Backstage at a Seattle tech event in the early 2000s, Chris Diorio was waiting his turn to speak. Next to him was Jeff Bezos, whose company was already becoming a household name.

Diorio, the leader of Impinj, then a tiny local startup, turned to the Amazon founder: “Jeff, you’ve got a much bigger near-term opportunity than we do,” Diorio recalls saying, “but we’ve got a much bigger long-term opportunity than you do.”

Before Bezos could respond, he was called onstage.

“The technology turned out to be way harder than I thought,” Diorio acknowledged after telling that story in a recent interview. “But that’s what I told him — and I still believe in those words. Our opportunity is to deliver physical intelligence for every item in the world.”

A quarter-century after that chance encounter, Diorio rang the Nasdaq opening bell Tuesday morning in New York City to mark the 10th anniversary of Impinj’s IPO. The company’s tiny, battery-free RFID chips — each smaller than a grain of sand — have been embedded in more than 160 billion items, including clothing, pharmaceuticals, airline luggage, and groceries.

Impinj commands nearly two-thirds of its market, won a patent war against a rival 15 times its size, and has grown from a $250 million IPO valuation to a market cap of more than $4.2 billion. Along the way, the company survived a billion-dollar industry hype cycle that killed nearly every competitor.

And yet, Impinj has posted exactly one profitable year since going public — thanks to a $45 million legal settlement at the time. Its accumulated deficit stands at $400 million, its financial reports show. Less than 1% of the items it envisions connecting are connected today. 

To Diorio, that speaks to the potential. The company is barely scratching the surface. He cited the 1% stat in his comments before ringing the Nasdaq bell on Tuesday morning, saying the “opportunity is so gigantic that we’ll still have a huge runway ahead of us 10 years from now.”

That the company has gotten to this point is as much a Seattle story as it is a technology story. Impinj has benefitted from a network of patient local investors, academic connections and supporters who gave the company the time that Silicon Valley never would have. 

But no one imagined it would take this long when they got started.

From Caltech to Seattle 

The origins of Impinj were at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1990s. Diorio was a graduate student working under Carver Mead, the physicist and engineer who helped coin the term Moore’s Law and helped lay the intellectual foundation for the modern semiconductor industry. 

Together, they discovered a way to change a transistor’s electrical properties after it had been manufactured — a quantum-mechanical phenomenon called “impact-ionized hot electron injection.” That made it possible to build chips so efficient and inexpensive that they could be embedded in disposable packaging. (“Impinj” is derived from that scientific name.)

In an oral history later recorded by the Science History Institute, Mead described Diorio as “a super-bright, super-high-energy guy” who “burned up the track” at Caltech.

After finishing his PhD, Diorio was recommended by Mead to the University of Washington’s computer science department. There was resistance among the UW faculty — his research in analog circuits wasn’t an obvious fit — but professor Larry Ruzzo carried the day. 

Ruzzo essentially said, “This guy is brilliant, and even if he is nothing other than our gift to the rest of the university, we should hire him,” recalled Ed Lazowska, the department chair at the time. 

Diorio joined the UW faculty in 1997. Over the next few years, his research earned a string of honors, including Packard and Sloan fellowships. A couple years later, Diorio met up with Mead on a trip to California, over dinner at Fresh Cream, a long-since-closed French restaurant in Monterey. Diorio asked Mead if it was time to start a company. 

“Are you up for it?” Mead asked. Diorio said yes. They started the paperwork the next day.

Impinj was incorporated in April 2000, headquartered in Seattle. It quickly got the attention of two local investment firms, with behind-the-scenes help from the everpresent Lazowska. 

On April 21, 2000, the UW computer science chair emailed Bob Nelsen at Arch Venture Partners and Tom Alberg at Madrona. He explained that he was urging Diorio and Mead “to get some local $ for the connections,” and that he had pointed them to Arch and Madrona. 

Patrick Ennis, then at Arch, reached out to Diorio that same day. As Ennis recalled in a recent interview, there were plenty of Silicon Valley firms that wanted in, thanks to Mead’s reputation, but Diorio and Mead decided to take Lazowska’s advice and go with Seattle investors. 

Diorio, who likes to take walking meetings, negotiated the terms with Ennis as they made their way on foot through the University of Washington Arboretum one day. The investment closed that summer: $15 million, split evenly between Arch and Madrona. 

Impinj at the time had patents, prototypes, and no real business plan. 

“That’s how venture capital should be done,” said Ennis, who has since become a Madrona venture partner. “You make big bets on great technology and great people.”

Betting the company on RFID

Bill Colleran joined Impinj as CEO in January 2001. He and Diorio had designed satellite chips together at defense contractor TRW in the 1980s. Colleran had just sold his Bluetooth startup, gotten married, and gone on his honeymoon. He came home to a message from Diorio: he’d started a company in Seattle and wanted Colleran to join. 

