A roster of top Seattle business leaders and regional CEOs is demanding urgent action from City Hall on public safety, calling on Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to roll out a concrete 100-day action plan backed by measurable goals and transparent progress tracking.

In a letter sent Thursday, executives from major area employers — including Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, F5, Alaska Airlines, Zillow, and others — urged city leaders to protect and expand public safety funding amid growing skepticism that the city currently has an effective strategy to address crime and homelessness.

The push centers on findings from an August joint public-opinion poll of registered Seattle voters, which revealed that while every proposed safety measure drew at least 75% support across all demographics, only 34% of respondents expressed confidence in the city’s current strategy.

Pointing to severe staffing shortages — noting Seattle has just 1.31 sworn officers per 1,000 residents, far below peer cities like Denver, San Francisco, and Boston — the signatories argued that budget decisions must directly align with measurable safety outcomes.

The effort was spearheaded by major regional business leadership organizations, including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, Challenge Seattle, and the Washington Roundtable. Their leaders — Joe Nguyễn, former Gov. Chris Gregoire, and Rachel Smith — jointly signed the appeal alongside dozens of local chief executives spanning technology, retail, healthcare, and sports franchises.

“Voters are asking for action, on a timeline, with results they can measure,” the coalition wrote in the letter, emphasizing that their recommendations reflect a broad consensus across the city. “This is not a narrow or partisan agenda, it is a shared baseline that Seattle residents and the business community are asking their elected leaders to deliver both now and as a sustained priority.”

The letter outlines a series of immediate and short-term actions the group is asking City Hall to enact, backed by overwhelming support in their poll:

CCTV surveillance: Activate CCTV cameras in Pioneer Square, the Stadium District, and other high-event areas to deter crime and assist law enforcement.

Foot and bike patrols: Establish regular police patrols on foot and bicycle in areas facing persistent public safety problems, specifically citing Little Saigon (90% poll support).

911 response accountability: Recommit to a standard 7-minute priority 911 response time, backed by transparent reporting when targets are missed (90% support). The letter noted data from Nordstrom showing only 29% of 911 calls from its flagship downtown store yielded a police response, compared to 100% at its Bellevue and Southcenter locations.

Drug treatment and diversion: Direct CARE Department specialists to offer treatment and shelter first, but require law enforcement to arrest and prosecute repeat offenders who repeatedly refuse help (82% support).

Open-air drug markets: Require SPD and the City Attorney to establish a clear, prioritized pathway for shutting down open-air drug markets (81% support).

Encampment bans and timelines: Institute a policy banning encampments within 250 feet of parks, playgrounds, or schools, and mandate that the city clear encampments in those zones within 72 hours (79% support).

Among those who signed the letter: Brad Smith, Vice Chair & President of Microsoft; Jeremy Wacksman, CEO of Zillow; François Locoh-Donou, CEO of F5; Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group; Julie Sandler, Co-founder & Venture Partner at PSL Ventures; Matt Oppenheimer, Chairman of Remitly; Erik Nordstrom, CEO & Co-President of Nordstrom; Brian Niccol, Chairman & CEO of Starbucks; Ron Vachris, CEO & President of Costco; Ben Minicucci, CEO & President of Alaska Air Group; Mike Sievert, Vice Chairman of T-Mobile; and Ada Healey, Chief Real Estate Officer at Vulcan Real Estate.

The business community’s coordinated push arrives during a pivotal moment for public safety policy in City Hall, where political tensions over policing and crime response have flared in recent weeks.

While overall violent crime and homicides in Seattle dropped during the first half of 2026 compared to last year, high-profile violent incidents continue to fuel public and commercial anxiety. Downtown, Belltown, and high-foot-traffic corridors have experienced recent spikes in gun violence and fatal altercations — including multiple homicides in Belltown and Westlake Park in early September alone.

At the same time, the Seattle Police Department continues to grapple with acute staffing shortages following years of officer departures exceeding hiring goals. The persistent deficit has left response times stretched thin, prompting deep frustration from major employers and pushing retail hubs to demand a more visible police presence.

