Temporal has raised $550 million in a Series E funding round that values the Bellevue, Wash.-based infrastructure startup at $12.55 billion, more than double its valuation from earlier this year as demand explodes for reliable agentic AI systems in production.
The massive round is among the largest venture capital investments in the Pacific Northwest this year and was led by Lightspeed, with co-leads Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global.
It caps a significant growth stretch for the open-source platform, whose annualized revenue run rate recently surpassed $250 million — growing over 200% year-over-year, according to a news release on Monday — as major tech players like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase rely on its “durable execution” engine to keep complex AI workflows from breaking.
Co-founded in 2019 by CEO Samar Abbas and CTO Maxim Fateev — veterans of Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber — Temporal originally made its mark helping developers manage complex distributed systems.
But as Abbas told GeekWire earlier this year, the AI explosion put that exact problem “on steroids.” While generative AI models handle reasoning, Temporal’s “durable execution” engine acts as the underlying plumbing — preserving application state, retrying failed steps, and preventing multi-step AI agents from crashing when external services drop out.
To support that surge, Temporal has doubled its workforce over the past year to 570 employees worldwide. While operating as a remote-first organization, the company maintains deep roots in the Pacific Northwest — where both founders have been based for decades — and continues to expand its engineering footprint in the Seattle area to keep pace with global demand.
“As agents take on more critical work across more systems, every additional step creates another place to fail. In production, that work has to survive those failures and finish reliably,” Abbas said in a statement. “Temporal was built for this problem. Durable Execution is becoming the standard for reliable applications at scale, and this investment reflects the conviction that much of the next generation of software will be built on Temporal.”
The cash infusion brings Temporal’s total capital raised to date to $1.2 billion, building on a $300 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz in February that valued the company at $5 billion.
In addition to Lightspeed, the Series E round drew new backing from Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and T. Rowe Price, alongside returning venture backers Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Madrona.
Temporal plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate platform R&D, expand its developer and enterprise go-to-market teams, and support global cloud operations.
— Silvia Candiani has been named corporate vice president of Worldwide Telco & Media within the Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion initiative launched by the tech giant in July to embed engineers inside customers to build and run AI systems. In her new role, Candiani will lead Microsoft Frontier Company’s work with some of the largest telecommunications operators and media conglomerates.
“The momentum across our industry is extraordinary, and I believe we are only at the beginning of what AI can make possible,” said Candiani, who is based in Milan.
Before joining Microsoft in 2010 as a general manager, Candiani was a marketing director for Vodafone in Italy for more than a decade.
— Kevin Frey has been appointed vice president and chief impact officer of Microsoft Elevate, the company’s philanthropic effort providing technology support, donations, sales and AI training for educational organizations and nonprofits. Frey joined from UNICEF, where he was the first CEO of Generation Unlimited, the organization’s skills and employment initiative.
Frey said he was joining Microsoft because it’s “one of the only organizations in the world with the scale, scope and influence to bend the arc of the AI-powered future we are entering.”
“I will be spending my time and energy trying to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared broadly and safely across society — by every teacher, every student and every worker — regardless of their postal code,” he added.
— And while we’re on Microsoft, Anne Linge has been promoted to director of communications for commercial and consumer experiences after nearly 10 years with the company. She previously worked in communications at Weber Shandwick and Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, which has since rebranded as We.
— Alexis Bateman has been promoted to director of global sustainability at Amazon Web Services after more than five years with the company. She was director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics for 14 years before coming to Amazon.
Her work with AWS has given her the chance to help “shape sustainability at enormous scale,” Bateman said. “AI and cloud are transforming technology and society at an unprecedented pace, creating both enormous challenges and incredible opportunities for sustainability.”
— Gradial has appointed Lynn Girotto as chief marketing officer. In June, the Seattle startup announced $65 million in new funding for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing. The company is No. 127 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
Girotto joins from Qualtrics, where she was CMO for two years. She has previously led marketing teams at companies including Vimeo, Tableau and Getty Images, and was a senior director at Microsoft for nine years earlier in her career.
“The best marketers I know want to build ideas and customer relationships, not manage processes,” Girotto said. “Gradial is the first company I’ve seen that’s built to give them that time back.”
— A Seattle-area nonprofit group known as the Fermi Explorer Mission announced that Kam Ghaffarian has joined as co-founder. Earlier this month, the organization shared its plans to send a spacecraft on an 80,000-year trip to the nearest alien star system, Alpha Centauri.