Colleran was soon in Seattle — one of six or eight people working out of what he warmly recalls as “a crappy little building” in the University District, several of them former TRW colleagues. 

“We were kind of getting the band back together,” he said. 

RFID wasn’t the original plan. Impinj’s first target was improving power efficiency for 3G wireless base stations, but the dot-com bust killed that market, and regardless, the company was too small to compete with the major chipmakers in the wireless industry.

The team spent two years exploring what to do with their technology. Cable modems required too much dependence on Intel, as Colleran recalled. Cell phone radios were dominated by players too big to compete against. GPS turned out to be a poor technical fit — Impinj’s chips excelled at low power, but GPS demanded low electrical noise, a different problem entirely. 

So they eventually settled on RFID, the technology that uses tiny wireless chips to identify and track physical objects. The industry was young, the standards were still being written, and Impinj’s low-power technology seemed tailor-made for it.

As Madrona’s Ennis and Tim Porter write in a piece pegged to the IPO anniversary, “When you have a truly powerful, groundbreaking deep technology, it behooves you to wander the product-market fit wilderness for a while, even when that is unsettling and downright frightening, and even when it runs contrary to what you learn in a VC class in business school.”

Then, a stroke of luck: In June 2003, Walmart announced it would require its top suppliers to tag every pallet and case with RFID chips. The Impinj team celebrated their good fortune. 

“We all high-fived,” Diorio recalled. “We did it. Eighteen months, we’re gonna IPO.”

In reality, it would be another 13 years.

Surviving the RFID hype cycle

Walmart’s announcement triggered a gold rush of venture capital investment into RFID technology startups. But there was no global spectrum allocated, no standard that worked, and no products ready to deliver on the promise. Walmart’s own January 2005 deadline came and went. Only half of its top suppliers could comply.

By 2008, the hype cycle had collapsed. Nearly every RFID startup died or got acquired. 

“More than $1 billion of VC money got poured into RFID,” Diorio recalled. “Way up, crashing down, and only one company that made it out the other side. … We were lucky enough that it was us.”

The real inflection didn’t come until around 2010, when retailers began tagging individual items, not just pallets. Knowing exactly which products were where, in real time, could lift same-store sales by as much as 10%, by solving a basic problem: getting items out of back rooms and onto shelves, making them available for purchase before customers gave up looking for them. 

Impinj filed to go public in April 2011, seeking to raise $100 million. But choppy markets — capped by the botched Facebook IPO in May 2012 — closed the window, and the company withdrew the filing that summer, raising $21 million privately instead.

After 14 years as CEO, Colleran stepped aside in 2014. 

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a lifelong RFID guy,” he said. 

An exit wasn’t in sight — the IPO window was shut, and a sale didn’t make sense because Impinj made both chips and readers, and “any of the companies that would be interested in boxes weren’t chip companies, and the chip companies weren’t interested in boxes.”

Diorio took over as CEO that November. The venture investors were 14 years in and needed a path to liquidity. He spent the next two years sorting things out and getting the company ready.

The long road to IPO

Porter, now a Madrona managing director, who had worked closely with Alberg on the Impinj investment since 2007, recalled the final stretch. One of the first target dates for trading landed on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union, sending markets into a tailspin. 

“It was a little bit like, are you kidding — what next?” Porter said. 

But on July 21, 2016 — some 16 years after its founding — Impinj went public on the Nasdaq at $14 a share, raising $67 million at a market cap of just over $250 million. 

Alberg, the late, legendary investor, who was one of the first people to back Bezos’ fledgling online bookstore, personally invested $500,000 in the offering — a rare move among venture investors, who typically use IPOs to finally cash out, not double down. 

Porter called Alberg’s move “a really big signal” to the market that demonstrated his long-term belief in Impinj. It was also a smart investment, as it turned out. As noted during the Nasdaq bell-ringing Tuesday morning, Impinj’s share price has grown by nearly 900% since the IPO.

But there was one last hitch. On the night before trading began, the offering was so oversubscribed that the final allocation became a drawn-out negotiation between the board and the bankers over how many shares to issue. It dragged on so long that Diorio and CFO Evan Fein, stuck in Chicago for the roadshow, missed their flight to New York.

Fein had been one of the first people hired at Impinj, joining Colleran in the University District office in 2001 and staying through the whole ride. He was not about to miss the bell-ringing.

The CFO wanted to make a run for it, but Diorio told him there was no way — the flight departed in 30 minutes from O’Hare. Fein tried anyway. He didn’t make it. They stayed in Chicago overnight and caught a flight the next morning.

The company’s CTO at the time rang the bell in Diorio’s place. 

Trial by fire

The celebration was short-lived. After the IPO, demand for RFID surged — but Impinj, thinly capitalized after years of private fundraising, didn’t have the operational capacity to fill the orders. The stock quadrupled from its $14 IPO price to more than $60. Then it all came apart.

NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch chipmaker roughly 15 times Impinj’s size, moved aggressively on pricing and took business away. Customers who had been stockpiling RFID tags pulled back on orders. Revenue declined. On Feb. 2, 2018, the stock plunged 47% in a single day.

What followed was the darkest stretch in the company’s history. The company laid off 9% of its workforce. Then a former employee complaint triggered an audit committee investigation, forcing the company to miss an SEC filing deadline and drawing a deficiency notice from Nasdaq.

For months, the outcome was uncertain. Executives couldn’t trade their stock or issue grants to employees. The investigation cost $1.4 million. NXP, sensing an opportunity, continued to press its advantage.

Diorio described the investigation as mentally draining. The company was spending millions of dollars, the outside attorneys weren’t sharing their findings along the way, following the standard practice, and there was no way to know for certain how it would end. 

“You firmly believe you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, “but who knows if somebody actually did something wrong that you don’t know about.” 

The investigation ultimately cleared the company, finding “no credible evidence” of wrongdoing, and Impinj received what Diorio called a rare letter from the SEC formally closing the matter. The stock surged 35% on the news.

Diorio called 2018 a turning point. “It was the year where everything got really difficult, the team and the company rallied, and it was the strength and the persistence of the team and their dedication that pulled us out the other side,” he said. “I’ll never forget that.”

The following year, Impinj went on offense. In June 2019, the company sued NXP, alleging it had copied 26 of Impinj’s patents. NXP countersued. The litigation stretched across five years and four lawsuits. In 2023, a federal jury found NXP had willfully infringed Impinj’s patents and awarded $18.5 million in damages. NXP settled in 2024, paying $45 million upfront and agreeing to ongoing royalties of roughly $17 million a year.

Where Impinj stands today

Diorio helped coin an industry term for the technology Impinj had built: RAIN RFID, short for “RAdio-frequency IdentificatioN.” It distinguished what Impinj does (using battery-free chips to identify and track individual items at scale) from other flavors of RFID used for key cards, animal tags, and contactless payments.

Today the company employs more than 450 people, most of them based in its headquarters at 400 Fairview Ave. N. in Seattle, with a test and development lab on Beacon Hill. The workforce is a fraction of NXP’s, which has more than 32,000 employees — a reminder that Impinj has built a market-leading position with a comparatively small team. 

Impinj holds an estimated 64% of the global market for RAIN RFID endpoint chips, up from 51% the year before, according to ABI Research. The company first overtook rival NXP for the market lead in 2024. The industry shipped nearly 53 billion chips in 2024, roughly one for every six or seven people on Earth. Impinj has connected more than 160 billion items cumulatively.

Each chip is battery-free, costs a few pennies, can be read wirelessly from 30 feet away, and identifies individual items at a rate of up to 1,000 per second. Vision systems can’t identify individual items. QR codes require line of sight. NFC has a range of four inches. Bluetooth requires a battery.

“Name any other technology that even gets close,” Diorio said. “You won’t come up with one.”

Privacy concerns nearly killed the RFID industry in its early years, when consumer groups campaigned against the technology in the mid-2000s. Although there’s privacy innovation still to come, Diorio said those fears have largely faded. The chips carry only a number, respond only when powered by an external reader, and don’t track people. 

One retailer already turns its tags invisible after the point of sale, though Diorio noted that’s “not the best solution because then that inhibits recycling.” 

His longer-term goal is cryptographic security, chips that can’t be cloned, putting “a dent in global counterfeiting” while keeping consumer data protected. 

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is shifting. Diorio views NXP as the only real competitor — “everybody else in the market is a partner,” he said — but the competitor list in Impinj’s SEC filings has grown from two names at the time of the IPO to more than six, including four Chinese chipmakers. When a product costs pennies, low-cost competitors have a natural opening.

Retail apparel remains the core market. About 60% of all RAIN RFID tags go on clothing. But that reliance has made the business volatile. Three times in 10 years as a public company, demand from retailers has dropped sharply, dragging revenue and the stock with it. 

Earlier this year, Impinj’s stock plunged after the company issued guidance well below expectations. Part of the challenge: the company’s top three customers account for 61% of revenue.

The financial picture reflects a company that is still proving itself. Revenue has grown from $123 million in 2018 to $361 million last year, but Impinj has posted just one profitable year since going public — a $41 million gain in 2024, boosted by the NXP settlement.

To Diorio, all of this is prelude. Apparel, he said, is “tiny” compared to the total market of every item manufactured, transported, and sold. General merchandise, supply chain logistics, pharmaceuticals, food — each is an order of magnitude larger, or more.

“We have a gigantic blue ocean,” he said. “It’s the size of the Pacific.”

