Seattle-based customer data startup Amperity conducted layoffs this week, the company confirmed to GeekWire, citing a transformation related to its use of more artificial intelligence.

The company did not specify how many jobs were cut, only that “a number of talented people are leaving.” Amperity’s headcount remains over 200 globally in offices across Seattle, New York, the U.K., Australia and Argentina.

“Amperity is transforming how it operates as a company, building AI into how we work across the organization,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “That shift changes where we’re investing and the shape of the team we need going forward.”

The layoffs come two weeks after Amperity announced that co-founders Derek Slager and Kabir Shahani were taking charge of the company as co-CEOs.

That move replaced Tony Alika Owens — a former Salesforce executive recruited as CEO in 2024 — in what Amperity called a planned “mutual transition.” Longtime CFO Amy Kelleran Pelly also took on added responsibilities and became president while retaining her CFO role.

Slager and Shahani said at the time that the rise of AI created a major opportunity for the company. And Thursday’s statement about layoffs reiterated that view.

“These decisions are about building a stronger Amperity for our customers. That’s where our focus is, and that’s what this next chapter is about,” the company said.

Founded in 2016, Amperity is one of Seattle’s most prominent enterprise software startups. It built its business around helping large consumer brands unify customer information from multiple systems into a single profile.

The company has raised more than $180 million from investors including HighSage Ventures, Tiger Global, Declaration Partners, Madrona and others. 

Amperity is ranked No. 32 on the GeekWire 200, a list of the top privately-held tech companies in the Pacific Northwest.

The tech economy in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest has long been shaped by software, but our quarterly ranking of the region’s top startups signals the rise of companies building physical stuff: rockets, fusion reactors, military robots, and data centers bound for orbit.

Big movers in the latest GeekWire 200 update include companies bioprinting human tissue, fusing atoms, and building autonomous machines. A reusable-rocket maker, Stoke Space, rose to No. 6, while a military-autonomy company, Overland AI, cracked the top 10 for the first time.

Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud vaulted 96 spots after becoming the fastest Y Combinator company ever to reach unicorn status, at a valuation of $1.1 billion, based on its vision to put solar-powered data centers in space to meet the soaring energy demands of AI.

Atop the list, fusion company Helion held its position at No. 1, now valued at $15.5 billion after raising an additional $465 million as it builds a plant for a new generation of energy.

Another company in the top 10 isn’t long for the GeekWire 200. Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit warehouse robot, is going public in a $2.5 billion deal. It’s currently No. 5, and companies graduate from the list once they go public or are acquired.

Software still has a big presence on the list: Bellevue-based Temporal rose to No. 2, now valued at $5 billion after raising $300 million for its platform that runs AI agents in production.

Another newly minted unicorn, XBOW, debuted at No. 35. The autonomous AI hacking platform from GitHub Copilot creator Oege de Moor raised another $35 million in May, extending a round that valued it at more than $1 billion.

Those are a few of the highlights from the latest edition of the GeekWire 200. Now in its second decade, the list pairs objective signals such as headcount, investment and followers with editorial judgment to identify and track the companies defining the region’s tech industry. 

Check out the full GeekWire 200, newly updated for Q2 2026. Here’s a look at the new top 10, followed by additional notes.

GeekWire 200

Top 10 Companies: Q2 2026

1

Helion

Everett, Washington • Renewable Energy Power Generation

Fusion-power leader backed by Sam Altman and SoftBank; now valued at $15.5B and building a plant to deliver fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.

2

Temporal

Bellevue, Washington • Software Development

Durable-execution platform now valued at $5B; revenue up roughly 380% as it moves AI agents into production.

3

Truveta

Bellevue, Washington • Hospitals and Health Care

Health-data venture backed by major U.S. hospital systems and led by former Microsoft executive Terry Myerson.

4

Chainguard

Kirkland, Washington • Computer and Network Security

Secure software-supply-chain unicorn valued at $3.5B, with ARR scaling fast toward $100M.

5

Agility Robotics

Salem, Oregon • Robotics Engineering

Maker of the Digit humanoid robot; heading for the public markets in a $2.5 billion deal expected to close this year.

6

Stoke Space

Kent, Washington • Defense and Space Manufacturing

Building a fully reusable rocket; has run a series of first-stage engine tests and extended its Series D to about $860M.

7

Brinc

Seattle, Washington • Aviation and Aerospace Component Manufacturing

Public-safety drone maker; launched its Starlink-connected Guardian “drone-as-first-responder” and a new Seattle factory.

8

Carbon Robotics

Seattle, Washington • Automation Machinery Manufacturing

Laser-weeding agtech that crossed $100M in revenue and launched a new “Large Plant Model.”

9

Overland AI

Seattle, Washington • Defense and Space Manufacturing

Autonomy stacks for military ground vehicles; a fresh $100M raise vaults the young Seattle startup into the top 10.

10

Customer.io

Portland, Oregon • Software Development

Messaging-automation platform that topped $100M ARR and has followed with its biggest-ever AI release.

GeekWire editorial • Rankings as of June 2026. View full GeekWire 200 →

More highlights from the updated GeekWire 200:

Truveta (No. 3): The clinical-data company launched an AI research tool for quick insights from its database of U.S. patient records.

Zap Energy (No. 11, up 2): The Everett fusion company added a fission line to its roadmap, an industry first.

Amperity (No. 32, up 5): Co-founders Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager returned as co-CEOs, vowing to carry the startup’s “soul” forward, two years after the customer-data company brought in an outside chief executive.

Armoire (No. 33, up 7): The clothing-rental startup, led by CEO Ambika Singh, rolled out an AI feature that arrays outfit choices for shoppers like digital paper dolls.

Alitheon (No. 69, up 8): The optical-AI startup raised $8 million to expand technology that gives physical objects a biometric ID.

Panthalassa (debut, No. 79): The wave-powered, floating AI data center startup netted $140 million in a round led by Peter Thiel.

Possible Finance (No. 82, up 11): The Seattle consumer-lending startup returned to profitability as its founders reunited for a new chapter.

Aspect Biosystems (No. 87, up 22 spots): The Vancouver, B.C. company, which bioprints human tissue, landed a $280 million partnership with the Government of Canada.

Portal Space Systems (debut, No. 114): The Bothell startup raised $50 million as it preps the first launch of its orbital maneuvering vehicle.

Gradial (No. 127, up 24): The agentic enterprise-marketing startup raised $65 million amid rapid growth, the biggest rank jump on this quarter’s list.

Humanly (No. 144, up 8): The hiring-AI startup raised $25 million and acquired Anthill, aiming its tools at job seekers, not just employers.

Avalanche Energy (No. 147, up 9): The Seattle fusion startup won a share of a $5.2 million Defense Department award to develop long-lasting “nuclear batteries.”

Tin Can (No. 153, up 14): The maker of a landline-style phone for kids had a late-night TV moment and launched a new program to help schools go smartphone-free.

Inflection (No. 172, up 20): The B2B-marketing startup acquired Seattle’s Keyplay, reuniting CEO Aaron Bird with Keyplay’s Adam Schoenfeld, who joins as CMO.

Notes on the GeekWire 200

Our list is not scientific, by any means, and the specific rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. But it has proven to be a valuable tool for many years. We hear regularly from readers who use the GeekWire 200 to look for jobs, prospect for customers, scout potential investments, and get a high-level view of the region’s tech community.

To make sure your Pacific Northwest technology startup is eligible for the GeekWire 200, first confirm it’s included in the broader GeekWire Startup List. If so, there’s no need to submit it separately. If your startup isn’t among the companies on that larger list, you can submit it for inclusion here, and we’ll crunch the numbers to see if it makes the next GeekWire 200 update. 

Email us at tips@geekwire.com with any questions.

For the first time in its nine-year history, Syndio has made an acquisition.

The Seattle-based pay equity startup announced Tuesday that it acquired Embrace.ai, an agentic AI startup whose founders and technology will help Syndio build out its AI-powered compensation platform.

Austin, Texas-based Embrace.ai was built to deploy AI-driven automation across business workflows, with a focus on governance and explainability in enterprise settings. The full team, led by co-founders Derek Butts and Seth Halpern, will join Syndio’s product and go-to-market organization, according to a news release.

Terms of the deal were not revealed.

Syndio, which works with nearly 400 global enterprises including more than half the Fortune 100, has been pushing beyond pay equity compliance reporting into what it calls “Decision Intelligence for Pay” — helping companies govern compensation decisions in real time, from job offers to merit cycles.

“Pay decisions are among the most important decisions a company makes, and they require AI that understands the domain, data, and governance expectations of the enterprise,” Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio said in a statement. “That expertise will help us move significantly faster as we build the next generation of pay intelligence.”

In a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, Colacurcio called the acquisition a “bold bet,” noting that the Embrace.ai team has spent three years deploying agentic AI inside real enterprises.

“You do not hire that one role at a time,” she wrote. “When you find a whole team that already has it, you move.”

She also said that she’s spent the year digging into tools, sitting alongside engineers and understanding what it actually takes to move faster, noting, “It has changed how I show up in every product conversation we have.”

The addition of the Embrace.ai team is expected to accelerate Syndio’s agentic AI roadmap, expand its AI-native technical depth, and strengthen governance and explainability for complex compensation decisions — areas that Syndio says are increasingly in demand from large employers.

Syndio was founded in 2017 by data scientist and law professor Zev Eigen to help companies analyze and address pay equity. Colacurcio, who previously co-founded workplace collaboration company Smartsheet, joined in 2018. The company raised $50 million in a Series C round in 2021, bringing its total funding to $83 million.

Syndio, which employs 140 people now, is ranked No. 48 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Both Embrace.ai founders are veterans of Workday, the enterprise human capital management giant. Butts spent 13 years there in product marketing, corporate strategy and M&A, and will join Syndio as SVP of product strategy. Halpern led global sales operations at Workday and WP Engine, and will join as a strategic advisor.

“Every pay decision carries consequences for the employee and the employer,” Butts said in a statement, “so AI has to be accurate, understand deep context, and support, not replace, human judgment.”

A team of Seattle-area high school students won the 2026 TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) Global Pitch Competition earlier this month, notching a three-peat for the TYE Seattle chapter.

More than 35 teams from 27 chapters around the world competed in the finals, which were held simultaneously at Bellevue College in Bellevue, Wash., and Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) in India, from June 11-13.

With another team finishing third, the Seattle chapter has produced five winning teams at the global event over the past three years.

• DuggAI won first place and a $3,000 prize. The startup’s AI agent is built to handle the “unglamorous side” of software development: triaging, contextualizing, and resolving engineering tickets so developers can stay focused on shipping product. Team members Ashish Naik, Shaurya Duggal, and Kruthik Ankam are all from Skyline High School in Sammamish, Wash.

• Hydrobin took third place and a $1,000 prize. Operating under EcoProducts LLC, the startup turns ocean-bound plastic into reusable packaging designed to displace single-use containers across consumer and shipping use cases. Team members Ananya Sharda, Aarav Narayan, Yatharth Kothari, Adithya Gogini, and Nissi V. are from Interlake High School in Bellevue, Wash.

TYE is a program under The Indus Entrepreneurs global network that gives students in grades 9-12 experience building companies from scratch. The program has been running for more than 20 years, now encompassing more than 40 cities around the world.

TYE Seattle credits its winning ways to a dedicated assortment of mentors, judges, and sponsors. For the 2025-2026 cohort, 22 mentors from Seattle-area tech leadership contributed, and more than 25 sponsors backed the program.

The Seattle chapter finals and the global semifinals attracted 10 judges with questions and targeted feedback for contestants. Bellevue College hosted the semis on June 12, where judges picked three teams from a field of 18 from the U.S., Canada, and Singapore to advance. On June 13, those three teams went head to head with the top three from India for the global title.

TYE Seattle’s leadership team includes Aravind Bala (instructor), Kishor Panpaliya (board member), Yashovardhan Wagh (program chair), and Aalok Doshi (program co-chair). Several are founders themselves who have spent years iterating on a blueprint for coaching high school entrepreneurs on aspects of customer discovery, prototyping, and pitch prep.

“In the world of AI, the earlier you get into entrepreneurship, the better. It teaches students how to actually build their own products, and puts more of them in position to change the world,” said Wagh, who is founder of Renton-based recommerce company gone.com. “We want to create a country-wide program, and ultimately an ecosystem, that lets students experience the real world and bring that experience back into their education.”

— Mike Jackson has been promoted to chief digital safety officer at Microsoft, a role within the company’s Trusted Technology Group that includes oversight of children’s safety, tech responsibility and international regulatory work. In a LinkedIn post, he called the work “critical, urgent, and inspiring.”

Jackson has been with Microsoft since 2020 and previously served as associate general counsel and head of legal and AI governance. Prior roles include legal counsel for Target, McDonald’s and other corporations.

“Mike has built his career at the intersection of law, technology, and responsible AI. He brings a rare combination of deep policy and legal expertise, genuine servant leadership, and a curiosity that makes everyone around him sharper,” said Jenny Lay-Flurrie, head of the Trusted Technology Group.

— Ankur Sinha has resigned as chief product and technology officer at Remitly, where he served for more than four years. The Seattle-based company facilitates international money transfers.

“Remitly has meant a lot to me — more than I think I fully realized until I started trying to put this note together. This has been a place where the work mattered, where the mission was real, and where I got to build alongside people who cared deeply,” Sinha said in a message shared with colleagues and posted on LinkedIn.

Before Remitly, Sinha was an engineering director at Google and spent more than a decade at Microsoft, working primarily on Xbox. He did not indicate his next role.

— Brett Taylor has taken the role of director of engineering for Synthesia and will lead the company’s West Coast team from its new Seattle office.

Taylor comes to the London-based company from Amazon, where he spent 17 years in roles including director with Amazon Web Services and senior manager at Amazon. Last year, Peter Hill, a former AWS vice president, became Synthesia’s CTO.

Taylor shared his excitement for joining Synthesia, which he described as having “an incredible team building interactive video agents that let employees ask questions, role-play scenarios, and get real-time answers.” He added that his office is recruiting AI video engineers for product, infrastructure and systems roles.

— Chigusa Sansen is, in her words, “graduating” from Microsoft after more than 25 years — a transition she has been planning for some time.

“Retirement implies stopping. Fading out. Calling it done. That is not what this is. This is a pivot. Into the life I have been building alongside my career, not instead of it,” she said on LinkedIn.

Sansen’s last day is July 1. She is departing as principal product manager, where she focused on making human-AI interactions more natural and intuitive. Sansen also owns Healing Communications, a business launched in 2017 that helps guide people and animals toward holistic well-being and calm.

— Aseem Datar, chief product officer and corporate vice president at Microsoft, has joined the board of Heidrick & Struggles, a Chicago firm specializing in executive search, corporate culture and leadership consulting. Datar has been with Microsoft for more than 20 years, with a brief departure to serve as a partner at Madrona Venture Group.

— Longtime University of Washington political science professor Aseem Prakash has left for a role at Georgetown University. During his 23 years at the UW, Prakash frequently published research and commentary on the environmental impacts of tech companies including Amazon and Microsoft.