Ghaffarian is a billionaire who helped launch companies including X-energy, Axiom and Intuitive Machines. “By committing to launching a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri by 2029, we are not just pushing the boundaries of current technology; we are inspiring a new generation to look up and dream of interstellar exploration,” Ghaffarian said.
Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of the Fermi Explorer Mission, also leads Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, a startup aiming to launch up to 88,000 satellites to serve as AI data centers.
— Yoodli, the Seattle-based AI roleplay platform for enterprise training, has named Rachel Cougan vice president of human resources. Cougan previously served as a fractional HR leader through her consultancy, Possible HR. Before that, she was VP of people for Logixboard and Hiya, and also served as VP of talent for Textio.
Yoodli, which launched in 2021, has grown to more than 100 employees. The company is No. 17 on the GeekWire 200.
— Kestra Medical Technologies has promoted Daniel Finney to vice president of research and development. The Kirkland, Wash.-based company sells cardiac monitoring and therapeutic devices. It raised $202 million in its IPO in March 2025 and was nominated for Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.
Finney has been with Kestra since 2019. CEO Brian Webster praised his role in developing the company’s FDA-approved monitoring device, adding that his “technical depth, product experience, and demonstrated leadership positions him to guide our next phase of innovation.”
Finney succeeds Phillip Foshee, Jr., who recently retired after leading Kestra’s R&D organization for nearly a decade.
— PATH has named Dr. Jeremy Farrar chief of its Asia, Middle East and Europe regional division. Farrar, a globally recognized leader in public health and clinical medicine, will join PATH effective Oct. 1 and be based in Geneva. His past roles include assistant director-general at the World Health Organization and director of the Wellcome Trust.
PATH CEO Nikolaj Gilbert praised the appointment, and noted that Farrar “possesses deep knowledge of the realities that prevent access, the people that make health care possible, and the need for PATH’s mission of ensuring breakthrough innovations reach all who need them.”
— American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced that University of Washington scientist Emily Levesque is the next editor in chief of the AAS journals. She will succeed Ethan Vishniac, who is stepping down from the role at the end of summer 2027 after 12 years.
“In the writing and publishing landscape we’re facing today, sharing information has never been easier, but trusting information has never been harder — which makes the AAS journals’ combination of rigorous peer review and accessible science more valuable than ever,” Levesque said.
Levesque has been an assistant astronomy professor at the UW for 11 years. She leads the massive stars research group, which studies the evolution and death of the largest and “most extreme” stars in the universe.
— The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber has added eight members to its board of trustees:
Sophia Space and SLI, an aerospace leasing venture based in Washington, D.C., say they’ve agreed on a $300 million asset-financing framework that will support the creation of a 10-satellite constellation for high-performance computing.
The details of the arrangement are as notable as the bottom line: Sophia Space will build the satellites, leveraging the startup’s patented TILE technology for modular in-space data processing. SLI will purchase the satellites under the terms of a financing agreement.
“SLI as the lessor will purchase the satellites from Sophia, hold title to the assets, and lease them to the end user on a long-term basis in exchange for fixed monthly or quarterly payments,” Max Yergan, the company’s senior vice president for investments, explained in an email. “Full control and operational responsibility for the assets sit with Sophia and the end user, who will determine between them how operations are handled.”
Sophia’s satellites are designed to deliver on-orbit edge data services for a wide variety of applications. “The demand we are underwriting exists today,” Yergan said. “Earth observation, weather and supply-chain analytics, disaster response and defense ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] users all face the same constraint now: They collect far more data than they can bring to the ground, and its value decays while it waits to be downlinked. Processing on orbit addresses that directly.”
The constellation’s first launch is targeted for as early as 2028. SLI would pay out funds linked to development and launch milestones, all the way through verification that the on-orbit network performs to pre-agreed standards.
The arrangement is laid out in a non-binding letter of support. “The non-binding nature is a reflection of where we are in the process, and is typical of large asset financings,” Yergan explained. “It sets the commercial framework so both parties can commit resources while definitive documentation is negotiated.”
Leasing arrangements are often seen in aviation and the maritime industry, but this is a relatively new concept for satellite ventures.