Machine learning and AI

The company is also using machine learning to move beyond handheld inventory scanning. Fixed readers mounted in ceiling tiles and other locations can track items autonomously at store choke points, from receiving docks to fitting rooms to exits, replacing employees who currently walk the aisles waving handheld scanners. 

More broadly, Diorio sees tagged items as a data source for AI, generating hard information at every point in a product’s journey from factory to shelf to recycling bin. 

“Most of the modeling that goes on today is based on guessing,” he said. “If the models are based on hard data, it’s immensely more valuable.” 

The biggest bet ahead is food. Three of the top five U.S. grocers (Kroger, Walmart, and Albertsons/Safeway) are piloting RFID for food freshness, according to Diorio, using tags to identify items approaching their expiration dates so they can be marked down before they end up in the trash. 

A European grocer is pushing toward fully automated checkout, where a basket of tagged items moves down a conveyor and is read instantly, no scanning required.

These are pilots, not deployments. The grocery market dwarfs apparel in volume, and Impinj has yet to prove it can crack it at scale. But here again, Diorio sees this as untapped potential. 

“My enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been,” he said. “We are just getting going.”

And this time, he made it to New York to ring the opening bell. 

During his Nasdaq remarks on Tuesday morning, Diorio told the story of getting stuck in Chicago for the IPO a decade ago, using the anecdote to make a larger point.

“The team stepped in,” he said. “The team that was here covered everything, rang the bell, did all the process, and did it beautifully. In fact, probably better than we could have. And that is the story of Impinj. It’s the team.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated July 23, 2026, to reflect ABI Research’s 2025 market share estimate of 64% for Impinj, up from 51% in 2024 as originally reported. The spelling of former CFO Evan Fein’s name was also corrected.

Tom Hiddleston is fascinated by Pompeii. As he tells me below, "Pompeii isn't just a place; it's the people." Outside of acting, one of Hiddleston's true passions in life is the ancient world. Stealing a page out of his character Loki's playbook on the Marvel show on Disney+, Hiddleston attempts to travel back to 79 AD to investigate the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston.

Back in the late 90s when absolutely everybody knew that Java was going to become the one programming language to rule them all, the Java Ring was handed out to folks at Java developer conferences as an example of how it was going to revolutionize smart wearable devices. Recently [Daisuke Yamazaki] got his mittens on one of these collector’s items to see about reviving it.

We talked about these rings and associated iButton devices before, with their intended use being primarily to act as authentication keys. For the Java Ring, this use was mostly just used as a kind of gag, whereby visitors to these conferences could specify their coffee preferences at a terminal, having this programmed into the ring so that they could get their desired cup of literal java at various bean juice dispensers around the conference site.

Talking to one of these iButton devices requires a so-called Blue Dot adapter, which [Yamazaki-san] purchased along with the ring. Although the device happily responded on the 1-wire bus, figuring out how to interact with the original Java-based firmware and answering the question of how much of the original information of someone’s coffee preferences in ’98 were retained would require more sleuthing.

After recovering an installer for the Dallas Semiconductor’s IB-DE IDE from the Wayback Machine, this posed the next problem. As it was a 32-bit Java binary, which didn’t play nice with the modern Java 25 runtime and belying the ‘write once, run anywhere’ marketing phrase of back then. Downgrading to 32-bit Java 1.8 with since removed communication APIs helped here.

With the IDE in place, the traffic between the Java Ring and the PC-based software could be analyzed to figure out what was going on. This revealed CRC errors that pointed to the built-in lithium backup battery having expired. Unfortunately the stainless steel case is meant to be sealed and thus turn into e-waste the moment said battery calls it quits. Here fortunately a Japanese TV program picked up on these efforts and featured his efforts on national TV.

This led to the happy ending, with some help with others in replacing this battery. This also answered the question of which parts of the firmware and data were in the battery-backed RAM and which in ROM. Although full details of the findings here are a bit scarce, it seems that the original data was lost along with the dead back-up battery, but the ROM retained the JVM and allowed for a new program to be eventually written to the device and retained across reader sessions.

Although these days the various NFC standards have made bulky devices like iButtons rather obsolete, they’re still a fun look at an era when it was thought that lugging a tiny computer as a (key) ring around for authentication was the future. Of course these days we mostly lug an entire 6″ smartphone for that purpose, so maybe the joke is on us after all.

Thanks to [Wood] for the tip.

In 1675, while transporting a barometer by night, the astronomer Jean Picard noticed a glow inside its glass tube, just above the mercury. As the mercury sloshed and splashed across the surface of the glass, a static electric charge had built up, which was discharging by ionizing the residual gas molecules inside the evacuated tube. [Styropyro] recreated this effect, and found that the dim glow could be made much stronger by adding some noble gas to the tube.

It starts with a simple recreation: he took a volumetric flask, attached a narrow glass stem to the mouth, added some mercury to the flask, evacuated it with a vacuum pump, and sealed off the glass stem. This produced a faint glow when shaken, but it was only really visible under very low light. When [Styropyro] brought it near a Tesla coil, however, it did glow much more brightly.