— Koki Sato is stepping down as program manager of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) after more than five years with the organization. He is moving to a new role as ecosystem development coordinator at Quantum Australia.

At a recent robotics event in New York, a young girl hid behind her mother when she first saw Codey. The robot broke the ice by complimenting the girl’s shirt, and 45 minutes later she was still there, taking Codey through the entire plot of Frozen.

Leaders of Mind Children Robotics tell that story to illustrate the potential of Codey — a child-sized humanoid with facial expressions, open-source AI and a planned price tag under $10,000. Codey represents the Seattle-area company’s answer to America’s most stubborn caregiving crises. It’s a social robot that can learn and adapt, and will soon have a stronger memory for relationship building, co-founder Ben Goertzel said.

Seattle-based Mind Children has built Codey for social connection at a time when turnover rates among school teachers continue to rise, the U.S. is projected to have at least 9 million unfulfilled direct care jobs by 2031 and 40% of older adults report feeling lonely or isolated.   

“I can show expressions and gestures, and sometimes I make robot jokes,” Codey said during an interview with GeekWire. “Just talk to me like you would to a person.”

A robot built for connection

Codey is 3 feet tall, rides on wheels and is made up of 3D-printed parts — for now, as it’s the first prototype and a proof of concept. Its physical design is mechanical and modular to achieve low-cost manufacturing, avoiding the uncanny valley and failing safely. Mind Children’s target production price is about $10,000 per robot, a fraction of what comparable platforms cost.

“The more of the same part you have on each robot, the cheaper they are,” co-founder Chris Kudla told GeekWire. “We want to get 80% of the functionality for 20% of the cost.”

The robot can look you in the eye, crack jokes and tell you your hat is fantastic. It’s designed for a child who needs more attention than one teacher can give, a patient in a busy hospital, or a senior who needs connection and medication reminders.

“It’s basically a teaching assistant’s assistant,” Goertzel said of Codey in a classroom. “There are loads of use cases for that right now.”

Mind Children isn’t the only social robotics company looking to enter American schools or care settings. Israel-based Intuition Robotics has spent about $60 million developing its social robot ElliQ and distributing it to seniors around the U.S. More than 90% report feeling less lonely, and most confide in the robot as “a close friend, a therapist or even an essential life partner,” the New York Times reported in February.

In Japan, a therapeutic robot in the form of a fluffy harp seal named Paro has reduced stress and anxiety in patients. In South Korea, more than 12,000 Hyodol companion robots have been distributed to isolated seniors.

‘A holistic robot design’ 

Before Mind Children, Goertzel was chief scientist of the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. He was a leading mind behind Sophia, a robot that sparked debate over the design of feminine humanoids, robot citizenship and whether the company overstated Sophia’s abilities for publicity.

“They were really cool for certain applications,” Goertzel said of the Hanson robots, “but it started us thinking: how could you make a holistic robot design?”

About five years ago, Goertzel, who had moved to Vashon Island to be close to family, began recruiting engineers to help with repairs of Desdemona, a Hanson Robotics humanoid that lived with him and sings in his band Desdemona’s Dream. He met local engineers Nile Fahmy and Kudla, who had design experience from aircraft to custom bicycles. In 2023, Goertzel and Kudla co-founded Mind Children, bringing on Fahmy and another engineer.

“There are a lot of amazing robot companies, but their faces are sort of blank, and the focus is on walking without falling down, or taking stuff off shelves,” Goertzel said. “We decided not to focus on those problems, not because they’re unimportant, but because everyone else is solving them.”

Since the early 2000s, Goertzel has been a leading researcher and proponent of AGI, or artificial general intelligence that surpasses human abilities. He believes it will trigger a point of irreversible civilizational change called the Singularity, which aligns with transhumanism beliefs around expanded consciousness and immortality. 

By his own estimate, Goertzel received about $360,000 from Jeffrey Epstein for his AI research over roughly 17 years, beginning in 2001. Goertzel has publicly addressed the issue, denying knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.

In 2017, he launched SingularityNET to develop and decentralize AGI through various research and AI products. Mind Children’s technology stack is built in partnership with SingularityNET, TrueAGI and the OpenCog Hyperon project – organizations oriented toward these ideas.

Codey currently runs on OpenAI’s API with custom guardrails layered on top. Through SingularityNET, Goertzel is developing a system called OmegaClaw, which he said combines language model reasoning and symbolic AI to create long-term memory and persona. When OmegaClaw integrates with Codey — targeted for this fall —  the robot should build ongoing relationships and remember every conversation, rather than starting fresh every time.

“The biggest value will be building real relationships, remembering people, stories, and past experiences,” Codey said. “I’ll be able to connect ideas across time, help them personally and keep conversations meaningful, even after weeks or months. It will make every interaction feel more human.” 

Who are the robots serving? 

Learning scientist Julie Carpenter has spent more than two decades studying what happens when people form relationships with robots and AI, including social AI systems provided to children with long-term disabilities. While she’s observed positive outcomes in the short term, there are lingering questions around whether the attachment that forms between vulnerable populations – such as children and older adults – and social robots is ethical. 

In Carpenter’s recent book, The Naked Android, she examines how AI reflects people’s beliefs and values. There’s no such thing as “neutral technology,” she said, and distinguishes between social robots developed with caregiving research at the center, and those developed with other goals aimed at caregiving populations. 

“My question is less about whether social robots can work, but under what conditions and who the robots are serving,” Carpenter told GeekWire. “The stakes in care contexts are much higher than on a talk show stage.”

Resistance to social robots isn’t just unfamiliarity, said Clara Berridge, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies care technology.

In a survey of 825 older adults on whether an “artificial companion that can talk with you” would ease loneliness, only a small share said “definitely yes.” The most common concern, raised by 45 respondents, was that companion robots reliant on audio data are overmonitoring, with worries about data security and third-party use. Another 32 said human interaction shouldn’t be replaced. 

Berridge suggests families ask questions before bringing a robot into a home or facility, such as whether it records continuously or only on a wake word, and what control users have over what’s collected. The deeper problem, she said, is structural: the U.S. has no comprehensive federal data privacy law, leaving those answers to vary company by company.

Codey’s visual and audio data collection won’t jeopardize user privacy, Mind Children insists. Any data the robot gathers will be encrypted with the user’s private keys, even when backed up to a server. The business model is selling robots and software subscriptions, not profiling users for advertising, Goertzel said. 

“We’re not going to have the robot say, ‘Good morning, drink Coca-Cola,'” he said. 

‘It takes a few years’

Although teacher and caregiver shortages are more acute in the U.S. than almost anywhere else, Mind Children’s first major rollout won’t be in the states. The plan is to run pilot studies in Korean schools. South Korea’s AI adoption grew 43% between mid-2025 and early 2026, the largest increase of any country globally, compared to 19% in the U.S. 

Fahmy recently completed a second prototype named Joy in Seoul, where the team has a manufacturing partner and a connection to South Korea’s Vice Minister of Education. The company is raising a seed round via WeFunder to help reach the near-term goal of 10 to 30 MVP units in pilot studies across education and healthcare. 

In the U.S., the team plans to enter lower-stakes hospitality environments first: hotel lobbies, museums and art galleries, where Codey could provide guided tours, answer questions and entertain guests.

“Every school board makes different decisions, and budgets are very poor because the U.S. undervalues education,” Goertzel said. “Bringing screens into classrooms was debated. Using the internet at school was debated. It takes a few years for these conversations to happen.” 

Each year, more than 130,000 people reach kidney failure. It’s the most advanced and expensive stage of a disease that affects 37 million Americans, 90% of whom don’t know they have it.

The tools being used to manage those patients, in many cases, haven’t kept pace. At nephrology clinics across the country, critical patient information still arrives by fax. Lab results sit in one system while the treating physician works in another. Staff manually key data into electronic health records one document at a time. 

“I can walk through the airport and facial recognition lets me through. I can take a picture of a check to deposit it,” Jonathan Lin, co-founder of Seattle-based Apacendo Health, told GeekWire. “But yet, we still manage this disease state with faxes and Excel spreadsheets. It’s so archaic.”

Lin and co-founder Chong Sun believe AI agents — software that can autonomously navigate interfaces, read documents and take action inside existing healthcare systems — can close that gap. Their startup is building what they describe as an AI-native operating system for nephrology practices: software that works in the background, processing incoming faxes, triaging incoming data, and handling the administrative labor that consumes hours of staff time every day.

A disease hiding in plain sight

The U.S. spends more than $150 billion annually managing the consequences of chronic kidney disease, including over $50 billion on dialysis alone, while the NIH invests $19 per patient in research to understand how to treat and prevent it. 

“For the most part, this is a silent disease,” said Dr. Osama Amro, director of nephrology at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and an advisory board member for the National Kidney Foundation’s Pacific Northwest chapter. “Patients don’t have symptoms of pain in the kidneys or anything that brings them to a physician, except when it’s late.”

A blood draw and a urine sample can detect kidney damage years before symptoms appear. But catching patients at that stage requires a level of coordination and data-sharing that the current healthcare infrastructure isn’t built to support.

“We rely on a very tedious process of reviewing data,” Amro said. “The data, believe it or not, comes in faxes, in multiple locations, despite having an electronic medical record. This is not designed to screen patients or manage them with chronic kidney disease. Many times there is a delay in evaluating patients who need initial evaluation in a timely manner.”

A patient with chronic kidney disease can cost the system about $30,000 per year, with the price rising as the patient reaches end-stage, driven by dialysis and hospitalizations that earlier intervention could have prevented. By that time, a patient without a transplant has less than a 50% chance of surviving five years.

Supporting the back office 

Anika Porter has been a nephrology practice administrator for 17 years. As practice administrator at Global Kidney Care in Houston, she oversees the operational side of a clinic where physicians see 20 to 24 patients a day, spending more time with each than providers at many comparable practices. The administrative burden, she said, falls hardest on staff who rarely get attention.

“People are so focused on the physicians,” Porter said. “The back office doesn’t get much support.” 

Before introducing Apacendo Health’s technology, her clinic had two people dedicated to managing faxes. It’s a task that can mean hundreds of documents a day, each requiring manual review and data entry.

Dealing with insurance companies adds another layer of friction. Billing codes are standardized, but reimbursements often aren’t. Lin described a practice called downcoding, where insurers pay significantly less than what was billed, without notifying the provider.

“The doctors will perform a service, they will bill for that service, and then insurance companies will pay them much less, and won’t even tell them they’re paying at a discount rate,” Lin said. “Most doctors will never figure out that this is happening until they start reviewing their finances.”

“We’re at their mercy,” Porter said of insurers – not to mention that pay in the specialty has stagnated, and nephrology is among the most susceptible to turnover and budget cuts. In 2023, about 52% of nephrologists in the United States were international medical graduates — a sign of how few Americans pursue the specialty, and how uncertain the field’s future is given ongoing immigration policy. 

Updating the playbook

Lin spent years working in the dialysis industry before moving into private equity and venture capital focused on healthcare. Two companies, DaVita and Fresenius, control about 70% of the U.S. dialysis market. What Lin observed was a system organized almost entirely around end-stage disease, with little infrastructure supporting the earlier, more preventable phases.

“A lot of the industry is relying on a high-touch clinical model, where they believe that if you engage with a patient on a very common basis, you can prevent their disease from progressing,” he said. “But the challenge is that it’s very highly manual. We’re basically using the playbook from five to ten years ago and applying it to this problem.”

A machine learning scientist, Sun had no prior experience in healthcare. His entry point was personal: his wife, a Navy veteran who became a VA mental health therapist after retiring from service, was spending up to seven hours a day on paperwork, leaving only three hours for actual patient care. In 2023, Sun built her an app to automatically generate session notes from recorded patient conversations. The VA wouldn’t adopt it, but the experience taught him what it meant to try to change healthcare from the outside.

The two connected through mutual friends and started Apacendo Health in 2025. Lin understood the clinical workflows, payer relationships and political terrain of a fragmented industry. Sun understood how to build software at scale. Their company, now at three employees, works with four nephrology practices across the country. So far, they’ve raised an undisclosed amount from the Science Fair Fund and angels.

‘Help us manage tasks to serve people better’

Apacendo’s product focuses on what Lin and Sun see as the most immediate and tractable problem: daily administrative work that’s keeping clinic staff from doing anything else.

“We like to work with the system rather than completely changing it,” Lin said. “We’ve spent our entire project talking to nephrologists in every single community across the country, figuring out what they need, and how we can build technology that gets them from where they are to where they want to be.”

Their software creates “digital employees,” or AI agents that operate inside existing workflows. For example, when a fax arrives, an agent could read it, extract the relevant patient information, and upload it into a database. The company works with their partners to understand their specific pain points.

For a small practice handling around 60 faxes per day, each taking about five minutes to process manually, that adds up to around five hours of staff time recovered daily. One early customer told Lin that the tool had given her back meaningful time with her family. Porter, who uses Apacendo at Global Kidney Care, said the priority is clear. 

“The biggest change we need to see is with more technology for back-office support,” she said. “We’re not looking for AI to replace people, but to help us manage tasks to serve people better.”

The startup’s ultimate goal is to use data to strengthen clinical protocols that reduce hospitalizations or delay disease progression. Identifying which patients are most likely to deteriorate benefits everyone in the system, Lin said. Amro’s hope is that eventually, technology could flag subtle signs of kidney disease and route that information to the right provider before the window for intervention closes.

“This comes back to the patients every single day,” Lin said. “We’re all going to age in this system. There just has to be a better way.”

— Former Microsoft, Amazon and Google exec Brian Hall is now chief marketing officer for Mistral — and he’s bullish on the move. “I think this could be the most interesting marketing job in the world,” Hall said on LinkedIn.

Mistral is a Paris-based enterprise AI platform that in 2024 signed a multi-year partnership giving it access to Microsoft’s data centers; Microsoft in turn agreed to offer Mistral’s models through Azure.

Hall said the company differs from major players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon by providing AI that customers can own more of, control more tightly and run on their own terms. He’s excited about the approach, which he said will also let him “learn and discover with the research, science, and developer communities.”

Hall spent roughly 20 years at Microsoft, then worked at Doppler Labs and Amazon before joining Google in 2020 as vice president of its cloud operations. He left Google in September.

— After 23 years with the company, Amazon‘s VP of Alexa Domains Aaron Rubenson is retiring to spend more time with family. During his tenure, Rubenson also led Amazon’s Appstore, which sold Fire tablets, phones and other products; the company’s cell phones and wireless services category; and third-party electronics.

“I’m so proud of the products we launched for customers. I feel honored to have had the opportunity to innovate in so many important and interesting areas,” Rubenson said on LinkedIn.

— Kimberly Schultz has left Amazon to join Seismic as chief human resources officer. Schultz was with Amazon for more than 11 years, most recently as director and head of corporate development integration.

Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff praised Schultz’s “deep experience in people strategy, organizational design and scaling global teams.”

The San Diego company builds AI agents that support corporate revenue teams.

— Seattle-based cybersecurity startup Dropzone AI has named Patrick Duffy as head of product. Duffy joins from Material Security and was previously at Expel. He praised Dropzone AI’s ability to keep up with the volume and pace of cyber attacks and its support for analysts.

