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.

Researchers have a new weapon against the scientifically inaccurate AI slop muddying public understanding of complex topics. A University of Washington team is helping scientists tell their own stories with a free tool that converts dense, jargon-heavy publications into short, accessible videos.

“There’s a lot of science communication happening in short form — primarily on TikTok, but also we’re seeing YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels — these tidbits of science findings,” said Meziah Ruby Cristobal, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering.

Cristobal and her colleagues built PaperTok hoping to use AI for good — to fight the technology’s irresponsible use elsewhere by non-scientists who misrepresent research.

The tool is simple. A researcher uploads a paper into PaperTok, which analyzes it to find attention-grabbing hooks and the most relevant takeaways for a general audience. The tool generates a script with an opening scene and narrative arc, producing a 45-second AI-narrated video. It closes with a reference to the paper, including the researchers’ names and the journal, to establish credibility.

Other tools can turn PDFs into videos, but Cristobal said PaperTok was intentionally designed to keep humans in the loop. It uses a multi-step process that requires approval at each phase, giving users the ability to edit the output down to individual words.

Cristobal presented research on PaperTok this spring in Barcelona at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. She co-led the study with fellow doctoral student Donghoon Shin; the senior author is UW professor Gary Hsieh.

A team of eight built PaperTok last summer, starting with interviews with science communicators and researchers before developing the tool and gathering user feedback.

“A lot of the researchers actually found huge value in seeing how the AI tries to visualize what they believe to be very abstract concepts,” Cristobal said. For many, it served as a brainstorming tool that highlighted new ways to communicate their findings.

There was critical feedback as well. Some users said the videos felt “too AI-ish,” pointing to issues like nonsense text. The UW team is continuing to refine PaperTok, including plans to let researchers incorporate charts and graphics from their papers into the videos.

PaperTok was built to translate research papers on human-computer interaction but has been tested on topics including physics, and it held up well. The team wants to expand its reach across research disciplines to create videos for social sciences and hard sciences alike.

The tool is free to use, but because video generation is computationally expensive, the company asks researchers to use a Gemini key so the cost is charged to their Google account.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with details from the Washington State Employment Security Department.

Bungie, the Bellevue, Wash.-based creator of the Halo and Destiny video game franchises, was hit by a new round of layoffs Wednesday as the Sony-owned studio undergoes a reorganization following the end of development on its long-running online shooter Destiny 2.

In an email to Sony Interactive Entertainment employees, Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony’s Studio Business Group, said the company is cutting “a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members.” 

Later on Thursday, a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filing with the Washington State Employment Security Department put the number of Bungie job losses in Bellevue at 292. The effective separation date is July 9.

The WARN notice listed a variety of impacted job titles, including artists, engineers, producers, designers, technical animators, audio leads, and more. The cuts also extend to Sony teams that support Bungie’s operations.

In a statement posted on Bluesky, Bungie said that “Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years” and that with “future projects still in early incubation, we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size.”

Bungie has now cut more than 600 jobs across three rounds of layoffs since Sony acquired the studio for $3.6 billion in 2022. The company cut roughly 100 jobs in October 2023 and another 220 in July 2024, when 155 additional roles were also transferred to Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The studio had more than 1,400 employees before the cuts began.

Hulst said in his email that Marathon “remains an important part of our portfolio” and that the company is working on “incubation efforts for future projects,” but offered no specifics.

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.

Amazon, Microsoft and other leading tech companies are joining a new nonpartisan workforce organization launched Thursday aimed at helping American workers navigate the transition to an AI-driven economy.

RAISE US aims to partner with governors, employers, and training organizations to retrain and redeploy workers displaced or affected by AI, with a goal of raising $1 billion in multi-year commitments — more than half of which has already been secured.

The organization is led by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who will serve as CEO, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, who will serve as co-chair. The two are pitching the effort as explicitly bipartisan.

“If we build the best AI systems in the world and leave millions of Americans behind, we won’t have won anything; we’ll have automated our own decline,” Raimondo said in a news release. “I believe AI will create new jobs and industries over time, but the transition could be disruptive, and it’s already underway.”

Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft and the OpenAI Foundation are serving as anchor partners. The coalition also includes more than two dozen companies and philanthropies, among them IBM, Cisco, General Motors, Mastercard, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Pivotal, the organization founded by Melinda French Gates. Initial state partnerships include Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah.

The launch of RAISE US comes amid layoffs and cost-cutting across the tech industry and widespread anxiety — from workers to recent graduates — about AI’s impact on employment. Some employers, including Meta, have cited AI as a reason for cuts, including in Washington state. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy blamed massive layoffs that started last year on a culture correction at the tech giant rather than being AI-driven.

In a blog post Thursday, Amazon Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer David Zapolsky said investment in workers must keep pace with the technology.

“The transition to an AI-driven economy will create enormous opportunity, but only if we invest now in helping workers develop the skills to seize it,” Zapolsky wrote.

Zapolsky cited Amazon’s own efforts to prepare workers for the AI economy, including its Career Choice program, which has helped more than 300,000 employees earn degrees and certificates over 14 years, and a broader $2.5 billion commitment to skills training through its Future Ready 2030 initiative.

Microsoft said it has already been piloting a model for the kind of worker transition RAISE US aims to scale — cross-training entry-level lawyers across different parts of the organization and equipping them with AI skills so they can be repositioned as technology evolves, The New York Times reported.

“It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told the Times.

The Seattle Seahawks are in search of a buyer — but first they’ve locked up the organization’s first-ever global partner, signing a multi-year partnership with Accenture this week.

The deal pairs one of the world’s largest technology consulting firms with the NFL’s reigning Super Bowl champions, with Accenture bringing data and AI capabilities to bear on the franchise’s business operations and fan engagement.

Starting with data infrastructure and platform design, Accenture will work to modernize the Seahawks’ technology foundation with an eye toward broader innovation down the road.

The collaboration launches with a tangible fan-facing element: an Accenture-presented “Trophy Tour” taking the Seahawks’ Super Bowl LX hardware on the road to Germany, Australia and Canada — markets where NFL interest is growing and fans can connect to Seattle’s football story.

“This partnership brings together two organizations committed to innovation and global engagement, and is an exciting step forward for the Seahawks as we continue to expand our international efforts,” Isabelle Van Coevorden, Seahawks managing director of global markets, said in a statement.

The deal also has a local giving component, with plans for scholarship support, volunteer engagement and community access programs in Seattle. For Accenture, it extends a broader push into sports — the firm already works with the NFL, women’s tennis and golf organizations on technology and operations.

Accenture has a significant Seattle-area presence, and the Seahawks have been intertwined with tech since Paul Allen — the late Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist — bought the team in 1997, kept it in Seattle, and turned it into Super Bowl champs.

