— Agility Roboticsnamed Michael Beeras its chief financial officer. Current CFO and chief operating officer Jennifer Hunter will transition to serving exclusively as COO.
“Michael brings outstanding public company finance and capital markets experience, while Jennifer, with her prior experience as a publicly traded COO, will focus exclusively on scaling our operational excellence and manufacturing capabilities,” said CEO Peggy Johnson, in a statement.
The Salem, Ore.-based startup, 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, the company announced last month.
Beer joins Agility Robotics from the California energy storage company Energy Vault, where he was CFO for two years. Past roles include venture partner at Vest Coast Capital and CFO at FreeWire Technologies.
Matt Fisher. (Efekta Education Photo)
— Seattle-area tech veteran Matt Fisher has taken the role of CTO for London-based Efekta Education. The company is developing an agentic teaching and learning platform.
“I’ve spent my career building technologies that help people learn, connect and achieve more. What attracted me to Efekta is its clear vision for using AI to enhance learning, support teachers and make high-quality education accessible to more people around the world,” Fisher said.
Last August, Fisher joined immersive media startup Adventr as a late-stage co-founder. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CTO at Daydream, a startup that raised a $50 million seed round last year to shake up the way people find and buy clothing online. Other past roles include leadership at Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom and Auth0.
— There is another name to add to the raft of departures from Microsoft‘s security leadership.
Rahul Prakash. (LinkedIn Photo)
Rahul Prakash, head of product for Microsoft Security Copilot, shared that he’s leaving his role after nearly a decade with the company.
“As any Identity professional will tell you, the world of [Identity Access Management] is far more intricate than people realize, and it’s being rewritten for the world of AI agents. At Microsoft, I’ve had the privilege of going deep into this space…” Prakash said on LinkedIn.
On Monday, GeekWire reported that Rudra “Rudy” Mitra, who spent more than 27 years at Microsoft, was joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of security services. Other recent departures include Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy, who resigned at after nearly three decades.
Nancy Lipson. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Nancy Lipson has joined Zap Energy as chief legal officer. The Everett, Wash.-based company is in pursuit of fusion energy, and recently expanded its scope to include next generation nuclear fission.
Lipson was previously executive vice president and CLO for the gold mining giant Newmont Corporation, departing after 18 years in 2023.
“Nancy’s deep expertise in areas of corporate strategy, governance, compliance, and sustainability will be key assets as Zap pursues its integrated approach to advanced nuclear,” Zap posted on LinkedIn.
Jyoti Shukla. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Jyoti Shukla was named chief product and technology officer at KEXP, a nonprofit radio station serving Seattle and the Bay Area. The station includes community and performance spaces, and features wide-ranging music genres.
“There is a lot of meaningful work ahead, and I’m excited to keep learning, building, and partnering with an amazing team as we shape what’s next,” Shukla said on LinkedIn.
Prior to taking the role, Shukla served on KEXP’s board of directors and was senior vice president of product design at SiriusXM. She has also worked in tech leadership roles at Nordstrom and Starbucks, and started her career at Microsoft.
— ZEV Co-op, a Washington-based nonprofit EV carshare cooperative, announced Ry Armstrong as its new executive director. Armstrong was previously at Sustainable Seattle, where they served as co-director.
— Tirzah VanDamme has joined Gagen MacDonald as senior director of AI and digital transformation. She brings more than 20 years of experience and was most recently at Microsoft.
— The Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS) announced the election four new board members. They are:
Amanda Boyd, executive director of Native American Programs and Professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State Universit
Mary Czerwinski, former research manager at Microsoft Research
John Stein, former science and research director of NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center
Judith Wasserheit, professor emerita of Global Health, Medicine, and Epidemiology at the University of Washington
WSAS also elected 30 new members, who will assist the organization in providing scientific and technical information to state policymakers.
They include 26 scientists and engineers elected by their WSAS peers and four members recently elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, or Medicine or awarded the Nobel Prize and who reside or work in Washington state.
The members include 11 UW professors and eight from WSU, five researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, three from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and three at private companies, with some participants holding roles at multiple institutions.
Roderick de Greef, CEO of BioLife Solutions. (BioLife Photo)
BioLife Solutions, a Bothell, Wash.-based company developing tools for cell and gene therapy, is being acquired for $1.5 billion by the life sciences corporation Repligen.
BioLife is a publicly traded business that makes products used by biotech firms to keep living cells alive and healthy while they’re stored, shipped, frozen or thawed for medical therapies. Waltham, Mass.-based Repligen makes tools and other materials used to manufacture vaccines, antibodies and other biological therapies. Both companies launched in the 1980s.
