Helion Energy, in its hard-charging pursuit of fusion energy, has opened an office in downtown Seattle as its headcount swells to 800 employees.

The company already occupies five buildings in Everett, Wash., where it’s headquartered, plus operations in the central Washington town of Malaga, where Helion is building what it hopes could be the world’s first commercial fusion plant.

“Who would have thought it when we founded the company in 2013 with only five of us,” said CEO and co-founder David Kirtley in a GeekWire interview, marveling at the growth.

In June, Helion announced $465 million in new funding, bringing its total capital raised to more than $1.5 billion and its valuation to 10 times that figure.

The company is racing to master fusion, which produces energy by smashing together light atoms — essentially replicating the process that powers the sun and stars. No one has been able to create a commercially viable amount of energy from fusion here on Earth, though notable progress is being made by research institutions and private companies.

The planet is increasingly hungry for abundant, clean power as data centers gobble energy and transportation, buildings and industrial processes shift toward electrification.

That has helped spike interest in fusion, and the sector globally has raised $14.24 billion since 2021, according to the Fusion Industry Association, with multiple companies predicting they’ll succeed in producing sufficient energy in the next five to 10 years. Helion has one of the most ambitious targets, aiming to reach that mark in two years.

The company is No. 1 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

The company’s Seattle office is 15,631 square feet in the 8th + Olive building, in a space formerly occupied by Airbnb. The move comes as Seattle pushes to bring businesses back into its core: The city’s urban neighborhoods had an office vacancy rate of 28.2% in the second quarter of this year, with downtown alone at 34.9%, according to Kidder Mathews research.

Kirtley said they’re hiring and the goal is to have 100 employees downtown working on business and operations, recruiting and finance.

Back in Everett, teams are running tests on the company’s prototype fusion device, named Polaris, and working to get a smaller fusion machine called Tiny Merge online. The startup is also ramping up a facility for assembly work where employees and automated systems will manufacture energy-carrying capacitors, semiconductor modules and other hardware. The facility is currently producing initial test pieces.

The Malaga site will be home to the Orion facility and will include three buildings: an office building, already complete and in use; a building for final assembly of components shipped from Everett, also finished; and the generator building, which will house the 50-megawatt Orion generator and associated power electronics. So far the beams are up for the last building, with the goal of getting it “weather tight” before winter, Kirtley said.

Helion is charging ahead with Orion and building its manufacturing capabilities while continuing to tackle the physics challenges of producing energy from fusion.

The plant must be operational in two years to meet Helion’s contract with Microsoft to provide energy for a nearby data center.

REDMOND, Wash. — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman came to Rocketdyne’s facility here today to give a pep talk to the space company’s employees — and lay out his vision for the future of America’s space effort.

Isaacman made clear that nuclear power will be a big part of that vision.

“NASA is at our best when we’re doing the near-impossible,” he said. “There is no obvious revenue model or business case for what we’re doing. We’re just out there pursuing the secrets of the universe, and nuclear or fission-powered spacecraft make sense in that it helps us extend our reach farther into the solar system.”

The pathfinder mission for NASA’s nuclear ambitions is likely to be SR-1 Freedom, a Mars probe that’s scheduled for launch in 2028. SR-1 Freedom is designed to carry a fission reactor and nuclear electric propulsion system.

Rocketdyne’s Redmond facility is working on thrusters for the system. “We built here, in Redmond, the Advanced Electric Propulsion System,” Rocketdyne CEO Kristin Houston told GeekWire before Isaacman’s talk. “It’s a 12-kilowatt Hall-thruster system, and that is going to be the propulsion element on the SR-1 Freedom. So, yeah, we’re really proud of that.”

Today’s visit was part of the Pacific Northwest leg of Isaacman’s nationwide “Inspiration Tour,” aimed at strengthening the connections between NASA and its partners. A similar tour in August brought Isaacman to Idaho National Laboratory, which will play a key role in providing the 20-kilowatt reactor for SR-1 Freedom.

In partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA is also looking into the prospects for putting a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface by 2030 as part of its Moon Base initiative. Houston said Rocketdyne is interested in playing a part in that program.

“That’s not as much out of the Redmond site, but as Rocketdyne, we’re doing a lot of investment in the power conversion and the power management and distribution design that could be used for that,” she said.

Over the course of nearly 60 years, Rocketdyne’s Redmond site has played a role in nearly every interplanetary NASA mission — and has gone through several ownership changes along the way. The company’s latest transition, including its rebranding as Rocketdyne, became official last month after AE Industrial Partners acquired a majority stake from L3Harris.

Nowadays, Rocketdyne is arguably best-known as one of the commercial partners in NASA’s Artemis moon program. “We have 21 engines on the Orion spacecraft,” Houston said. “That’s between the crew module and the service module … all built in Redmond.”

