Providence will receive $1.1 billion — one of the largest gifts ever pledged to a U.S. healthcare institution — from Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny. The donation will allow the nonprofit health network to build Oregon’s first hospital focused on women’s health, increase support for cardiovascular services and improve patient care.

“Penny and I have always believed that real breakthroughs come from people willing to take on the toughest challenges,” Phil Knight said in a statement. “Providence has shown that kind of ambition in cardiovascular care, and we see the same opportunity to do something truly distinctive for women’s health.”

The funds are being directed to Portland’s Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and to Providence Heart Institute.

The new women’s hospital will be located on the campus of the medical center and provide care in specialties including gynecology, pregnancy, labor and delivery, menopause and cardiovascular care. Providence leaders note that many pregnant patients are also managing hypertension, diabetes, behavioral health and substance abuse, requiring more specialized services.

The Knights have previously donated $200 million over the course of 10 years to Providence Heart Institute, which sees nearly 63,000 patients each year across the Pacific Northwest, up from 40,000 a decade ago. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and hospitalization in the U.S.

The added support for the institute will help pay for diagnostic cardiac imaging, additional clinical trials, and the recruitment of leading doctors.

Knight, 88, co-founded Nike with Bill Bowerman in Eugene, Ore., in 1964. The business was originally called Blue Ribbon Sports before rebranding seven years later. Knight is currently worth an estimated $25.4 billion, according to Forbes.

“The Knights’ extraordinary gift is a generational investment, leading to bold and innovative ideas that will shape healthcare in Oregon for decades to come,” said Jennifer Burrows, chief executive of Providence Oregon.

BuyWander, an auction-based online marketplace for returned and overstocked retail items, announced Tuesday that it has raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group and Inspired Capital.

The fresh capital comes on the heels of the startup relocating its headquarters from Spokane, Wash., to the Seattle area to tap into the region’s deep pool of tech and retail talent and accelerate its nationwide warehouse expansion.

Founded in 2023 by CEO Jordan Allen and CFO Brock Kowalchuk, BuyWander connects bargain-seeking shoppers with inventory from major retailers like Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Home Depot.

Bidding on all items starts at $1 in fixed seven-day auctions, with customers picking up their winning purchases directly from local fulfillment centers to bypass shipping costs. The new funding — which brings total raised to date to $28 million — will fuel technology investments and power nationwide market expansion following recent warehouse launches in Denver and Chicago.

“This is blue ocean right now,” Allen said in an interview with GeekWire. “Nobody’s really built an incredibly strong consumer brand in this retail return space — what we call the intersection of the weird meets the wonderful underneath this misfit inventory. These items deserve a second chance, and as people have to tighten up their wallets, we’re an incredible option for them to buy the things they want and love.”

BuyWander officially relocated its corporate headquarters from Spokane to the Seattle area in August, establishing its central hub out of Kent, Wash., where 45 of its employees are based. The startup initially entered the region with a cramped facility to prove out local demand, but recently upgraded to a 52,000-square-foot warehouse that can process three to five times more volume for local shoppers.

Across its expanding national footprint — which now spans eight fulfillment locations — BuyWander’s total workforce has surged to 325 people, with the vast majority working in intake, stocking, and customer service.

“Spokane was a wonderful place to start the company,” Kowalchuk said. “It was where we were living at the time, and we were able to get a lot of feedback very iteratively. But getting to the size where we are today and building out that leadership team really requires a little bit more talent density that Seattle can provide with deep roots in retail and deep roots in tech.”

Allen previously founded Stay Alfred, a Spokane-based short-term rental company that shut down in 2020, amid the pandemic, after expanding to more than 30 cities.

Behind the scenes, AI is now helping BuyWander process and list hundreds of thousands of unique items each month. Historically, manual data entry and poor photography created a bottleneck for resale platforms. Today, automated tools instantly identify returned products, pull in retail valuations, and generate detailed listings with a single click.