Allen died in 2018, and his estate put the Seahawks up for sale in February — shortly after the team’s Super Bowl LX victory over New England — with all proceeds directed toward philanthropy. The franchise is expected to fetch upwards of $7 billion.

Several high-profile names have surfaced as potential buyers. Former Boston Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck and ArcelorMittal CEO Aditya Mittal were reported in May to be preparing a bid. Todd Boehly, who owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, L.A. Lakers and Chelsea Football Club, emerged as another potential suitor in June.

Accenture employs 799,000 people in offices around the world, including locations in Seattle, Redmond and Kirkland. The company says it serves approximately 9,000 clients and generated about $70 billion in FY25 revenue.

The developers for a video game based on Magic: The Gathering announced on Tuesday that they’ve successfully unionized, following a petition filed with the US National Labor Relations Board.

United Wizards of the Coast, in partnership with the Communications Workers of America, represents the team that develops Magic: The Gathering – Arena. Made in-house at Wizards of the Coast in Renton, Wash., Arena is an online adaptation of the long-running collectible card game.

UWOTC previously announced on June 2 that it had begun the official NLRB election for recognition of its union, with in-person voting beginning on that day. Now that the union has been officially elected via the NLRB, its next step is to seek a ratified contract.

The union’s stated goals include seeking layoff protections; addressing Hasbro’s mandates of required AI usage; dealing with pay discrepancies; keeping the option to work remotely after Hasbro issued a return-to-office mandate; clarifications about workers’ side projects; and transparency regarding career progression and pay scales.

As per UWOTC’s official website, the union is made up of roughly 100 workers in Washington state and elsewhere.

UWOTC previously announced its union efforts in late April, which were originally spurred by the surprise wave of Hasbro layoffs that impacted Wizards in Dec. 2023, despite Wizards as a whole having one of its most successful years on record. (2023 was, after all, the year that Baldur’s Gate III came out.)

The new union initially sought voluntary recognition from Wizards with a May 1 deadline, but Wizards didn’t issue a direct response. Instead, in late May, several Arena team members reported that Wizards had sent them multiple anti-union messages. Other sources noted that Wizards had allegedly hired a legal team that has a reputation for counteracting unionization efforts, which is suggestive.

When asked for comment, a Wizards representative pointed GeekWire to the company’s official statement, shared via LinkedIn.

GeekWire has reached out to UWOTC for further comment.

Arena is a free-to-play digital version of Magic for Windows, MacOS, and mobile devices, which saw full release September 2019. It operates on a “freemium” model where players can play the game at no up-front cost, but have the option to acquire new virtual cards and in-game currency in exchange for real money.

According to official announcements from Hasbro, there were over 13 million registered accounts on Arena as of 2023. At time of writing, independent trackers such as SteamCharts have logged just under 7,700 daily players on Arena for the last 30 days, which is a respectable number for a modern live-service game.

It’s worth noting that many of the issues that UWOTC was formed to deal with are traditional, endemic issues in the video game industry, particularly in the higher-end, “AAA” sector. The last three years in gaming have been punctuated by studio closures, waves of layoffs, allegations of toxic “crunch culture,” and executive mismanagement, despite the industry itself being bigger and more popular than ever.

Real estate industry icon Glenn Kelman has found his next home — professionally, anyway.

The longtime Redfin CEO, who stepped down in January, six months after Rocket Companies acquired the Seattle brokerage for $1.75 billion, has joined venture firm Greylock as an executive in residence.

In the new role, announced by the Silicon Valley firm on Tuesday, Kelman will work directly with founders on leadership development, company building, go-to-market strategy, and what Greylock calls “the hard parts of scaling that don’t fit neatly into a board deck.” 

When he announced his departure from Redfin in January, Kelman said he wanted to find “another mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate.”

Reached by email Wednesday, Kelman confirmed that’s still the plan.

“I’m still looking to start some kind of new mission-driven enterprise, which involves being in the wilderness a bit and exploring ideas that are never going to work and howling at the moon,” he wrote. “Occasionally, I just end up doing the kids’ laundry in the middle of the day too.”

The Greylock role, he said, will aid his creative process by exposing him to the range of big ideas the firm has backed.

But he doesn’t intend to become an investor himself. Kelman noted that he bet longtime Seattle investor Greg Gottesman back in 2005 that he’d never become a VC — a bet he says he still hasn’t lost.

He described the role as “mostly just advising other founders, which I don’t think is incompatible with starting my own thing. You learn a lot from other people.”

Kelman said he’s staying in Seattle (“probably for the rest of my life”), citing “the people, trees, mountains, lakes and islands here.”

Greylock, he added, “gives me more exposure to what’s happening in Silicon Valley and beyond, which I really like.” The firm, founded in 1965, is among the oldest venture firms in the U.S., known for its early bets on companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb and Workday.

Kelman’s ties to the firm run deep. Greylock partner James Slavet was an early Redfin investor and board member, and the firm credits him with playing “a formative role in Glenn’s development as a leader,” according to the announcement of his new role.

A veteran tech founder, Kelman joined Redfin in 2005, a year after it launched, and spent two decades building the Seattle company into one of the best-known names in U.S. real estate. Redfin went public in 2017 at a valuation of roughly $1.73 billion.

Along the way, Kelman became one of the industry’s most candid voices: testifying before Congress on commission reform, pulling Redfin out of the National Association of Realtors in 2023, and turning routine earnings calls into must-read theater with his off-the-cuff analogies. 

Redfin, meanwhile, is pressing ahead under Rocket. The brand kept its name and Seattle headquarters as a Rocket subsidiary. Rocket CEO Varun Krishna has been running Redfin since Kelman’s exit. 

The U.S. House Oversight Committee on Tuesday released the transcript of a closed-door interview in which Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates answered lawmakers’ questions about his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Gates sat for the voluntary interview on June 10 in Washington, D.C., as part of the committee’s ongoing investigation into Epstein and his crimes.

In a statement Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for Gates said he appreciated the chance to appear before the House Oversight Committee and, as several committee members acknowledged, answered every question put to him over the nearly six-hour interview.

“With the full, unredacted transcript now publicly available, everyone can review the details for themselves,” the statement continued, reiterating that Gates “supports the full release of the files and hopes the Oversight Committee’s investigation will lead to justice for the victims.”

See the full transcript here and below, and continue reading for a summary of key points.

Bill Gates Transcript – U.S. House Oversight Committee by GeekWire

Meetings with Epstein

Gates described his association with Epstein as “one of the larger mistakes I’ve made,” saying he was foolish to spend time with him and that their interactions, from 2011 to 2014, were a “complete dead end.”

He said Epstein “certainly wasn’t a friend,” and that he declined Epstein’s social invitations — including to Epstein’s island — as Epstein tried to deepen the relationship.