“The company’s innovation is rooted in a clear understanding of where cybersecurity is headed, with AI agents working across tools, data, and workflows to transform how security operations get done,” Duffy said.

Dropzone AI is No. 19 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Wasif Jamal has departed Providence to become SVP and chief information officer for WellSpan Health, a Pennsylvania-based hospital and healthcare system. Before joining Providence, he was a group engineering leader at Microsoft.

Jamal had a six-year tenure at Providence, a healthcare network based in Washington and spanning seven states. On LinkedIn, he expressed gratitude for the opportunity to improve the organization’s technology and cybersecurity capabilities, expanding its use of data and AI, and “most importantly,” better serving patients, caregivers and communities.

— Alaska Airlines has promoted Shane Tackett to president and chief financial officer, effective June 29. Tackett was previously CFO and executive VP of finance. He has been with the company for 25 years.

“Bringing commercial and finance leadership together under Shane will strengthen alignment and accelerate our priorities as we continue advancing our strategy and creating long-term value for our stakeholders,” said Alaska Air Group CEO Ben Minicucci.

— Former Amazon leader Nidhin George was named chief product officer for A Place for Mom, a New York-based platform that helps families transition loved ones to assisted living. George, who will remain in the Seattle area, joins from Grubhub, where he served as SVP of product. Before that, he was with Amazon for more than 16 years, departing in 2022 as head of product for global logistics.

“Over the past two decades, I have had the privilege of building and scaling complex marketplaces that connect people, businesses, and service providers at critical moments in their lives,” George said on LinkedIn. “What drew me to APFM is the opportunity to apply those lessons to a mission that matters deeply.”

— Emory Clark is now founder designer at SageOx, a Seattle startup building tools for teams where humans and AI coding agents work side by side. The company launched in January and last month announced $15 million in funding.

Clark joins SageOx from Learning Design Alliance. She earlier co-founded Celipa, a startup that built an app to enable bill splitting among friends.

— Mike Gaal has taken on a new role at Microsoft, leading the Software & Digital Platforms team for Microsoft Americas and serving as general manager of Digital Natives. Gaal, who is based in San Francisco, has been with Microsoft for 14 years across 10 roles.

— Dr. Veena Shankaran was named the inaugural recipient of the Lert Family Endowed Chair at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Shankaran is a gastrointestinal cancer specialist and co-director of the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research.

— Space Northwest, an organization working to strengthen the connections among industry, government and academia to grow the region’s space economy, has named new members to its board of directors. They are:

• Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems, who was named vice chair of the board
• Sierra Clouse, managing partner of the Seattle investment firm Barclo Ventures 
• Brenda Kuhns, vice president of marketing and communications for Kymeta
• Chris Stessing, general manager of Karman Space & Defense
• Cameron Wakefield, director of brand and marketing for Stoke Space
• Ryan Wilson, director of economic development for Amazon Leo
• Dale Goulding, partner at Forge Digital

— And in case you missed it:

• Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of the online freight marketplace Convoy, has left Microsoft to start a new company focused on one of the most expensive problems in artificial intelligence: the cost of running AI models. Read more.
• Sri Chandrasekar is now managing director for Seattle’s AI House, which until today was known as AI Incubator. Read more.

AI2 Incubator has spent the past 12 years building AI companies in Seattle. Now it’s taking the name of the community it built around that work, rebranding today as AI House and dropping the AI2 name it had kept as a vestige of its former ties to the Allen Institute for AI.

The incubator was founded in 2014 inside Ai2 — the Seattle research institute created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — long before artificial intelligence became a household term. Its mission has been to help founders with the early work of company building: idea formation, customer discovery, recruiting, technical strategy and more.

In 2022, the incubator spun off from Ai2, and last year launched AI House as a physical hub for Seattle’s AI ecosystem — a gathering space for founders, engineers, researchers and investors at Pier 70 on the Seattle waterfront. In its first year, more than 20,000 people came through its events and programming.

“We’ve grown a lot, we’ve become our own organization in so many ways,” said Jacob Colker, the co-founder and managing director of AI2 Incubator and now AI House. “Community has become a deeply intertwined company-building platform for how we do what we do — and that was a big catalyst for the evolution of our brand.”

Along with the rebrand, AI House is bringing on Sri Chandrasekar as a new managing director. Chandrasekar spent nearly a decade at Point72 Ventures, where he helped build the firm’s ventures and private equity businesses, and previously led investments at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community.

While considering what to do next and possibly starting his own fund, Chandrasekar said he realized it was already being built.

“I think the core of what I would have wanted to do was build a community of founders all learning from each other and going as fast as they can,” Chandrasekar said. “And it already existed at AI House.”

Chandrasekar was already deeply connected to AI House before joining full-time — he had invested in several of its portfolio companies and wrote the first check into the organization’s $80 million Fund III last fall. He moved to Seattle from the Bay Area in 2021, betting the city would become a major force in AI.

Five years later, that conviction has only grown.

“As I think about my portfolio from Point72, some of our best performing companies are Seattle-based,” Chandrasekar said. “We had never made a Seattle investment before I moved up here, and something like 25% of our investments, maybe even more, were Seattle-based by the time I left.”

Chandrasekar joins Colker and fellow AI House managing director Yifan Zhang, who have led the organization through its evolution from research institute spinout to independent venture firm and community hub.

Colker credited Zhang with creating the basis for a community and building a public-private partnership with the City of Seattle, the State of Washington and Ada Developers Academy, with early support from Google and JPMorgan.

“It’s through her hard work over the last year that we have so much energy coming through the space,” he said.

Oren Etzioni, the longtime AI researcher and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, continues in a part-time role as technical director, and AI House also recently hired former GeekWire editor Taylor Soper as director of community and programming.

Under the AI House name, the organization is formalizing itself around three pillars: Community, which brings together founders, engineers, researchers and investors across the Pacific Northwest; Incubator, where the team works side by side with founders from the earliest stages; and Capital, where it writes pre-seed checks from its Fund III into applied AI companies.

Colker said the company-building playbook that worked in 2018 no longer applies in 2026.

“The new playbook is being written in real time,” he said. “One team’s breakthroughs that week become another team’s unfair advantages next week.”

Over its 12-year history, AI2 Incubator spun out more than 40 companies — including computer vision startup Xnor.ai, acquired by Apple; legal tech firm Lexion, acquired by Docusign for $165 million; and applied AI startups Yoodli, Ozette, Roboto and Casium — with 90% of graduates going on to raise venture funding.

AI House will continue to recruit founders from across North America — the organization has portfolio companies in Montreal, New York, San Diego and elsewhere — but Seattle remains the home base. Going forward, every founder in the incubator will be required to spend at least one month working from AI House daily.

Colker said the requirement isn’t a hard sell.

“Community is not something you can fully access from a distance,” Colker said. “The value comes from being in the room: the conversation after an event, the founder at the next desk, the operator who helps with a pricing question.”

Colker has been vocal on LinkedIn about what he sees as Seattle’s underappreciated stature, and he had no shortage of examples. Forty percent of world air travel flies on planes built in the Pacific Northwest, he noted. The cloud was invented here. When OpenAI needed compute, Sam Altman flew to Seattle to talk to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. When Anthropic needed compute, Dario Amodei flew to Seattle to talk to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

“How are we not just walking around with our heads held high?” Colker said. “I think we are as a region bad at telling our story — but that doesn’t mean we don’t have ambition and world-changing impact. It just shows up a little differently.”

Chandrasekar, who made his own bet on Seattle, put it simply.

“I can’t imagine a more exciting opportunity than investing in AI companies in an area that has a plethora of AI talent like Seattle,” he said. “If you want to use AI to disrupt an industry, this is the place where we teach you how to do that.”

Seattle startup Gradial continued its hot funding streak, raising another $65 million for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing.

The Series C round was led by Insight Partners alongside existing investors VMG, Madrona, and PruVen Capital.

Gradial raised $35 million in December and said in a blog post this week that it’s raised over $110 million in the past 16 months, calling it “a testament to the rapid growth” Gradial has seen across its business.

Axios reported that the new round values Gradial at $675 million.

Gradial works by plugging agents into the marketing tools enterprises already use — Adobe, Salesforce, Sitecore — and handling the operational work of getting content live: authoring, QA, brand compliance and routing updates through existing approval chains.

The company also watches for gaps in AI-generated search results, with agents that can draft and publish fixes automatically — without a human queuing up an agency ticket.

Customers include AWS, Prudential, T-Mobile, Vanguard, Kaiser Permanente, and US Bank.

The company was launched in 2023 by four co-founders who met at Dartmouth College: CEO Doug Tallmadge previously worked at SpaceX as a software engineering manager; chief growth officer Anish Chadalavada is a former AI strategy manager at Microsoft and investor at Point72 Ventures; CTO Deip Kumar also worked at SpaceX and Microsoft; and COO Anup Chamrajnagar worked at Point72.

The funding will help Gradial grow its 100-person company across engineering, sales and marketing, according to Axios.

Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of the online freight marketplace Convoy, has left Microsoft to start a new company focused on one of the most expensive problems in artificial intelligence: the cost of running AI models.

The stealth startup is building “the supply chain for intelligence,” a computing platform designed to run AI models more efficiently, according to a recent update to Lewis’ LinkedIn profile. He acknowledged the new venture this week in response to a message from GeekWire but said it was too early to share details. 

It’s a new chapter for an entrepreneur who led Seattle-based Convoy from startup to nearly $4 billion in value before it shut down in 2023 amid a prolonged freight recession that battered the trucking industry. Flexport acquired Convoy’s technology, and Lewis joined as a technical advisor.

Lewis went to Microsoft in February 2025 as a chief product officer focused on enterprise AI, later rising to corporate vice president, according to his LinkedIn profile. He left this spring to launch the new venture, which his profile says he co-founded in May. 

In his LinkedIn description, Lewis elaborated on the “supply chain for intelligence” concept, saying the startup is building a platform that spans data centers, networking, computer chips, and the software that routes AI requests in real time. The focus is inference — running AI models versus training them — to improve speed and response time for heavy workloads. 

“Our mission is to be the best stewards of power to make AI efficient, abundant, and affordable for this next era,” the description concludes.

It’s the latest chapter in a career that has blended AI, logistics, and efficiency. Lewis studied cognitive science at Yale, then was an executive at Wavii, a Seattle machine-learning startup that Google acquired in 2013, and later built AI-driven product personalization at Amazon. 

At Convoy, he and his colleagues built a digital marketplace that used machine learning to match truckers with shippers, set pricing, and fill empty trucks that would otherwise drive back without a load. A big part of the goal, as the company saw it, was reducing the waste and carbon emissions of trucks running empty — “deadhead” miles, as they’re known. 

At Microsoft, he worked on enterprise AI, helping companies build and run AI agents and workflows, and started an internal program called Camp AIR to accelerate AI-first teams.  

For now, details such as the name of the new startup and funding haven’t been confirmed. Lewis lists himself as CEO and co-founder, indicating that he’s not leading the company alone. Stay tuned for more on this one in the months ahead. 

Devplan, a Seattle startup trying to automate away the meetings and status reports that eat up a product team’s week, is coming out of stealth Thursday with $2.5 million in seed funding.

The company, founded by two industry veterans with experience at companies such as Uber, Amazon, Snap and Meta, is also expanding availability of its software for coordinating work across product and engineering teams, after testing it quietly with a small group of customers. 

Devplan traces its roots to a youth soccer pitch, of all places, where co-founder Anton Safonov coached the daughter of his future business partner, Chris Bee. They had kids at the same school, and discovered they shared a frustration from running engineering teams: too much of the work didn’t have anything to do with building the product. 

Bee calls it an invisible tax.

“With AI fundamentally changing the way we do software development, we’ve seen this huge acceleration in coding and in engineering work,” he said in an interview. “But the rest of the coordination work, the rest of that tax — that ‘work about work’ — hasn’t changed very much, frankly.”

They co-founded Devplan in 2025, with Bee as CEO and Safonov CTO. 

How it works: Devplan’s core product, Weaver, connects to commonly used tools including GitHub, Jira, Slack and meeting note-takers. A user can query Weaver through a built-in chat function, a Slack bot, or through a direct link into AI coding tools like Claude Code, asking about product status, features, or who’s responsible for which aspects of the project, for example.

Weaver also works in the background, generating a daily digest for each person and tracking projects on its own, flagging risks and progress without anyone filing an update.

The idea is to avoid scheduling a meeting or creating a status report.

Bee said queries run faster and cheaper through Weaver than pointing an AI tool at the raw data each time, because Devplan processes the information in advance and stores it in a knowledge graph rather than scanning code and documents on every request. He said queries run roughly twice as fast and more than three times cheaper on token costs in internal testing. 

Funding: The company’s $2.5 million seed round was led by AI2 Incubator, with participation from Acequia Capital, Mighty Capital, Grand Ventures and eLab Ventures. 

Based at AI House on Seattle’s Pier 70, Devplan employs six people, with a seventh hire in the works. The seed money is going toward engineering hires and deeper integrations, Bee said. 

Founder backgrounds: Bee was previously CTO of Lessen, where he helped grow the property-services company from a $20 million startup to a $2 billion valuation, and earlier led product and engineering teams at Zillow, Uber and Amazon. 

Safonov spent seven years as a principal software engineer at Snap, where he was a lead engineer on the company’s infrastructure team, and earlier worked on systems at Meta that handled realtime traffic for Messenger, Facebook and Instagram. He also built systems at LinkedIn.

“Chris and Anton have lived this problem at scale, and they have the technical depth to solve it,” said Yifan Zhang, managing director at AI2 Incubator, in a statement.

Competitive landscape: Devplan’s bet is that a tool built specifically for product and engineering teams will outperform the general-purpose AI assistants. 

Glean, the enterprise AI search company, may be the closest comparison, Bee said, but it works more broadly across all of a company’s information while Devplan goes deeper on software development specifically. Devplan integrates with Linear, the project-management tool, making it more of a partner than a rival, he said.

Increasingly, given the capabilities of AI coding assistants, the competition also includes companies deciding to build a coordination tool in-house rather than buy one.

Current status: Devplan has dozens of paying business customers on annual contracts, plus hundreds of users who have tried it so far. Pricing is consumption-based, with companies quoted a flat rate based on team size and expected usage. 

What’s next: The company is focusing on enterprise customers for now, with plans to eventually open the product to individuals on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Vedana Therapeutics, a Seattle-based startup aiming to prevent migraine attacks, emerged from stealth Wednesday with $46 million and a leadership team of heavy-hitters in cutting-edge migraine treatment.

The new funding will allow the company to advance antibody therapies targeting migraine-related signaling pathways — potential drugs patients could eventually self-administer by injection at home.

Vedana’s goal is to become the definitive migraine therapy company — and its roster of leaders, board members and advisors have played essential roles in the sector already, helping develop antibody therapies against two types of proteins: calcitonin gene-related peptides (CGRP) and a newer target called pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptides (PACAP).

“We need to make medicines that will enable patients not to have a single migraine day,” said Anurag Agarwal, Vedana’s co-founder and CEO. “And that means targeting not one, but multiple biological pathways and layering them together to completely address this very complex and diverse disease.”