“This is the first time that this approach has been applied to this kind of constellation, but not the first time for in-space assets,” said Gareth Zundel, SLI’s senior vice president for communications. “In December 2025 we announced the acquisition of two AscendArc satellites that will be offered to operators on leasing terms. Then, in March this year, we did a similar deal with ReOrbit. We do believe, however, that we are the first leasing company to specialize in the space sector.”
Rob DeMillo, Sophia Space’s CEO and co-founder, said the arrangement demonstrates how far the commercial space industry has come.
“Asset financing didn’t invent aviation or shipping, but it accelerated them at scale,” he said in a news release. “We’re doing the same for orbital computing. This approach with SLI signals that Sophia Space’s space infrastructure is mature enough to attract the capital structures that have historically built terrestrial infrastructure.”
The approach also gives Sophia Space — which is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., but also has strong ties to the Seattle area — access to capital without diluting the equity held by current investors, including Unlock Venture Partners in Seattle.
“Sophia has the technology, the team and the vision. What had been missing was access to scalable, non-dilutive capital,” said Praveen Vetrivel, SLI’s CEO. “This framework provides it, giving them the capacity and flexibility they need to build the next layer of digital infrastructure.”
Each of the 10 satellites in the constellation will link together six of Sophia’s TILE (Thermal Integrated LEO Edge) modules, with four Nvidia Jetson processors on each module. That adds up to 240 edge computing servers in orbit.
“These 10 spacecraft are dedicated to this transaction,” Yergan said. “Sophia’s other programs and partnerships involve separate spacecraft and separate funding and are not directly affected by this facility.”
Sophia Space has previously said that it plans to start selling TILE systems and related components to customers in 2028. The company is also collaborating with Axiom Space, Armada and Kepler Communications on separate in-space computing initiatives.
In June, Sophia Space announced the conclusion of a $7 million financing round that brought the company’s total funding to $22 million. That round took advantage of an arrangement known as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE, in which investors provide cash to a startup in exchange for the right to receive stock later.
Nearly 25 years after enrolling at Dartmouth College to study psychology and embarking on a path that led him to co-found Seattle fintech giant Remitly, Matt Oppenheimer has been inducted into the Ivy League school’s Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.
The honor, presented Thursday night in San Francisco as part of Dartmouth’s annual Entrepreneurs Forum, comes seven months after Oppenheimer stepped down as Remitly’s long-time CEO to become chairman of the board.
Created by the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, the Hall of Fame honors Dartmouth alumni who have made lasting positive impacts through their ventures. Oppenheimer joins a select group of honorees with Northwest ties — including Smartsheet co-founders Brent Frei and Mark Mader — and used his acceptance remarks to express deep gratitude to the admissions officers who took a chance on a kid from Boise, Idaho, with “OK grades” and “below average SAT scores.”
Speaking with GeekWire ahead of the event, Oppenheimer recalled how his early college years studying social psychology helped shape his understanding of business.
“I think a lot of business and entrepreneurship does come down to interpersonal dynamics,” Oppenheimer said. “I am a people person. But how do you find what I call career-market fit when it comes to really understanding and connecting with people? That’s ultimately my strength, but it was really hard to define earlier in my career.”
After graduating from Dartmouth in 2005, Oppenheimer earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked in Kenya for Barclays Bank, where seeing families hit with steep fees on cross-border money transfers inspired him to start Remitly in 2011.
He served as CEO for nearly 15 years, guiding the company through its 2021 NASDAQ IPO and building it into a fintech powerhouse serving over 9 million customers across more than 170 countries before transitioning to chairman in February.
In his acceptance speech on Thursday, Oppenheimer focused on a central philosophy he calls leading authentically through “towering strengths and shadows.”
“Each of us has a few towering strengths — things we are in the top 10% of the world at doing. Not good at. Towering,” he said. “And almost always, that tower casts a shadow. The same trait that makes you exceptional at one thing quietly makes you a liability at another. They aren’t two traits. They’re one trait, seen from two sides.”
He pointed to his own extreme tenacity as an example, noting how it helped him build Remitly through years of investor rejections and early product stumbles, but how it also had a darker side.
“That same tenacity can lock onto things that are unhealthy, or unchangeable, or both,” Oppenheimer shared, candidly discussing his personal experiences with OCD-related anxiety and depression. “This isn’t a character flaw sitting next to my strengths. It is the shadow of my greatest strength, from the same place. Which means it’s something to work with … harness the tower, manage the shadow … rather than something to be ashamed of.”