The Redmond facility oversees the refurbishment of space shuttle engines for upcoming Artemis missions and is redesigning the spacecraft’s Orion Main Engine for missions starting with Artemis 7. “Our in-space propulsion business, really based here, has the lead on the entire OME program,” Houston said. “So we’re already concurrently doing the design and test of the new engine while doing all the refurbishment.”

Isaacman said the Artemis program is one of NASA’s top priorities, in part due to geopolitical competition. The current schedule targets a crewed lunar landing in early 2028, followed by initial work on a permanent base near the moon’s south pole later that year.

“NASA is very hot,” he said. “But NASA is hot right now because we are in a great-power competition. That’s across AI, energy and infrastructure, and everything you can imagine militarily, but certainly in the domain of space. We cannot take our foot off the gas. Really, if we miss our time by a matter of months, there are only so many good parking spots in the south pole of the moon, where we want to build our moon base. Well, the Chinese want to build their moon base there, too.”

NASA is relying on Rocketdyne and other commercial partners to set a fast pace.

“For all the great companies, the partners that are contributing to our near-impossible objectives, now is absolutely the time,” Isaacman said. “Just as so many of you were probably inspired by the space race in the 1960s and what we accomplished — all those books and movies that came from it — you’re now contributing to that.”

One of the VIPs in the audience, Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, said she was energized by Isaacman’s visit. “I am so excited that Rocketdyne is on the forefront of missions in space,” she said. “For me, as a former science teacher and someone who’s so interested in encouraging innovation and development, this just feels like a fantastic day to celebrate all of that.”

Rocketdyne wasn’t Isaacman’s only scheduled stop on this week’s tour. Earlier in the week, the administrator and other federal officials paid a visit to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Castle Air Museum in California’s Central Valley. In addition to Rocketdyne, today’s visits included stopovers at United Precision Corp.’s headquarters in Washougal, Wash., Seattle’s Museum of Flight and Boeing’s Everett facility. Stoke Space is on the agenda for Friday.

After his talk, Isaacman told GeekWire that Washington state is home to a “lot of industry” that’s contributing to America’s space effort.

“It takes contributions from great talent all across the nation to contribute to our world-changing efforts,” he said, “but it just happens to be that a lot of it is here in Washington.”

— Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years.

The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for workers and workforces alike,” Raman said.

Raman, who is based in San Francisco, began his career as a TV journalist and served as a speechwriter for President Obama and other political leaders. More recently he was an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom and led economic impact for Facebook.

— Jenny Lay-Flurrie was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft‘s Trusted Technology Group. In February, she had taken the role of vice president and head of Trusted Technology, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, responsible AI use and related topics.

Lay-Flurrie announced the change on LinkedIn, saying that she was “honoured, humbled and a little lost for words (yes,, it does occasionally happen ;)).”

The tech leader has been with Microsoft since 2005, and led the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion for more than a decade.

— Brian Gill has resigned as chief product and technology officer for DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based freight company. Gill was with DAT for more than three years and previously served as CPO for Nordstrom.

In a LinkedIn post, Gill did not give specifics on his next move but said he would be “rolling up my sleeves and building the many ideas that are suddenly so much easier to bring to life.”

Gill’s other past roles include executive positions at Hotwire and nearly a decade at Expedia. Last month DAT announced multiple promotions and hires to its leadership team.

— Colin Newman has joined Zillow Group as head of public policy. He was previously director of U.S. public policy for Amazon, leading initiatives on employment, workforce transformation, AI, transportation and economic development. He first took a government affairs role with Amazon’s Audible business in 2015 and moved to Amazon five years ago.

“I look forward to leveraging my government, legal, and public policy experience to support our efforts to simplify and democratize the housing process for everyone,” Newman said. His background includes legal counsel for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

— Lisa Finnegan is returning to Microsoft as vice president and human resources business partner for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Finnegan, who is based in Dublin, was previously with LinkedIn for more than eight years, departing in March 2025. Her interim role was with Lumera HR Consulting.

“It’s a pretty incredible time to (re)join Microsoft and the opportunity to help shape the people and organisation agenda across EMEA at this critical moment is incredibly compelling,” she said.

— James Lau, chief product officer at Hiya, announced this is his last week at the Seattle startup, which battles fraudulent calls and provides technology to protect voice identity. He’s been in the role for three years and previously worked at Microsoft over multiple stints.

Lau is launching a company called Entrovox, which he describes as an AI phone team that helps insurance agencies land new customers through state-of-the-art AI voice agents, branded caller ID and smart campaigns.

“There has never been a more exciting time for building, and I am deeply passionate about voice AI. Making AI sound genuinely human is a challenge I find irresistible,” Lau said.

— Jason Wilbur has left Oracle to join OpenAI‘s Seattle office as a leader in cloud partnerships.