Asked how often he saw Epstein, Gates gave this breakdown: three times in 2011, twice in 2012, and “five or six” times in each of 2013 and 2014, noting some of the 2013 contacts were Skype calls. He described the meetings as generally substantive rather than social.

Gates said that when he first met Epstein, at a January 2011 dinner in New York arranged by his former science adviser Boris Nikolic, he was aware Epstein had been convicted of a sex-related crime but had not looked into the specifics, acknowledging he “probably should have.”

He said it was not until 2018, when the Miami Herald detailed the extent of Epstein’s crimes, that he grasped their scope and learned Epstein had registered as a sex offender.

Gates said the primary reason he met with Epstein was Epstein’s claim that he could raise billions of dollars for global health from wealthy clients — money that never materialized. He acknowledged he also dealt with Epstein over a separate matter, the exit of his adviser Nikolic.

Gates said he was surprised to learn from the released files how extensive Nikolic’s own relationship with Epstein had been, and that reports Nikolic was named in Epstein’s will surprised him “a lot.”

He said he never witnessed Epstein engage in any sexual misconduct, was never offered any young women or girls, and never visited Epstein’s island, ranch, or Florida home.

He did acknowledge he “may have been in the presence of victims,” citing Epstein assistants he was photographed with and two who sat in the front cabin during a private New York-to-Palm Beach flight he took with Epstein — the one time, he said, that he flew with him. Gates said it was not Epstein’s 727, and he didn’t know who owned or chartered it.

Gates said neither he nor his representatives ever asked any victim to sign a nondisclosure agreement, secured any settlement, or held NDA discussions with victims or their lawyers regarding Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime Epstein associate who was convicted in 2021 of helping him sexually abuse underage girls.

Gates testified that Epstein flew to Seattle and visited his Gates Ventures office for a meeting focused on Nikolic’s departure — an encounter the committee dated to Aug. 8, 2013. Gates called it “kind of a worthless meeting.”

The next day, Gates emailed that Epstein had been “quite helpful,” but he told the committee he only “went along with the narrative” to close the deal, insisting Epstein’s involvement actually accomplished nothing.

Gates acknowledged making a $2 million donation to MIT during the period he knew Epstein, and said he told Epstein about it hoping to end Epstein’s requests that Gates give money in his name. He said MIT later investigated and found the gift was not Epstein-related.

He acknowledged three extramarital affairs — with a competitive bridge player, a nuclear scientist, and a doctor — and said Epstein had become aware of two of them, apparently through Nikolic.

However, Gates said, “I was not blackmailed,” characterizing Epstein’s notes as “emails to himself” that mixed true and false information and that he said he did not see until the Justice Department released the files. He allowed that the drafts looked like Epstein’s “brainstorming” heading toward blackmail.

Microsoft connections

Gates said the name Epstein “never came up” in his conversations with former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, and that he learned of Epstein’s reported dealings with Sinofsky only through the press this year. (Sinofsky has declined to comment on the revelations and has not been accused of any wrongdoing.)

Regarding other Microsoft-connected figures, Gates said he never discussed Epstein with former CTO Nathan Myhrvold, though he had a “vague awareness of some connection” beforehand.

(Documents released in 2025 included an apparent letter and other materials from Myhrvold in Epstein’s 2003 “birthday book.” A spokesperson has said Myhrvold knew Epstein from TED conferences and as a donor to scientific research, doesn’t remember the letter, and regrets that he ever met him.)

As for LinkedIn co-founder and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman, Gates said Epstein “may have come up” in conversation, that he’d had some prior awareness of a link through “some MIT connection,” and that both Hoffman and Epstein attended his final meeting with Epstein, a December 2014 breakfast. Hoffman has said he deeply regrets interacting with Epstein after his conviction and has called for full release of the files.

Other items

Rep. Lauren Boebert pressed Gates on Epstein’s interest in eugenics, transhumanism, and genetic engineering, asking whether Epstein ever discussed “genetic ambitions,” “population engineering,” or CRISPR-related DNA research with him, or tried to tie any of it to the Gates Foundation’s work. Gates said none of it ever came up and that Epstein had no influence on those initiatives.

At another point, pressed on whether he would support higher taxes on billionaires, Gates said he has paid “over $14 billion” in taxes and that the U.S. “has to find a way of taxing very rich people at a far higher level,” including himself.

Defending his foundation’s work, Gates said GAVI’s vaccine purchasing is “the primary reason childhood death has gone from 10 million a year down to below 5 million a year.” Separately, Gates said the foundation’s work “will be the focus the rest of my life.”

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.”

British Columbia-based General Fusion announced Wednesday a partnership with energy infrastructure company Renexia to begin planning the deployment of a commercial version of its clean energy technology in Italy.

In January, the company disclosed a $1 billion Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC, agreement to go public through a merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III.

General Fusion is operating its Lawson Machine 26, a magnetized target fusion demonstration device that’s about half the size of its planned commercial‑scale machine. Earlier this week, it announced that LM26 had reached a new temperature milestone of approximately 8.4 million degrees Celsius.

The agreement with Renexia establishes a milestone-based framework covering site identification in Italy, development, funding, construction and commissioning of one or more fusion power plants. General Fusion aims to deploy a commercial fusion machine by around 2035.

The Canadian company is among roughly 50 contenders in a global race to commercialize fusion, though none has yet managed to produce more energy from a fusion reaction than it takes to initiate one.

The sector continues to draw significant attention and investment as tech companies and others scramble for carbon-free energy sources. Fusion startups aim to replicate the physics that power the sun and stars, generating energy by fusing light atoms together.

General Fusion launched in 2002 and has raised $400 million from investors, industry partners and government grants. The company has hit some roadblocks in recent years. In 2023, it put plans on hold to build a larger demonstration machine in the United Kingdom, pivoting to construction of the LM26 device. Last year, it laid off employees and its CEO made a public plea for new investment.

The SPAC deal continues to progress, and Spring Valley has a shareholder meeting scheduled for July 6. If shareholders and General Fusion security holders approve the SPAC, the deal could close shortly after.

California-based TAE Technologies has similarly made plans to go public. The fusion startup is pursuing a $6 billion merger with Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded parent of Truth Social. With the merger and new funding, TAE said it aims to select a site and begin building a utility-scale fusion plant this year.

Salem, Ore.-based Agility Robotics, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, beating its Silicon Valley and East Coast rivals to Wall Street.

The company, led by former Microsoft and Magic Leap executive Peggy Johnson, is going public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC — remember those? — named Churchill Capital Corp XI, created by financier Michael Klein.