While CGRP medicines represented the first specialized therapies for migraine, roughly two-thirds of patients still suffer from the condition. A migraine attack can trigger a cascade of symptoms unfolding over days, potentially including nausea, light sensitivity and disrupted sleep; flashing lights or partial vision loss; moderate to severe headaches; and fatigue and brain fog.

Vedana’s lead drug candidate program is a next-generation PACAP antibody, and its second targets both PACAP and CGRP.

The multipronged approach is essential, said Dr. Ernesto Aycardi, chief medical officer, because it’s “not just one neurotransmitter, it’s not just one protein that is causing the problem. In addition, there’s a significant complexity from the patient perspective.” Patients respond to different treatments, he added, and even within an individual, a migraine can be triggered by different causes between episodes.

The startup has 14 employees. Its leadership includes:

• Agarwal previously worked as an investor at Osage University Partners, which helped commercialize academic research.
• Leon Garcia, co-founder and chief scientific officer, previously oversaw the discovery and development of both CGRP and PACAP antibodies at Alder Biopharmaceuticals, a Seattle-area company acquired by Lundbeck seven years ago for $1.95 billion.
• Aycardi, chief medical officer, previously led clinical development of the migraine drug AJOVY at Teva.
• Dr. Rob Lenz, executive chair of Vedana’s board of directors, is the former head of global development at Amgen, where he led the development of competing migraine treatment Aimovig.

While multiple Seattle-area biotech companies in general are pursuing medical therapies created using AI tools, Vedana touts the decades of its team’s experience as a huge advantage.

The antibodies from living organisms “are more robust than any LLMs that we have built. These have been built over billions of years of information, so I would say that we are leveraging that neural network,” Agarwal said. The company will use AI for later steps in the drug development process, he added.

Major biotech companies marketing approved CGRP antibody therapies include Amgen, Eli Lilly, Teva and Lundbeck. In the PACAP space, Vedana faces competition from Lundbeck, Mentari Therapeutics and Slate Medicines.

Vedana’s Series A round was co-led by Westlake BioPartners and Canaan Partners, with participation from Dawn Biopharma and Alexandria Venture Investments.

Editor’s note: Story updated at 10:35 a.m. to add additional comments from Anurag Agarwal and Dr. Ernesto Aycardi.

A Seattle-area startup that once asked people to step inside a glowing kiosk for light therapy is now bringing that same technology into the home.

Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based Solius Labs announced $23 million in Series A funding on Wednesday along with the launch of the Solius Pro: a $2,995 UVB (Ultraviolet B) light therapy device for home and professional use.

The device, which hangs on a wall and is about the size of a large laptop computer, scans a user’s skin to calculate a personalized dose of UVB light at a targeted 293-nanometer wavelength. Solius Pro delivers light therapy to the user’s back in a single weekly session of less than five minutes, and is controlled via a smartphone app.

“UVB is not new,” Solius CEO Chris Kiple told GeekWire. “We’re just the first that has made UVB safe and usable and accessible anytime in an efficient way.”

The Food and Drug Administration cleared the Solius Pro as a Class II medical device under a product code — SGZ — created for the technology, according to the company. That clearance specifically covers stimulating the body’s vitamin D production in people 22 and older, according to FDA filings.

UVB light therapy has traditionally been available in dermatology clinics, where it’s typically used to treat skin conditions including eczema, psoriasis and vitiligo.

The skin-scanning system is patent-pending and central to Solius’s safety claim. Because UVB response varies significantly by skin type, a personalized dose is essential — too little delivers no benefit, too much risks skin damage. Kiple said Solius is the first company to develop a sensor that can calculate that dose automatically, without a clinician present.

Founded in 2013, Solius originally developed large walk-in light therapy kiosks, deploying them in clinical settings and pharmacies — including its first public installation in Vancouver, B.C., in 2018 — while running clinical trials in the Seattle area.

Kiple joined as CEO in 2023, bringing a team from Bothell-based Ventec Life Systems — which had partnered with General Motors to scale critical care ventilator production during COVID. He set about recapitalizing Solius and reinventing its technology as a smaller, more affordable home device.

The Series A round was led by Lauder Partners and included venture capital funds, family offices and individual investors. Solius has just over 20 employees and is actively hiring across engineering, quality, sales and marketing roles.

The company says it has recorded more than 1,000 pre-orders ahead of the Solius Pro launch, with the device now available on its website and shipping expected to begin in July. Kiple sees opportunity across multiple markets, from direct-to-consumer home use to doctors’ offices, dermatology clinics and wellness facilities.

Solius is targeting a significant and growing health problem — vitamin D deficiency affects an estimated 1 billion people worldwide, and research increasingly links lack of sun exposure to a range of conditions including seasonal affective disorder, bone density loss and cardiovascular disease.

For a company selling sunshine, the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a fitting home base, and Kiple, who works out of Bainbridge Island, doesn’t shy away from the irony.

“We have learned to avoid the sun, and our lifestyles have evolved to avoid the sun,” he said. “Tech workers in Seattle — Microsoft, Amazon — we’re all inside all the time. In Seattle, in particular, we don’t see the sun for nine months out of the year.”

That, Kiple said, is precisely the point of Solius Pro.

“How do we give you that benefit of the sun anytime, anywhere?”

Robbie Cape has been hinting for months that something was coming. Now he’s ready to say what it is.

The Seattle tech entrepreneur revealed on Tuesday that he’s building a new startup to reimagine the insurance industry, launching The Instrument with backing from Pioneer Square Labs.

In a post on LinkedIn, Cape said the decision to enter insurance came after a nine-month job search that nearly ended with him taking a role at a healthcare company in Utah.

Cape said he chose insurance for three reasons: PSL partner Greg Gottesman, who he described as the kind of tough, authentic venture investor he wanted beside him; the industry itself, which reminded him of healthcare in its complexity and potential for disruption; and money.

“For the first time in my career, I chose an opportunity without a mission to repair the world at its core,” Cape wrote. “Insurance is a trillion dollar industry built on exceptional business models. Generational wealth gets created here in ways that most industries simply don’t match. I found that compelling. More compelling than I’m comfortable admitting.”

Cape previously co-founded and ran telehealth startup 98point6 as CEO for six years, and before that spent 11 years at Microsoft and co-founded Cozi, a family scheduling app. Most recently he helped launch sustainable chicken restaurant Mt. Joy in Seattle, which he left in May 2025.

The idea for The Instrument had been in development at PSL for several months before Cape signed on, brought to him by PSL partners Gottesman and David Zager.

The startup incorporated in March, and Cape, the CEO, is joined so far by CTO T Van Doren and chief product officer Matt Witcher as co-founders. Cape said Van Doren was employee No. 1 and Witcher was employee No. 8 at 98point6.

The company’s website offers few details beyond the tagline “insurance reimagined,” though the domain — theinstrument.ai — signals an AI-driven approach.

“Several months in, I’m more excited than the day we shook hands,” Cape wrote of his partnership with PSL.

Neuralwatt, a Seattle-based startup launched by two Microsoft veterans, has released what appears to be the first tool for calculating, in real time, the carbon emissions of individual AI requests — everything from asking a bot to edit a high school essay to deploying an autonomous AI agent for a complex coding assignment.

The co-founders hope the data will unlock more planet-friendly operations and give AI developers something to feel optimistic about, even as public anxiety grows over data centers’ energy, water and utility bill impacts.

There’s a lot of worry that AI requires “a data center in every neighborhood,” said Chad Gibson, Neuralwatt’s co-founder and CEO. While new facilities will be built, he added, existing ones and their energy sources could be used much more efficiently.

The startup estimates that if AI growth continues at its current pace, and with the current approach to energy use, the technology could generate 24 million to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030 — volumes equivalent to adding millions of gas-powered cars to the road.

Neuralwatt aims to help avoid that outcome. The carbon intensity of grid power varies throughout the day and across regions, depending on its source and how much demand there is. The company’s platform captures a carbon intensity snapshot each time an AI function — or “inference,” in tech jargon — runs, giving customers insight into the emissions tied to that specific task.

Just as cloud users have come to expect emissions data linked to their usage, Gibson said companies running AI workloads will soon expect the same. “We believe that is going to be the future.”

The data is increasingly important for companies that will need to comply with Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and for other organizations disclosing the full range of their carbon emissions.

Neuralwatt offers three products, all of which integrate the carbon-impact metrics: Neuralwatt Cloud, which provides AI services from leased data centers with energy-based pricing; Neuralwatt Deploy, which identifies underused data centers for AI customers to tap into; and Neuralwatt Optimize, which lets data center managers subtly adjust operations in real time to improve efficiency.

Its customers include Parasail, an AI inference startup; ZutaCore, which makes chip-cooling technology; and Crusoe Cloud.

Gibson launched Neuralwatt in December 2024 with Scott Chamberlin, who serves as chief technologist. Both spent more than two decades at Microsoft, with Gibson departing in 2019 and Chamberlin in 2022. The two overlapped while working on the company’s now-defunct Zune media player.

After leaving Microsoft, Gibson took an entrepreneurial path, becoming a limited partner at Seattle investment firm Flying Fish and an angel investor with Alliance of Angels. Chamberlin, whose final Microsoft role was sustainability lead for Windows, moved to Intel to lead its green software strategy.

Neuralwatt joined the Climate Collective accelerator in 2025 and received a grant to support its work, then was selected this year for the Plug and Play accelerator. The startup is also part of the Nvidia Inception and Microsoft for Startups programs, which provide access to hardware and services.

Last summer, the company received an undisclosed pre-seed investment from Powerhouse Ventures, Avesta Fund and Remarkable Ventures. The team has four employees and three advisors.

Two University of Washington alumni who built companies out of everyday frustrations — hard-to-recycle household waste and the struggle to focus while working alone — have been recognized with the Allen School’s 2026 Alumni Impact Awards.

David Dawson, co-founder of Ridwell, and Nodira Khoussainova, co-founder of Focused Space, received the award at the Allen School’s graduation celebration on June 12.

The goal is not only to recognize accomplished alumni but to “show all of you, our new graduates, that you’re joining a long line of individuals who are changing the world,” said Dan Grossman, Allen School vice director and professor, introducing Dawson and Khoussainova at the school’s graduation ceremonies Friday evening.

Dawson, who received his bachelor’s from the Allen School in 2006, has been involved in Seattle startups for nearly two decades. After serving as an early Zillow engineer, Dawson went on to co-found a string of Seattle startups across hospitality, food delivery and recycling. 

In 2018, with two startups already launched, he turned his attention to a problem right in front of him. Frustrated that recycling something as common as a battery was so hard, he co-founded Ridwell, a subscription service that offers home pickup and mail-in collection of waste that municipal recycling systems didn’t support. Last year, the service announced that it had surpassed 130,000 customers, and it has since surpassed 150,000.

Dawson credited the computer science program for helping him become resilient, personally and professionally. His mentors emphasized that setbacks were part of the process, a lesson that became invaluable in the unpredictable world of early-stage startups: 

“It’s okay to fail some and pick yourself up and ask for help,” he noted in a UW announcement about the award. Mentorship and community connections he built on campus ultimately empowered him to take risks and build meaningful companies.

Most recently, alongside fellow tech veterans Marius Ciocirlan and Wesley Yun, Dawson co-founded MarkOS, an AI tool that lets companies continually audit marketing media to ensure that content is compliant and up to date with their latest messaging as soon as it comes out.

Grossman, in his remarks, noted that Dawson “has spent the two decades since graduating building technology companies rooted in community, purpose, and the people around him.”

Khoussainova received her PhD from the Allen School in 2012. After a tenure as a software engineer at Twitter, leading its product insights & experiments team, she went on to co-found Streamlit in 2018, an open-source front-end framework for machine learning models. The company was acquired by Snowflake in 2022 for $800 million.

Those experiences gave her front-row seats to the daily realities of tech work, allowing her to see how technology was impacting human behavior and mental health. In 2021, she co-founded Focused Space, a platform that lets people, particularly ADHD or neurodivergent remote workers, be more productive using neuroscience. 

By providing on-demand virtual “body doubling” sessions, users can find accountability and motivating effects by intentionally working in parallel with others, helping people enter a “flow state” more easily, according to the company’s website.

She credited the Allen School’s focus on systems thinking for helping her as an entrepreneur, noting that “running a company is basically a systems problem.”

Previous award recipients include:

• Paul Mikesell, who received the award in 2023, co-founded Isilon Systems and founded Carbon Robotics, a startup that uses AI and lasers to replace chemical weedkillers and address labor shortages with self-driving tractors. 
• Joe Heitzeberg, who received the award in 2019, co-founded Crowd Cow, a direct-to-consumer premium beef company focused on sustainability. The startup also won GeekWire Startup of the Year in 2018. 
• Nicki Dell, who received the award in 2025, is a Cornell Tech associate professor and co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, a nonprofit that helps survivors of intimate partner violence navigate digital safety and stalkerware. Her research earned her a 2024 MacArthur Fellow “Genius Grant.”
• Karen Liu, who received the award in 2024, is a Stanford University professor and co-principal investigator at Stanford’s Movement Lab, researching physics-based character animation, biomechanics, as well as assistive robotics for people with physical disabilities.
• Heather Underwood, who received the award in 2022, is a health tech entrepreneur and the former CEO of EvoEndo, a medical device company that developed a safer, sedation-free endoscopy platform for pediatric and adult patients. Her research for midwives and nurses in Kenya earned her a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Grant and a Gates Grand Challenges Grant.

A full list of past awardees can be found on the Allen School’s alumni page.

Luke Larson used to get a charge out of working on Tasers and body-worn cameras for law enforcement at Axon. Now he’s buzzing over matcha, the ancient Japanese green tea powder that devotees say delivers calm, focused energy without the jitters of coffee.

Larson’s ambition is noteworthy in its own right as he plans to build Vale into a Seattle-born beverage empire — think Starbucks, but make it matcha — scaling from a handful of local cafes and mobile bars to a nationwide network of thousands of automated machines.

It’s a move he’s pulled off before. As president of Axon, Larson helped grow the company from roughly $100 million to $1 billion in sales before stepping down in 2022.

Larson sees Vale as sitting at the intersection of consumer products, hospitality, technology and automation — and a chance to build something from the ground up.

“While other companies are leaving Seattle, we’re investing in Seattle,” Larson told GeekWire from Vale’s Pioneer Square headquarters, where he’s especially bullish on hiring tech talent from companies including Starbucks, Amazon and Microsoft.

Body cams to matcha bars

Larson, who grew up in Forks, Wash., served two tours in Iraq as a Marine Corps infantry officer and he was awarded the Bronze star with V for valor on his first tour. He joined Axon in 2008 and was product manager for the company’s first cameras.

He rose to president at Axon in 2017 and helped build out the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company’s significant engineering presence in Seattle. Alongside its mission to build tools and technology to help de-escalate police use of force, Axon attracted attention in Seattle for its geeky spaceship-themed office and its unique recruiting tactics.

In 2022, Larson left Axon following a health scare, taking a six-month medical leave before relocating with his wife and three daughters to Switzerland for a two-year sabbatical — time that gave him space to think about his next chapter.

