— F5 named former Amazon executive Cathy Peterman as executive vice president and chief people officer of the Seattle-based application-delivery and security company. In May, F5 celebrated its 30th year in business.

“Cathy brings a rare combination of strategic depth and genuine humanity that will raise the bar for how we invest in our people,” said CEO François Locoh-Donou in a statement. “She and I share a reverence for culture and its impact on driving sustained results.”

Peterman joins F5 from Wayfair, where she served as CPO for the retail company’s technology organization. Prior to that, she was with Amazon for more than five years, departing as the HR executive for advertising products and technology.

— After more than 27 years at Microsoft, Rudra Mitra has announced his departure. He leaves the role of corporate vice president and head of Microsoft Security Purview, a team addressing data security and governance focused on artificial intelligence and AI agents.

Mitra joined the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant straight out of college as a software engineer. He has led work on products including Office, Windows Live and Microsoft 365 Cloud Infrastructure.

“Microsoft is a very special place full of incredibly talented people, and this decision comes with gratitude, happiness, and optimism for the future,” he said on LinkedIn. Mitra did not share his next move, saying only that there is “more on that soon.”

— Markham McIntyre, who previously led Seattle’s Office of Economic Development, is now executive director of Climate Surge, which is described as a “project built to accelerate the deployment of climate policies and market solutions in Washington.”

The effort works with corporations, heavy industry, government, developers, advocates, and philanthropy, and is a partnership between Earth Finance, Climate Solutions and Stolte Foundation.

Prior to his role with the city of Seattle, McIntyre was at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber for more than eight years, leaving in 2022 as executive vice president.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, announced a slate of new hires, all of whom appear to be working remotely:

• Adam Block was named chief sales officer, joining from Motive where he was chief revenue officer.
• Ken Coleman was named senior vice president of marketing, coming from Ramsey Solutions.
• Khoi Hoang was named leader of the global sales engineering organization, joining from Salesforce.
• Aaron Ellis was named leader of corporate sales, joining from Workday.

Qualtrics previously shared news that it promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product.

— Jay Shankar, Amazon’s former vice president of global talent acquisition, has joined Uber in a comparable role. Shankar, who is based in San Francisco, resigned from Amazon in December. Past employers include Adobe and BMC Software.

“When I joined AWS almost 8 years ago to lead recruiting, I had never run a talent acquisition organization. What I discovered was a team of builders who showed me that this work is fundamentally about investing in people and obsessing over customer needs,” Shankar said on LinkedIn.

— Jamie Boyd has joined the advisory board for Seattle’s GemaTEG, a startup building technology to manage the heat produced by computer chips. Boyd is a founder of Cypress Capital Holdings and previously helped build Cascadia, an investment banking franchise focused on energy and climate technologies.

— Seattle immigration tech startup Casium named Kat Kelley as its founding go-to-market lead. Kelley joins from Teaching Strategies, a digital education company, and past employers include Rectxt and brightwheel.

— Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm that specializes in corporate and technology-focused legal work, announced that Ty Kayam has joined as counsel in Seattle, expanding the firm’s healthcare regulatory team.

— Rogo named Joe Xavier as chief technology officer of the New York-based finance platform. Early in his career, Xavier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft, and more recently served as Grammarly’s CTO. At Rogo, he will help establish a San Francisco office.

— And in case you missed it: Dave Brown, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services leading its compute, AI and machine learning operations, is leaving after nearly 19 years. He is departing at the end of this month, and Amazon exec Dave Treadwell will take over the group. Read more in this GeekWire story.

— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.

The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.

“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.

— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.

The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.

Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.

The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.

Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.

Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.

Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.

— Monica Lazo is now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.

And some departures from Big Tech:

• Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
• Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
• Jeff Nienaber is departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.

Seattle Seahawks head coach and self-professed football nerd Mike Macdonald just doesn’t understand why any coach or team would ignore the chance to lean into data and analytics.

“Why wouldn’t we use the best information out there?” he said during an interview this week on the Dan Patrick Show. “Why would you be scared about things that are going to possibly help you?”

Macdonald called himself a “psycho data guy” who needs “numbers and tendencies.” He has a new Super Bowl ring to show for his coaching style, but he’s also clear that while advanced technology and metrics may help support the team’s planning and in-game decisions, they don’t drive those decisions completely.

“You don’t have to do what the numbers say,” Macdonald said, adding that variables such as how a game is going, the feel for your own team, and gut instinct can all cancel out data suggestions.

That data-be-damned mentality came into play at the start of last season when the Seahawks, facing a 4th-and-1 from the San Francisco 49ers’ 19-yard line, ignored the analytical model that said to go for it. Macdonald opted to kick a field goal for a three-point lead and ended up losing when the 49ers came back and scored a touchdown.

Seattle started 0-1 and six months later won its second NFL title.

This year, Seattle opens against the New England Patriots, the team they beat 29-13 in Super Bowl LX.

Macdonald hasn’t learned much yet from that game, because he said he’s only watched it once, via tape and not the standard TV broadcast.

“Are you worried there’s a different ending?” Patrick laughed.

While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a funding round for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposedly going to replace.

Auger, the supply chain technology startup founded in Bellevue, Wash., by the former Amazon executive, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse, with existing investor Oak HC/FT also participating in the new round.

The round brings total funding to $150 million for the company, which has grown to about 130 employees and counts Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division, sports merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark among its customers.

Clark’s view is that general-purpose AI can generate insights but can’t handle deeply specialized domains like running a supply chain. Making financial and operational decisions and executing them at the scale of big companies requires systems built on strong supply chain expertise — what Auger calls its ontology, essentially a detailed map of how supply chains actually work.

“Many a pure technology company died on the hill of supply chain over the last decade,” said Clark, the company’s CEO, in an interview this week. “You really need to understand the complexity and the contextual requirements.”

Auger sits on top of a company’s existing systems — ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning tools — and unifies the data into a single operating layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents and traditional optimization models to make decisions and execute them automatically, as much as possible.

For example, in a recent demo at the company’s Bellevue office, Clark showed how the system would handle a supplier missing a delivery commitment when there isn’t enough product to go around. Auger identifies the shortfall, determines which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back to the company’s existing systems.

Most supply chain software, Clark said, generates alerts and waits for a person to act. Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and flag the exceptions for human review.

“We’re not really a tool,” he said. “We’re really the new employee.”

At Fanatics, the sports merchandise company, Clark said about 85% of decisions in the process Auger manages are happening autonomously, with a goal of reaching the mid-90s soon. In addition to the customers it has named so far, Clark said another eight to 10 companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead the company’s worldwide operations and later its worldwide consumer business. He left in 2022 and became CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarding startup, but that tenure lasted less than a year amid a turbulent period for the company.

He launched Auger in 2024 with a team that includes Leigh Anne Clark, his wife, who serves as co-founder and president of the company’s fashion and beauty division, focused on an industry Clark describes as one of the most wasteful supply chains outside of groceries.

Clark moved back to the Seattle area from Texas to tap the region’s talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. The company quickly assembled a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon’s senior ranks, along with leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce, spanning supply chain operations, AI, data science, and product development.

In March, Auger was named a premier supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric, the tech giant’s data platform. Auger’s product is built on Azure, and Microsoft sales reps can earn commission on Auger deals. Clark said the partnership has generated engagement but is still early.

Clark said Auger went out for the Series B early, before the company needed it, to avoid the distraction of fundraising during what he expects to be a busy fall of customer onboarding.

With the investment, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joined the Auger board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT’s Matt Streisfeld.

Auger hasn’t disclosed revenue or other financial metrics, but Clark said the valuation was roughly double the level set by Auger’s initial round. “We didn’t shoot for the crazy astronomical valuation,” he said. “We sat at a place that we felt really comfortable with.”

That pragmatic approach extends to how Auger operates. In Bellevue, the company works out of an office it subleased after Microsoft vacated the space. Auger kept the desks, monitors, and chairs the tech giant left behind, furnishing its new offices for next to nothing.

But Clark’s ambitions for the company are anything but modest. He said Auger’s goal is to have half of U.S. GDP flowing through its platform by 2030, with revenue exceeding $1 billion.

“That requires a pretty steep curve to get there,” he said. “We’re not playing small.”