Backfilling an identical flask with neon to about 40 millitorr produced a much more spectacular result (a low pressure in the tube is necessary, but moderate pressure variations don’t significantly alter the effect). When shaken even slightly, this neon-containing flask produced a bright orange-red glow just above the surface of the mercury. Points of obstruction, such as those in a zig-zag tube, produced a brighter glow. A krypton-containing tube glowed blue, but less brightly than the neon tube.

Since this is, essentially, a triboelectric effect, other materials besides mercury should work; [Styropyro] tested several materials, and found that pieces of Teflon produced a faint glow, and copper beads a somewhat brighter glow. Unfortunately, Galinstan, the obvious replacement for mercury, wets and coats glass, preventing a charge buildup.

Without an added noble gas, the standard glow of barometric light comes from the excitation of mercury vapors, a glow which can also be seen in mercury rectifiers, and which excites the phosphors of fluorescent light bulbs.

Thanks to [Vik Olliver] for the tip!

Although we’d rather bring you news of clever modifications and repairs down on the farm, more often than not, the name “John Deere” has appeared on the pages of Hackaday because of their opposition to farmers actually being able to work on the machines their livelihoods depend on. But thanks to a settlement reached between the company and the Federal Trade Commission this week, farmers seem to have been handed a much-needed win in the Right to Repair battle.

When a lawsuit against a company ends in a settlement, it usually means spending money they would rather pay than go to court. Indeed, earlier cases against John Deere have resulted in plenty of checks being written. But this time around, the FTC agreement requires Deere to make its diagnostic and repair software available to owners and independent shops. It also has a clause that prevents them from retaliating against owners who want to handle their own repairs rather than going through the company’s official service channels — hard to believe that’s something that actually needs to be specified, but it does give you a hint as to just how bad the situation has been. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this story.

Sounds like the Feds were busy this week, as the Federal Communications Commission also gave the green light to Reflect Orbital to launch a prototype satellite for their controversial “sunlight as a service” concept. The company plans to put the spacecraft into a roughly 600 km orbit around the planet, where it will deploy its 324-square-meter reflector and angle itself to illuminate a spot on the ground. It might sound like something a Bond villain would come up with, but Reflect Orbital says the capability will be used to beam sunlight directly onto solar panels at night and to provide light for search-and-rescue operations.

As you might expect, providing such a service on a global scale would require many such reflectors, which is where the concern really comes in. Critics note that a sky full of literal mirrors can cause all sorts of issues, ranging from the scientific to the scenic. The American Astronomical Society points out that each satellite in the constellation could appear to be four times as bright as the full Moon, and that it’s possible an amateur sky watcher could get an eyeball full of redirected sunlight should one of them unexpectedly zip past the aperture of their backyard telescope.

Moving from 600 km above to 400 meters below the surface of the ocean, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have provided our first look at the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s final ship, Quest. The schooner-rigged steamship was launched in 1917 and had a storied career that included not only a number of scientific expeditions but service during the Second World War. The ship ultimately met its fate in 1962 when it was damaged by ice and sank off the north coast of Labrador. The exact location of the wreck was unknown until its discovery in June of 2024.

Now, before you start questioning your knowledge of history, we should probably clarify that Shackleton was not exploring the Labrador Sea in 1962. He did, however, die aboard Quest in 1922 at the age of 47 as he was preparing to depart on another expedition to the Antarctic.

This next one isn’t new, but it’s the first time we’ve come across this gallery of gorgeous Soviet-era control rooms. Hackaday isn’t the place to dive into the political and socioeconomic aspects of the USSR. All we know is that they were putting out some damn fine-looking control panels back then. Half of them look like they wouldn’t be out of place on a Moon base, and the white lab coats with the little hats really complete the retrofuturism vibe. Now we have to go watch Chernobyl again.

In software news, FreeCAD has received a new tool that we know many in the community will be excited about: Banana For Scale. Forget the confusion between Metric and Imperial measurements. Placing a 3D banana in the scene alongside your rendered part provides a globally recognized size reference. While the free and open-source CAD package has often been criticized for being behind its commercial counterparts in terms of user interface and overall feature set, we think this addition should go a long way toward evening the scales — no pun intended.

Finally, Phoronix reports that Linux 7.2-rc3 includes several vital updates to device drivers for the Sega Dreamcast. Users running Linux on the ill-fated PlayStation 2 competitor will benefit from improvements made to the keyboard, mouse, and joystick interfaces. These fixes join the improved code for the console’s GD-ROM optical drive that emerged back in April. The “Year of the Linux Desktop” continues to be elusive, but it certainly looks like 2026 may finally be the Year of Linux on the Dreamcast.

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See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.