Wilbur was with Oracle over two stints spanning more than six years and leaves the role of senior director of product management. Past jobs include CEO at Aarno Labs, co-founder of Require Security, and senior product manager at Amazon.

— Julia Liuson was appointed to Elastic’s board of directors. Earlier this year, Liuson resigned from Microsoft after more than 34 years. She was most recently president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. San Francisco’s Elastic bills itself as the “search AI company.”

— Dan Walter was promoted to vice president of fission technology for Everett, Wash.-based Zap Energy. Walter joined Zap earlier this year as the clean power startup announced it was expanding to pursue fission micro-reactors as well as fusion-based nuclear energy. Zap is No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Walter was previously at TerraPower for nearly a decade, most recently in a director role for the nuclear power company.

— Kelsey Wolf has joined next-gen battery company Group14 Technologies as director of communications and marketing. Wolf was previously the communications lead for Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that went bankrupt and was acquired this past spring. Group14 is No. 34 on the GeekWire 200.

“I’ve spent my career telling exciting stories about technology that changes how we work, how we find home, and how we move around the world. Up next, I will get to tell stories about the technology and materials powering our world,” she said.

— Tin Can, a Seattle startup selling Wi-Fi-enabled landline phones for kids, announced three hires:

• Evan Jacobs has joined as head of engineering, previously serving as a software development manager at Amazon Web Services. Jacobs is also a startup founder.
• Quinn Hawkins was named head of communities, joining from First Street, where he was chief product officer. His background includes leadership at Redfin and Microsoft.
• Masud Khan was named staff software engineer. Past employers include Apple, Databricks, Meta and Amazon.

Tin Can, which launched last year, is No. 153 on the GeekWire 200.

— EchoMark, ​the ​Bellevue, Wash., startup using forensic ​watermarking ​to identify ​the ​source of information leaks, ​has named Alex Gamoran vice president of enterprise sales. Gamoran was previously at Smartsheet for nearly a decade, leaving as regional vice president of commercial sales for North America.

“It struck me that every security-conscious enterprise is going to need a solution to the types of information leaks that conventional security software is blind to — and that’s when I knew I wanted to be part of EchoMark,” Gamoran said via email.

— Sara Dutta was named director of AI innovation and partnerships for Seattle biopharmaceutical company Omeros. She previously founded the life sciences consultancy Ocilisni and was a director at Novo Nordisk, focused on external partnerships and emerging technologies.

Last year, Omeros struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with Novo Nordisk, giving the latter exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize a clinical-stage drug candidate that treats rare blood and kidney disorders. Omeros won Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

— Rebekah Bastian announced that she is leaving mpathic as chief marketing officer. She joined the Bellevue, Wash., startup working to make AI safe in December. Bastian previously launched and was CEO of the life-and-career social platform OwnTrail. She was with Zillow Group for more than 14 years and also worked at GlowForge.

“I’m giving myself some intentional time to explore ideas and let them incubate before deciding where they lead,” she said. That could include new companies or initiatives within existing companies, and her areas of focus span “human agency, creative entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and generally how humans find meaning and thrive in the age of AI.”

— Seattle-area wine recommendation startup Theodora has appointed Heather Stephens founding marketing lead. Stephens has worked for more than a decade in consumer and B2B marketing, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy development.

— Marc Brown, former global head of M&A and strategic investments at Microsoft and now managing director of venture capital coverage at JPMorgan, has joined the board of trustees of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, an organization supporting civic engagement for young people.

— Adrienne Lopez, a Seattle-based marketing leader who has worked on initiatives with organizations including Meta, WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, was named executive vice president of WH Inc.

— Washington Research Foundation announced its new cohort of venture analysts: Jessica Ayers, Ankit Azad, Nello Gu, Michael Malone and Elya Shamskhou. The program helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gain expertise in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.

A decade or two on the road will drain an EV battery’s range and hobble its acceleration. But while it peters out for daily commutes, that battery still has a lot of juice left.

A cohort of battery entrepreneurs is giving these units a second life, powering off-grid communities, industrial sites and energy-hungry data centers. Industry leaders — British Columbia’s Moment Energy and Redwood Materials in Nevada — are rapidly scaling up as the supply of aging batteries surges.

This summer, Moment moved into its 100,000-square-foot Megafactory 1 near Vancouver, converting a shell into its new HQ and manufacturing space in six weeks. It’s also building a Texas Gigafactory expected to open in January.

Redwood is likewise ramping up after unveiling the world’s largest used-EV battery system in June 2025: A 63-megawatt-hour solar and battery installation powering a Nevada data center run by AI infrastructure company Crusoe.

Absent reuse, these batteries end up in landfills or recycling shredders.

“Why recycle this battery prematurely when there’s over 95% life left?” asked Eddy Chiang, CEO and co-founder of Moment. When the batteries get recycled, some companies send the material to China for refinement, exporting valuable raw materials.