Policy friction between the Council and Wilson’s administration has also intensified. Debate has centered on the rollout of public surveillance technologies — where the mayor’s office recently paused CCTV camera expansions pending a data privacy audit — as well as ongoing friction surrounding the leadership of the police department.

Responding to the letter, Wilson told GeekWire that her administration shares the business community’s commitment to public safety, noting that “many of the specific requests they made are well underway.”

Wilson highlighted expanded foot and bicycle patrols in neighborhoods like Little Saigon and Belltown, 3,500 police officer applications currently in the queue, and an upcoming gun violence reduction strategy set to roll out next week. While noting that SPD data shows homicides and shootings at 10-year lows, Wilson acknowledged public impatience.

“We have far too much crime and public disorder and people have a right to be frustrated,” she said. “I, like everyone in Seattle, want to see that progress happen faster and steadier.”

The safety campaign comes on the heels of a 127-page independent economic study commissioned by the city, which warned that while Seattle boasts an “almost peerless” tech workforce and key AI assets, its economy is in a fragile position due to heavy corporate concentration and tax policies that penalize senior hiring.

The study noted that Seattle’s tax base remains vulnerable if major employers opt to relocate or grow outside the city limits, reinforcing the business coalition’s argument that public safety is closely tied to the city’s long-term economic stability.

Digs, a Vancouver, Wash.-based startup building AI software for residential construction, raised $25.3 million in Series A funding led by building products giant Builders FirstSource, the companies announced Tuesday.

Under the five-year agreement, Builders FirstSource will integrate Digs’ AI platform into its digital ecosystem, expanding tools for its 140,000 builder clients. The technology streamlines everything from pre-construction estimates and blueprint collaboration to post-move-in home maintenance and warranty care for homeowners.

The deal represents a major milestone for Digs, which was founded in 2022 by Ryan Fink and Ty Frackiewicz. Fink said the partnership moves Digs closer to its vision of creating “the first scalable true digital twin of the home” that lives on well past the construction phase.

The Series A pushes Digs’ total funding to more than $47 million, building on a $5 million pre-Series A round in late 2025. The startup previously drew backing from regional venture firms including Fuse, Flying Fish, Oregon Venture Fund, and Cascade Seed Fund.

Digs has grown to 37 employees and Fink said they’ll look to double that count to more than 60 by the end of the year, mostly in engineering, design, and product and some in sales and marketing.

Digs charges builders on a SaaS model and currently has thousands of homes on its platform across all 50 states. Fink often describes the tool as a “CarFax for the home,” replacing static PDF blueprints and lost paperwork with an AI-powered hub that tracks a property’s history, materials, and warranty details.

Fink and Frackiewicz previously collaborated on augmented reality startup ONtheGo Platforms, which was acquired in 2015. Fink later founded home-service AR startup Streem (acquired by Frontdoor in 2019), while Frackiewicz brought a background in construction engineering and luxury homebuilding.

Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Builders FirstSource is the nation’s largest supplier of building materials and prefabricated components for residential construction. The Fortune 500 company operates approximately 565 locations across 43 states, supplying structural building products, trusses, and millwork to professional homebuilders in 91 of the top 100 U.S. metropolitan markets.

“Our customers are looking for seamless technology that helps them operate more efficiently and deliver a better homeowner experience,” Builders FirstSource President and CEO Peter Jackson said in a statement. “By combining Builders FirstSource’s scale, deep customer relationships, product data, and extensive digital ecosystem with Digs’ AI platform, we are advancing tools that can simplify workflows, improve productivity, and create a more connected experience across the homebuilding lifecycle.”

Scott Thurlow isn’t a morning person. So much so, he wants to change state law.

In 2019, Washington lawmakers voted to put the state on permanent daylight saving time if Congress ever allows it. Thurlow has a different idea: Stop changing the clocks now, even if that means staying on Pacific Standard Time for a while.

Thurlow spent 32 years at Microsoft in product management for franchises including the original Outlook, Teams and, most recently, Copilot. A constant stressor was working across time zones. 