“There’s been a ceiling on this business historically because of the technology required,” Allen said, adding that AI now optimizes everything from auction scheduling to appointment bookings. “It feels like World War II and Star Trek at the same time and we’re merging these two worlds together.”

To better capture regional markets, BuyWander plans to increase facility density in key metro areas. In the Puget Sound region, Allen noted that traffic and geography often create a barrier between regional hubs, pointing to plans to open four to five warehouses across the greater Seattle area over the next few years to keep pickup convenient for local shoppers.

Beyond bargain hunting, the circular model addresses a massive environmental headache for retailers, who often dispose of returned goods simply because their systems aren’t built to re-process them locally.

Total U.S. retail returns reach roughly $850 billion annually, driven heavily by online shopping, where return rates hover near 20%, according to data from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns. For retailers, processing a single return can cost between 20% and 65% of the item’s original retail price once return shipping, inspection, and restocking are factored in — making local secondary marketplaces an increasingly vital alternative to taking a total loss.

“Some of these brands and retailers were throwing this stuff away, and it just feels kind of criminal,” Allen said, pointing out how returned items often get trucked back and forth across the country. “You can buy a Seahawks jersey, and it gets returned in the mail back to Hebron, Kentucky, and ends up loaded up on a truck, ending up in Miami. The stars really align when the stuff can be sold locally where the demand already was to begin with.”

BuyWander’s expansion is backed by rapid operational momentum, hitting 400% year-over-year growth as it expands nationally. The platform now counts 50,000 active and winning customers who have saved a cumulative $200 million — averaging roughly $4,000 in savings per customer. Over the past month alone, the company sold nearly 500,000 unique items across its eight warehouse locations, with goods selling for an average discount of 75% off retail prices.

According to Kowalchuk, roughly 80% of the returned goods arrive in “appears new” condition with only minor packaging damage. About 80% of buyers are end consumers using the platform for everyday shopping, while 20% are local resellers — a customer base Allen says grows almost entirely organically, with nine out of 10 shoppers joining via word-of-mouth referrals.

The platform offers a sprawling, unpredictable lineup of products — having sold everything from electronic cow milkers, log splitters, and commercial ice cream machines to everyday staples like hair dryers and air fryers.

“It is probably one of the best product discovery platforms out there,” Allen said, predicting the company will eventually sell a bit of everything listed on the internet. “We’ll get hilariously fun items, like foam blasters right after spring break or 12-foot tall skeletons right after Halloween. That’s why it’s odd, and that’s why the deals are so good.”

The Gates Foundation is pledging to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence for health workers, farmers and teachers, largely in the world’s poorest countries, funding AI tools for people the market would otherwise overlook.

The bet is that AI can help reaccelerate the world’s progress against child mortality, poverty and disease, which has slowed sharply as governments cut global health funding.

The Seattle-based foundation’s new financial commitment, released Monday evening in conjunction with its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, illustrates the double-edged sword of AI at a moment when the U.S. in particular is preoccupied with what the technology might damage or destroy.

Bill Gates, who issued his own AI warnings in an essay three weeks ago, writes in the new report that the risks “are real and deserve serious attention.” He adds, “AI could be a great equalizer — or widen the gap. This is not a long-range prediction. It’s a present-tense choice.”

In this case, Gates writes, he’s focusing on “the possibility that AI, if shaped well, could expand who has access to solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that has too often been out of reach.”

The window is short, he writes: “I believe that the decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months — about how AI is built, funded, and deployed — will determine whether this technology primarily benefits the people who already have the most or reaches those who have the least.”

Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, in an interview with GeekWire, called the $1 billion a “down payment,” saying he expects the figure to grow significantly after the first two years.

For this first installment, 40% of the money will go to education, 40% to health care, 10% to agriculture and 10% to digital infrastructure, including datasets in languages the models don’t handle, according to the foundation.

More than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, according to the report. Leading AI speech recognition systems make errors less than 6% of the time in English and more than 60% of the time in Yoruba, a West African language spoken by tens of millions of people, for example.