The market’s potential is massive. Chiang estimates that the used batteries available today could match Denver’s electricity use 20 times over — and 90 times over in four years.

The ‘Christmas light’ problem

So why pull an EV battery that still has 80% or more of its life left? Think Christmas lights, says Chiang.

Particularly with lights sold in the past, “if one light bulb burnt out, the whole string burns out,” he said. “And that’s what’s happening in the battery pack. The actual failure mode for EVs is actually due to a single cell failure, like that light bulb.”

EV battery packs contain hundreds or thousands of cells that are grouped into modules, which are housed in large metal shells affixed under the vehicle’s floorboard. The cells can be similar to the AA batteries in consumer electronics, while others are larger blocks or pouches.

When Moment receives used batteries, it first runs diagnostics to test their performance. Then it breaks down the packs into modules, and racks them in cooled shipping containers. Moment uses proprietary software to redirect energy away from weak cells to healthy ones to extend battery life.

The company’s largest storage system is called Luna, delivering up to 1 megawatt hour of energy, which is enough electricity to power roughly 49 Seattle households for 24 hours. It’s preparing to launch a new model, but keeping the details under wraps.

Moment customers range from God’s Pocket Resort, an eco-lodge on a tiny Canadian island where its system slashed the use of diesel generators, to Vancouver International Airport, which avoided up to $20 million in grid upgrades to power fast chargers for its EV fleet, Chiang said. “Instead, they bought a couple of our batteries.”

From recycling to reusing

Redwood Materials began nearly a decade ago as a battery recycler led by former Tesla executives. But in recent years, they recognized a missed opportunity.

“We had a group of people standing around watching our recycling operation, looking at these giant battery packs that we’re going to so much effort to disassemble, and just wondering, ‘Can we do more with these before we shred them?'” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer.

Now 95% of the EV batteries Redwood receives are reused rather than recycled. And despite its Tesla roots, the startup accepts batteries from any automaker and has created a “universal translator” that manages battery packs with different voltages, power and chemistry.

Campbell touts the conversion of the EV devices to stationary storage as straightforward.

In its simplest terms, Redwood’s energy storage sites are “an electric vehicle parking lot with the wheels removed,” he said. “So it’s just literally the battery that was in the car. There’s lots of them arranged in a grid together and plugged in.”

That plug-and-play approach solved major headaches for Crusoe. By pairing repurposed EV batteries with solar power for its new AI data center in Nevada, Crusoe bypassed multi-year grid-connection delays, saved money and avoided emissions from diesel generators.

Scott Williams, vice president of energy at Crusoe, said the solution has worked well for his company, which builds data centers and offers its own AI cloud services.

“We’ve signaled to Redwood that we’re going to grow with them,” Williams said, including “multiple gigawatt hours paired with our modular units, which is super exciting.”

Industry headwinds

Despite the momentum, the sector faces headwinds. Communities have resisted large battery projects due to fire concerns, sparked by high-profile incidents like California’s Moss Landing fire.

The companies emphasize that EV batteries are built to survive high-speed crashes, making them inherently safer than standard stationary battery storage. The Moss Landing fire involved older, non-EV batteries in a very different setup than the startups are using. Additionally, Moment’s systems hold extensive UL safety certifications and Redwood has passed a UL fire-safety test.

Another industry hurdle is competition. Overbuilt recycling capacity — plus U.S. and European mandates requiring recycled content in new batteries — creates competition for used EV packs.

Yet from a climate perspective, repurposing is vital. Batteries are almost always “the most carbon-intensive component” in any electronic device, said Grayson Shor, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Battery Collaborative and co-founder of the startup Buckstop.

Repurposed EV systems can extend that initial carbon investment by providing clean power for 20 to 30 years and meet urgent energy demand.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Where are we going to get electricity?'” Campbell says. “And we have a really excellent option already here.”

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Eddy Chiang, CEO and co-founder at Moment Energy
• Colin Campbell, chief technology officer at Redwood Materials
• Scott Williams, vice president of energy at Crusoe
• Grayson Shor, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Battery Collaborative, and co-founder and chief product officer of Buckstop, a circular-economy startup focused on the recovery of minerals and other valuable materials

Additional sources:

• “Electric-Vehicle Battery Basics” (Car and Driver)
• “How long do EV batteries last” (Recurrent)
• God’s Pocket Resort eco-lodge

Matt Allen wasn’t sure he wanted to pursue a career at McKinstry, the Seattle-based company his grandfather co-founded in 1960. The business started with plumbing and piping, evolving into a construction and energy services firm with national reach.

But after joining in 2012, Allen began appreciating the impact McKinstry has helping customers find affordable, planet-friendly solutions for their operations.

It could be as simple as replacing an old, natural gas boiler with a high-efficiency heat pump, Allen said, “but you feel like you’re part of that customer’s journey, and our societal journey, to get to a carbon-free environment.”