“We always dreaded the time zone changes on either end because it was meeting chaos,” he said. “Talking with India, which is like 12 hours off, went from really bad to worse.”

In July, Thurlow took part in Microsoft’s voluntary retirement program, and was featured in a GeekWire story along with several others. Last week, he launched Last Fall Back Washington, a nonprofit campaign built around what he’s calling the Last Fall Back Act. The idea is straightforward: Washington should move to permanent Pacific Standard Time immediately. 

Thurlow’s campaign is timely: British Columbia is dropping its seasonal clock changes and moving to permanent daylight time, meaning Washington will fall an hour behind its northern neighbor from November until March. Thurlow argues the difference could complicate everything from cross-border travel to transportation schedules and business meetings.

His own proposal would make that gap year-round at first, since Washington would sit on the winter clock while B.C. stays on the summer one. He accepts the tradeoff: stop the switching now, and get back in sync later if Congress makes daylight time permanent nationwide.

He also points to research linking the spring clock change with short-term increases in heart attacks, workplace injuries and fatal crashes — in 2020, one study published in Current Biology reported that fatal crashes increase by about 6% in the week after the spring time change.

Under the federal Uniform Time Act, states can opt out of daylight saving time changes, but only by staying on standard time. Permanent daylight time requires an act of Congress. Permanent standard time does not, which is how Arizona and Hawaii do it. That’s the path Thurlow’s proposal would take.

“If and when Congress ever really does act,” Thurlow said, “we would snap into daylight time.”

Done waiting for Congress

In July, the House passed the federal Sunshine Protection Act by a 308-117 vote, sending the bill to the Senate. The legislation would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, but the Senate has not taken it up. Thurlow isn’t counting on that changing — although President Trump is pushing for it.

“It’s going to end up withering on the vine and stalling,” Thurlow said.

Washington’s Legislature has also considered permanent-time legislation, but bills introduced since 2022 have stalled without reaching a floor vote.

Washington has two types of citizen initiatives: an initiative to the people, which goes directly to the ballot, and an initiative to the Legislature, which gives lawmakers the opportunity to pass the measure themselves or send it to voters.

Thurlow plans to spend the coming months building support for the latter approach and pushing legislators to introduce and pass the Last Fall Back Act when the 2027 session begins.

“The single most effective thing we can do is have lots of people contacting their legislators,” he said.

If lawmakers again decline to act, he expects to file an initiative to the Legislature around March 2027. The campaign would then need to collect about 386,000 signatures, providing a cushion above the 309,000 valid signatures required. If lawmakers still don’t pass the measure, it could go before voters in November 2028. 

Experts are divided 

Experts seem to agree Washington should stop changing its clocks — but disagree on how to go about it. 

University of Washington law professor Steve Calandrillo has long advocated permanent daylight time, and has testified against Washington legislation that would put the state on standard time. He told GeekWire he appreciates Thurlow’s efforts to pressure Congress, but doesn’t want Washington to spend years on standard time while waiting for federal action.

“I don’t want to see us go in the wrong direction,” he wrote in an email.

Under Washington’s current system, daylight saving time effectively functions as the state’s default for about two-thirds of the year. Permanent standard time would move sunset an hour earlier throughout that period, Calandrillo argues, creating safety risks and other costs.

Evening darkness is more dangerous than morning darkness, he argues, because more people are traveling and spending time outside in the evening — and there’s a greater chance of crime.

Other UW researchers have split on the question. Biology professor and circadian researcher Horacio de la Iglesia has testified in favor of permanent standard time. 

Environmental and forest sciences professor Laura Prugh testified against the 2024 bill alongside Calandrillo, citing research she co-authored that modeled about an 8% increase in deer-vehicle collisions in Washington under year-round standard time. She also worked on a study across 23 states that showed collisions with deer jump by 16% in the week following the autumn clock change. 

National groups are similarly divided. Save Standard Time has supported Washington legislation favoring permanent standard time, while Lock the Clock has pushed Congress to give states more flexibility rather than taking a position on which permanent time is best.