Preservationists usually take great care to prevent fungi from appearing the world of art, but in the case of [Kexin Wang]’s Funguy project, the fungus itself is the art. It uses a laser diode to repeatedly trace an outline onto a dish of agar gel in which fungus is growing, and the photophobic fungus grows only up to the edge of the laser-traced figure, potentially creating complex designs.

This project evolved out of a research project in which they developed a computer model for fungal growth, then used its predictions and a laser to control a fungus’s growth pattern. The model has two parts: a temporal convolutional neural network which learns fungi growth patterns from a series of images, and a cellular automaton to simulate these growth patterns under different starting conditions. The cellular automaton’s rules aren’t fixed; each cell runs a small neural network which learns the rules under supervision from the convolutional network. By training these networks on images of the growth stages of three different fungi, it was able to realistically predict the different growth patterns of the different species.

To actually control the growth pattern, the researchers tried a series of different wavelengths and laser powers; shorter wavelengths tended to work better, with a 405 nm laser working best. The growth model complemented the laser setup by predicting in which areas the growth medium had run out of nutrients. Since fungus would no longer spread in these regions, the laser no longer needed to trace these sections. The Funguy kit’s laser system itself is similar to a laser engraver, with an XY-kinematic system seemingly built from a DVD drive frame. It uses fungi from the Mucor genus, though it can print with other photophobic microorganisms, such as slime molds.

This project seems aimed at artistic and educational uses, but considering the various electronic parts that have been made of fungi, more functional applications should be possible.

The University of Washington’s CoMotion program announced 10 startups that secured UW-licensed intellectual property over the past year. Eight are in healthcare, spanning diagnostic tools, medical devices and new therapeutics. The other two focus on K-12 education or climate change.

CoMotion, which operates as a collaborative innovation hub, reports that it and its predecessors have fostered 310 deep-tech companies over the past three decades, more than one-third of which are still active. Those businesses have raised $1.8 billion from investors in the past five years alone.

Here’s a look at the 10 startups:

CathConnect is a Seattle-based startup making urinary catheters that are easy to insert into a patient’s bladder and will safely disconnect if pulled out accidentally. The devices could help prevent the 450,000 traumatic catheter removals that occur in the U.S. each year, which lead to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs and increased infection risk.

CathConnect was launched by Joelle Tudor, a former UW undergraduate researcher and Michael Malone, a UW doctoral candidate.

Climate Solutions International offers a software platform that helps government employees analyze factors like climate resilience, cost and carbon emissions for proposed infrastructure projects. The startup is the brainchild of Jan Whittington, a UW urban planning professor who previously received funding from the World Bank to apply these strategies across 300 cities in 30 countries.

Climate Solutions International was selected for CoMotion’s second Climate Tech Incubator, a six-month program located at the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, a public-private partnership in the city’s downtown.

Colleague AI created an AI tool and chatbots to assist K-12 teachers craft lesson plans and streamline other classroom operations. The technology was developed by Min Sun, a UW professor of education and Colleague AI co-founder, with substantial research and testing by educators.

The UW College of Education was selected two years ago as a national center for research and development on using generative AI as a teaching tool, a designation that included a $10 million grant to support Sun’s work.

DetellaDx is using AI and single-cell technology — a research tool that allows scientists to analyze genetic information in individual cells — to detect early stage cancers with a high degree of accuracy.  The diagnostic approach is based on research by Scott Kennedy, an associate professor in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology. DetellaDx’s initial focus is on women with a genetic predisposition for ovarian cancer. 

KeenSight Health aims to help clinicians communicate better with patients through its Clinical Intelligence Engine, a coaching software that reviews doctor-patient conversations and gives physicians practical feedback. The platform also incorporates patient history stored in electronic records and other resources.

KeenSight was co-founded by past and current UW professors Dr. Ian Bennett, Dr. Misbah Keen and Larry Mauksch. The startup is based in Bellevue, Wash.

Nanosync Labs has created wearable sensors that monitor brain health and sleep without invasive procedures. The devices and platform allow for continuous tracking of changes in brain pressure and deep sleep, a restorative stage essential for brain health. The sensors enable earlier detection of neurological conditions, benefiting patients with traumatic brain injury and sleep disorders.

The technology was developed in the UW lab of Jae-Hyun Chung, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Viggy Sakthivelpathi, who earned a PhD from the UW, is Nanosync’s co-founder and CEO.

PEAR-Net Society provides resources to help medical and public-health experts understand whether medications, chemicals, infections, vaccines, or other exposures may harm a fetus during pregnancy.

The organization relies on two well-established databases documenting teratogens, factors that can cause birth defects. These include the Teratogen Information System, or TERIS, developed by Dr. Jan Friedman, a UW graduate, and Shepard’s Catalog of Teratogenic Agents.