Now serving as McKinstry’s chief client officer, Allen shared his thoughts with GeekWire about sustainability. His quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

What’s your biggest worry when it comes to solving climate change?

With all the expansion in energy consumption and the race for compute, I worry about maintaining our progress around decarbonization. And having a young son, I do worry about rising temperatures and what the world is going to look like for young people. However, I am encouraged to see a continued emphasis in decarbonization action across industries. On the data center side, the hyperscalers that we work with are evolving their designs to focus on sustainability as much as possible.

What gives you hope for the planet?

Human ingenuity has been able to innovate our way through challenging spots. Western Washington is a big hotbed for clean nuclear solutions, deep geothermal, and some of these new, emerging clean energy generation technologies. When enough brain power is focused on those pieces, combined with capital infusion, progress is made. I think there is a lot of motivation to increase clean energy generation through innovative solutions. That gives me hope.

If you could invent one sustainability solution overnight, what would it be?

Clean nuclear fusion. If you could accelerate Helion, Zap or Avalanche, that would be great. Or deep geothermal — Fervo Energy, for example, is developing a commercial project down in Utah. If we could snap our fingers and get some of those technologies to market, you could rapidly accelerate people’s willingness to electrify systems and connect to a clean grid. A lot of this comes back to having a clean grid, so when we’re doing electrification projects at a building level, the building owners can have confidence in having energy availability to reduce their carbon footprint.

What’s an underrated solution that deserves more attention?

Operations — that’s a big focus for us, finding optimized ways to operate buildings and turn down systems when appropriate. We joke that everyone talks about first cost when they’re building or doing a retrofit, but they don’t talk about the ongoing operation and maintenance costs. If we can find more efficient ways to operate buildings, that reduces strain on the grid and reduces overall energy consumption while providing real savings for our clients.

What’s one metric you watch obsessively?

We rigorously track greenhouse gas emissions. Our baseline started in 2019, around the time we signed the Amazon Climate Pledge, which has a net zero target of 2040. We hope to hit net zero sooner. We’re also tracking a couple of different measures. One is GHG emissions on a per-revenue basis. So, as we’re growing our revenue, are we still taking a bite out of emissions? We also track it on a per-FTE-employee basis. Those two measures hold us accountable as an institution to make sure we’re not taking our eye off the ball moving toward net zero.

The scope of the climate challenge is daunting — how do you approach this work?

For the work we do for customers, or even the work we do internally to reduce our own carbon footprint in our business operations, you just take it quarter by quarter, project by project — focus on doing a good job for your customers, bring things in on time and on budget, and help strategize with them on the most cost-effective ways to do things.

We do the same thing internally, creating a glide pattern. There is no magic bullet, so you take it one piece at a time. A good example for us is our biggest carbon emitter — our vehicle fleet. We have 600 service vans and another 300 utility trucks out on the road, and we track our progress toward electrifying that fleet. We’re 10 or 15% of the way through, and every time a vehicle needs to be replaced, we replace it with an electric one.

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

I just hope that there isn’t an existential climate crisis, that we’ve taken collective action — whether it’s the Paris Climate Accord or some other macro commitment — and come together as a society to ensure we’ve left the campsite in a better place than we found it and that our world remains a habitable, thriving, healthy environment for the next generation to live in.

— Mehul Shah joined Oracle as group vice president for OCI data and storage services, ending a 14-year run at Amazon and Amazon Web Services.

In his last role at AWS, Shah led engineering and product for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Oracle and Db2, and ran the launch and expansion of Oracle Database@AWS, the partnership that put Oracle’s database inside Amazon’s cloud.

“Through that collaboration, I saw firsthand that OCI shares the same DNA that inspired me to join Amazon back in 2012,” Shah said on LinkedIn, citing “deep curiosity, a passion to innovate, the courage to make bold decisions, and relentless drive to excel.”

Shah, who is based in Seattle, spent more than eight years at AWS, earlier leading real-time data streaming services including Amazon Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Streams, and serving as director and general manager of Amazon EMR. He started at Oracle this month.

— Seattle Children’s named Dr. Natalie Pageler senior vice president and chief information officer, putting her in charge of digital strategy and IT operations for the pediatric hospital system.

Pageler comes from Stanford Children’s Health and the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was division chief of clinical informatics and earlier spent a decade as chief medical information officer. She is a pediatrician and clinical informaticist with more than 20 years of experience.

Seattle Children’s CEO Dr. Christopher Longhurst followed a similar path. He was chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health, the same role Pageler held, before spending a decade at UC San Diego Health, most recently as chief clinical and innovation officer.

— Zillow Group named Cassandra “Sandi” Knight its first-ever chief legal and policy officer, a role the Seattle company created this month as part of a broader leadership shuffle. Reporting to CEO Jeremy Wacksman, she oversees Zillow’s legal, compliance and government relations functions.