It was during that period that Larson first tried matcha, at the urging of his wife and sister-in-law. His initial reaction wasn’t promising — he didn’t like it. But an introduction to chef Jeffrey Hayden, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who had worked at Michelin-starred restaurants, convinced him that high-quality, cold-served matcha was a different experience entirely.

Larson returned to Seattle with a new company idea, and last year launched Vale, opening its first cafe in South Lake Union in May 2025.

While a second cafe is in the works on First Hill, Vale’s growth target is more pronounced. The company this summer will operate 23 portable, staffed matcha bars with plans to scale to 100 by year’s end and 1,000 by next year. To support that growth, Vale recently leased 36,000 square feet of production space south of downtown Seattle — a space formerly used by Atomo Coffee as a roastery.

Hayden serves as the startup’s head of craft and Vale has 73 employees, roughly half of them frontline matcha bar workers, with the rest split among software engineers, mechanical engineers and roboticists. Former Axon leaders include CTO Jay Reitz and Sydney Siegmeth, head of people and communications.

Larson, who is the majority investor, plans to keep the company private for another two years before seeking outside capital.

His longer-term play involves robots.

Larson wants to build out a network of automated self-serve matcha machines that he envisions in office towers, apartment buildings and other spaces that wouldn’t support a traditional cafe.

Matcha from a machine

Vale sources ceremonial-grade matcha from Shizuoka, Japan, a region Larson likens to the Pacific Northwest, sitting at the base of Mount Fuji. Hayden leads a team that has developed a specialty drink menu — from classic cold matcha to lattes and seasonal creations like a tiki-themed summer drink — served across the cafe, matcha bars and machines through a single mobile app.

Next to Vale’s HQ in the lobby of an office building at 505 First Ave. S., just a block from Lumen Field, sits a futuristic-looking matcha-dispensing machine. With its smooth finish and rounded edges, it’s about the size of a small car, with a touchscreen centered between two frosted panels that reveal a drink-delivery portal.

A peek inside the back of the machine reveals a robotic arm that moves from end to end. First it applies a personalized label to a plastic vessel to match what the customer typed in. Next it fills the container with the drink of choice from a selection of 10 automated taps. The container is then topped with a soda-can-style aluminum lid before it’s placed in the window for retrieval.

Larson envisions the machine as something like a “Star Trek” replicator, where the technology fades into the background and the focus stays on the customer experience.

“We want to shatter your expectation of what can come out of a machine,” he said.

A $7 strawberry matcha latte tasted by GeekWire came pretty close to doing just that. Flavored with oat milk, the iced, fruity, creamy drink was a nice surprise compared to more traditional hot and bitter matcha I’ve previously sipped from a straw.

Larson hopes the taste lands equally well with a generation of consumers increasingly drawn to matcha as an alternative to coffee — particularly younger drinkers who prefer cold beverages and are wary of the jitters that can come with a caffeine habit.

He’s betting Seattle is the right place to find them, and to build the team to serve them, as Vale plans to hire up to 100 people over the next 12 months.

“I believe that Seattle’s best years are ahead of it,” Larson said. “To build the type of company that I want to build, I don’t think there’s a better city in the world.”

— Microsoft technical fellow Marcus Fontoura is leaving the company after serving as Azure Core’s chief technology officer for more than a year. During that time he also published A Platform Mindset, a book exploring how to build scalable systems and effective teams.

Fontoura had an earlier eight-year run at Microsoft, where he worked as a technical fellow in Azure and as a partner architect for Bing before departing in 2022 to join fintech company Stone as CTO and head of engineering. Prior to Microsoft, he held positions at Google, Yahoo and IBM.

“I leave with deep gratitude and immense respect for the people and culture that make Microsoft such a special place,” he said on LinkedIn. Fontoura, who is based in Boca Raton, Fla., did not share his next move.

— Travis Moore is now the first chief revenue officer for Xealth, a Seattle-based digital health startup acquired last year by Samsung Electronics.

“The challenge is no longer simply finding more technology. It is connecting that technology to the clinical workflows and turning fragmented tools into coordinated, meaningful care,” Moore said on LinkedIn.

Moore began his career in healthcare 25 years ago as a pediatric nurse before moving into health technology, where he worked in product management, sales and marketing and then transitioned to commercial leadership. He joins Xealth from Eleos Health, a North Carolina behavioral health company, where he served as head of sales.

— Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s Commercial Business, was appointed to GE Aerospace’s board of directors. Althoff has been with the tech company for 13 years.

— Eric Foster has taken a role at Slalom, a Seattle-based business and technology consulting firm, as leader of its Pacific Northwest market. Foster comes from Accenture, where he spent 14 years across three stints, most recently as managing director.

— Digimarc, a Beaverton, Ore., company providing digital watermark technology, named Paul Carreiro as CEO, effective July 6. Carreiro joins from Atlanta’s Elemica, where he has been chief executive and president for two years. He succeeds Riley McCormack, who will remain on the board of directors.

The AI boom is driving business, said a Digimarc release, as “both humans and intelligent systems require scalable ways to verify what’s real, protect what matters, and move forward with confidence.”

— Jose Calzada has joined the VP ranks at Microsoft with a promotion to VP software engineer. Calzada works on the company’s AI platform and has been with Microsoft for 17 years. He joined as a design engineer intern and was later hired permanently to the Outlook team.

— Soracom, a Japanese IoT connectivity company, has named Richard Halliday as CEO of its operations in North and South America. The publicly traded company’s U.S. headquarters are in Bellevue, Wash. Halliday has been with Soracom for more than four years.

— Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has reshuffled her leadership team, moving Nicole Vallestero Soper from her current role as director of policy and innovation to director of affordability, housing, and economic development, Publicola reported. Before joining city leadership, Soper was a principal consultant at Transformative Shifts.

— Scott Whalen of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been honored as the Department of Energy’s National Innovator of the Year. Whalen serves as chief scientist in PNNL’s Applied Materials and Manufacturing group and leads its Thermomechanical Processing team. He holds 23 U.S. patents with 13 more pending.

Endurance Energy, a Seattle-based startup developing technology to extract energy from the heat beneath the ocean floor, has raised $54 million.

The team — led by former SpaceX engineer Andrew Redd — is racing to meet surging demand for clean power, with plans to deliver electricity to the grid within two years.

“Our SpaceX heritage enables a pace of development that is unprecedented for new energy projects,” the company said Thursday on LinkedIn.

Redd launched Endurance in 2024. Over the past year, the startup has completed four prototype deployments to deep-sea volcanoes up to nearly 1,000 feet below the surface, where volcanic systems heat water to 728 degrees Fahrenheit.

Geothermal companies produce energy by drilling wells into underground reservoirs of hot water or steam, bringing that fluid to the surface and using it to spin turbines that generate electricity, then reinjecting it back into the reservoir.

Endurance is unique in its pursuit of undersea geothermal sources and aims to produce power on the gigawatt scale. For comparison: Washington’s Grand Coulee Dam has a generating capacity of 6.8 gigawatts and it’s the largest power station of any kind in the U.S.

Hitting gigawatt generation will take time. Endurance is on track this fall to deploy its 100 kilowatt generator dubbed “Adelie” to the underwater volcanic range called Juan de Fuca ridge, located off the coast of Washington and Oregon. Adelie is the company’s first complete system, which is capable of drilling under the ocean, generating power from that drilling and handling the energy transfer.

Geothermal power has become a hot ticket in the clean energy sector. With Google as a key investor, Fervo Energy raised $462 million in December, bringing its total to more than $1.5 billion. Sage Geosystems closed a round worth over $97 million in January.

Geothermal sources currently account for only 0.4% of U.S. power generation — but that share is expected to grow given the technology’s potential to provide around-the-clock, carbon-free electricity.

Redd, a Pacific Northwest native, is building his company on the north shore of Seattle’s Lake Union. He praised the location for its ample moorage and allowing the team to load seafloor drills and power generators directly onto seagoing vessels.

“Subsea geothermal and Seattle is a match made in heaven,” Redd said on LinkedIn. “The opportunity to work on renewable energy, with a group of people this talented, right back home, is a dream come true!”

The startup has 25 employees, according to TechCrunch, 12 of whom previously worked at SpaceX.

The Series A round was led by Founders Fund with new investors Felicis, Voyager Ventures, Riot Ventures and Construct Capital. Previous backers Point72 Ventures, First Round Capital and Ascend also participated.

Amperity is putting its founders back in charge.

The Seattle-based customer data startup announced this week that co-founders Derek Slager and Kabir Shahani will serve as co-CEOs, taking over leadership of the company less than two years after Amperity hired former Salesforce executive Tony Alika Owens to lead the business.

The leadership change marks a significant shift for one of Seattle’s most prominent enterprise software startups as it looks to capitalize on growing demand for AI-powered customer data tools.

In LinkedIn posts announcing the transition, Slager and Shahani said they will lead the company into what they described as a major opportunity created by the rise of artificial intelligence. Longtime CFO Amy Kelleran Pelly will expand her responsibilities and become president while retaining her CFO role.

“I’ve watched this technology go from interesting to transformative in real time, with a front row seat at the center of where it matters most: customer data,” Slager wrote. “Amperity has built an incredible foundation over the past decade. This is exactly the infrastructure the AI era runs on.”

Amperity recruited Owens, a veteran Salesforce executive, as CEO in 2024. At the time, the company said Owens would help guide its next phase of growth as brands increasingly sought ways to unify customer data across marketing, commerce and customer service operations.

In a statement provided to GeekWire, Amperity said that Owens’ departure was planned and a “mutual transition.” It added, “Tony leaves Amperity stronger than he found it, and we’re grateful for his leadership and contributions to the company.”

In 2022, Shahani stepped down as CEO, telling GeekWire at the time that he left voluntarily for personal reasons. The company did not publicly disclose additional details at the time. Slager continued serving as chief technology officer.

Shahani, who resides in New York, also is the co-founder of 3-year-old Seattle marketing tech startup Adora.

Founded in 2016, Amperity built its business around helping large consumer brands unify customer information from multiple systems into a single profile. Customers include brands such as Virgin Atlantic, Brooks Running and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Slager and Shahani also previously worked together at Appature, which they sold to IMS Health in 2013.

Amperity has raised more than $180 million from investors including HighSage Ventures, Tiger Global, Declaration Partners, Madrona and others. It boasted a valuation of more than $1 billion after raising capital in 2021. The company declined to comment on its financial performance, or future fundraising plans.

Amperity is ranked #37 on the GeekWire 200, a list of the top privately-held tech companies in the Pacific Northwest. It employs more than 200 employees in Seattle, New York, the United Kingdom, Australia and Argentina.

Shahani said via email that having the company’s co-CEOs in two of its major hubs — Slager in Seattle and him in New York — is a real advantage.

“We view this as the right leadership structure for Amperity’s next chapter,” he said. “Derek and I bring highly complementary strengths, and we’re excited to lead the company together along with our newly appointed President, Amy Pelly.”

With AI reshaping how companies use customer information, Amperity’s founders are betting that the technology shift creates a new growth opportunity for the startup they launched a decade ago.

“We’re carrying the soul of Amperity forward and aiming it at our biggest opportunity yet,” Shahani wrote.

Two former executives from enterprise software giant Icertis have teamed up to launch a new Seattle startup aimed at a multi-trillion-dollar corporate headache.

Rivvun AI, which today is announcing a $7.55 million oversubscribed seed funding round from Sitara Capital and 3one4 Capital, is led by CEO Anand Veerkar and Chief Product Officer Niranjan Umarane. 

Both spent the last decade as executives at Icertis, helping scale the contract intelligence platform to more than $350 million in annual recurring revenue. They are joined at Rivvun by co-founder and serial entrepreneur Patrick Linton.

Rivvun is tackling what the founders describe as an “execution gap,” a costly friction point between what a corporation contractually negotiates and what actually hits its books. 

“The enterprise has spent a decade being told AI will transform how it operates,” said Veerkar. “What it needed was AI that creates direct, measurable impact on the P&L — not productivity narratives, not dashboards. Rivvun closes the gap between what was agreed and what was collected, recovering money that goes straight to the bottom line.”

Rather than building a conversational chatbot, a copilot or another analytics dashboard, Rivvun has built what it terms an “autonomous value execution layer.” 

Rivvun’s agents sit on top of a company’s internal ERP, CRM and procurement databases — like SAP, Ariba and Salesforce — to catch commercial discrepancies and write corrective actions back into those systems.

It dubs these AI agents “stewards” (focused on money going out to manage invoices, suppliers, and leakage) and “sentinels” (focused on money coming in to track renewals and customer behavior). 

It has also developed what it calls a “margin bridge”: a financial module that matches what you sell against what you spend to protect profit margins.

According to the company, these agents continuously monitor commercial events across corporate systems, apply governed playbooks and write corrective actions directly back into the systems while preserving an audit trail. 

To address specific industries, Rivvun is building vertical-specific logic tailored to sectors like pharmaceuticals, healthcare, banking and retail. 

For example, the company said that a large manufacturing company with $3 billion in spend may experience leakage across its disconnected systems, creating an invisible problem that financial dashboards and consultants may miss. In that scenario, Rivvun’s agents could run continuously across the data sources, recovering an estimated $110 million to $138 million annually. 

The company is targeting Chief Financial Officers, Chief Revenue Officers and other C-level executives who oversee large budgets, noting that there’s no “rip-and-replace” as the agents tie directly into existing software systems. 

Citing research from McKinsey, Rivvun said that companies lost an estimated 3 to 4 percent of their total external spend because of inefficiencies and non-compliance. That’s about $2 trillion when factored across the Fortune 2000 companies, which Rivvun said is money that basically “disappears in the gap between what was contractually committed and what enterprise systems were ever built to collect.”

In a statement, Anurag Ramdasan of 3one4 Capital said Rivvun is one of the strongest teams they’ve encountered. 

“They are not pitching a horizontal AI solution and hoping for enterprises to extract value out of it,” Ramdasan said. “They are delivering ROI on AI for large enterprises from the first day of implementation, which is very critical for enterprise AI adoption.”

Similar to how Icertis grew over the past decade, Rivvun is taking a dual approach to its operations. It is headquartered in Seattle, with engineering operations in Pune, India. It employs 15 people, with plans to double this year.

The company plans to use the new seed capital to fund engineering, customer pilots and expand its enterprise global sales operations.

Four founders of companies on the tech frontier got together this week at a Seattle conference for a show-and-tell about the hardware at the heart of their businesses. And like any good show-and-tell, their talks touched on strategy as well as gadgetry.

For example, consider the laser-powered weed zapper pioneered by Seattle-based Carbon Robotics. The LaserWeeder system takes advantage of optical sensors and artificial intelligence to identify and target the weeds among the crops as the robotic rig is pulled through a field.

Carbon Robotics’ founder and CEO, Paul Mikesell, held up one of the LaserWeeder’s scanners during Monday’s DeepTech session at the downtown office of K&L Gates.

“We have it set up so this camera can see exactly what the laser shooting this way is going to hit, and every time we turn on that laser, the same pixel area in the camera is going to explode and blow up,” he said. “This device reminds me of a lot of science and technology that we had to tackle, but also, there’s a lot of pain that went into this thing.”

The company’s engineers had to figure out how to target weeds precisely based on imagery that was distorted by the camera’s viewing angle. “It’s a pretty incredible feat to get that right, and once we got it right, we’re just banging off them all the time,” Mikesell said.

Mikesell said he’s often asked about his strategy for selling LaserWeeders through farm-implement dealerships. “We decided to go direct every time, all the time,” he said. “And so we have a global team of sales reps and service support people. What that means is, we maintain the customer relationship. We know what things are being used for, how well it’s working, what are their challenges. And the customers know how to get a hold of us directly instead of going through a dealership.”

He’s looking forward to the day when artificial intelligence can speed up the process of hardware design. “I’m surprised by the lack of an AI tool in there, but I think it’s also because, you know, software engineers wrote the software that made the AI, so they’re much more comfortable with it,” Mikesell said.

“We actually did hook Claude up to an oscilloscope and got it to produce firmware that was proving out what we needed,” he said. “So I think that’s just going to continue to come.”

Starfish Space co-founder Austin Link’s gadget for the show-and-tell was too big to lift off the display table. It was an engineering model of Starfish’s Otter Pup spacecraft, one of which is currently in the midst of an orbital satellite docking test.

“We actually ran a pretty exciting test over the weekend, which I can’t tell you about yet,” Link said.

Otter Pup is designed to prove out technologies that will be used on Starfish’s full-scale Otter spacecraft for inspecting or maneuvering other satellites in orbit. “Humans have done this before, but every time we’ve done it before, it’s really expensive,” Link said. “You look at a Northrop Grumman satellite that did a similar mission. They made $65 million by extending the life of a satellite. It cost $400 million to do it.”

Starfish aims to use innovations in computer vision and robotics to make satellite docking more affordable. That means the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup has to do more with less.

“This satellite has just a single thruster on board, and the force that that thruster creates is the equivalent of a house fly sitting on your hand,” Link said. “It’s a tiny amount of force, so you have to apply it very thoughtfully over time. You have to predict what’s going to unfold with the physics and ultimately come together and dock. And that’s our big challenge as a company, not just with a demonstration satellite, but eventually with our full-size Otter.”

Overland AI builds autonomous off-road vehicles, including a 3,000-pound tactical vehicle that can transport supplies, drones or even anti-drone weapon systems for warfighting units.

“It’s not super-easy to get one in this room, but I wish I could have brought it,” said Byron Boots, co-founder and CEO of the Seattle-based startup. “Instead, what I did was rip the sensor pod off one of these vehicles.”

The sensor pod is equipped with stereo cameras and a lidar ranging system, all of which are hooked into an onboard computer. “This is from something called our SPARK Kit, which allows you to take any vehicle and make it autonomous,” Boots said. “It actually hangs up over the head of where someone would sit on a vehicle like this.”

Even though “AI” is part of the company’s name, Overland AI’s focus has widened from just writing the software to building the hardware as well.

“In order to move fast, we decided we just needed to do that ourselves and own that full vertically integrated stack,” said Boots, who is a professor of machine learning and robotics at the University of Washington as well as a startup CEO. “If you do that, you can then literally hand this robotic system with an autonomous stack on it to a user, and they can just start using it. You don’t have to wait for someone else to integrate with you.”

Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud made its mark at the intersection of AI and space operations last year when it became the first company to train a large language model in Earth orbit. For this week’s show-and-tell, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Ezra Feilden, brought an Nvidia H100 GPU — the same type of AI chip that was used for last year’s in-space demonstration.

“It’s very high power density. These GPUs were designed to sit and have a nice easy life inside a data center. They were not designed to be strapped to a rocket and launched into the vacuum of space, and then be run for five years without any maintenance or any TLC,” Feilden said. “So, that’s part of what we do at Starcloud. We ruggedize GPUs and other IT hardware such that they survive the launch, and then they can operate continuously in space without any mechanical intervention.”

Orbital data centers are attracting a rising tide of buzz because they could get around some of the big problems created by the rapidly growing hunger for AI data processing capacity: for example, limits on available electrical power, and concerns about land and water use.

Data processing in space brings its own challenges, however. How many solar-powered satellites will be required to handle the load? How will they be connected? And how will they be able to get rid of the waste heat produced by all those high-powered AI chips? Feilden and his colleagues at Starcloud are working to address those challenges.

Feilden said his company is scaling up operations at a new facility in Woodinville. “We’ll be deploying dozens of satellites that we build from that facility in the next couple of years, scaling up to thousands of satellites per year, which is the number that we need to hit to have a meaningful impact on the terrestrial data center industry with what we’re doing,” he said.

Starcloud isn’t the only company with big ambitions for orbital data centers. SpaceX, which is just days away from the world’s biggest initial public offering, envisions putting a million data center satellites in orbit. But SpaceX could be as much of a partner as a competitor. Last month, Starcloud struck a deal to use SpaceX’s Starlink mini laser terminals on its own satellites. And Starcloud is counting on new launch vehicles, including SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket, to drive down the cost of putting satellites in orbit.

“We strongly believe that’s happening very soon,” Feilden said. “This decade, certainly.”

Starfish Space’s Austin Link was intrigued by that perspective. He noted that Feilden and his colleagues are working with a business model that assumes launch costs will decline significantly. “We assume that launch cost is what it is today, and we don’t make any changes in our models when we’re designing products,” Link said. “It’s a really interesting contrast.”

The schedule of events for Deep Tech Week Seattle continues through Friday.

ArchAstro just emerged from stealth with an artificial intelligence network designed to automate complex, cross-company software deployments and integrations.

Founded earlier this year by a team of veteran engineers from Microsoft, Stripe, Statsig and Meta, the Seattle-area startup is tackling a complex problem — the prolonged period it often takes for corporate clients to integrate newly purchased software into custom enterprise environments.

ArchAstro is led by co-founder and CEO Vivek Sharma, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer who most recently worked in technical leadership roles at Meta and Stripe. 

GeekWire first got wind of the new startup back in January, when we noted Sharma’s departure from Stripe. At the time, he simply offered a cryptic message that they were using “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”

Now, more details are coming to light, including pre-seed funding of $6.2 million from a marquee list of investors. 

In a blog post announcing the new company, Sharma said “even the simplest B2B software requires hand-to-hand combat to properly integrate.”

Hand-to-hand combat may be an apt description of the challenging business problem that ArchAstro is looking to tackle, an endeavor that Sharma admits is “a very difficult problem.” 

Traditional artificial intelligence agents tend to operate entirely within a single organization’s firewall, while ArchAstro’s agents are designed to work across distinct corporate boundaries. 

Securely connecting these disparate systems is no easy task. That’s why the company says its “privacy-aware” AI agents — what it calls Forward Deployed Agents— are designed to handle cross-company integrations, migrations and bug fixes quickly and securely. 

“The key thing we’re enabling is a continuous connection enforced with code, built off the most current context across both companies,” Sharma tells GeekWire. 

Of course, there is always the concern of possible data leakage between two entities — a potential showstopper for any corporate chief information security officer. But Sharma said they are addressing that concern. 

Since customers control their own agents and how they operate, they choose how they interact. 

“Instead of moving data between companies and managing leak risk, you’re just adhering to shared ‘acceptance tests’ that ArchAstro hosted agents create and maintain across both,” Sharma said. “Code is also easy to evaluate and check for correctness. This is how engineering systems have always worked, and we’re extending that discipline between companies rather than within one.” 

Sharma said the ArchAstro system also could be used to help answer cross-company questions, like a custom agent assisting account managers with their customers. 

“Either way, we work with the customer to share only what’s appropriate, and our runtime enforces that with additional safeguards layered on as needed,” he said. 

In that regard, ArchAstro acts as a secure, automated translation layer, allowing two entirely different corporate systems to speak the same language and verify each other’s work instantly based on a shared set of rules. That seamless, secure flow of collaboration between companies translates directly to dollars saved.

“Product teams ship fast, but customers take months, sometimes years, to deploy what they buy,” Sharma noted. He added that delayed deployments result in revenue loss, customer churn and engineering burnout spent debugging individual setups rather than building what is next.

The system is designed to plug directly into existing developer workflows, including Cursor, Claude and Codex.

Given the complexities involved, Sharma’s founding engineering team includes veterans who previously worked on some thorny technical challenges: Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365, Stripe Billing and Connect, and engineering platforms at Meta, Atlassian and Statsig.

The team includes: 

• Tore Hanssen, who was a founding engineer at Statsig, the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup acquired last September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
• Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist in Meta’s Seattle office, who spent nearly 11 years with the company before going to Atlassian early last year.
• Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as a Facebook director of engineering, based in Seattle. He was most recently at Stripe.
• Rafael Brandao Lobo, a founding engineer who previously spent more than a decade building brand advertising and gaming products at Facebook/Meta. 
• Bruno Garcia, an open source startup founder who previously worked at PlayCo and Sega.

Rakesh Parida, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Stripe, said utilizing AI agents to create strong technical connections between companies is a major strategic advantage. 

“ArchAstro is making that model repeatable at scale, enabling continuous integrations, deployments, and migrations across companies, with the security, (forward deployed engineering) oversight, and judgment that serious software partnerships require,” Parida said. “The future of software partnerships isn’t just about going live together. It’s about staying live together.”

Two Fortune 500 companies have already begun utilizing the platform as design partners, though Sharma declined to say who they are. There’s also the potential threat of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or others entering the market, given their interests in making sure B2B customers are satisfied in deploying agentic AI systems.

Sharma said they are fully expecting competition in the nascent sector, and in some cases they are already speaking to the big players.

“But their demand is so high that they don’t have the time or the focused energy to build a solution like ours,” he said. “We think we can accelerate their revenue and help these larger companies scale even further.”

ArchAstro is backed by venture capital firms 20VC — the London-based firm led by Harry Stebbings — and Kyber Knight — whose investments include Cruise, SpaceX and Anduril. Its angel investors include a who’s who of technology leaders:

• Will Gaybrick (President of Technology & Business at Stripe)
• Claire Hughes Johnson (Former COO, Stripe)
• Vijaye Raji (Statsig founder, now CTO of Applications OpenAI)
• Vlad Fedorov (CTO, GitHub)
• Karandeep Anand (CEO, Character.ai)
• Deb Liu (Former VP Meta, Ancestry CEO)
• Ash Jhaveri (SVP at Meta)
• Akin Babayigit (Co-founder, Tripeldot Studios)

Based in Seattle, the company employs seven people. Sharma said they are deliberately “staying lean,” adding that a smaller team forces them to be “extremely nimble and invent a path to value.”

He’s also excited to build the startup in Seattle, which he says has “some of the best engineers anywhere.”

“If you want to be a serious B2B company, at some point you have to venture up to Seattle,” he said.

ZeroAvia was flying high. After launching in California in 2017, the clean aviation startup was expanding, establishing an R&D facility in Everett in the shadow of aerospace juggernaut Boeing and running test flights in the United Kingdom. It was raising cash from government grants and investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.

In May 2023, the company unveiled a retired turboprop from Alaska Airlines, wrapped in ZeroAvia’s navy and sky blue graphics, as part of a partnership to outfit the craft with sustainable technologies.

“The largest hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft is being developed right here in the greatest, most innovative state, the state of Washington,” said then-Gov. Jay Inslee at an event at Everett’s Paine Field.

Three years later, the startup is in a far different place.

Except for a sales team, ZeroAvia’s operations in Washington have ceased. The plane was never retrofit with hydrogen powertrains and the fate of the startup’s 136,000-square-foot Paine Field R&D facility is uncertain. Product development has shifted to the UK, and that work has narrowed. The company left California.

Last month ZeroAvia announced that CEO and founder Val Miftakhov had stepped down “to pursue new opportunities.” At least three other members of the C-suite have also departed.

Despite the setbacks, the company says it’s moving forward.

“The vision and mission of the company is the same — it’s hydrogen electric powertrains for aviation, decarbonization, reduced cost — these are the goals,” Chief Strategic Officer James McMicking told GeekWire. “But we have to adjust the pace and focus based on what’s going on in the market.”

‘An incredible opportunity’

Aviation is proving one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonize. Traditional jet fuel is far more energy-dense and widely available than planet-friendly alternatives such as hydrogen, batteries and sustainable aviation fuels — and that challenge is central to ZeroAvia’s struggle.

The startup is developing hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity, which powers electric motors to turn an aircraft’s propellers. The plan was to develop a product line at the Everett site including fuel cells, power electronics, compressors and advanced electric motors, giving companies the option of buying full engines as well as components.

But hydrogen has struggled to take off in the U.S., and while momentum was building under the Biden administration, President Trump slashed support for the sector after taking office last year.

Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers was sympathetic to ZeroAvia’s struggles.

“Any business can face ups and downs, and those ups and downs may be particularly notable for businesses in emerging technologies or sectors,” he said by email, wishing the company his best “as they work through their challenges.”

One year ago, Bloomberg reported the company was trying to quickly secure $150 million from investors to stay solvent through the end of 2028. McMicking declined to say how much was raised. Earlier rounds and government support come to roughly $300 million, and in 2023 Breakthrough Energy Ventures was ZeroAvia’s largest shareholder.

That funding includes $700,000 from Washington state, awarded across two grants to support its Everett operations. ZeroAvia put up $5.5 million of its own money to lease and prepare the R&D facility, which is owned by Snohomish County. By 2023, ZeroAvia employed roughly 40 people in the area.

Daniel Tappana, director of economic development for the Economic Alliance of Snohomish County, said ZeroAvia was a good fit for the region, with Boeing’s deep roots and a robust aviation sector with skilled employees.

“It was an incredible opportunity with some of the new emerging clean, green aviation technologies,” Tappana said.

Refocused on fuel cells

Three years after launching, ZeroAvia conducted its first test flight on a six-seat hydrogen-powered electric aircraft in 2020. The company in 2024 announced that American Airlines planned to buy 100 of its hydrogen electric engines for its 65-seat Bombardier CRJ700 jets. It set a target of selling hydrogen-powered systems for aircraft carrying up to 20 passengers by the end of last year, and for Q400 aircraft — like the plane provided by Alaska Airlines — as soon as next year.

The new plan is more modest: focus on the hydrogen fuel cell system, while powertrain ambitions are on hold. R&D in the UK now centers on systems including hydrogen refueling and onboard storage, with a team also working on high-temperature fuel-cell stacks for larger aircraft.

ZeroAvia is selling prototype fuel-cell systems and working toward certification with UK aviation regulators. Customers can integrate the technology into their own systems, which the startup aims to accommodate with customized products. The company also sees opportunities in defense applications, including hydrogen-powered drones, particularly in remote locations.

The work is underway as ZeroAvia’s board searches for a new CEO. Board chair Christine Ourmieres-Widener has been managing day-to-day operations for the past five months and will continue in that role until a successor is hired. Miftakhov, who is based in California, “is still very much engaged,” McMicking said.

“We all feel very comfortable that we’ve got a good plan,” he said.

Hydrogen’s hurdles

Clean aviation has proven a tough sector to crack. Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft laid off most of its employees last year after developing an electric-powered airplane. But other electric aviation startups press on, including magniX, AeroTEC, Electra and Beta Technologies.

Fellow California aviation company Universal Hydrogen ran out of money in 2024 and shut down — a fate Europe’s hydrogen-aviation ecosystem has largely avoided, thanks in part to stronger public funding.

In announcing Universal Hydrogen’s closure, co-founder Jon Gordon urged others to stay the course, saying it was up to companies like ZeroAvia, Airbus and others to realize the vision for hydrogen aviation.

“You can bet I am cheering them on,” Gordon said on LinkedIn. “Our future may depend on it.”

REDMOND, Wash. — Startup founders used to worry that tech giants would make their product obsolete. Now it’s even trickier: AI labs are not only encroaching on startup turf, they’re also offering tools for customers to attempt DIY solutions of their own.

The question of where startups can find a profitable niche was a recurring theme this week at the Technology Alliance Seattle Investor Summit+Showcase, hosted at Microsoft’s headquarters.

“Anthropic and OpenAI are a little bit of different beasts,” said Bryan Hale of Anthos Capital during an afternoon panel of investors. “I don’t think people appreciate the speed at which you have to move in order to outpace the big monsters that are gaining on you.” 

Hale recalled a previous era when founders dreaded Andy Jassy taking the Amazon Web Services re:Invent stage and announcing 100 new AWS services, one or two of which inevitably sounded like their product. That mostly turned out fine. Concerns were generally overblown.

This time, he said, is different. Big companies are increasingly using coding tools like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code to build what they used to buy as packaged software. The result is that many of the applications startups once sold as subscriptions — sales automation, lead scoring, demand planning, accounting, etc. — are now being built on the fly. 

Hale, who was an early executive at Seattle startup Chef and then AI2 Incubator, said the pace required to survive has changed completely. “If I were to take my clock speed as a good but not great startup operator from 10 or 15 years ago, I’d get smoked today,” he acknowledged. 

Yifan Zhang of AI2 Incubator, a two-time founder who built startups GymPact and Loftium, said the hardest problems still reward patience, deep expertise, and a willingness to grind. 

When code is cheap, she said, “standing out, distribution, capturing attention, is so much harder than it used to be.” But she cited portfolio companies in mining, shipping containers, and immigration — domains where founders have the reputation to sell into specialized industries.

Mia Lewin of TheFounderVC said the formula starts with picking the right target — a wedge small enough that the AI labs won’t bother chasing it. From there, founders need deep industry knowledge that lets them build better products faster without the usual mistakes, and a data moat that compounds through personalization or reinforcement learning.

“If you are creating the flywheel of rapid growth, it’s harder for them to catch up,” she said.

Tim Porter of Madrona said the anxiety is real but oversold. He cited legal tech startups Harvey and Legora, which kept growing faster even after Anthropic launched its own AI for legal work. Lawyers care about accuracy, workflow integration, and avoiding hallucinations. 

“They have crushed it, they just keep growing faster and faster,” Porter said, explaining that the importance of understanding a specific domain doesn’t go away even as the tools improve.

Earlier in the day, OpenAI’s Vijaye Raji offered a view from the other side of the platform. Raji, the CTO of applications for the ChatGPT and Codex maker, told the same audience that founders have faced this fear in every platform era and won. 

He agreed that the key is domain expertise. Big platforms chase the largest surface area they can reach. “A lot of innovation can be done at the edge of your domain and AI,” he said.

In fact, Raji highlighted one possible startup opportunity. Inside OpenAI, the surge of AI-generated code has outpaced the company’s testing and deployment systems. “The problem is no longer code generation,” he said. “The problem is now all the test tools, all the build tools.” 

When he and his former Facebook colleagues started Statsig in the Seattle region in 2021, investors warned him AWS would inevitably build a similar tool for A-B testing software. “If every startup decided to think that,” he said, ”no SaaS company would ever exist.”

OpenAI acquired Statsig in September 2025 for $1.1 billion. 

— After 28 years at Microsoft, Rohan Kumar is heading to Salesforce as president and chief platform officer, based out of the San Francisco company’s Bellevue, Wash., offices.

The rise of automated AI agents is “reshaping how every company thinks about work, software, data, productivity and customer relationships,” Kumar said on LinkedIn, adding that Salesforce is well positioned to harness the technology for better workflows.

Kumar most recently held the role of corporate vice president of Microsoft Security (see the next Tech Moves item for his successor). Previous positions included CVP of Azure Data and leadership roles in SQL Server, the company’s database management system.

— Naseem Tuffaha is back at Microsoft as CVP of Microsoft Security, stepping into the role vacated by Kumar. Tuffaha spent nearly two decades at the Redmond, Wash., tech giant before departing in 2022 for The Trade Desk and then Pearson, where he served as chief business officer for more than a year.

During his previous Microsoft tenure, Tuffaha held wide-ranging roles including VP of sales for a suite of products including Office 365 and Teams, along with oversight of marketing and operations across the Middle East and Africa.

Away from Microsoft, Tuffaha said he gained firsthand experience navigating the secure implementation of AI solutions — and now wants to improve that process. Microsoft is well-positioned “to make security easier to adopt, easier to use, and easier to trust,” he added.

— Graham Sheldon is now at Docusign as chief product officer, departing his CPO role at UiPath. The Seattle-area executive spent 20 years at Microsoft before joining UiPath in 2022.

He left Microsoft as CVP of product for Teams and served as technical advisor to Satya Nadella back when Nadella was in CVP and SVP roles — before his ascent to CEO. Sheldon also held an engineering manager role in dynamics applied research.

On LinkedIn, Sheldon cited Docusign’s track record of trust across the industry and said he’s excited to work on “the next frontier of agreement innovation” at the San Francisco-based company. (Also on GeekWire: Docusign moving downtown Seattle offices, leaving its namesake tower).

— Hannah McClellan, VP of Amazon Pharmacy Operations, is leaving the company after more than 15 years. During her tenure she served as chief of staff to the CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores and held roles spanning retail automation, Amazon Freight and Amazon Fresh.

“We are grateful to Hannah for all of her contributions to Amazon and our customers, and wish her the best in her next endeavor,” a company spokesperson said. McClellan has not announced her next move.

— Gurinder Raju is departing Amazon after more than 18 years. Most recently general manager of Amazon WorkSpaces for AWS, he previously worked on Webstore, a now-discontinued e-commerce platform for independent sellers.

On LinkedIn, Raju reflected on “owning and growing WorkSpaces into a recognized leader” and the colleagues he’s worked alongside. His summer plans include time with family and his dog, travel and indulging his “love of computer science.” Come late summer, he added, “I’ll turn my attention to what’s next. If you feel compelled to share a suggestion or idea, or want to hear mine, feel free to ping me.”

— Kate Coelho has joined Microsoft as director of AI Transformation Change, coming over from ServiceNow where she led AI adoption in customer service and support. Previous stops include Equinix, Point B and Infosys.

“We are already in a new era of work, and Microsoft is helping shape how it continues to unfold,” Coelho said on LinkedIn. “And I get to help with the human side of that transformation. Because technology alone doesn’t change organizations. People do.”

— Chris Grusz has left Amazon after a decade, resigning from the role of managing director of technology partnerships for AWS. He was previously at IBM as director of sales.

In a LinkedIn post, Grusz said that Amazon’s “learn and be curious” principal helped change his career mindset, pushing him to take risks and embrace reinvention. Grusz did not share his new role, but said that while he’s departing from AWS, he’s not going far.

— Tanya Chen is now at OpenAI as a member of technical staff, joining the company from Atlassian where she spent three years as senior VP of engineering. The Seattle-area executive has also worked at Meta and Microsoft.

Chen described her OpenAI onboarding as “a whirlwind of rapid learning” and said she was “energized to dive in together and build next-generation products at the edge of frontier AI.”

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center promoted Nida Shekhani to a newly created role of executive VP and chief strategy and clinical growth officer. She previously served in a deputy capacity and has been with the Seattle organization for nearly three years, joining from UChicago Medicine.

— Seattle-based shipping tech startup Shipium has promoted David Panitz to chief revenue officer. He joined in 2023 as senior VP of sales and is based in Ohio.

“(Panitz) helped us redefine what kind of company Shipium is, and is the right person to guide our massive growth journey ahead,” CEO Jason Murray said. Shipium launched in 2019 and is No. 117 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Matt Wargon has joined Everett-based fusion startup Zap Energy as a senior nuclear engineer. He comes from neighboring nuclear energy company TerraPower, where he spent more than eight years. Zap, which recently announced an expansion into traditional nuclear fission, ranks No. 13 on the GeekWire 200.

— Alaska Air Group, parent company of Alaska and Hawaiian airlines, has appointed Mike Sievert to its board of directors. Sievert is the former CEO of T-Mobile and currently serves as vice chairman of the board at the Bellevue, Wash.-based telecom giant.

— Bothell, Wash.-based biotech Cocrystal Pharma has named James Sapirstein as its new CEO, succeeding co-CEOs Sam Lee and Jim Martin. Lee, a Cocrystal co-founder, will continue as president and move into the chief scientific officer role, while Martin transitions to chief financial officer. Sapirstein brings a long biotech resume, with past CEO stints at Contravir Pharmaceuticals and Tobira Therapeutics.

— NuScale Power appointed two new members to its board of directors: mining executive Stuart Harshaw and Dale Klein, an engineering professor emeritus at the University of Texas. The Corvallis, Ore.-based company is developing small modular nuclear reactors.

— And in case you missed it: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who has served on Microsoft’s board since 2017, will not stand for re-election at the company’s 2026 annual meeting. Read GeekWire’s full coverage here.

For my 10th column in the “Etzioni on AI” series, I want to share ten commandments for AI startups, preceded by timeless classics that still apply. They draw on my work with founders at the AI2 Incubator, Madrona, and my own experience as an AI founder from Netbot (1996) to Vercept (2024).

To see what’s different for AI startups, let’s warm up with ten commandments for startups in general, which fold in the wisdom of startup stalwarts such as Vinod Khosla, Reid Hoffman, and Eric Ries. If you already know the classics, jump straight to the AI commandments.

1. The real risk is regret. It’s sitting in the stands at 60 and realizing you never stepped up to the plate.

2. Choose your co-founder as carefully as a spouse. You may end up spending more time with your co-founder in the early years. And founder breakups are also very painful.

3. Maximize your odds of success, not your ownership stake. Don’t end up owning 99% of nothing. The right investor, incubator, or hire will add far more value than cost.

4. Raise on the story. Investors are buying the company you could become. As Khosla puts it: “Don’t subvert your story in service of logical order.”

5. Solve a real problem. Is it a painkiller or a vitamin? Startups sell painkillers.

6. Talk to your customers early and often. Your assumptions are wrong until a customer proves otherwise; an ounce of data is worth a pound of intuition. A scrappy experiment engaging users settles arguments that could otherwise take months to resolve.

7. Focus, focus, focus. The hardest word for some founders is “no.” Say it to good ideas so you can execute the one great one. If your product is both a dessert topping and a floor wax, it’s neither.

8. Build the rocket while you’re flying it. You launch without every answer in place and iterate quickly to figure the rest out.

9. Be ready for a rough ride. A startup can seem like a series of near-death experiences. The winners are the ones who refused to quit.

10. Beware of consultants. Remember the ham-and-eggs adage: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. You want a committed team. Anyone running a meter has incentives misaligned with yours.

Here are a few commandments that didn’t make the cut: hire carpenters, not architects; hire slowly, fire fast; know your numbers cold, especially your burn rate.

Other ten-commandment lists worth perusing include: Reid Hoffman’s, Howard Tullman’s, and Shlomo Kalish’s, as updated by Glilot Capital.

These classics still rule, but it’s time to add ten AI commandments.

1. “We’re an AI company” is no longer a differentiator. It’s table stakes. Tell the story: what’s the pain point? Who’s the customer? How do you make money? Why now?

2. AI technology is not enough. As Madrona’s Matt McIlwain puts it, “the most important AI model is the business model.” And you have to deliver against that model — vision without execution is hallucination.

3. Don’t put lipstick on a model. If your company is a skin-deep gloss over someone else’s API, the frontier labs will eat you alive. They have the model and the distribution. You have neither. Build where they won’t (or can’t) go.

4. Own your data, but don’t mistake it for the moat. Proprietary data helps, but it’s not the promised land. What matters is the flywheel: Waymo learns from every mile its cars drive, and the learning makes the next mile better. Build that loop.

5. Velocity is the new moat. AI has collapsed the cost of being smart. The edge belongs to whoever is smart faster. As a16z’s Bryan Kim writes, “momentum is the moat.”

6. Embed in the workflow. The application your customer opens at 9am and closes at 6pm is the one they can’t switch off. Become that. Or quietly take over the one they already use. AI coding makes it cheaper than ever to recreate the application layer from scratch.

7. Distribution is the scarce resource. Building an AI product has never been cheaper. Getting it in front of buyers has never been harder. The thousand companies competing for your customer won’t lose on features. They’ll lose on reach. Distribution deserves equal billing with product from day one.

8. Don’t marry a model. The frontier model that wins your demo today will be third-best in six months. Build the stack so you can make an easy change if the chemistry fades.

9. Inference is the new COGS. Every query costs real money, and the cost scales with every user. Bessemer puts it bluntly: “If the math doesn’t work at 10 customers, it won’t at 1,000.” Know what your product costs you before you grow.

10. Personal relationships still matter most. AI doesn’t earn trust. It won’t take your call at midnight or defend you to the board, and it won’t be there when you need a bridge round.

Seattle is a phenomenal place to live by these commandments: AI House has opened on the waterfront; new funds have been raised; and hundreds of startups are thriving.

The time for AI startups is now. Go build.

AI-powered security tools are getting increasingly good at finding vulnerabilities, but a new Seattle startup is aiming to help software companies do the harder part: fixing them. 

Emphere announced $2.1 million in pre-seed funding Thursday from AI2 Incubator and Outsiders Fund to automate the work of fixing software security flaws. It focuses on open-source distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and Alpine, automatically patching known vulnerabilities for software companies that sell to banks and other regulated industries.

The startup was founded by CEO Ankit Kumar and CTO Pallav Gupta, who met as roommates at Northeastern University. Kumar spent six years in security at Uber, opening the kind of tickets that Gupta was on the other end of trying to fix as an engineer at CarGurus and Twitter.

“Remediation is going to be as important as detection, given the fact that exploitation is going to be super, super fast,” Kumar said in an interview. He noted that the companies Emphere’s customers sell technology to “won’t accept your software if it has a single critical vulnerability.”

The company says it has early revenue and a handful of signed customers, though it declined to name them. Emphere has a team of five, including two security researchers whose job is to play the role of hackers — attacking its patched images and confirming the fixes are good. 

Emphere is entering a crowded market, though most security firms focus on finding vulnerabilities rather than fixing them. Its closest comparison may be Kirkland, Wash.-based Chainguard, the $3.5 billion software supply-chain company known for its secure pre-built software container images.

The biggest difference: where Chainguard generally asks customers to adopt its container images, Emphere says it patches the ones they already use.

The volume of security vulnerabilities has started to outpace what human teams can keep up with. A federal watchdog said in a May 26 report that the government’s National Vulnerability Database had a backlog of more than 27,000 unprocessed flaws, and projected that new vulnerabilities would surpass 60,000 in 2026 — nearly ten times the number a decade ago. 

Emphere spun out from the AI2 Incubator, the Seattle startup program based at Pier 70. Its other backer, Outsiders Fund, is the early-stage firm co-founded by Austin McChord, who built the data-backup company Datto before selling it in 2017. 

Kumar said Emphere plans to use the funding to grow its customer base and keep building out its platform. Longer term, it’s looking to expand into other areas of how software gets built and secured.

Enduring Planet, a fintech company with Pacific Northwest roots, on Wednesday announced it has closed its second fund at more than $12 million — more than twice the size of its first.

Launched in 2021, Enduring Planet provides loans to early-stage climate startups, with a focus on those that have been awarded government grants and contracts. The company also offers part-time chief financial officer services.

“We’re really proud of this outcome, despite the challenging market environment that climate tech is facing in the US,” said Dimitry Gershenson, the startup’s Portland, Ore.-based co-founder and CEO.

Enduring Planet has issued nearly $40 million in loans to more than 70 climate startups and other businesses, including Tacoma, Wash.-based Aquagga and Portland’s Photon Marine.

The company provides financing of $100,000 to $2 million and, unlike venture capital investors, does not take equity in the startups it backs. The cash still comes at a price: annual interest rates run up to 15% to 17%, though additional fees are limited to a 1.5% origination fee.

The new fund arrives at a difficult moment for the sector. U.S. government support for climate initiatives hasn’t disappeared under the Trump administration, but it has become less broad, less predictable and less friendly to early-stage ventures.

Meanwhile, Sightline Climate reports that roughly $90 billion remains in climate investors’ coffers, but that capital is being deployed faster than new funds are being raised. Investors are also pulling back from riskier early-stage startups in favor of more established companies and infrastructure projects.

The fund was backed by Blue Haven Initiative, Cisco Foundation, ImpactAssets, DF Impact Capital, Green Spark Ventures, Montcalm TCR, SK2 Fund, The Arthur B. Schultz Foundation, Rebecca Buyers and Nils Johnson, Viridian Works, Brighter Investing, clients of Figure 8 Investment Strategies, 1994 LLC, Realize Impact (with support from The Schmidt Family Foundation), and others.

The big winner at the University of Washington’s 29th annual Dempsey Startup Competition was BioBead, a startup launched by a UW team with an ag tech solution for boosting soil health and crop production.

The company won $25,000 from BECU as well as the $2,500 Voyager Capital Best Business to Business Idea Prize.

A record 186 startups entered the competition, whittled down to 16 contenders who pitched before judges in mock boardroom settings. Winners took home a share of $92,500 in prize money.

The event is open to student entrepreneurs from across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and British Columbia. Entrants range from very early-stage startups with a prototype to teams with minimum viable products or technologies ready for commercial production.

The competition runs over seven weeks, during which teams refine their strategies — recruiting business students to strengthen go-to-market plans, for example. Judges this year noted that AI is helping teams design more sophisticated technologies.

The awards were announced at a Seattle event on May 21.

Grand prize recipient BioBead is developing small, biodegradable pellets that bring together bacteria and fungi that have coexisted in soil for 400 million years, helping plants absorb essential nutrients including nitrogen and phosphorus.

“People seem to be quite disconnected from everything below our feet because we can’t see it,” said Korena Mafune, a BioBead co-founder and UW research scientist. But those organisms are what allow crops above ground to flourish, she added.

BioBead’s other co-founders are Renee Davis, who is finishing her doctoral degree at the UW, and Mari Winkler, a UW professor in civil and environmental engineering. Jared Espinosa, a recent MBA graduate from the UW’s Foster School of Business, joined the team for the competition.

The startup has been working with farmers growing lettuces, tomatoes, corn and wheat to test the benefits of the soil treatment. Initial results show higher crop yields while reducing the need for increasingly expensive fertilizers.

Mafune last month also won a $275,000 grant from the Washington Research Foundation to support commercialization of the technology.

The second to fourth prize winners were:

$15,000 WRF Capital Second Place Prize – CPRight (UW and Western University of Health Sciences in Oregon) is developing a low-cost patch that provides real-time information on compression depth and pace during cardiac emergencies requiring CPR. CPRight also won the $2,500 Chris and Barbara Petersen Best Health & Wellness Impact Idea Prize.

$10,000 iSpot.tv Third Place Prize – Kinnex Health (University of Idaho) is building a wearable sensor to provide continuous joint-movement data collected from patients after orthopedic surgeries and procedures. The team also won the $2,500 Amazon Best Consumer Product Idea Prize.

$7,500 Friends of the Dempsey Startup Fourth Place Prize – Alarmable (UW) is creating a wearable bracelet charm that also serves as an alarm that can be triggered in emergency situations.

Other winners:

• $5,000 Wilson Sonsini Social Impact Big Picture Prize – Osanwe Link (UW)
• $5,000 Kathryn Gardow & David Bradlee Climate Solutions Big Picture Prize – LEAF (UW)
• $5,000 Glympse Emerging Tech Big Picture Prize – Adam Biotech (UW)
• $2,500 Smukowski Family Best Sustainable Business Prize – Clubless Collective (UW)
• $2,500 eBay Best Marketplace Idea Prize – Kindred (UW)
• $2,500 Perkins Coie Best Innovation/Technology Idea Prize – Emerald Dynamics(UW)
• $2,500 Saara Romu Community Impact Prize – UWEMS (UW)
• $2,500 DLA Piper Best Idea with Global Reach Prize – GridGuard (UBC)

Bellevue, Wash.-based Alitheon raised $8 million in new funding to expand its FeaturePrint technology, which uses optical AI to create a unique digital “fingerprint” for physical objects — no barcodes, tags, or labels required.

FeaturePrint works by reading the microscopic surface variations every manufactured object naturally has using nothing more than a standard camera. Alitheon calls it “biometrics for things” and says it works on everything from designer purses to industrial gears to pharmaceutical packaging.

“We aren’t just identifying goods; we are powering the trust layer of the global economy, providing a level of security that additives and standard AI simply cannot match,” Alitheon CEO Roei Ganzarski said in a news release this week.

Founded in 2015, Alitheon has built a portfolio of 55+ patents and attracted customers across industries including aerospace, automotive, luxury goods and defense. Swiss precious metals company Argor-Heraeus is a customer.

Alitheon has landed $1.5 million in federal contracts, including work with the Pentagon’s Nuclear Weapons Center. Time magazine named FeaturePrint one of the 200 best inventions of 2023.

In a 2024 GeekWire feature, Ganzarski illustrated the problem his company is trying to solve.

“Last year, auditors found that Lockheed Martin had lost a million parts in the F-35 program,” he said. “Lost? You don’t ‘lose’ parts. They just become unidentifiable. The barcode fell off, the sticker got erased.”

The Series A1 round was led by Emerald Technology Ventures, with participation from eBay Ventures. Alitheon, which employs 24 people, has raised a little over $40 million to date.

Space Northwest, a nonprofit association serving the Pacific Northwest’s space industry ecosystem, says it’s partnering with the Commercial Space Federation to launch a regional space business accelerator.

The initiative will begin with an executive roundtable scheduled this summer, followed by a 12-week accelerator program due to begin in autumn. The accelerator is expected to support up to 10 early-stage space companies with programming focused on commercial space markets, investment readiness, tech commercialization, growth strategies for commercial and government markets, and integration into the space industry’s global supply chain.

The accelerator initiative will receive local support from the City of Kent, which hosts Blue Origin, Stoke Space, PowerLight Technologies and other ventures targeting space applications. The city has a heritage in the space industry that goes back to Boeing’s role in building lunar rovers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions.

A report published in 2022 estimated the overall economic impact of Washington state’s core space industry at $4.6 billion annually, supporting more than 13,000 jobs. That impact is probably greater today than it was four years ago. Blue Origin was said to employ about 6,000 people nationwide in 2022, but more recent figures suggest the company has upwards of 12,000 employees.

“The Pacific Northwest has a uniquely entrepreneurial space ecosystem complemented by world-class aviation, software and advanced technology industries,” Sean McClinton, Space Northwest’s co-founder, said today in a news release. “We believe this accelerator can help capitalize on the region’s strengths and support innovators building the next generation of world-class space companies.”

The Washington, D.C.-based Commercial Space Federation will shape the accelerator curriculum. “Commercial space scales on the industrial base around it, not just its marquee names,” said Kelli Kedis Ogborn, strategic adviser on global Markets and industry engagement at CSF. “The Pacific Northwest has both: world-class aerospace leaders and the deep bench of adjacent capability the sector needs to grow.”

Ogborn said the accelerator program will aim to “connect those strengths to the broader national commercial space community and turn the region’s industrial depth into a driving force in the space supply chain.”

Space Northwest said additional details about the application process, program structure, speakers and partner organizations will be announced later this year.

The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) named the 21 startups that will be participating in its 14th Founder Cohort Accelerator Program.

The early stage companies from across Washington state are working in areas such as AI, cybersecurity, healthcare, enterprise software, and other emerging technologies, the WTIA said Tuesday.

The four-month accelerator is designed to help founders with mentorship, peer learning, and connections to investors and industry leaders.

Selected companies include:

• 7thGear
• ABRI Labs
• Ahmi
• bulkshare.ai
• Citaria
• Credential Network
• Dork Labs
• empathium
• Groforma
• InsurPal
• Kednus
• Makko AI
• Moe
• Ngentix
• Ocko Navigation
• Qinsay
• Rhonda
• Securim
• SmartVerify
• Somnistics Research Labs
• StackIQ

“With Seattle leading the way as a world-class hub for AI and advanced technology, this diverse group of founders perfectly captures the immense technical depth and entrepreneurial drive thriving across our entire ecosystem,” Randa Minkarah, chief operating executive of WTIA, said in a statement.

Since its inception, the WTIA Founder Cohort has supported more than 350 companies, and alumni from previous cohorts have collectively raised more than $500 million, according to WTIA.

Cohort sponsors include Accenture, Clark Nuber, Edward Jones, Fenwick, KBF, Madrona Venture Group, MeeBoss, and Seed IP.

— Expedia Group appointed Bill Watkins as senior vice president and general manager of global advertising within its marketing organization. He will focus on helping outside advertisers across Expedia’s portfolio of sites engage with consumers planning travel.

Watkins and his team will connect advertisers “more directly with our marketing, audience insights, and loyalty capabilities to help us deliver even more effective, measurable solutions,” said Jochen Koedijk, Expedia’s chief marketing officer.

Chicago-based Watkins joins from Pinterest, where he spent 12 years and most recently served as chief revenue officer.

— Johannes Gehrke, a Microsoft technical fellow in AI infrastructure, is leaving the company after 14 years to join Uber. Gehrke recalled interviewing with Satya Nadella, now the company’s CEO, before joining for what he thought would be a two-year sabbatical from Cornell University. Instead, it became “one of the defining chapters of my career,” he said.

Leaving the company is “bittersweet,” Gehrke added, but in a LinkedIn post Tuesday he shared his excitement about becoming a technical fellow for the transportation company.

“What drew me to Uber is the rare opportunity to bring AI to a global platform that already touches everyday life at extraordinary scale,” he said.

Gehrke began his Microsoft tenure working on Office Graph, a platform that has since evolved to help power AI tools across Microsoft 365. He also helped incorporate AI into Teams, led Microsoft Research Redmond and most recently worked in its CoreAI division, which focuses on Copilot and other AI technologies.

— Tracy Galloway, chief operating officer for Microsoft Americas, is retiring after 10 years with the company. She joined as regional VP of commercial business for the Great Lakes region and was previously with HP for more than 16 years.

On LinkedIn she thanked colleagues and partners “who trusted me with big challenges and stood alongside me through moments of growth, change, and reinvention.” Galloway, who is based in Breckenridge, Colo., said she plans to spend more time with family and pursue travel, golf and boating.

— Val Miftakhov, founder and CEO of sustainable aviation company ZeroAvia, has stepped down “to pursue new opportunities,” according to the company. He will remain on its board of directors.

Miftakhov launched ZeroAvia more than eight years ago in California, but the company is now operating in the United Kingdom and its R&D and manufacturing facilities in Everett, Wash. An aviation publication reported multiple rounds of layoffs starting last year, while another source said its Q400 test facility in Everett has shuttered.

Christine Ourmieres-Widener, the board’s executive chair, has been overseeing day-to-day operations in recent months and will continue in that role until a permanent CEO is selected. The board thanked Miftakhov for his leadership, adding that it was “grateful that he will continue to lend his insight and support as a director.”

— After more than 23 years at Amazon, Robin Sweers has resigned to become “retired-ish.” Sweers is departing as senior program manager for device advertising, having also worked on teams within the Amazon AppStore. She began her career at the Seattle tech giant as a college technical recruiter.

“I am so grateful for the experiences I had, lessons I learned and wonderful people I met. I don’t exactly know what comes next, but I’m certainly looking forward to figuring it out!” she said on LinkedIn.

— Amy Miller has joined Portal Space Systems, a Bothell, Wash.-based space and defense manufacturing company, as its first head of Talent & People Operations. Miller comes from Amazon, where she was recruiting manager for its Leo satellite business, and has also held roles at Google and Meta.

Portal praised her “more than two decades building technical and manufacturing teams across aerospace, AI, advanced manufacturing, and large-scale technology organizations,” and noted that she has become “widely known on LinkedIn as one of the most transparent, direct, and genuinely human voices in recruiting.”

— “New chapter, new challenge, new city.” That’s how Britt Provost is describing her move to Los Angeles. The HR veteran is joining Sunbit as senior VP of human resources after 20 years in the Seattle tech industry.

Sunbit is a financial services tech company that lets customers split large bills — auto repairs, dental work, veterinary visits — into smaller installment payments. Provost’s career includes HR roles at Cascade AI, Siteimprove, Accolade, Apptio, Avanade and Microsoft.

— Stanley Janicki has been named chief financial officer of Janicki Industries, an aerospace and defense manufacturer based in Sedro-Woolley, Wash. He was previously chief commercial officer at Sedron Technologies, a spinout of Janicki that provides water treatment solutions for sewage facilities and dairies. Sedron was acquired in April.

— Maggie Lehr was promoted to director of Revenue Products & Experimentation at Alaska Airlines, moving up from product team manager for revenue products. She has been with the airline for more than six years.

— Daryl Maeda was named the next Katherine and John Simpson Endowed Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington. His tenure begins July 13, pending approval from the Board of Regents. He joins from the University of Colorado Boulder.

— Seattle-based executive Brook West has joined employee healthcare platform When as its first chief revenue officer. The Chicago startup helps workers navigate health insurance and other benefits challenges during job transitions and major life changes. West was previously president of Verifiable, with past leadership roles at 98point6, Carrum Health and Valant.

— Will Daugherty, the outgoing Pacific Science Center president and CEO, officially passed the PacSci baton on Monday to successor Kevin Malgesini after more than a decade leading the Seattle-based educational nonprofit.