Digit is a two-legged robot, about 5-foot-9, built to work in facilities designed for people. It lifts up to 35 pounds and handles repetitive tasks like moving totes and tending machines for up to 20 hours a day. The upcoming Digit v5 adds swappable hands, a 50-pound lifting capacity, and safety systems meant to let it work alongside people without barriers.

“What this will do is help us accelerate the customer engagements that we have right now — a long list of customers who are seeking to fill their labor shortages,” Johnson said on CNBC.

Financial details: The merger values Agility at $2.5 billion and is expected to provide more than $620 million in cash to fund its growth. That includes about $420 million Churchill raised from public investors and roughly $200 million from a group led by manufacturing giant Foxconn.

Initial filings released in connection with the deal do not disclose Agility’s revenue, and indicate that the company remains unprofitable. Its operating expenses rose to about $111 million in 2025 from $71 million the year before, and it burned through roughly $100 million in cash, according to figures Agility describes as preliminary and unaudited.

The filings cite more than $300 million in “committed” multi-year orders for the next-generation Digit v5. But the fine print acknowledges that the figure “is not a measure of current period revenue,” that it depends on the company hitting certain milestones, and that it comes from a three-year contract for 1,000 robots, placed by a customer whose identity isn’t disclosed.

Agility has raised more than $390 million in equity since its 2015 founding, according to its investor presentation made public Wednesday in conjunction with the deal.

A more detailed financial disclosure, including revenue and profit, typically comes later in the SPAC process with a filing known as a Form S-4. Agility is expected to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker “AGLT” once the deal closes, which the companies expect by the end of 2026.

Active deployments: Agility says Digit is currently being used by customers including auto-parts giant Schaeffler, logistics provider GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre, with more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation overall.

Amazon, an early Agility investor, has run multiple pilots of Digit, including one we observed in 2023 at an Amazon warehouse in Sumner, Wash., south of Seattle.

Asked if Amazon is an active Digit customer, an Agility spokesperson said Wednesday morning, “We have been actively engaged with Amazon since their investment in 2022 and have completed multiple pilots with them. We are looking forward to working with them again once we launch the next generation of our robot, which will be the first cooperatively safe humanoid.”

Agility is beating a field of better-funded rivals to the public markets, including Silicon Valley’s Figure AI, valued at $39 billion after raising more than $1 billion last year, and Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, the Hyundai-owned maker of the Atlas humanoid.

Elon Musk’s Tesla is also developing its Optimus robot, but inside an already-public company, not as a pure-play humanoid robotics company.

The company this week became the first to adopt NVIDIA’s newly announced Halos safety system for robotics, which is part of the company’s push to deploy humanoid robots that can work alongside people without safety barriers.

Agility is currently #5 on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the Pacific Northwest’s top privately held tech startups. It will graduate from the list when it officially goes public.

Microsoft announced Wednesday that over the past two decades, it has become dramatically more efficient in its use of water to cool data centers, slashing its consumption rate by 90% compared to levels when it opened its first facilities in the early 2000s. The company used 0.27 liters per kilowatt-hour last year, about three times better than the industry average.

Microsoft has for the first time replenished more fresh water globally than it withdrew, making important progress on its 2030 goal of being water positive across its operations.

And if this sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. Earlier this month, Amazon shared similar water usage stats (though it performed better) and Google came out with updated pledges around being water positive.

The tech giants are working to quench concerns about water use, which has become a key point of contention nationwide. Communities and local leaders are protesting and passing moratoriums on new data center construction. Other concerns include significant energy use that could drive up utility rates and noise complaints.

At the start of the year, Microsoft tried to get ahead of those fears by launching its Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative, in which it vowed to cover its electricity costs and forgo local tax breaks. Last week, it came out in support of the Ratepayer Protection Act, a congressional measure addressing data center utility bill impacts, though it earlier opposed Washington state legislation targeting some of the same concerns.

Microsoft remains “deeply committed” to water protections, said Judy Priest, CTO of Cloud Operations & Innovation, and Steve Solomon, vice president of Datacenter Engineering, in a blog post Wednesday.

“We continue to advance datacenter innovations that reduce water use intensity while supporting the growing performance demands of cloud and AI services,” Priest and Solomon said.

Data centers use a variety of strategies to keep electronics cool, including fans, evaporative cooling, air conditioning and direct liquid cooling. The approaches involve tradeoffs: air conditioning draws more electricity but saves water, while evaporative cooling is less energy-intensive but consumes more.

Microsoft’s approaches to curb its water use include:

• Cooling primarily with fans, supplemented by evaporative cooling when outside temperatures exceed 85 degrees.
• Using chip-level cooling that recirculates water through the system.
• Auditing data centers to ensure facilities are operating as designed and conserving water optimally.
• Expanding its use of recycled, reused or non-potable water.

Comparing companies on this front is tricky. Microsoft’s liters-per-kilowatt-hour figure applies only to data centers it owns, while Amazon’s includes both its own computing facilities and leased ones.

Though Microsoft has made strides on the goal set in 2020 of becoming water positive within a decade, that benchmark takes a global tally of water use and replenishment. In theory, that means water used in a desert climate could be offset by Microsoft’s actions in a wetter region as regards its overarching target. The Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative, however, pledges to replenish more water than it uses in each district where it operates AI data centers.

That aligns with the approach used by Amazon and Google, though Amazon’s replenishment goal covers only data centers, not all of its operations.

While concern about data center water use is growing, it remains relatively modest in the broader context: data centers account for about 0.5% of all industrial water use worldwide, as Amazon recently noted.

In terms of total volume, Microsoft withdrew 2.7 billion gallons of water in fiscal year 2024 across its data centers and its other operations. For context, Seattle Public Utilities delivers roughly 43 billion gallons each year to 1.6 million people in its service area.

Editor’s note: Story updated to clarify that progress on the 2030 water positive goal is ongoing.

It’s 100 feet shorter and $100 million cheaper than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht, but another billionaire’s ship had no trouble drawing attention in Seattle on Tuesday.

“Zen,” a $200 million, 289-foot yacht reportedly owned by Chinese billionaire Wu Guangming, motored smoothly through the Ballard Locks and out to Puget Sound, attracting onlookers along the railings of the popular Seattle destination.

Flying a Cayman Islands flag, the vessel displayed its port of registry, George Town, below its name on the stern.

Wu is the founder of China’s Jiangsu Yuyue Medical Equipment and Supply, which supplies devices such as rehabilitation machines, oxygen tanks and diagnostic equipment.

Forbes ranks Wu, with a net worth of $2.6 billion, No. 1251 on its 2026 list of billionaires. It wasn’t clear if he was onboard or why the vessel was in Seattle.

Marine Traffic listed Alaska as the ship’s reported destination.

The yacht’s fenders and lines were tended to by a dozen or so crew members wearing matching white shirts and black shorts. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers workers guided the ship through the Locks, which connect the waters of Lake Washington, Lake Union, and Salmon Bay to the tidal waters of Puget Sound.