On Tuesday in Shenzhen, the Chinese company UBTech unveiled the U1, a full-sized humanoid robot with silicone skin, blinking lashes, manicured nails, and an AI tuned to read your mood. It comes in male and female versions, and racked up more than 13,000 orders by the end of launch day, with deliveries beginning in September.

“It will never betray you, will always be loyal to you, and will love you unconditionally,” promised Michael Tam, the executive running UBTech’s consumer brand.

The sci-fi TV series “Humans” imagined lifelike android “synths” sold to ordinary families as helpers and companions, and it treated the idea as speculative fiction. A decade later, the fiction has a September ship date. What it does not have is an American logo.

Elon Musk announced the Tesla Bot in 2021 and has been re-announcing it ever since. He hoped for production readiness by 2023. Entering 2025 he targeted 10,000 units, then trimmed the goal to 5,000.

The unveiling of Optimus 3, promised for March of this year, slipped because the robot needed “finishing touches,” and as of Tesla’s April earnings call Optimus 3 is still MIA, with the reveal now promised for late July or August. Tesla is spending $20 billion in capital expenditure this year, with Fremont assembly lines converting from the Model S to Optimus. The robot is not vaporware; it’s merely years behind schedule.

Now look at what China shipped while Optimus was getting its finishing touches.

In April, a bright-red humanoid named Lightning, built by smartphone maker Honor, ran Beijing’s E-Town half marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, roughly seven minutes faster than the human world record. The remarkable number is not the 50 minutes. It is the comparison to last year’s inaugural race, when the winning robot needed 2 hours and 40 minutes and most of the field fell over, wandered off course, or lay down at the starting line. The machines cut their time by two-thirds in 12 months.

Meanwhile, UBTech won a $37 million contract to deploy its Walker S2 humanoids at the Fangchenggang border crossing with Vietnam, where they guide travelers, patrol corridors, and inspect cargo. Barclays estimates China accounted for 85% of the world’s humanoid robot installations last year, and Beijing counts more than 140 domestic companies selling over 330 models.

Why the gap? Talent is not the problem, and neither is money. The difference is the customer.

Optimus’s most important customer has always been the Tesla shareholder, and a Musk keynote serves that customer just fine. The Walker S2’s customer is a border authority with a delivery date and a cargo queue that does not pause for a reboot.

China’s supply chain proximity and its government’s decision to treat humanoids as a strategic industry help, but the deeper difference is that Chinese robot makers get paid for delivery while Optimus gets valued for anticipation. Only one of these incentive structures produces robots in a timely manner.

In fairness, the most useful robots in American homes and hospitals are not humanoid. Form follows task, and when the task is specific, the human form is expensive overhead. For instance, the da Vinci surgical system, which has operated on more than 20 million patients, is four arms bolted to a cart, because a surgeon needs wrists steadier than human wrists and has no use for a reassuring face. The most successful household robot in history is a disc that eats dust. No one wants their Roomba to watch the sunset with them. 

The humanoid shape is a bet on generality, on a machine that can use our doorways, our staircases, and our tools. That bet makes sense at a border crossing built for human bodies. It is far less obvious in the operating room.

Companionship has never required human form; ask anyone with a dog. The New York Times recently told the story of Jan Worrell, an 85-year-old widow on a remote stretch of the Washington coast, and her companion robot ElliQ, which resembles a small reading lamp. It has no face, no legs, and no silicone anything, yet it shares her morning coffee, nudges her toward chair yoga, and has become, in her words, “me and my robot.”

Hundreds of ElliQ units deployed through New York State’s Office for the Aging show the same pattern of daily attachment. A machine does not need a body to keep you company, and the ElliQ price tag is much lower.  (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of Intuition Robotics, the maker of ElliQ.)

So why did UBTech give the U1 lifelike skin, styled hair, and a face you can customize to resemble anyone you choose?

Every new medium in memory has been pulled toward intimacy by its early adopters: the VCR conquered the living room on the strength of what people watched in private; the early internet monetized romance and its rougher cousins before it monetized much else; and app stores learned that “companionship” is a category with remarkable elasticity.

A humanoid robot with a skin warm to the touch is heading in a certain direction, whatever its maker’s official positioning. The company states that the U1’s skills don’t extend to the bedroom, then adds “for now.”

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.