Seven months into his transition from operational CEO to board chairman, Oppenheimer says the shift has felt surprisingly comfortable. Free from managing daily execution, he now channels that same intensity into coaching current leaders and serving on corporate boards.
“I have so much trust in Sebastian [Gunningham], our CEO, and it’s super exciting to support him in a chair capacity,” Oppenheimer told GeekWire. “I get to share reflections on the journey, mentor, and coach. I didn’t know that would be the case, because you hear so many examples of founder-CEOs who transition and have a really hard time with it.”
That mentorship extends to Seattle’s broader startup community, where Oppenheimer is an active member of Foundations, a collective of local tech founders and AI leaders. When advising early stage entrepreneurs, he urges them to remain hyper-focused on solving a single, deep customer problem rather than spreading themselves thin.
And while AI has vastly accelerated product development, Oppenheimer notes that the core fundamentals of building a business haven’t changed.
“With fintech, you still have to build the trust, get the licensing, and build out the compliance infrastructure and banking relationships,” he said. “The actual building and deployment of product got a lot faster, but if you don’t have great judgment, you can go down the wrong path pretty quickly.”
Looking back 25 years later, Oppenheimer noted that the Dartmouth admissions officers who took a chance on him didn’t look past his test scores by accident — they told him years later that they were drawn to his personal qualities and humanity.
“Two strangers in an office in Hanover found my tower before I had any idea what it was, and then they handed me the place to build on it,” Oppenheimer said in his closing remarks. “That isn’t a debt. It’s a privilege. And the only sensible thing to do with a privilege is use it well.”
Hector Rivas spent a decade building ThriftBooks into one of the country’s largest used-book sellers, before an unlikely second act: co-founding a sports agency representing NFL players.
That career change led him to the problem behind his newest startup, and to the Las Vegas Raiders running back who just invested in it.
Nukleus, based in Issaquah, Wash., is building what Rivas calls an operating system for the business of sports. The idea is a single workspace for everyone in an athlete’s orbit: agent, lawyer, CPA, financial advisor, marketing team, and others. It lets them all work from the same contracts, deadlines and records, rather than each keeping a separate pile of emails and spreadsheets.
The idea came out of Rivas’s years at Disruptive Sports, the agency he co-founded in 2020 and left earlier this year.
Ashton Jeanty, who signed a four-year, $35.9 million rookie contract with the Raiders in 2025, has taken equity in the company and signed on to serve as its public face.
Nukleus has also named four strategic investors: Mat McBride, Microsoft’s executive vice president and CFO for commercial products and infrastructure; WaFd Bank President and CEO Brent Beardall; investor Skyler Nelson, previously of Vulcan Capital and its successor firm Cercano; and Dr. Brett Kindle of the Andrews Institute in Gulf Breeze, Fla.
The company has a team of 12 based out of its Issaquah office, plus a supporting engineering team in India. Most of the team is engineering.
Other executives include CTO Eric Ahlstrom, previously at Microsoft, Unity, Oracle and ESPN; chief creative officer Ben Miller, a former creative director at the University of Washington and CAA Sports; and CFO Matt Porter, who worked with Rivas at ThriftBooks, EcoGoodz and Disruptive.
Nukleus closed a pre-seed round from friends and family in 2025 and is raising again now. Rivas declined to disclose the amount raised by the company so far.
From books to football: Rivas was ThriftBooks’ first CEO, running the used-book seller for about a decade after it launched in 2003. Based in the Seattle area, the company grew during his tenure from a storage unit in Kirkland, Wash., to 10 distribution facilities in 10 states, by his account.
He went on to found EcoGoodz, a used-goods and overstock brokerage, and in 2020 co-founded Disruptive Sports Agency with agent Henry Organ.
Rivas, an NFLPA-certified contract advisor, worked the business side of the agency. He left earlier this year to build Nukleus full time.
The years inside the agency are what produced the idea.
Everyone in a player’s orbit was working off “their own version of the truth,” Rivas explained via email: the agent, the lawyer, the CPA, the financial advisor, the marketing team. The athlete, he said, “was the one absorbing the cost of that disconnect,” in slower decisions and deals that fell through the cracks.
The pitch in Las Vegas: Jeanty and Rivas knew each other from Rivas’s years at the sports agency, and Rivas said the running back had been tracking what he was building.