Temporary costs for long-term gains

Thurlow’s campaign acknowledges the tradeoffs: permanent standard time would put Washington out of sync with Oregon and California for much of the year, shorten summer evenings and potentially increase deer collisions.

But those costs would be temporary, he argues. The twice-yearly clock changes, by contrast, would continue indefinitely unless someone breaks the stalemate.

Thurlow also expects opposition over winter darkness, particularly concerns about children walking to school before sunrise. His response is that many Washington students already do so under the current system, and that changing school start times can address the problem. Seattle and other districts have already adjusted schedules for other reasons.

“There’s sort of a set of gut reactions and instant responses that people have, which may not be grounded in truth,” he said. 

Thurlow is betting that enough Washingtonians are tired of changing their clocks that the campaign can turn a decades-old annoyance into a political issue — and give the state a way out before Congress decides on the issue. His campaign is in early stages, with a handful of signups through his website.

— Dave Levy, vice president of AWS Worldwide Public Sector, has left Amazon for a role at Google, according to Nextgov/FCW. An AWS spokesperson confirmed his departure; Google did not respond to a request for comment. Levy, who is based in Arlington, Va., was with AWS for more than nine years. He was previously head of U.S. government sales at Apple for 12 years.

Amazon first launched government-specific cloud infrastructure in 2011 and now supports more than 11,000 government agencies. In November, the company announced it would invest up to $50 billion to expand AI and advanced computing infrastructure for U.S. government agencies. That includes support for Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud (US), which serve classified and sensitive workloads.

David Appel, VP of AWS Global Government, National Security and Defense, has taken Levy’s role in an acting capacity, according to his LinkedIn account. Levy’s last day was July 31.

— Kristin Hamilton has been named chief commercial officer for Funko, the Everett, Wash.-based makers of pop culture collectibles. Hamilton joined from Crunchyroll, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. She was previously at Hasbro for nearly 15 years, leaving as the consumer products division’s head of strategy and transformation. Hamilton begins work Aug. 24.

Funko has weathered financial and leadership bumps in recent years, with a quick succession of CEOs and the accumulation of significant debt. The company this month reported a strong second quarter with increased sales over the previous year.

— Seattle cryptocurrency company Coinme has named Laurent Reichert as chief compliance officer, consumer protection officer and Bank Secrecy Act officer. Reichert, who is based in Miami, was previously chief compliance and risk officer for the blockchain company Paxos.

In January, Coinme announced that it had agreed to be acquired by blockchain payments company Polygon Labs. Polygon said it would also acquire wallet provider Sequence as part of a combined deal valued at more than $250 million.

Reichert praised Coinme’s currency trading platform, adding that he looks forward to “the next phase of growth, both domestically and as we move into new international markets alongside Polygon.”

— DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based truckload freight marketplace, announced changes to its leadership team.

• John Xiao has been promoted to chief technology officer, leading work on DAT’s tech platform, analytics and AI integration. He joined the company two years ago from Nordstrom, where he oversaw technology strategy in merchandising, supply chain and inventory management.
• Marcus Womack, who joined DAT last year through the acquisition of his fintech startup Outgo, is now responsible for DAT’s carrier segment in addition to financial services.
• Kary Jablonski, former CEO of Trucker Tools, which DAT acquired in 2024, continues to lead DAT’s broker business and is also responsible for marketing and customer support.

All three are based in DAT’s Seattle office. The company won GeekWire’s Workplace of the Year Award in May.

— Seattle’s Membrion has promoted Emily Rabe to vice president of technology. Rabe has been with the industrial wastewater treatment startup for six years, leading its intellectual property efforts and most strategic technology programs while also working with external technology partners.

“She has a remarkable ability to take on hard, ill-defined problems, learn quickly and put durable solutions in place,” the company said on LinkedIn.

The startup made two additional promotions: Ryan Flores has risen to senior scientist, and Michael Moreland has been promoted to senior customer success engineer.

