said. 

“I could actually start at zero, try to catch up to my own startup, or I could join forces with them, right?” Sridharan said. “They had already cracked the code.”