A Redmond, Wash., robotics software startup founded by former Microsoft researchers says its platform can now handle much of the work of getting a robot up and running in a factory, warehouse or other industrial setting, a job that used to take a team of engineers.

General Robotics said Wednesday that advances in GRID, its robot intelligence platform, have cut the process of onboarding a new robot from about a month to as little as two hours. The company calls the approach “Auto Engineering,” with each onboarded robot and diagnosed failure feeding back into the system and speeding up the next deployment.

“Before this moment, it would take us a team of experts to go and execute on behalf of our customers,” said General Robotics CEO and co-founder Ashish Kapoor in an interview. “Clearly non-scalable, clearly very expensive, and clearly will take a long time.”

With Auto Engineering, he said, “we can magnify and accelerate each engineer’s capability.”

Founded in 2023, the company has grown to about 50 employees, primarily engineers. It has raised nearly $34 million, most recently in an April round led by Construct Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Nvidia and Valo Ventures. PitchBook put the size of the round at $25 million; the companies didn’t disclose terms at the time.

Kapoor said General Robotics has roughly a dozen customers — large enterprises across manufacturing, logistics, energy and defense — and revenue in the millions of dollars.

Customers include HTX, the science and technology agency of Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which Kapoor said has been working with General Robotics for about a year and a half.

The company’s platform works with robot types including industrial arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled robots and drones, according to the company.

General Robotics is operating in a competitive and well-funded sector. Physical Intelligence, which builds foundation models for robots, has raised more than $2 billion. Nvidia — an investor in General Robotics, and the maker of the Isaac Sim simulation software built into GRID — is developing its own robot models and deployment tools.

Robot makers build good hardware, Kapoor said, but often lack the expertise to put it to work in a specific setting like a shipping terminal. “That last layer is missing.”

Before co-founding the company, Kapoor spent 17 years at Microsoft, ultimately as general manager of its autonomous systems and robotics research group in Redmond, where he created the open-source drone simulator AirSim. General Robotics co-founders Sai Vemprala (CTO) and Shuhang Chen came from the same Microsoft team.

GeekWire covered the launch in 2023, when it was Scaled Foundations and billed itself as “ChatGPT for robots.” It had five employees at the time, focused on aerial robotics and drones, with backing from Khosla and E14 Fund. It later renamed itself General Robotics.

Robotics jobs in the Pacific Northwest are multiplying faster than universities can train people to fill them. The University of Washington thinks it has an answer — or at least a start.

This fall, UW’s College of Engineering will launch its first robotics graduate programs: a Master of Science in Robotics and a Graduate Certificate in Applied Robotics. 

The university capped enrollment at 35 students for the inaugural cohort. More than 30 people had already signed up for an information session before applications even opened. It’s an  early signal, engineering leaders say, of pent-up demand from regional powerhouses racing to hire engineers who can operate at the intersection of AI, software and hardware.

Program leaders say that skill set is rooted in a traditional, narrowly focused engineering degree that hasn’t kept pace with the rapid evolution of technology. UW is betting that the fix lies at the intersection of AI and hardware, echoing an industry buzzword called “physical AI.”

“Robotics is no longer confined to a single discipline,” said Xu Chen, a UW engineering professor and director of the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, who played a large role in the committee that designed the new programs. “The future will need a wide variety of robotics knowledge, and that’s what we built these programs to deliver.”

Applications opened Sept. 1 and will close Sept. 10, with UW aiming for a roughly one-week turnaround before notifying applicants. For its inaugural year, the university is intentionally keeping things small: 25 seats in the master’s program and 10 in the certificate track, which is designed for working professionals who want robotics training without leaving their jobs.

Chen said the small first cohort is by design, not a limitation. The goal, he emphasized, is to get the fundamentals right before scaling up. He expects the programs to roughly triple in size within three to five years.

“Companies are seeing newer potential in robotics as advanced computing and the wave of AI technology mature,” Chen said. “They see that their workforce will benefit from a modern robotics program, and that need is really what drove this.”

Getting there will take machines, and lots of them. UW is purchasing robots and computing hardware for its initial course offerings while also leaning on industry donations: robots, GPUs, and computing infrastructure among them, according to Chen.