“Tis the season,” said one worker when asked by GeekWire if it seemed like an unusual number of superyachts were sailing into Seattle these days. He said it was not the biggest he’d seen and besides, the Locks are long enough to hold the 600-foot Space Needle lying down.

Zuckerberg’s “Launchpad” arrived in Seattle on May 26 and turned heads with its own trip through the Locks before mooring on Lake Union and drawing even more attention before moving out.

Zen was built in 2021 by Feadship, the same Dutch shipbuilder that made Launchpad. According to Superyacht Times, Zen can accommodate 16 guests and 25 crew members. In the world rankings for largest yachts, it’s listed at number 141.

Matt Sunday of Green Lake was out for a bike ride Tuesday evening when he stopped to check out Zen at the Locks. A director of engineering at Boeing, Sunday said he was interested in how the boat navigated the waterway.

“I’m fascinated by the precision and how it’s using the bow thrusters,” Sunday said. “It looks like it’s got space, but it’s tighter than that captain wants it to be, I’m sure.”

Sunday said he couldn’t really fathom the wealth of someone who could own such a vessel, calling it “a $200 million toy.”

Check out more GeekWire photos:

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.”

Lime went full Beastmode for last Friday’s FIFA World Cup match in Seattle.

Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch was among the riders who helped Lime set a new single-day ridership record in Seattle, with 83,000 trips recorded on shared bikes and scooters.

The tally eclipsed a record set by fans of Lynch’s former team in February when they descended on Seattle for the Super Bowl Championship parade and took more than 60,000 trips.

Across the full week, from June 15 through June 21, Lime said riders took more than 300,000 trips on its devices in Seattle, underscoring Lime’s position as the sole shared e-bike and scooter provider in the city — and the popularity of micromobility during crowded events.

“Major events put real pressure on city streets, transit systems and people’s wallets, and Seattle’s first week of match play showed how micromobility can help,” Parker Dawson, senior regional lead of government relations at Lime, said in a statement Tuesday.

The company — which has 15,000 devices on city streets — says it worked closely with the Seattle Department of Transportation and local stakeholders “to support safe, organized and reliable operations.” Around Pioneer Square, the waterfront and stadium district, huge numbers of Lime devices were staged in drop-off and pick-up spots.

The company also gave away free helmets to riders and deployed teams to help with orderly parking and fleet rebalancing. Lime introduced temporary geofencing and launched a Fan Pass for discounted riding and flexible use through July 19.

“Seattle showed the world how shared e-bikes and scooters can help a major host city move,” Dawson said.

Sound Transit’s Link light also set a record, drawing approximately 280,000 riders on Friday and exceeding a mark of 220,000 that it also set earlier this year during the Super Bowl parade. 

The agency said it operated at peak service from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. to get soccer fans from across the region to and from Friday’s match. Baseball fans also descended on T-Mobile Park for a sold-out Mariners game that evening.

Seattle will host four more World Cup matches:

• June 24, Bosnia-Herzegovina vs. Qatar, noon
• June 26, Egypt vs. Iran, 8 p.m.
• July 1, Round of 32, 1 p.m.
• July 6, Round of 16, 5 p.m.

Microsoft is promising relief to engineers who get woken up at 3 a.m. for outages and other cloud glitches: an agent informed by its years of experience running Azure, designed to diagnose whatever’s going wrong and recommend potential fixes. 

One big benefit over humans: the agent can operate without the stress, fatigue, or tunnel vision that often hampers people doing it on little sleep.

“Agents are a little bit less emotionally attached,” said Brendan Burns, a Microsoft technical fellow and corporate vice president who was one of the creators of Kubernetes. He pointed out that agents don’t feel the pressure when a manager asks for a rapid root-cause analysis.

The Azure Copilot Observability Agent, in preview since late last year, was made generally available Tuesday. It investigates incidents by connecting the logs, metrics, traces and other signals scattered across a company’s systems, then points engineers toward the likely cause. 

At this point, the agent does not fix problems on its own. Microsoft also introduced what it calls autonomous operations, in preview, letting the agent triage and investigate alerts without a person prompting it. But it still stops short of acting. It won’t restart a resource or change a configuration, for example, instead leaving it to humans to decide and execute. 

Microsoft is joining a crowded field. Datadog made its Bits AI SRE agent generally available in December, and Amazon’s AWS followed with a comparable DevOps Agent this spring. Microsoft said the agent is priced based on usage rather than a flat per-seat license, which is the same model AWS uses for its DevOps Agent. 

Established observability players including Dynatrace, Splunk, New Relic and Grafana are moving quickly in the same direction, alongside a wave of AI-focused startups. 

In an interview with GeekWire this week, Burns said he believes Microsoft’s breadth is one of its advantages, seeing more of a customer’s software than rivals do, from GitHub to Azure deployments to the signals systems generate. Knowing how those connect, he said, helps the agent trace a problem back to the line of code behind it. 

More than a decade ago, Burns and his then-Google colleagues Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie created Kubernetes, the open-source software that lets companies run applications across large, constantly changing infrastructure. It became foundational to cloud computing, and added to the complexity teams now have to manage.

Kubernetes brought a kind of self-repair to that world: when something breaks, it works automatically to restore the system to a healthy state. But it follows fixed rules, Burns said. It’s “very deterministic” — it “can’t make hypotheses, it can’t investigate solutions.” 

AI tools like the Azure observability agent are meant to add that missing layer: forming a theory about what went wrong, testing it against the data, and continuing to work to find a solution. 

Full autonomy — letting the agent act, not just investigate — is still down the road. In a blog post Tuesday, Burns framed the launch as part of a broader shift toward “agentic operations,” which reason across signals and will someday be able to act on them. 

For now, the agent can do a lot of the digging, even if a human still makes the call. 

Burns, who recalled once pulling a 36-hour on-call shift, said he can think of “a lot of late nights that would have been a lot nicer if I’d had this 10 years ago.”

— 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.” 

Valve Software abruptly opened reservations for its latest Steam Machine on Monday, but due to the ongoing PC component shortage, did so at a significantly higher price than expected.

The company, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., first announced the new version of the Steam Machine late last year. It’s a small-scale, high-powered gaming PC that’s designed for your living room, which runs the same Linux-based SteamOS as Valve’s Steam Deck.

The 2026 Steam Machine starts at a whopping $1,049 through Valve’s digital storefront Steam, which gets you the base model with an internal 512GB SSD. A higher-end model with a 2TB drive costs $1,349, and both also come in bundles with one of Valve’s new Steam Controllers.