Precision Cognition Labs has developed a tool for memory assessment that can detect mild dysfunction and track changes in cognitive performance. The assessment is faster and easier to use than tools that require in-person, clinical evaluations, allowing for more frequent checkups and longitudinal studies.

The startup is a joint venture between the UW and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where it is based. Andrea Stocco, a UW associate professor and expert in computational psychiatry, is a co-founder and scientific director.

Prosthetic Fit 360 is building sensors that improve outcomes for patients with lower-limb prosthetics. The devices use trilateration, a technology that measures an object’s precise location by calculating distances from multiple known reference points. The startup was founded by Conor Lanahan, who earned his bioengineering and biomedical engineering doctorate degree from the UW.

Skape Bio is using AI to create new therapeutics that target G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs. The receptors, which are located on cell membranes, detect hormones, neurotransmitters and other signals that trigger biological responses.

The Copenhagen-based startup was founded by Chris Norn in partnership with UW Nobel laureate David Baker and scientists from the UW’s Institute for Protein Design and the BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen.

Oh, the farming lifestyle…living off the land, fending for yourself. But who’s got time for all that? For the modern hacker, the best option in the garden space may be this over-engineered automated AI tomato farm created by [Gerd Nicolay]. You can even interact with it right now through the magic of the Internet.

[Gerd] started off with your run-of-the-mill pot and plant, choosing the humble tomato to keep the system simple. Then things started to escalate, with the addition of automatic lighting, watering, and data logging environmental parameters like humidity. Now we’re getting somewhere, but there’s more that can be added. How about an entire AI council to monitor and decide the fate of each individual tomato while recording an entire storyline to go alongside the growing cycle?

That’s right, four different models collaborate to ensure only the utmost quality of care for these tomatoes based on camera feeds, humidity, and various other environmental factors being recorded constantly. Is this a little overkill? Maybe for those who have even a modest sense of gardening knowledge — but who can bash the mountain of documentation and data collection on these wonderful little plants?

Perhaps the best part: you can recommend actions for the AI counsel to take from the comfort of your own web browser. While the TomatoFarm might be slightly unnecessary for the average farmer, if you want to try a more reasonable monitoring system, we have you covered too!

Seattle-based Overland AI has landed a U.S. Marine Corps contract to produce autonomous ground vehicles, a milestone the defense-tech startup says makes it the first ground autonomy company to serve as the prime contractor on a military production deal. 

The nearly $20 million agreement — $19.7 million, according to the Department of War — calls for Overland to deliver more than a dozen autonomous ground vehicles, along with the software that runs them. Initial deliveries are expected to begin sometime in early 2027.

The agreement was announced June 29. The vehicles will work with a Marine Corps system that shoots down enemy drones. Overland’s vehicles will initially handle resupply for those crews rather than replace any existing vehicles, co-founder and CEO Byron Boots said in a media briefing, as reported by trade publications DefenseScoop and Defense One. 

Boots is a University of Washington machine-learning professor who leads the school’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He co-founded Overland in 2022 with Stephanie Bonk, the company’s president, spinning it out of the UW. 

The company’s technology is designed to let military vehicles drive themselves across rough, off-road terrain in places where GPS isn’t available. 

Overland has grown to more than 100 employees and raised over $140 million in venture funding, including a $100 million round in February led by the venture firm 8VC. It opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in Seattle last year, and ranks No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our index of the top privately held Pacific Northwest tech companies. 

The company isn’t alone in chasing military ground autonomy. One of its rivals, Maryland-based Forterra, won a larger, $92 million Marine Corps production deal earlier in June — but as the autonomy supplier under prime contractor Oshkosh Defense, rather than holding the contract itself. That’s the distinction Overland is claiming as a first. 

Overland’s deal came through a Pentagon program called APFIT — short for Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies — which fast-tracks funding to move promising technology from prototypes into production. For Overland, it marks a step from testing and demonstrations into building vehicles at scale for the military. 

“We’re registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation,” Boots said in the briefing, pointing to the war in Ukraine as evidence of a growing role for uncrewed vehicles.

Overland has been working for years with the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, also completing a multiyear DARPA autonomy program. The new contract builds on recent work integrating its self-driving technology into Marine Corps vehicles.

Ballmer Group, the Bellevue, Wash.-based philanthropy founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, is spinning out its Washington state work into an independent organization, one of three new regional groups launched Wednesday as part of a broader restructuring.

The new organization, MoveUp Washington, will be led by Andi Smith, who currently heads Ballmer Group’s Washington regional office. It will operate independently from Ballmer Group but continue to be funded by the Ballmers, carrying on the philanthropy’s existing mission of improving economic mobility for kids and families in the state.

Similar organizations are launching in Southeast Michigan and Los Angeles County — MoveUp Southeast Michigan and MoveUp LA — led by Kylee Mitchell Wells and Nina Revoyr, respectively, who currently lead Ballmer Group’s regional offices in those areas.