Membrion spun out of the University of Washington a decade ago, has raised $40 million and is No. 154 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas has been appointed to the board of Sprinklr, a company helping global brands manage their customer experience, social media, ads and other marketing. Ribas has been with Microsoft for 26 years, currently as president of search and AI.

— Seattle biotech company Omeros has named Joseph Schocken to its board of directors. In 1987, Schocken founded the investment bank Broadmark Capital, now Tranceka Capital.

— Jay Carney, who served as Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs for seven years ending in 2022, has left his position as Airbnb‘s global head of policy and communications. He did not indicate his next role.

Two Seattle-area health and longevity startups are joining forces through Viome Life Science‘s acquisition of Circulate Health. The two parties would not share specifics but said the deal was valued between $15 million and $50 million.

The acquisition will allow the companies to expand their reach and offerings of diagnostics, wellness supplements and a blood-cleaning service called therapeutic plasma exchange.

Here’s what each brings to the table:

• Viome sells test kits for saliva, blood and stool samples for customers to use at home and send in for analysis. Based on the results, the company offers personalized supplements and oral care products.
• Viome has also developed diagnostic tools that analyze RNA biomarkers to detect disease, including a test for early detection of oral and throat cancer that has received FDA breakthrough device designation but not formal FDA clearance.
• Circulate operates machines providing therapeutic plasma exchange administered by its own specially trained nurses. The goal of the exchange is to provide a circulatory-system tune-up that removes inflammatory factors, microplastics and biological compounds associated with aging, returning clean blood cells with a replacement protein fluid.

Combining the services and expertise of the two companies could expand their reach and provide new insights into health and treatment, said Dr. Brad Younggren, Circulate’s co-founder and former CEO.

“We want to build the largest network in the world for plasma exchange to answer questions, to figure things out. We’re adding new diagnostics. We’re looking at different kinds of biomarkers and diagnostics in the chronic disease space,” Younggren said.

The merged company has 115 full-time employees, with an additional 10 consultants on staff. Most of Circulate’s workers retained their jobs following the acquisition. Younggren is now president of the newly formed clinical group, Viome Pro, which includes diagnostics, oral and throat cancer detection, and therapeutic plasma exchange. Naveen Jain is Viome’s CEO and co-founder.

Circulate operated in stealth mode for a couple of years and officially launched in January 2024. It raised $14 million prior to the acquisition. Viome was founded a decade ago and has received approximately $250 million from investors.

Circulate had previously operated in 40 health and longevity clinics, primarily in the U.S., with one each in the United Kingdom and the Bahamas, and had relationships with additional sites. Combined with Viome’s clinic partnerships, those connections could expand the company’s potential reach to 400 sites.

The expansion comes as both microbiome testing and plasma exchange face questions from the medical community about how well the evidence supports their claims of health benefits.

The microbiome health market is growing, though estimates of its size vary widely. Some researchers are wary of microbiome kit companies, criticizing a lack of scientific rigor and regulation.

Plasma exchange is considered medically effective for conditions including certain cases of multiple sclerosis and leukemia, Guillain-Barre syndrome, sickle cell disease, and organ transplants. The treatment has more recently been embraced by biohacking proponents who pursue cutting-edge and not necessarily scientifically verified strategies for improving mental performance and longevity.

In 2025, Circulate published a study of 42 adults in Aging Cell showing potential reductions in biological age following repeated treatments, though outside medical experts questioned the long-term significance of the findings. A separate 2026 study in the Journal of Clinical Apheresis showed its protocols helped reduce microplastics in the blood.

“We’ll continue to do research,” Younggren said. “We have new tools. We’re going to be doing a trial combining plasma exchange with all the technologies that already exist under the hood at Viome.”

— 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.

The Gates Foundation broke its own record at the University of Washington with the largest charitable gift in university history: $540.2 million for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

The commitment, announced Monday, will fund a 10-year expansion of IHME’s Global Burden of Disease study, increasing the number of locations it covers from about 925 to nearly 5,000. For many countries, the study is the only source of comparable data on causes of death and disease, according to IHME.