Most people in Africa use feature phones rather than smartphones, Suzman said, so the tools have to work by voice. That means collecting recordings of speech, not just written text, in local accents and including children’s voices. He said the foundation works with Google and Microsoft on AI language initiatives.

Winding down: Gates announced in May 2025 that he would give away virtually all his wealth and close the foundation in 2045, which requires doubling its spending over those 20 years. The foundation had previously planned to close 20 years after his death.

As part of that plan, the foundation will need to give away $200 billion before it shuts down. Its budgeted payout is $9 billion this year, the largest in its history. Suzman said the $1 billion over two years comes out of its core budget.

Goals for its final two decades include cutting preventable child deaths in half again, eradicating polio and malaria, and bringing tuberculosis and HIV under control.

The report’s data section shows how far off the pace the world is. Child mortality, neonatal mortality and HIV are all projected to miss their 2030 targets. HIV incidence is on track to fall only to 0.22 new cases per 1,000 people, more than 10 times the target of 0.02.

Early AI results: The report makes the case that AI could change those trajectories. It points to a number of tools already in use in different settings:

• Penda Health, a network of affordable clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, where an AI tool built into patient records has raised diagnostic accuracy by 16 percentage points.
• In the U.S., seventh graders using a tool called Kiddom Atlas across 21 middle schools gained the equivalent of six extra months of learning in a single year.
• In India, the state of Maharashtra runs a free AI advisory service called MahaVISTAAR that has signed up more than 740,000 farmers, with 70,000 more joining every month.

The foundation has supported all three, according to the report’s endnotes. The endnotes also cite OpenAI’s account of its work with Penda Health on the clinical copilot.

One caveat: the evidence behind the examples is early. Suzman said the education work is “still on a relatively small scale,” and pointed to agriculture as the area already operating at size.

Suzman said the foundation spent years experimenting with AI without committing at this scale, wary of getting ahead of what the technology could actually deliver in its areas. Progress in the models over the past year, and results from early investments, convinced him otherwise.

“We now can state with a pretty high degree of confidence there are real deliverables that we can see across health, across education, across agricultural development,” he said.

What AI won’t fix: Asked whether AI can substitute for the money the U.S. and other governments have cut from global health, Suzman said: “Sadly, no.” The cuts run to “tens of billions of dollars,” he said, and they are hitting basic services now. He cited the purchase of bed nets and antiretroviral drugs, and care for mothers before and after birth.

“That’s affecting families right now with a real impact,” he said. “Ideally, you combine the two [AI and aid funding], and that’s how you get hugely accelerated progress.”

Suzman said the foundation will keep pressing the U.S. to remain a leader in global health. Despite the cuts, he said, it has been encouraging to see the country stay a partner in programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and he noted that Congress has moved to fund these areas more fully than the administration has.

“We believe that currently reflects the U.S. public’s broad view and support for these areas, when you can see the concrete results,” he said.

The Epstein review: Asked how the scrutiny of Gates’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein has affected the foundation’s work, Suzman pointed to the external review the foundation released in July.

Conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, it found no evidence that Epstein received foundation money or that the foundation knew of his crimes. It counted roughly 30 meetings from 2011 to 2014, involving Gates and nine other foundation leaders and staff, and found that staff had repeatedly raised concerns about associating with him.

The board adopted the recommendations that followed, among them centralized vetting of brokers and co-funders and tougher conflict-of-interest rules.

Suzman expressed optimism that the review has cleared the way for the foundation to keep working across the full range of governmental and philanthropic partnerships. “Hopefully it’s full speed ahead,” he said, “and with these AI shifts, that’s more important than ever.”

In a sudden shadowdrop, Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software announced on Monday that it’s launched its new standalone virtual-reality headset the Steam Frame.

Initially revealed in Nov. 2025 as part of the same initiative that brought us the new Steam Machine, the Steam Frame is a new entry into the VR hardware space.