Amazon and Microsoft anchored the effort early; the list of partners has since grown to include NVIDIA, Boeing, Dassault Systèmes — the French software company behind design tools like SolidWorks — and at least one smaller robotics manufacturer.

“The industry board was incredibly supportive from the start,” Chen said. “We’ve had almost a year of continuous meetings and collaboration with them and with representatives across our own engineering departments.”

The broader structure of the program is meant to make it easier for students from different corners of engineering, such as electrical, mechanical and computer science, to land in the same classroom and eventually choose their own path deeper into robotics through electives.

The program is also drawing on UW’s existing research muscle in the region. It taps directly into the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, which Chen directs, along with robotics labs inside the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. That gives students a line into the same research infrastructure that already feeds Seattle’s aerospace and e-commerce giants. 

The university’s ambitions extend well past this fall’s launch. Chen said UW has already mapped out longer-term plans for an undergraduate robotics degree and, eventually, a Ph.D. program, with the two new offerings serving as the foundation.

For now, the clearest sign of the program’s ambitions arrived this summer in an unlikely form: a pack of robot dogs let loose on UW’s campus.

“Seattle’s hills make it a uniquely difficult place for robots to move around, which is exactly why it’s a great place to study it,” Chen said.

Both students and faculty got a chance to operate the robots directly, Chen said. It was a hands-on moment that underscored how much more accessible robotics technology has become in just the last few years.

“It was exciting to see the students so happy to see the robots,” Chen said. “That’s the kind of energy we want to build this program around.”

Starcloud says it has raised $250 million in new funding to support the creation of a constellation of data center satellites powered by Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips.

The Series A extension funding round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors including Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX and 776. Among the new investors joining for this round are Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital and Standard Capital.

Founded in 2024, Starcloud is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., and is building production lines for its Starcloud-3 spacecraft at a new 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Wash. The newly announced round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $450 million, with a post-money valuation of $2.3 billion.

Nvidia’s participation in the funding round brings Starcloud’s collaboration with the computer-chip titan to a new level. In November 2025, Starcloud flew Nvidia’s H100 GPU to orbit for the first time. It used the chip to train a large language model called NanoGPT — marking a milestone in space-based AI data processing.

Starcloud plans to equip future satellites with Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, which Nvidia says will deliver 25 times as much in-space compute capability as the H100. Starcloud’s satellites will serve as an early flight platform for the space-rated chips.

“This fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs into space,” Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston said today in a news release.

Starcloud says the new investment will fund the continued buildout of manufacturing capacity, engineering work in collaboration with Nvidia and the procurement of future launch slots. Manhattan West’s Lauren Selig will join Starcloud’s team as a board observer.

Starcloud has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to operate as many as 88,000 satellites as orbital data centers for AI and other applications. It’s not the only company targeting the market for orbital data centers. Most notably, SpaceX has filed its own plans to put up to a million data center satellites in space, for a project called Starmind.

The push to move AI infrastructure into space is driven by growing terrestrial bottlenecks surrounding land, power and water consumption — and by the political controversies those bottlenecks have sparked.

Microsoft and Amazon both saw their stocks surge again Monday, riding a post-earnings tech wave across the stock market that pushed Amazon past $3 trillion in value for the first time.

The gains follow earnings reports last week in which both companies’ cloud platforms exceeded expectations. Microsoft said Azure grew 43%, passing $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Amazon said AWS grew 37%, its fastest pace in 18 quarters.

Microsoft and Amazon are now the world’s fourth and fifth most valuable companies, respectively. The three ahead of them (Nvidia, Alphabet and Apple) are all headquartered in the Bay Area, although each has sizeable engineering centers in the Seattle region.

Amazon rose 4.6% in intraday trading to $284.15 as of publication time, after touching an all-time high of $287.20 earlier in the session, giving it a market value of $3.06 trillion.

Microsoft climbed 5.2% to $488.97, worth $3.63 trillion. Its rally began Thursday, when it added nearly $450 billion in market value, the largest one-day gain by any company on record.

The rallies came despite AI spending plans that have unsettled investors for much of the year. Microsoft went into earnings near a one-year low, after a $357 billion wipeout to start the year.