“Because Ashton and I already knew each other, and he’d been aware of what I was building, the conversation came together naturally,” Rivas said.
He flew to Las Vegas to walk Jeanty through the model, the team, and where the company was headed. Rivas said Jeanty’s equity reflects both money invested and his role promoting the platform.
In a statement, Jeanty described the job of running his own career.
“Coming into the NFL, you become a CEO, directing a team of agents, advisors, and marketers, whether you’re ready or not,” he said. “Nukleus is what finally gets them all on the same page, so I can actually run that team the way it should be run. That’s why I invested in it.”
Where things stand: The product is in a free beta with about 30 users, including athletes, agents, agencies, lawyers and marketing staff. Nukleus plans to charge $99 per user per month for a starter plan and $249 for a full-featured one, with custom enterprise pricing. Athletes join free.
Alongside contract storage, deadline tracking and a shared workspace, the company is building AI tools meant to answer questions about contract terms and league rules.
Others are working similar territory. Agent Live 360 sells software built specifically for sports agents, and Opendorse, which says it works with more than 1,000 sports agents, offers tools to negotiate, approve and track deals. Nukleus says it differs from narrower tools by serving everyone in an athlete’s orbit.
The bigger bet: The company is looking well past a single app.
“Long-term, I don’t see this as a tool athletes use, I see it as the infrastructure the entire business of sports runs on,” Rivas said. “Every athlete becomes the center of their own connected team, and every professional working with them, across every sport, at every level, operates on one shared system instead of a hundred disconnected ones.”
Seattle startup veteran Stefan Kalb is back with a fresh brand and an ambitious vision for enterprise automation in the AI era.
Rebranded earlier this year from Super Labs, Kalb’s latest venture, Latch, is positioning itself as the context layer for enterprise AI, helping companies observe, learn and document how work actually gets done.
Kalb launched the startup alongside co-founder and CTO Jared Kofron, a University of Washington physics alum and former principal software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs last year.
Kalb is well known in startup circles. In 2009, the Bainbridge Island resident founded Molly’s, a fresh food supply company that serviced Seattle-area cafes and hospitals. That led him to start Shelf Engine, which used machine learning to drastically reduce food waste for retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart. After raising $60 million in venture funding, it sold to New York retail data analytics company Crisp in 2025.
We recently caught with Kalb to hear more about Latch, his latest startup venture that has the ambitious goal of liberating humanity “from doing work that owns us.”
In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
Latch captures how work actually gets done. An employee records themselves doing a task and narrates it like they’re training a new hire. Latch turns that into a knowledge graph of the company’s processes and serves it to your AI agents. Your agents finally know how the business really runs.
What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Liberating people from work they don’t like. Every job has hours in it that only exist because software never learned how the company runs. I want that work to disappear, and I don’t think anyone will miss it.
What surprised you after talking to customers?
That people are bad at explaining their own jobs, and they know it. Ask someone to document their process and you get a five-step list. Watch them do it and it’s forty steps with a dozen decisions they never mention, because to them it isn’t a decision. It’s just Tuesday.
How has AI changed the way you build?
The obvious stuff is real, but the interesting change is org shape. The ratio of product to engineering has flipped. So has the ratio of SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) to closers. Building used to be the bottleneck, so you staffed for it. Now the bottleneck is deciding what to build and who to sell it to, and you staff for that instead.
What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
They think we’re Loom. A Loom is a video in a folder waiting for a human to watch it. Latch watches the recording, figures out what you did and why you did it that way, and turns it into something your agents can act on. The video is the input. What we learn from it is the product.
Toughest decision in the past year?
Go to market. AI made reaching customers harder and more expensive, not easier. Every inbox is full of AI-written outbound now, so the cheap channels are gone. We decided to stop competing on volume and spend real money on fewer, deeper conversations. Showing up in person. It costs far more per account than we planned for, and it’s the only thing that works.
One piece of advice for other entrepreneurs?
Look away from the obvious. If someone is telling you about the front of their store, ask them about the loading bay. The best problems are the ones nobody is talking about, usually because they can’t put words to what’s happening. That’s also where you’ll have the least competition.
We’ll know we’ve made it when…
Someone gets furious that we’re down. Not because they lost a file, but because they can’t do their job without us. That’s the moment we stop being a tool and become key infrastructure.
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