It is, on paper, an impressive overall device, particularly as a sort of gateway product for anyone who’d like to break into gaming on PCs and/or Linux. However, its price tag is a significant barrier. A comparatively powerful PC would still cost as much or more, but Valve’s old strategy with the Steam Deck, by comparison, was to practically give it away.

As it turns out, Valve isn’t particularly happy about the price either, preemptively addressing concerns via a post on the official Steam blog. The short version is that the planned launch of the Machine has been complicated by the ongoing component crisis that surrounds SSDs and RAM.

The prices “reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months,” the company said in the post.

The two Steam Machine models’ internal storage capacity is the only difference between them. Both are gaming PCs that pack “semi-custom” AMD CPUs and GPUs, 16 GB RAM, Bluetooth capability, an ethernet port, and a MicroSD card slot into a 6” black cube, complete with a removable faceplate.

The high cost of entry for the Steam Machine is another knock-on effect from the ongoing global RAM and SSD shortages, which were initially created by high demand from the burgeoning AI industry. The same problems have resulted in multiple price hikes for current-generation gaming consoles and spiked the costs for new-built gaming PCs. It’s been a bad time for the hobby overall, especially for newcomers and players on a budget.

The Machine isn’t likely to fail, but its costs may mean that for the time being, it turns into little more than an expensive toy for gadgetheads. One of Valve’s quiet ambitions for years has been to bring more people into PC gaming, and especially PC gaming on Linux, but for a thousand bucks a throw, the Machine isn’t likely to draw in any new customers.

That suggests that if a company like Valve, which controls roughly half the PC gaming on Earth via Steam, is having problems like this, then it’s wise to expect further disruption for the foreseeable future. Xbox in particular was talking about launching a new console at the end of 2027, but with RAM and SSD costs on the rise, it looks like the next generation of hardware will either be prohibitively expensive or best pushed off for a few years.

As with the Deck, you get games onto the Machine via direct download from Valve’s digital storefront Steam. Also as with the Deck, the Machine is designed so it can also be used as a desktop computer, with no particular guardrails to keep out tinkerers and modders.

Even with their high cost, and with a lower number of available units at launch than Valve had planned, the 2026 Steam Machine was already listed as “out of stock” within 10 minutes of the store page opening, which was before Valve itself had officially announced it had done so.

However, Valve has implemented a lottery system in order to stymie resellers and attempt to make the process as fair as possible. Any interested buyers can sign up for a Steam Machine reservation at any time before this coming Thursday, at which point Valve will randomize the queue. Anyone who doesn’t get in on Thursday will be added to a waiting list.

The idea is so simple: generating power from the heat trapped beneath the Earth’s crust. It’s clean, renewable and potentially abundant. The challenge is how to map what lies beneath — and efficiently tap it.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is partnering with chipmaker Nvidia and Fervo Energy, a leading geothermal company, to build a publicly available, digital twin that will create physical models of geothermal reservoirs to optimize power generation.

Geothermal energy is produced by drilling wells that push cold water to depths of up to 10,000 feet below the surface — for comparison, Seattle’s Space Needle is 605 feet tall. The water flows through a network of underground fractures, which can be widened and connected through high-pressure injections. Expanding those fractures allows water to reach higher temperatures before returning to the surface, where it produces steam that spins power turbines. Underground rocks at those depths can reach 555 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Plant operators need to answer questions like ‘How many monitoring wells does the system need? How do we design those wells? How much water should we inject?’” said Maruti Mudunuru, an Earth scientist at PNNL and principal investigator of the project, in a statement.

Current models are too slow to provide meaningful insights and guide operators addressing problems in wells, reservoirs or pipelines in real time. Those delays, Mudunuru added, “can lead to an underutilized resource.”

PNNL researchers will train the AI models; Nvidia will contribute technical expertise and data center infrastructure for the virtual twin; and Fervo is providing proprietary data from its geothermal sites in Nevada and Utah.

Geothermal is viewed as an increasingly promising source of clean energy and attracting interest from investors and tech companies hungry for electricity. Earlier this month, Endurance Energy, a Seattle-based startup looking to extract energy from beneath the ocean floor, announced $54 million in funding.

Fervo launched its Nevada commercial pilot, Project Red, in 2023, supplying 3 megawatts to a grid serving some of Google’s data centers. The company is now building its Cape Station plant in Beaver County, Utah, which is expected to begin delivering electricity to the grid later this year and will ultimately generate 500 megawatts — enough to power a small city.

Fervo’s design captures steam in a closed-loop system that returns it below the surface. The company raised $2.17 billion in its initial public offering last month, according to PitchBook.

The AI models generated by the project will be incorporated into Nvidia’s Omniverse libraries. The final product — named the Enhanced Geothermal System Twin, or EGS Twin — should be completed by 2029. It is funded by the Department of Energy’s Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office.

Amazon’s latest film drama isn’t a movie that it’s producing or streaming, but rather the situation surrounding a project it has dropped.

Amazon MGM Studios has backed away from “Artificial,” a nearly finished film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The studio said last week that the film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio,” according to reports in Puck, Variety, and elsewhere.

The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and focuses on the brief period when Altman was fired from his position at OpenAI in 2023 and then rehired, according to Variety. The film has been referred to as “‘The Social Network,’ but for the AI era,” in a nod to the 2010 film about Facebook.

The New York Times reported that Amazon MGM had spent around $40 million on the project and had tested it in four markets. The decision to drop the film, planned for a 2027 release, “shocked the filmmakers,” the Times said.

Amazon announced a $50 billion investment and strategic partnership with OpenAI in February. The ChatGPT maker and Amazon Web Services deepened their technical ties, expanding an existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years, with OpenAI planning to run more of its AI workloads on AWS.

Amazon said it is “working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.” The Hollywood Reporter said Netflix and Focus Features have both passed on “Artificial.”

Puck, which first reported the news, said the finished film struck Mike Hopkins, the head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, as darker in tone than the script Amazon had originally bought, and that Hopkins made the decision to drop it after watching a cut. Amazon’s public statement gave no reason.

Guadagnino, who directed the 2017 Oscar winner “Call Me by Your Name,” previously worked with Amazon MGM on “After the Hunt” and “Challengers.”

“We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

Other “Artificial” cast members include Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.

Sila raised its first round of funding in September 2011 — the same month solar power manufacturer Solyndra went bankrupt, sullying the sustainability sector.

But the California-based startup developing high-performance battery materials kept plugging away, and eventually batteries started booming as EV sales and concerns about the lack of domestic battery production accelerated in the U.S.

Last fall, Sila began manufacturing material in Moses Lake, Wash., at the first automotive-scale, silicon-anode plant for both the company and the nation.

“With something like this, you just keep plugging away at it,” said Gene Berdichevsky, Sila’s CEO and co-founder. “And you ride the waves.”

Keep reading to learn more about Berdichevsky’s sustainability journey. His quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

What was the moment you realized you had to work in energy? 

In my freshman year, I discovered the Stanford Solar Car team. We were student-run group, and the group was building a solar-powered electric car for a race that would go 2,300 miles from Chicago to L.A., and I started participating. It was very little adult supervision, lots of students. And I fell in love with energy, like everything energy. It’s really at the foundation of civilization. And what was super interesting to me is it felt like there was still so much opportunity to make an even better energy system.

What gives you the most hope for the planet?

The creativity of people and the opportunities for science and technology to solve impossible problems. It wasn’t that long ago that the world faced a choice between depopulation or starvation, as the world was thought to not have enough resources for the food needed for a few billion people. But crop science solved it. The same can be said as we face energy challenges today — and I believe material science can solve it. 

What’s your biggest concern when it comes to addressing climate change?

You cannot cut your way to solving climate change, yet that is often the temptation and the rhetoric. The only way we will solve climate change is by harnessing scientific breakthroughs, technology, and the power of markets to make the clean option simply the better, more economical option. 

What’s the biggest misconception about building an energy company?

In the end, there is no such thing as a billion-dollar energy company. When you start an energy company from zero, you have to understand what it takes to succeed at a $10 billion or $100 billion scale and stay rooted in the long term because that’s the minimum threshold to have an impact on the world of energy — and nothing smaller will survive. 

What’s one habit you’ve changed personally because of sustainability concerns?

None. I drive an EV because they are more fun to drive — but they happen to be clean. When I travel internationally, I try to fly on 787’s because they’re designed for more passenger comfort — and they happen to be more efficient. When I travel in major cities, I take the metro because it’s faster to get around. Let’s make the cleaner option simply the better one. 

Coffee with any energy leader, past or present — who do you pick?

Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. The scientist and the entrepreneur responsible for transforming our world and making electricity flow as freely as water in our lives. While Thomas Edison was the stronger businessman, Tesla was so ahead of his time, and his partnership with Westinghouse created the competition with Edison that revolutionized our world.

What impact do you hope your work has in 20 years?

A better energy foundation for the world. Oil, coal, and gas have created immense prosperity and transformed our society for the better in the 20th century. But an even better, more resilient, lower-cost, and cleaner energy foundation is possible with batteries, geothermal, and renewables. That is the path to yet more prosperity for the world in the 21st century — and it requires innovation, commercialization, and incredible scaling. My hope is for Sila to play an important part in that energy foundation.

In soccer, a single blown offside call can decide who advances and who goes home. But what can you do? Referees are only human.

Well, the 2026 World Cup has put computer vision and AI on the officiating crew: video review, a sensor inside the ball, semi-automated offside calls, cameras bolted into every rafter. And the tech has already decided a goal.

On June 15 in Monterrey, Sweden were busy thrashing Tunisia when Mattias Svanberg came off the bench and scored with his first touch. The linesman’s flag shot up. Offside. The goal was gone, until it wasn’t. Video review handed it back, because the ball itself had registered a touch the human eye missed: a faint flick off Alexander Isak that reset the play and left Svanberg onside. Yet the cameras missed the flick. The sensor inside the ball caught it.

How does a ball overrule a linesman? Start with what FIFA has actually wired into the tournament. Sony’s Hawk-Eye underpins the video review, the goal-line decisions, the semi-automated offside system, and a “last touch” feature that settles who knocked the ball out for a corner.

Chenliang Xu, a computer-vision researcher at the University of Rochester, told the university’s news service it’s “a very sophisticated system that glues together multiple computer vision techniques.” Underneath, that means calibrated cameras, models trained to spot the ball and the players and their poses, and a thin layer of logic that decides when a human should take a look. 

Player and ball tracking run on neural networks trained on millions of labeled images, the same lineage of models behind face unlock and the perception stack in a self-driving car.

Xu compares the training to “teaching a child how to recognize things”: feed a model enough examples and it learns what matters. Sixteen cameras ring each stadium, because a single angle can be blocked or fooled, and many angles can be triangulated into a three-dimensional picture of the play. It works the way your eyes do.

“If you block one of your eyes,” Xu says, “it’s very hard to perceive depth.” Two eyes recover what one eye cannot. So do 16 cameras. The reconstruction lands in seconds, and a person signs off.

How is it so fast? The system is narrow. According to FIFA, the cameras throw off more than 150 million tracking points per match, more data than any all-purpose model could process in real time. The networks are tuned for one job, recognizing players and a ball, and stripped of everything else, which is precisely what makes them quick.

The narrowness is also a confession. The system measures the one thing a camera and a sensor can measure cleanly, a body’s position at the instant the ball is struck, and it stays out of the call that starts most arguments: whether an offside player was actually interfering with play. The machine gets the measurement. The referee keeps the judgment. A good reminder that currently AI is Assistive Intelligence, not more.

But the quietest AI at this World Cup isn’t on the broadcast.

A torn hamstring can end a player’s World Cup, and a contender’s with it. Long before kickoff, clubs pour the data from GPS vests and motion sensors, the gear sold by firms like Catapult and Zone7, into models that flag when a player’s accumulated workload is bending toward injury, sometimes before the athlete feels a thing. It produces no spike on a graphic and no slow-motion replay. It produces a number that tells a coach to rest a hamstring for a day.

The cameras get the highlight, but the hamstring monitor keeps the players from being, well, hamstrung.

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Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Carrying bullhorns and signs depicting Amazon executives as war criminals, about two dozen people protested outside the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Thursday evening, calling on the company to stop providing technology to Israel for what they described as genocide in Gaza.

The protesters said they were trying to disrupt what they believed to be a gathering of Amazon executives, state and local leaders, U.S. State Department officials and Australian government representatives on an upper floor of the Spheres, on the eve of the World Cup match between the U.S. and Australia.

Contacted Friday, Amazon described the gathering differently. The company said the event underway during the protest was for members of Seattle’s business and sports communities, Australian parliamentarians, and Amazon employees celebrating the World Cup. A separate meeting concluded before the protests began, the company said, without specifying who attended that meeting.

“We respect individuals’ rights to engage in peaceful public demonstrations,” said Montana MacLachlan, Amazon spokesperson, in response to GeekWire’s inquiry. The company, she added, is “committed to being a responsible corporate citizen in the Puget Sound region, Washington state, and every community we serve.”

The protest group, which goes by the name Amazon Worker Intifada, described the protest as part of an effort to escalate pressure on the company’s leaders over the issues. An affiliated group, No Azure for Apartheid, has been protesting Microsoft for more than a year over its work for Israel.

The protesters object to Amazon’s work with Israel, including Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract that Amazon and Google won in 2021 to provide cloud and AI services to the Israeli government, including the Israeli military and weapons suppliers, according to leaked contract and procurement documents.