It’s all still coming at a huge cost. Microsoft spent a record $41 billion on capital projects last quarter and told investors to expect more than $50 billion in the current quarter. Amazon raised its 2026 forecast to about $220 billion from $200 billion, citing rising memory chip prices.

In one sign of the impact of the spending, Microsoft’s free cash flow fell 23% last quarter. Amazon’s free cash flow turned negative for the first time since 2023.

But cloud growth and other signs of demand for AI seem to have appeased investors for now.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors the spending reflects unmet demand: “Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too. In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking.”

The gains come as both companies operate with fewer people. Amazon confirmed 16,000 more corporate job cuts in January, bringing the total to 30,000 since October, along with more recent reductions in its robotics and artificial general intelligence groups.

Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs in July, revamping its salesforce and overhauling Xbox.

How interconnected is Washington’s tech industry? Enough that a large share of the state’s companies can trace their lineage to Microsoft, the University of Washington, Amazon, and a handful of other institutions.

A new visualization from the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), unveiled this week, charts those family trees. But the “Washington Tech Universe” map offers only a partial view: Washington is home to 25,000 tech companies, and just 625 are featured.

“This is not a ranker of all the best companies,” said Nick Ellingson, WTIA’s vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship, during a presentation at Seattle Tech Week. The point, he said, is to show the region’s connectivity and to make the case for investing in the community as a whole.

The “Tech Universe Map” comes 11 years after the trade group published a similar visualization. According to Ellingson, the update came because people kept asking for it, not because of a single event. It’s unrelated to WTIA’s efforts to help Washington establish a public AI narrative.

That said, the 2026 edition is markedly different from the one in 2015: The new map looks at the entire state, aiming to comprehensively chart the connections among different companies, while the prior version was limited to companies in Seattle, with a more narrow focus on acquisitions and similar data.

Microsoft and UW produce the most founders

WTIA’s data shows that today, Washington has four main founder “hubs,” with Microsoft being the largest. About a quarter of the mapped companies — 161 of 625 — have at least one founder who came out of Microsoft. UW is the second with 143 companies, followed by Amazon, which anchors 58 firms. Google rounds out the group with 20 connections, though it’s a pipeline that didn’t exist in WTIA’s 2015 map.

UW isn’t the only school producing founders. WTIA’s map traces company lineages to Washington State, Western Washington, Central Washington, Eastern Washington, Whitman College, Seattle University, and Seattle Pacific. Still, UW accounts for 70% of the map’s university connections.

Broken down, the data shows that nearly two out of three companies (64%) grew out of another company listed on WTIA’s map. A third came out of a university, or out of a company that operates in Washington without being headquartered here.

Google is the clearest example of the latter since it’s based in California but has a significant presence here. Moreover, WTIA found that 44% of mapped companies had founders who previously worked at two or more Washington organizations before starting theirs.

Ellingson called the hubs “gravity wells that bend the entire region toward the next generation of founders” in the announcement.

However, he cautioned that this pipeline concentrated around four main sources could be a risk. Some of the hubs he expects to grow next, such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia, are headquartered elsewhere and maintain engineering centers here, a presence that is easier to scale back. Microsoft, Amazon, and UW aren’t going anywhere. The next generation of hubs has no such guarantee.

To mitigate this risk, Ellingson called for broad community support for these hubs, saying it would keep the flywheel going.

These companies, he said, “are growing not just the jobs at their companies, but they’re creating the next employers, venture-scale startups, and tech companies that go on to build amazing things, and hire the next generation of talent here and bring more talent to the area, who then go and create their own startups.”

The next hubs are forming around AI

WTIA also recognized AI’s impact on Washington’s tech ecosystem. Although the technology was not a formal selection criterion, it became evident that AI would be a dominant theme among the featured companies. In fact, firms like Read AI, Karat, Yoodli, Outreach, and Pictory appear on the map for the first time. And Ellingson revealed that “many of the startups on the map are AI startups.”

“Twenty-three percent of the AI talent in the United States is here in Seattle,” he said.

That, along with the burgeoning startup ecosystem, is why organizations like the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and AI House, are poised to have large constellations of their own. AI House was formerly the AI2 Incubator. It spun out as an independent entity in 2022 and rebranded in June.

WTIA noted that Ai2 is the first research lab on its map to operate as a “founder factory.”

Other AI companies making their presence known on the “Tech Universe Map” include OpenAI and Anthropic. While not Washington-native, both AI model makers have established or expanded their outposts in the state since 2015.

Ellingson predicted that, like Ai2, both would eventually become major hubs.

How companies were selected

To create the “Tech Universe Map,” WTIA started out with a dataset of 3,500 Washington-based tech companies with at least $1 million in funding or revenue according to PitchBook.

The group was filtered further to those that were headquartered or had notable engineering centers in the state, were still active, and had “meaningful” Washington-grown connections through founder or university lineage. The GeekWire 200 was also used in the process.

WTIA enlisted the help of UW graduate Jessica Forcucci and a team of designers to create the visualization. In brief remarks, Forcucci explained her vision for the “Tech Universe Map,” saying the goal was to “demonstrate the interconnectivity” these companies had with each other.

Predicting what the next map will look like

As Washington’s tech ecosystem evolves, Ellingson predicted there will not only be bigger constellations of AI companies, but also quantum, fusion and advanced energy, and space and defense. He believed more tech clusters will blossom statewide beyond King County.

Ellingson said WTIA is seeing real growth in Wenatchee, the Tri-Cities and Spokane. Those regional clusters are small now, he said, but he expects them to be substantial by 2031.

To make the next map happen, Ellingson urged people to open doors for others, make introductions without expecting anything in return, and give first, building community and forming new constellations.

Posters of the Tech Universe Map are available for purchase.

Note: GeekWire is a media sponsor of the Tech Universe Map project.

Amazon’s next pillar could be built on a foundation of silicon.

In a new interview with Fortune, Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom chip business is on track to become one of Amazon’s most durable businesses, placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company.

“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos told Fortune. “What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.”

The comments offer one of Bezos’ clearest public endorsements yet of Amazon’s push to design its own chips for artificial intelligence, an increasingly important strategy as demand for AI computing soars and companies look for alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant processors.

More than a decade of investment

Amazon has invested heavily in custom silicon through Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip startup it acquired in 2015. The company now develops its own AI chips under the Trainium and Inferentia brands, designed to train and run large language models while reducing costs for customers using Amazon Web Services.

AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. Anthropic trains and runs its Claude models on Trainium, and OpenAI has committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, ramping in 2027.

The company disclosed revenue for its in-house data center chips for the first time earlier this year, and since then its Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chips have grown to a combined annual run rate of more than $20 billion. Amazon has been pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, including new data centers and custom networking hardware.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly argued that demand for AI computing will remain strong for years, making investments in chips, servers, networking equipment, and power generation essential to the company’s long-term growth.

In an earnings release earlier this year, Jassy signaled plans to pour a record $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, citing “seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.”

The real potential for Amazon’s chips business could come in going beyond the walls of its own data centers. Jassy wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this year that it’s “quite possible” Amazon will sell racks of its internally developed chips to third parties in the future.

Amazon’s fourth pillar?

This discussion about Amazon’s “pillars” goes back to Bezos’ 2014 letter to shareholders, where he described four characteristics of what he called a “dreamy” business: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time — with the potential to endure for decades.”

AWS, Marketplace, and Prime are considered the first three pillars. The question of what could become Amazon’s “fourth pillar” has been debated for more than a decade, with areas including shipping and logistics and Alexa cited as contenders in the past.

The company’s big bet on silicon also was emphasized by Jassy in the Fortune piece. He told the magazine that chips are often the key to computing. “The growth in AI has been so significant, but we have a chips business that we built over the last decade here that is growing very quickly,” he said.

The profile appeared alongside Fortune’s release of its 2026 Global 500 ranking, which placed Amazon at No. 1 for the first time, ending Walmart’s 12-year run as the world’s largest company by revenue after Amazon surpassed $700 billion in annual sales, as reported previously.

Walmart fell to No. 2, followed by State Grid of China, UnitedHealth Group, and Saudi Aramco. The magazine reports that Amazon is on pace to be the first trillion dollar company by revenue.

Amazon reports Q2 2026 earnings on Thursday afternoon. Check back with GeekWire for coverage.