Knight joins from Google, where she spent four years as a vice president leading global civil litigation and discovery. She was previously vice president and chief litigation counsel at PayPal, and spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley in senior litigation and compliance roles.

She began her career as a trial lawyer at the San Diego Public Defender’s Office, the firm Keker & Van Nest and the San Francisco City Attorney’s office. She holds a law degree from Stanford and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She arrives at a busy moment: Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the companies’ $100 million rental listings deal. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year.

Two longtime Zillow leaders are heading out:

• Sara Bonert, vice president of industry engagement for Zillow Group and ShowingTime+, is leaving after nearly 20 years. One of Zillow’s earliest employees, she joined in the fall of 2006 as director of broker services, helped build Zillow’s first platform for taking in listing data, and signed the partner agreements that took the site from zero to a million listings in four months.
• Jeff Tompkins, head of corporate real estate and operations, wrapped up almost five years with the company. Tompkins, who is based in Denver, ran Zillow’s workplace strategy across North America and beyond. He said he will share his next role soon.

— Amir Pelleg, a veteran of companies including Amazon and Convoy, is the new chief product officer at Uber Freight. He is based in Seattle, working out of the shared Uber and Uber Freight office on Second Avenue.

At Amazon, Pelleg was principal product manager for Kindle Fire, launched the Dash Button and initiated Alexa’s smart home controls, then incubated and launched Amazon Shipping in India, the U.K. and the U.S. as a director and general manager in Amazon Transportation.

He was a vice president on Convoy’s executive team until the Seattle freight startup shut down in 2023, then spent two and a half years at dental tech company Dandy.

“I’ve seen what works and what fails in digital freight,” Pelleg said in a Q&A posted by Uber Freight.

— Seattle’s Frazier Healthcare Partners added Wes Wheeler to its Growth Buyout team as an executive in residence, advising on diligence and on life science logistics and infrastructure.

Wheeler was most recently CEO of LabConnect, a central laboratory services company serving clinical trials, and before that president of UPS Healthcare, where he built a vertical of 10,000 employees across 35 countries. During Operation Warp Speed he was the primary industry interface to the U.S. government, overseeing distribution of more than 1.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to over 100 countries.

— Dr. Heather Cheng was announced as the inaugural recipient of the Marty Lazarus Weiden Family Endowed Chair at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, which will fund her work detecting, preventing and treating hereditary cancers.

Cheng is clinical director of cancer genetics programs at Fred Hutch and directs its prostate cancer genetics clinic. In 2016 she was part of a team that found more than 10% of men with advanced prostate cancer carry inherited mutations in DNA-repair genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The chair is named for Marty Lazarus Weiden, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and died in 2001. The family learned only later that some of its members carry a BRCA mutation.

— Microsoft corporate vice president Darryl Willis was named to the board of ONE Nuclear Energy, a natural gas and advanced nuclear developer going public this quarter through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp.

Willis has led Microsoft’s energy and resources group since 2019. He was previously a Google Cloud vice president and a BP executive who ran the company’s Deepwater Horizon claims process and testified before Congress. He will officially join the board when the merger closes, and he is expected to chair its compensation committee.

— Jake Milstein was named head of healthcare solutions marketing at Zscaler, a return to healthcare cybersecurity. He joins from application security company Contrast Security and was earlier chief marketing and revenue officer at Critical Insight, the Bremerton, Wash.-based security firm acquired by Lumifi Cyber.

Before moving into technology, Milstein spent a decade at Seattle’s KIRO TV, including four years as news director.

— Michele Mehl left Amazon Web Services after nearly two and a half years to become senior public relations manager at ALSO, arriving the same week the electric vehicle company announced a $150 million Series D round led by Prysm Capital.

ALSO builds the TM-B consumer electric bike and the TM-Q commercial delivery quad, and counts Amazon and DoorDash among its commercial partners.

— Richard Van Bibber was named senior vice president of research and development at Verasonics, the Kirkland, Wash.-based maker of ultrasound research platforms used in fields including biomedical ultrasound, materials science and earth sciences.

Van Bibber has spent much of a 25-year medtech career in the Puget Sound region, including seven years as director of research at Kirkland’s Cardiac Dimensions and five years leading clinical affairs at Bellevue-based Aortica.

— Dave Cotter joined the board of Nickson, the apartment-furnishing startup led by Cameron Johnson, alongside MarcyPen Capital Partners and Larry Braithwaite. Cotter is CEO of Greenwood and has previously worked at Amazon, Nordstrom, zulily, RealNetworks and Leafly.

— PCC Community Markets president and CEO Krish Srinivasan will retire effective Jan. 29, 2027. Srinivasan was chief financial officer at Remitly and vice president of finance at Lyft before joining the Seattle grocery co-op as CFO, and earlier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft.