It will also support the institute’s health forecasting and its tracking of health spending worldwide.

The funding “will allow us to provide high-quality evidence at a much more local level and help leaders understand not only where health is improving or worsening, but which decisions can make the greatest difference for people,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME’s director and a professor of health metrics sciences at UW, in a statement announcing the grant.

Roughly 60% of IHME’s budget comes from the Gates Foundation, according to the institute. The rest comes from federal grants, projects with other countries and other philanthropies.

IHME describes the new commitment from the Gates Foundation as a core grant that keeps the institute at a “steady state.” The previous core grant, $279 million announced in 2017, ramps down in December, and the new one begins in January.

IHME employed 425 people in fiscal 2026, down from 469 the year before, the institute said. No significant additional hiring is planned.

The institute became widely known during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its projections of cases, hospitalizations and deaths were used by the White House coronavirus task force and cited around the world. It drew criticism from statisticians who said its early forecasts understated the U.S. death toll and that its uncertainty ranges were too narrow, prompting revisions by IHME.

The Gates Foundation helped create IHME at UW in 2007 with a $105 million grant, then the largest in UW history. It has repeatedly set UW’s donation record since then, including $210 million in 2016 for the building that now houses the institute and $279 million to IHME in 2017.

The latest grant comes as global health funding falls sharply. IHME’s own tracking found that development assistance for health dropped 21% between 2024 and 2025, driven by a 67% decline in U.S. spending. Britain, France and Germany also cut their contributions.

It also comes at a tough moment for UW, which is facing a budget crisis driven by funding cuts. KUOW reported in April that NIH award money promised to UW dropped 50% from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026, with funds in hand down 74% because of slow federal grant processing.

The foundation is going through a transition of its own. It announced in May 2025 that it would spend $200 billion over 20 years and close on Dec. 31, 2045. Its board approved a record $9 billion budget for 2026 and a plan to cut up to 500 of its roughly 2,375 staff positions by 2030.

The new grant will run into 2036, about a decade before the foundation closes.

Updated after publication with additional information from IHME.

Giant anime robots are landing in the Seattle area.

Bandai Namco is opening an official Gundam Base retail store at Westfield Southcenter mall in Tukwila, Wash., this fall, giving Pacific Northwest anime and model-kit fans a permanent flagship destination for all things Gunpla.

For the uninitiated, Gundam isn’t just a nostalgic cartoon; it’s a massive, multibillion-dollar global media franchise that revolutionized Japanese animation when the original “Mobile Suit Gundam” series debuted in 1979.

Owned by Tokyo-based entertainment giant Bandai Namco, the IP spans decades of TV shows, video games, and movies, but its biggest cash cow is “Gunpla” — a portmanteau of “Gundam” and “plastic model.”

Unlike standard pre-assembled action figures, Gunpla kits are snap-together, highly engineered mechanical puzzles that fans clip off plastic runners and assemble by hand, ranging from entry-level builds to ultra-intricate models with thousands of pieces.

Bandai Namco says the new Southcenter location will be built around four core pillars for visitors: “watch, buy, build, and learn.”

Rather than functioning as a standard retail shop, the flagship is designed as an experiential destination. Shoppers can expect life-sized mecha statues and immersive themed environments for photo ops, alongside displays featuring fully painted master builds spanning 45-plus years of Gundam lore.

The store will carry model kits catering to every skill level — from beginner-friendly “Entry Grade” sets to complex “Perfect Grade” builds — along with exclusive, store-only Gunpla kits and limited-edition merchandise. The location will also feature community spaces hosting building workshops, special activations, and hands-on guidance from staff.

The Tukwila store is part of a broader U.S. brick-and-mortar push by Bandai Namco. Alongside the Southcenter opening, the company is launching a location at the Mall of America in Minneapolis this fall. Both follow the late-2025 debut of The Gundam Base Chicago at Fashion Outlets of Chicago — the entertainment giant’s first permanent retail footprint in North America.

Watch a video tour from the Chicago store: