— Kymeta has appointed former CIA Deputy Director Elizabeth Kimber as chief growth officer.

Kymeta, a Redmond, Wash.-based mobile satellite communications company, is working to increase sales with the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and other organizations in national security.

Kimber had a 37-year career with the CIA, departing in 2022 as the agency’s deputy director for operations. She most recently worked as a vice president with Two Six Technologies and has served on Kymeta’s board of directors for two years.

— Alaska Airlines has named Amaresh Siva as its first chief information technology officer. Siva joins from CVS Health and has held technology leadership roles for more than two decades at companies including Lowe’s, Target and GE Money.

“Technology touches nearly every part of how we run our airline and serve our guests, and Amaresh will bring our technology and digital teams together under one leader,” said Ben Minicucci, CEO of Alaska Air Group, in announcing the news.

— Vijaye Raji, founder and former CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Statsig and now OpenAI’s CTO of applications, has joined the board of Amplitude, a digital analytics and product intelligence company. OpenAI acquired Statsig last year, and Statsig and Amplitude announced a strategic partnership in May in which Amplitude would build on Statsig’s brand and customers.

“Statsig continues as a platform and brand within Amplitude,” Raji said. “Joining the board is an opportunity for me to help carry that mission forward as Amplitude and Statsig build their next chapter together.”

Here are four departures and arrivals for Microsoft leaders:

— Vasu Jakkal has left her role as Microsoft corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, management and privacy after more than six years. She has joined Armadin, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based cybersecurity company, as chief strategy and business officer.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She praised Armadin’s mission, which she described as building “autonomous security to stay ahead of attackers and build a safer world for all.”

— Microsoft VP Hans Yang is leaving. The Los Angeles-based leader, most recently focused on AI transformation, product strategy and growth, was formerly a general manager for Microsoft for Startups and Microsoft Learn.

“I think my next hill to climb is helping companies capture real ROI from AI,” Yang said, adding, “If you know a company that is struggling to get started with AI, or has invested but is not yet seeing meaningful value, I would welcome any introductions.”

— Venky Chandrasekharan is returning to Microsoft for the role of general manager of Windows commercial category and investments. He left the company in 2021 after 12 years and worked at Qualcomm and Acuity Brands in the interim.

“Having spent some of my most formative years at Microsoft, there’s definitely a sense of familiarity — but I’m coming back with new experiences, a broader perspective, and a lot of excitement for what’s ahead,” Chandrasekharan said.

— Meg O’Conor Bannecker has left Microsoft after two years leading communications for the company’s Washington state team. Past roles include communications leadership at NanoString Technologies, Bannecker Public Affairs and Pier 70 Ventures.

— Patrick Miller has been appointed as global division president of real estate company JLL’s technology sector. Miller joins from Snap, where he served as senior director of global workplace services. He previously oversaw real estate operations for Amazon’s Seattle-area headquarters for more than three years and has worked for Facebook and DTZ.

“I’ve spent my career on the client side … so I know exactly what it feels like to need a partner who shows up, tells you the truth, and solves real problems,” Miller said.

— DigniFi, a Bellevue, Wash.-based fintech company providing repair financing for autos, RVs, ATVs and other motorized vehicles, has named Jefim Piekarz as chief product officer. Piekarz joins from Arch, and his past employers include Skylab74, Welo, Octane and Etsy. Launched in 2012, DigniFi has facilitated more than $575 million in transactions for automotive merchants in the U.S.

— Seattle-based global logistics company Tideworks Technology has named two C-suite leaders:

• Mark Traynor, chief product and technology officer, joins from Lynxis. He is an entrepreneur who has worked in port, rail and terminal logistics for more than 20 years.
• Guenter Schmidmeir, chief revenue officer, joins from Avlino and has decades of maritime leadership from Germany.

— Adaptiva, a Kirkland, Wash.-based company automating software updates across computers, has named Allison Armstrong VP of product marketing. She joined from Elemica and has worked for Transmit Security, Hopin, Qualtrics, Apptio and others.

— Smarsh, a Portland, Ore.-based company providing communications data and insights, has appointed Alessandro Silva as its first chief growth officer. He joins from ACI Worldwide, and his past employers include Western Union and Carlyle Group. Silva is also a board member for Teach for America.

— Seattle-based Yoodli has named Mike Mather as chief learning advisor. The startup recently expanded from helping people practice speeches, sales pitches and job interviews to providing corporate training across wide-ranging skills. Mather is CLO for the accounting firm KPMG US and was previously a partner at EY, IBM and PwC.

“For most of my career, the hardest part of [learning and development] was the gap between training and the moment someone actually has to perform,” Mather said. “Yoodli closes that gap.”

— DigiStor, a company with offices in Austin, Texas, and Vancouver, Wash., that offers secure data storage products, has appointed Peter Bell to its board of directors. Bell co-founded StorageNetworks and serves as managing partner at Stowe Capital, among other roles.

— Seattle-area tech leader Jake Varghese has been promoted to chief product and technology officer for Dayforce, a Minneapolis company providing HR, payroll and related technology. He previously worked for companies including Microsoft, ServiceNow, Tanium and ConnectWise.

— The Association of Washington Business Institute has appointed Meagan Darrow as executive director. Darrow is also an adjunct professor at Evergreen State College and was most recently executive director of the American Diabetes Association. The AWB Institute is the nonprofit research and education affiliate of the association, a longtime organization advocating on behalf of its 8,000 members.

— Five Seattle-area physicians were appointed to the National Academy of Medicine:

• Dr. Susan Stern, professor emeritus and founding chair of UW Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine
• Dr. Elizabeth Swisher, professor in the Fred Hutch Clinical Research Division and UW Medicine’s Division of Gynecologic Oncology, as well as deputy director of the Fred Hutch/UW/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium
• Dr. Leslie Walker, chair and professor of UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics and chief academic officer at Seattle Children’s
• Dr. Dimitri Christakis, professor in UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, pediatrician at Seattle Children’s and chief health officer with Special Olympics International
• Dr. Christopher Longhurst, CEO of Seattle Children’s and clinical professor with UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics

Amazon announced new AI tools for its independent sellers Wednesday, led by a plugin that lets them run their Amazon businesses from Anthropic’s Claude or Amazon’s own Quick assistant.

The idea is to let sellers check inventory, adjust prices and update listings without opening Seller Central, which merchants have used for years to manage their Amazon businesses. Amazon says about 90% of sellers already use some form of outside AI to run parts of their operations.

“Our vision was that they would never have to log into Seller Central,” said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, in an interview. “We would just bring it to them where they work.”

The company is making the announcement at Accelerate, its annual seller conference, taking place in Seattle this week. It’s also releasing automations that monitor a seller’s business in the background and can act on it with the seller’s approval, and an upgraded Seller Assistant that remembers a seller’s pricing patterns, inventory cycles and growth goals from one session to the next.

The stakes: Independent sellers account for more than 60% of units sold on Amazon worldwide, and the fees Amazon charges them brought in $46.8 billion in the second quarter, more revenue than AWS.

Those fees are one of the issues in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Amazon, which accuses the company of overcharging sellers and punishing them for offering lower prices elsewhere. Amazon has denied the allegations and called the suit “wrong on the facts and the law.”

The case is set for trial in March 2027 in federal court in Seattle.

Amazon’s advertising business, which includes the sponsored listings sellers buy to promote their products, brought in $19.8 billion in the quarter, up 26% from a year earlier. When it filed the case, the FTC said advertising had become “virtually necessary for sellers to do business,” and that Amazon’s combined fees take close to half of many sellers’ revenue.

Sellers are a tough and pragmatic crowd. The loudest ovation at last year’s Accelerate went to a housekeeping fix rather than a new tool, when Amazon ended commingling, the practice of mixing identical inventory from different sellers in its warehouses.

Which agents get in: By starting to officially connect its seller tools to outside AI platforms, Amazon is loosening its grip on the technology sellers use to manage their presence in the company’s e-commerce store, although it still decides which platforms to support.

The announcement comes days after Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse, a new AI agent that can shop on behalf of consumers, from its store. Amazon says outside agents need to identify themselves and follow the rules of the sites they use.

Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, and the AI company’s Claude models already power Seller Assistant, the AI technology built into the Seller Central portal that answers sellers’ questions and, with their approval, updates listings and prices.

The company says more integrations will follow Claude and Quick. “We’ve built this in a way that should be modular enough for us to continue to publish plugins,” Westmoreland said.

How it works: Amazon says connecting Claude takes about 60 seconds and no coding. The plugin pulls a seller’s listings, inventory levels, sales analytics and performance metrics into the outside assistant, which can then act on the account the way Seller Assistant does inside Seller Central.

Sellers choose which types of data the plugin can reach and approve each action before it’s carried out. The company says it doesn’t see the other business data in a seller’s assistant.

The plugin is in beta in Amazon’s U.S. stores, with international expansion to follow.

Among other announcements, Seller Assistant is getting a new canvas feature, a visual workspace generated on the fly from a seller’s live data. Sellers can use it to compare pricing strategies or diagnose ad campaigns, and it redraws as they ask follow-up questions.

In addition, Amazon says it’s giving every primary selling account holder worldwide a free 12-month subscription to Amazon Quick Plus, available through Dec. 31, 2026, with two additional co-workers covered at no cost.

This year’s event comes amid a leadership change in the seller organization. Amit Agarwal, a 27-year Amazon veteran who launched its India marketplace, took over selling partner services in February as Dharmesh Mehta moved to become CEO Andy Jassy’s technical advisor.

Augmeta, a startup that assigns an AI agent to monitor, investigate and act on each of a company’s key business metrics, has raised $3 million in seed funding to speed up customer deployments and expand what its agents can do.

The idea is to have software keeping watch over every key metric around the clock — everything from online sales to airline bag check-in rates — instead of waiting for the inevitable question at the weekly business review. The company, based in Redmond, calls this “Agentic KPI Ops,” short for key performance indicator operations.

Augmeta CEO Salman Jamali gave the example of an e-commerce company that switches email systems, and the move pauses a campaign aimed at winning back lapsed customers. Sales slip, and the explanation is scattered across six or seven different systems.

“Everyone reads part of it,” he said. “Nobody reads it end to end.”

How it works: Augmeta refers to its agents as “operators.” Jamali said the company took the name from startup culture, where an operator owns a problem end to end.

“They don’t just stop because the role tells them to stop,” he said. “They only stop when the outcome gets delivered.”

When an agent finds a problem or an opportunity, it estimates what it’s worth in dollars, brings the evidence to the right team, and checks back to see whether the fix worked. What it can change on its own depends on the permissions a customer grants, and not every fix is automated, according to the company.

Founders: Jamali, who previously led engineering for Opendoor’s home operations, co-founded Augmeta in 2025 with Nitin Bhaskaran, who led product teams at Home Depot and Opendoor, and Arslan Jamali, a former Amazon Business senior product manager who worked in finance at AWS and Prime Video. (Salman and Arslan are brothers.)

Augmeta has seven people on its team, including the three founders, and is hiring for additional roles.

Funding: The seed round was led by Depth Ventures, a San Francisco firm founded last year by Paul Jun, a former Index Ventures partner and CFO of AI accounting startup Pilot, and Jeff Arnold, an early OpenAI employee who is now a director at the OpenAI Foundation. A former Opendoor colleague introduced them to the Augmeta founders.

NextWave NYC, part of Flybridge Capital, also participated, along with investments through the Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital scout programs and angel investors.

“Enterprises lose millions in revenue every day to friction and unintended changes in their customer funnels, from underperforming landing pages to slow checkout experiences,” Jun said in a statement.

He said Depth invested because of the founders’ technical expertise and their vision for how AI can help companies go from just tracking their numbers to constantly acting on them, with people still in charge.

Customers: Tractor Supply Company, the Tennessee-based farm-and-ranch retailer, is among the startup’s customers. Augmeta says its agents track more than 100 KPIs in the retailer’s e-commerce business and produce reports used in business decisions, and that the retailer renewed after its first year.

“It feels like we’re building a brain for the digital team that stays with a KPI end to end,” said Sada Kshirsagar, Tractor Supply’s vice president of product management and operations, in a statement. Kshirsagar said the system surfaces answers before anyone thinks to ask, and carries what it learns from each investigation into the next.

The startup has run pilots with other large companies and has more underway.

Augmeta sells annual enterprise contracts rather than charging per user or per month. Jamali said he eventually wants to move to pricing based on the value customers get, such as a percentage of what the system saves them.

Competition: Jamali said he doesn’t see the AI labs as a competitive threat, since each new model they release immediately helps Augmeta.

Analytics companies including Amplitude, Adobe and Quantum Metric have added AI agents of their own. Jamali said other companies are building what he called “triage agents,” whereas Augmeta’s operators apply ongoing, end-to-end ownership to business metrics.

The bigger question may be whether companies try to build their own KPI agents with off-the-shelf AI. Augmeta addresses the issue with what Jamali calls “anti-selling,” which he summed up this way: “Don’t buy Augmeta. Let’s go build this in Claude.”

The company then walks prospects through everything they’d have to build, making the point that the hard part is keeping agents running reliably across hundreds of KPIs as a business changes.

What’s next: Much of the money will go toward speeding up sales and deployments at big companies, which tend to have long purchasing timelines and processes, Jamali said.

The startup also plans to reach more customers, cover more KPIs for each one, and give its agents more ability to act on what they find and learn from the results.

Jamali said AI has changed how they’re building the team: “I really do think we can do a lot more with under 10 people, compared to what I would have said, let’s just say, six months ago.”