— Seattle Foundation named Elizabeth Wong as chief philanthropy officer, reporting to President and CEO Alesha Washington. Wong spent more than a decade at Foundation Source and earlier worked directly with the Gates family at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And in case you missed it:

— Jay Bartot, a co-founder of the airfare-prediction startup Farecast and former chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs, was named CTO of Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an “AI co-founder” for entrepreneurs. Read more here.

— Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and promoted five other leaders, as it reorganizes its product and technology groups around AI. Read more in this GeekWire story.

Next month, Endurance Energy will send Adélie — a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin — to an undersea volcano off the Oregon coast, tapping hydrothermal fluids that can reach 750 degrees Fahrenheit.

It’s the Seattle startup’s fifth deployment onto the ocean floor, part of founder and CEO Andrew Redd‘s bet that the technology can one day electrify entire cities.

“Addressing the clean power problem is a way to make significant, scalable impact,” Redd said. “It’s a fundamental of human life — people need power.”

Endurance is part of a broader race to harness geothermal energy — heat from water or steam under the Earth’s crust, converted into electricity. But while companies such as Fervo and Sage Geosystems focus on terrestrial sites, Endurance is the first commercial venture pursuing undersea sources.

Redd left an engineering role at SpaceX to launch his company in January 2025. Endurance’s headquarters sit on the north shore of Seattle’s Lake Union, in a building that once housed seafood processing, just down from Ivar’s Salmon House.

“There was a big crab on the wall. There were pinup pictures from the fishermen that would sleep out back,” recalled Nate Rodland, Endurance’s chief operating officer.

This summer, the team expanded across the street into a 25,000-square-foot concrete facility — it’s cavernous, like a parking garage with ultrahigh ceilings — where giant white tents now house separate R&D and manufacturing operations.

The space is bustling with employees assembling components ahead of the Sept. 7 pilot demonstration.

“Everyone is incredibly multidisciplinary. The challenge is incredibly multidisciplinary. That’s what makes it so fun and exciting,” said Redd, watching his team at work. He pointed to the company’s thermal fluids analyst, for example, who at that moment was assembling electronics enclosures.

The team’s roughly three-dozen members include 12 SpaceX alumni, plus veterans of fusion startup Helion Energy and space venture Blue Origin.

Here’s how the Endurance system works:

• Drill a borehole: The team will drill a narrow hole a safe distance from active vent fields that will go about 200 feet into the seafloor to tap hydrothermal fluid.
• Harness the heat: Hydrothermal fluid flows into a generator, heating a closed-loop refrigerant through titanium tubes until it boils and spins a turbine.
• Reset: Naturally cold seawater cools the refrigerant back into a liquid state to repeat the cycle. The warmed water is released to the seafloor.
• Move energy: The deployment next month will send performance data back to shore via Ocean Observatories Initiative’s Regional Cabled Array, operated by the University of Washington. Permanent installations will move electricity through undersea cables.
• Control the process: Underwater, remotely controlled electronics are housed in oil-filled, pressure-balanced chambers to handle deep-ocean conditions.

“We kind of joke that everything we do is just heating, cooling and pumping,” said Aditi Bhatt, chief of staff, as she pointed out earlier prototype devices housed in Endurance’s original building.

Each unit is named for a sea creature, moving up the food chain as the generators grow — krill, silverfish, and eventually an orca pod. Adélie’s generating capacity would be enough to power a small neighborhood of homes.

The company touts the environmental sustainability of its system, which has a small physical footprint, creates limited noise, releases no toxic chemicals and emits no carbon.

Endurance has done four prototype deployments, reaching a depth of about 2 miles and temperatures up to 726 degrees Fahrenheit. The company has previously visited the Pacific Northwest’s Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Mariana Trough, the East Pacific Rise off Mexico, and the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean.

While the startup has made rapid progress, the strategy faces real challenges: high pressure and corrosive conditions, mineral scaling inside devices, and the risk of costly repairs to seafloor machinery. And though many population centers sit near shorelines, the systems will still need expensive subsea cables to carry power over potentially long distances.

But the potential to tap a limitless source of around-the-clock, carbon-free electricity is attractive, and the company has raised $63 million from investors.

The next device, at megawatt scale, will power Endurance’s first commercial pilot, with the Kingdom of Tonga. Work on that begins as soon as Adélie is deployed, with the goal of shipping next year.

The pace aligns with Redd’s experience at SpaceX.

“I remember many times working on the next rocket before the previous one had actually launched, just because of how much you learned from the process of building something,” he said, adding that the team is inspired by their mission.

“The sooner we can get clean, low-cost power on the grid, the more people we’re able to help,” Redd said. “So we’re really driving with intensity.”

Keep scrolling for additional photos.

— Hannah McClellan Richards has left Amazon after more than 15 years to become chief operating officer of micromobility company Lime.

“Ensuring hundreds of thousands of light electric vehicles are available, fully charged, when and where riders need them, at global scale is exactly the kind of operational challenge I love,” she said on LinkedIn, praising Lime’s carbon-free, affordable transportation model.

McClellan Richards previously served as VP of operations, product and tech for Amazon’s pharmacy division. Other past roles include technical advisor and chief of staff to the CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, and VP of freight, inbound transportation and returns. She will serve in the new role remotely.

— Ankur Sinha, former chief product and technology officer at Remitly, shared that he’s taken a role at Anthropic as head of enterprise and verticals. Sinha was at Seattle’s Remitly for more than four years, and was previously an engineering director at Google and spent more than a decade at Microsoft, working primarily on Xbox.

“Moving from transforming lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders (Remitly’s mission) to ensuring the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI (Anthropic’s mission), a few things stay constant,” Sinha said on LinkedIn. “The impact on human lives is what makes the work worth doing, and trust and safety are critical to doing it well. I’m super stoked to be part of this and to help carry it forward.”

— Christine Chambers has been named chief financial officer of Redmond, Wash.-based lidar maker MicroVision. She joins from Fusemachines and previously served as CFO of PetMeds and RealNetworks. Chambers was also a financial vice president at Seattle-area company Rosetta Stone.

MicroVision, which develops lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous driving and security use cases, cut 49 jobs in March, targeting engineering and technical roles.

Chambers’ appointment was disclosed in a federal filing and takes effect Aug. 27.

— Slalom has appointed Dan Garrison chief AI officer of the Seattle-based global business and technology consulting firm.

Garrison, who is based in Detroit, spent nearly 30 years at Accenture, most recently serving as chief technology officer for Accenture Song. His experience there included work in quantum computing and generative AI, integration of acquired businesses, and technology strategy leadership.

“Dan has an incredible amount of hands-on technical depth, enterprise transformation experience, and entrepreneurial energy,” said Brian Turner, Slalom’s chief capability officer, in a statement.

— AI infrastructure and data center company Crusoe has hired Celeste Grebe as senior vice president of financial planning and analysis. She will be based in Crusoe’s Bellevue office, which opened in December.

Grebe joins from CoreWeave and was previously with Microsoft for more than a decade across two stints. She left the tech giant as chief financial officer of cloud and AI data centers. She was also with PicMonkey as a vice president.

“It’s rare to find a company positioned to shape infrastructure at this scale, with such a deep understanding of, and partnership with, its customers—and that’s exactly what drew me here,” Grebe said on LinkedIn.

— Gravyty, a Seattle-based ed-tech company, named two new executives:

• Margaret Onisick Lawless will serve as chief product and technology officer, joining from TeachTown, where she held a comparable role for nearly five years. Onisick Lawless is based in North Carolina and will work remotely.
• Brandon Stec has joined as senior vice president of marketing, coming from Frontline Education. Stec resides in Illinois and will also work remotely.

— Richard Tso has taken a role as senior director analyst of AI marketing strategy for Gartner. He joins from Microsoft, where he worked for nearly a decade over two stints. Tso was most recently director of product marketing management for Azure and has held marketing roles for Microsoft Viva, Edge, PowerPoint and other products.

Tso was a founding member of Round, an organization providing mentorship and support for tech executives. Other past roles include leadership positions at Persefoni and LivePerson.

— TerraPower’s former chief operations officer, Eric Williams, is joining rival Hadron Energy as executive vice president of engineering. Williams was with Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower for 12 years, leading design and operations of its modular nuclear reactor and helping secure Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction permits.

“I have spent my career proving that advanced nuclear technology can be engineered, licensed, and deployed in the United States,” Williams said in a statement. “The mission at Hadron to commercialize a first-of-a-kind microreactor (MMR) is exactly where the nuclear industry needs to go.”

Williams’ move to New York-based Hadron is effective Aug. 31.

— Seattle’s Ian Wathen was promoted to chief financial officer of Conga, a Houston-based company that helps businesses coordinate their pricing, quoting, contracting, rebates and communications.

— Brittany Jarnot was promoted to senior manager of state and local government affairs in the West for Salesforce.

— Kristy Carrington was promoted to the role of chief executive for the North Division for Providence, overseeing operations in Western Washington and Alaska for the healthcare system.

— Colin Dale is now director of sales for Factal, a Seattle company providing risk intelligence, working out of its London office.

— And in case you missed it, Zillow announced a series of executive changes: CFO Jeremy Hofmann‘s role is expanding to include chief operating officer, while Jun Choo, who became chief operating officer in 2024, is stepping down to focus on his health and will serve as an advisor through the end of the year.

Editor’s note: Updated on Aug. 10 at 1:20 p.m. with news of Ankur Sinha’s new role.