The protesters marched to the Spheres shortly before 6 p.m. Thursday, walking in a circle outside the glass-domed buildings with signs, drums, balloons, noisemakers and Palestinian flags, engaging in call-and-repeat chants such as, “Say it loud and say it clear — Amazon’s a war profiteer.” 

Amazon workers and soccer fans walked by on the sidewalk, some stopping to take in the scene. Small groups of people in business attire walked through the protest to the Spheres entrance.

A banner at the edge of the space read “Amazon War Criminals Meeting Here.” Another depicted Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and AWS CEO Matt Garman, with blood on their hands, embracing what appeared to be a bomb. “We See Your Crimes,” it read.

Members of what appeared to be a wedding party, including a woman in a white bridal dress and a man in a suit, emerged at one point from one of the restaurants at the base of the Spheres and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the protesters to stop or move elsewhere.

In a press release after the protest, the group said its demonstration forced Amazon to reroute attendees, and that an arriving Australian delegation had to use a different entrance to get around the protesters. The group also said an event attendee grabbed and shoved a protester’s camera.

After protesting for an hour at entrances on both ends of the courtyard between the Spheres and Amazon’s Day One tower, the group moved to the Lenora Street side of the Spheres, where they released two helium balloons on strings with loud noisemakers attached, attempting to position the noisemakers outside the windows where an event could be seen taking place inside. 

One of the leaders of the protest Thursday was Ahmed Shahrour, a Palestinian software engineer in Amazon’s Whole Foods division in Seattle who was fired in October over internal Slack posts criticizing the company’s ties to Israel.

Amazon said at the time that he violated multiple company policies, alleging that he “misused company resources, including by posting numerous non-work-related messages pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

Shahrour called it “a blatant act of retaliation designed to silence dissent from Palestinian voices within Amazon and shield Amazon’s collaboration in the genocide from internal scrutiny.”

On Friday, Amazon spokesperson MacLachlan said of that incident, “We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings.”

No Azure for Apartheid, which includes current and former Microsoft workers, has staged repeated protests of its own, similarly calling on Microsoft to cut ties with Israel.

They set up an encampment on the Redmond campus last year, where 20 people were arrested for trespassing, and later occupied the office of Microsoft President Brad Smith. Microsoft has fired several employees over various protests and activities, citing violations of company policies.

After a Guardian investigation revealed that an Israeli military unit had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud to store millions of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, the company cut off the unit’s access and opened a review that recently led the company to announce that it would tighten its human-rights controls on its work with national security agencies.

An employee group filed a civil rights complaint against Amazon with the City of Seattle on Thursday on behalf of three engineers who allege that the company is wrongly investigating them for testifying before the Seattle City Council in favor of regulating data centers. 

The complaint, filed by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), invokes an unusual Seattle law that bars employers from discriminating against workers based on political ideology. 

Amazon acknowledged the investigations but characterized them differently, citing its policy against employees speaking publicly as representatives of the company without first going through specific procedures. A spokesperson described this as the focus of the internal inquiry, noting that employees are free to discuss working conditions in their individual capacity.

The three engineers — Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand — testified June 3 before city council subcommittees in support of regulating data centers. Each opened by noting they were legally protected from retaliation for speaking out.

A week later, Amazon’s Employee Relations team called them into separate meetings and told them they were under a disciplinary investigation, according to the complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by GeekWire.

“After publicly affirming our right to speak freely, Amazon privately interrogated me, asking me the same questions over and over to try to get me to admit to doing something wrong and made me feel like I committed a crime,” Irani said in a statement released by the group. 

The complaint says the engineers were told the investigation could lead to termination. 

Amazon denied that it threatened to fire the engineers or told them they were at risk of termination, saying the reference came up in response to a direct question and was taken out of context in AECJ’s characterization of what happened.

After reviewing the testimony, “it became clear that they may have been speaking in their capacity as Amazonians and not as private citizens,” said Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan in a statement. “We believe it’s important to apply our policies consistently so, just as we would with anyone else, we’re investigating whether there was a violation of our policies and may or may not take action based on what we find.”

She added, “It’s important to note that we don’t tolerate retaliatory behavior.”

Under the city’s Fair Employment Practices Ordinance, the Seattle Office for Civil Rights will investigate the complaint and determine whether there is reasonable cause to support the allegations. Remedies can include reinstatement, back pay, and financial damages.

Following testimony by more than 50 people, including members of AECJ, the full Seattle City Council voted unanimously on June 9 to impose a one-year emergency moratorium on new large data centers inside the city limits.

When a startup town turns into a soccer town attracting worldwide attention, it’s a great opportunity to test your guerrilla marketing skills.

Seattle’s Yoodli leaned into that theory on Thursday by getting its name and web address on Fox Sports’ live broadcast of FIFA World Cup festivities from Pier 62 on the waterfront.

The company, which launched out of the former AI2 Incubator in 2021, develops AI-powered software that allows users to simulate and practice real-world conversations. Yoodli has been at AI House all week on nearby Pier 70, and the team said grabbing free TV ad time was a “Hail Mary move” — especially in an era when AI company billboards are such a thing.

In a description of events relayed to GeekWire via email, the effort started with Yoodli’s new growth marketing manager Connor Wright scrolling Instagram earlier that morning to catch up on World Cup updates. He saw that Fox was live-streaming from Pier 62.

A scrappy startup lightbulb went off.

Communications and content leader Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno said she quickly ripped up a monitor box — because the startup is getting a new office soon — and wrote “Yoodli.ai” on the front and “USA” on the back.

Marketing intern Luis Quiroz ran down Alaskan Way with Wright to get inside Fox’s Pier 62 makeshift studio space and hold up the sign just over the shoulder of soccer commentator Alexi Lalas.

“When you’re standing outside with a piece of cardboard and a Fox broadcast camera sweeps by, you seize the moment,” Quiamno said. “Connor held the sign without hesitation while I directed him via phone from the office.”

Yoodli has been watching World Cup action daily from the lunchroom at AI House, and Quiamno said the energy downtown has been something else, especially in anticipation of Friday’s noon match between the U.S. and Australia at Seattle Stadium (Lumen Field).

“It’s the kind of vibe Seattle rarely gets: the waterfront is packed, everyone’s in a good mood, and there’s this collective feeling that the city is on the global stage,” she said.

Yoodli was co-founded by Esha Joshi and Varun Puri and is ranked No. 22 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups. The company currently has about 80 employees.

“We’re growing but still small enough to pull off a guerrilla PR stunt,” Quiamno said.

And apparently it worked. Yoodli says it saw an increase in website traffic and demo inquiries following the broadcast.

“Proof that a handmade sign and a little World Cup energy go a long way,” Quiamno added.

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.