Cell and gene therapies are advanced treatments that use living cells or genetic material to treat disease at the molecular level. Cell therapies replace or repair damaged tissue with healthy cells, while gene therapies add, fix or modify DNA to correct the underlying cause of a condition.
“Over the past several years, we have successfully repositioned BioLife around our market-leading biopreservation media franchise, while strengthening our financial profile and establishing a durable foundation for profitable growth,” said Roderick de Greef, CEO of BioLife, in a statement.
BioLife shareholders will get $11.25 in cash plus 0.1442 shares of Repligen stock for every share of BioLife they own—bringing the total deal value to $31 per share.
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, pending BioLife stockholder approval and regulatory clearance. The law firm K&L Gates advised BioLife Solutions on the acquisition.
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— F5 named former Amazon executive Cathy Peterman as executive vice president and chief people officer of the Seattle-based application-delivery and security company. In May, F5 celebrated its 30th year in business.
“Cathy brings a rare combination of strategic depth and genuine humanity that will raise the bar for how we invest in our people,” said CEO François Locoh-Donou in a statement. “She and I share a reverence for culture and its impact on driving sustained results.”
Peterman joins F5 from Wayfair, where she served as CPO for the retail company’s technology organization. Prior to that, she was with Amazon for more than five years, departing as the HR executive for advertising products and technology.
Rudra Mitra. (LinkedIn Photo)
— After more than 27 years at Microsoft, Rudra Mitra has announced his departure. He leaves the role of corporate vice president and head of Microsoft Security Purview, a team addressing data security and governance focused on artificial intelligence and AI agents.
Mitra joined the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant straight out of college as a software engineer. He has led work on products including Office, Windows Live and Microsoft 365 Cloud Infrastructure.
“Microsoft is a very special place full of incredibly talented people, and this decision comes with gratitude, happiness, and optimism for the future,” he said on LinkedIn. Mitra did not share his next move, saying only that there is “more on that soon.”
Markham McIntyre. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Markham McIntyre, who previously led Seattle’s Office of Economic Development, is now executive director of Climate Surge, which is described as a “project built to accelerate the deployment of climate policies and market solutions in Washington.”
The effort works with corporations, heavy industry, government, developers, advocates, and philanthropy, and is a partnership between Earth Finance, Climate Solutions and Stolte Foundation.
Prior to his role with the city of Seattle, McIntyre was at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber for more than eight years, leaving in 2022 as executive vice president.
— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, announced a slate of new hires, all of whom appear to be working remotely:
Adam Blockwas named chief sales officer, joining from Motive where he was chief revenue officer.
Ken Coleman was named senior vice president of marketing, coming from Ramsey Solutions.
Khoi Hoang was named leader of the global sales engineering organization, joining from Salesforce.
Aaron Ellis was named leader of corporate sales, joining from Workday.
Qualtrics previously shared news that it promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product.
— Jay Shankar, Amazon’s former vice president of global talent acquisition, has joined Uber in a comparable role. Shankar, who is based in San Francisco, resigned from Amazon in December. Past employers include Adobe and BMC Software.
“When I joined AWS almost 8 years ago to lead recruiting, I had never run a talent acquisition organization. What I discovered was a team of builders who showed me that this work is fundamentally about investing in people and obsessing over customer needs,” Shankar said on LinkedIn.
— Jamie Boyd has joined the advisory board for Seattle’s GemaTEG, a startup building technology to manage the heat produced by computer chips. Boyd is a founder of Cypress Capital Holdings and previously helped build Cascadia, an investment banking franchise focused on energy and climate technologies.
— Seattle immigration tech startup Casium named Kat Kelley as its founding go-to-market lead. Kelley joins from Teaching Strategies, a digital education company, and past employers include Rectxt and brightwheel.
— Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm that specializes in corporate and technology-focused legal work, announced that Ty Kayam has joined as counsel in Seattle, expanding the firm’s healthcare regulatory team.
— Rogo named Joe Xavier as chief technology officer of the New York-based finance platform. Early in his career, Xavier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft, and more recently served as Grammarly’s CTO. At Rogo, he will help establish a San Francisco office.
— And in case you missed it: Dave Brown, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services leading its compute, AI and machine learning operations, is leaving after nearly 19 years. He is departing at the end of this month, and Amazon exec Dave Treadwell will take over the group. Read more in this GeekWire story.
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