As the three regional groups become independent, Ballmer Group said in a news release that it will narrow its own focus to a smaller set of large, scalable initiatives aimed at improving economic mobility for kids and families nationally.

“Our intention is to ensure that these local philanthropies can be permanent, ongoing resources in each region, while we concentrate our national efforts on advancing economic mobility in new ways,” the Ballmers said in a statement.

Ballmer Group CEO Terri Ludwig, who helped guide the shift, will serve as a founding board member for all three new organizations while continuing to lead Ballmer Group.

Each organization will establish its own independent board and continue its existing regional work while evolving to meet local needs, according to Ballmer Group.

“Across these regions, our teams have demonstrated exceptional leadership and have distributed more than $1.5 billion in grants over the past decade,” Ludwig said in a statement.

Examples of past giving include:

• $38 million to strengthen mental health services in Washington, including graduate-level clinical education scholarships coordinated through the University of Washington’s School of Social Work.
• $43 million to the UW and other groups to boost early childhood education, including more than 1,500 scholarships over eight years.
• $400 million toward Black investment fund managers and Black businesses, working with firms including Fairview Capital and Goldman Sachs.

Ballmer Group team members currently working in Washington, Southeast Michigan and Los Angeles County will transition to the new organizations over the next year. Current grantees will continue to be supported throughout the process, with no disruption to existing commitments, according to Ballmer Group.

The Ballmers are still determining the long-term financial structure for the new organizations — an endowment is one option under consideration, though not something being established at launch.

Steve Ballmer, who served as Microsoft CEO from 2000–2014, is founder of USAFacts, a nonpartisan organization founded in 2017 to make government data more accessible and understandable. He’s also chairman of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team.

The science team behind the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially launched a decade-long survey of the southern sky — an ambitious project three decades in the making.

The start of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, follows years of planning and construction of the billion-dollar observatory in Chile. Scientists celebrated the completion of the construction phase with a “First Look” batch of pictures a year ago, and then turned to preparing for the LSST in earnest.

In February, the Rubin team turned on the observatory’s Alert Production Pipeline, which can send out millions of notifications about potentially noteworthy astronomical phenomena. That set the stage for what some have compared to filming a time-lapse movie of the cosmos.

“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made. This moment reflects decades of vision, innovation and the power of federal investment in science through the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy,” acting NSF Director Brian Stone said in a news release. “Every night, NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will expand the frontiers of knowledge and strengthen America’s global leadership in science and innovation.”

Researchers at the University of Washington have played a key role in the project, primarily by developing software tools for analyzing the terabytes of data that the observatory is expected to produce on a nightly basis. That work is done at UW’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology, also known as the DiRAC Institute.

UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezić, who heads up the LSST campaign, helped determine when the observatory was ready for the survey.

“The decision to officially begin the LSST was made after a period of system optimization and a careful operational review of technical readiness, data system performance and scientific validation,” he said. Among the factors considered were image quality, effective survey speed, system reliability and calibration accuracy.

The observatory makes use of the world’s largest digital camera (3,200 megapixels per image) to capture a fresh picture every 40 seconds. If the skies over Chile are clear, the entire southern sky can be photographed over the course of just a few nights. Then Rubin begins the next round of picture-taking.

The concept for the observatory began with discussions among astronomers in the 1990s, and picked up steam in 2007 when Seattle-area tech pioneer Charles Simonyi and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates contributed a total of $30 million to the project. In 2020, the observatory was named after the late astronomer Vera Rubin — and its 8.4-meter (27.5-foot) telescope was dubbed the Simonyi Survey Telescope in honor of Simonyi’s family.

To celebrate the start of the survey, the Rubin Observatory team released a 1.7-gigapixel image featuring an “ocean of stars” in the constellation Lupus. “The faint, glowing clouds spread across this image are galactic cirrus: clouds of interstellar gas and dust that can be seen in the foreground of the Milky Way,” the team said in an image advisory.

Distant stars aren’t Rubin’s only targets. The survey is also expected to supercharge the search for small bodies in our own solar system. During preparations for the LSST, the Rubin team reported the discovery of more than 11,000 previously unseen asteroids. And that’s just the start: A computer simulation suggests that the survey could map more than 5 million asteroids.

Rubin’s observations could even shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, invisible components of the cosmos that together make up more than 95 percent of the universe’s mass-energy content.

Scientists say the key to Rubin’s success will be the ability to track changes in the night sky over the course of 10 years.

“With its world-class design and tools, Rubin Observatory will capture the dynamic nature of our cosmos and reveal unimagined insights into our universe’s biggest mysteries, from our own solar system to the very structure of the universe,” said Dario Gil, undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy. “By seeking to understand the enigmatic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter, we are not just observing the stars; we are striving to grasp the fundamental laws that govern our existence.”

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and is operated jointly by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.