Valve’s previous VR device, 2019’s Index, was designed to be installed semi-permanently in a single room. The Frame, conversely, is a standalone wireless device that consists of a lightweight headset and two hand controllers, much in the same spirit as the Meta Quest 2.

As with Valve’s other recent hardware projects, the Frame is essentially a specialized PC running the custom SteamOS 3, a Linux-based operating system. The Frame runs off of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, with 16GB RAM, a microSD card slot, and two 2160 x 2160 LCD screens, one per eye. Oddly, it does not ship with its own dedicated power supply, but can be recharged using the same kind of USB-C plug as the Steam Deck uses.

As with the rest of Valve’s hardware, the Frame is designed to run games from your Steam library, but doesn’t necessarily run every game that’s currently on Steam. Instead, the Frame has its own verification system similar to the Steam Deck’s, with over 100 games currently hand-tested to be compatible with the Steam Frame. Every Frame also comes with Valve’s 2020 game Half-Life: Alyx as a pack-in bonus.

As with the Steam Machine, Valve plans to offer the first batch of Frames with a lottery system. To minimize the impact of scalpers, Valve intends to leave signups open for both models of the Frame until Thursday morning, then randomize the list once and email customers to let them know if they’re getting a Frame or will end up on the waiting list.

Maybe most importantly, however, the Steam Frame’s starting price is $1,059 for a model with a 256GB internal storage drive. Users who want or need more storage can upgrade to a model with a 1 TB drive for $1,299.

Much as how its low price tag was the biggest point in the Steam Deck’s favor back in 2022, the Frame’s high price tag is an albatross around its neck. Reviews note that it’s a uniquely comfortable device and makes it easier than ever to fire up games in VR, but selling it for over $1,000 means it’s unavoidably aimed at the most hardcore members of what was already a niche market.

• Engadget: Valve Steam Frame review: Solid standalone VR that’s too little, too late
• PC Gamer: The king of convenience
• Eurogamer: Valve’s latest tech is now my go-to VR headset, but it’s not without teething issues
• Ars Technica: Valve’s new $1,049 VR hardware tries to revive an abandoned VR “revolution”

This is the same problem Valve hit with the launch of the Steam Machine back in June, and it’s likely to be an issue for every hardware manufacturer in the market for the foreseeable future. With AI companies gobbling up most of the RAM and hard drives on Earth for data center construction, in an event that’s often nicknamed the “RAMageddon,” any consumers who look to build or buy a new PC or console can expect a bad case of sticker shock for the foreseeable future.

That having been said, the Frame does position Valve to pick up where other companies have left off. Meta was previously the market leader in the VR space (PC Gamer claimed recently that Meta still commands roughly 54% of the VR market), but has made distinct cutbacks in 2026 in favor of refocusing on AI research and wearable computing.

Meta invested heavily in recent years on the assumption that virtual reality was the next big thing, and while it made big strides in making VR accessible, it appears to be in the process of rethinking that bet. VR still has plenty of fans and advocates, but it has yet to live up to the hype factor that it had in the late 2010s. The AI arms race, to some extent, appears to have eaten its lunch.

On paper, Meta’s pullback could’ve left space for Valve to shoulder-check its way into the VR market, but then RAMageddon hit. This wasn’t a bad plan as recently as last year, but the current state of the hardware market makes the Steam Frame a tough lift.

Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web conferencing system that could record and replay live sessions. He filed for a patent without the help of a patent attorney, stuffing two CDs full of C++ source code into the application to show his work.

The patent was issued in 2010, and years later, after Kohler had joined Microsoft, the Redmond company licensed his technology for its Teams video-conferencing platform.

When YouTube later added the ability for viewers to pause, rewind, and change the playback speed of live video, Kohler saw in the feature what he considered to be his own invention. Kohler, who lives in Bellevue, Wash., sued Google for patent infringement in U.S. District Court in Seattle in April 2023.

But rather than defending the feature’s originality, Google argued that Kohler’s patent was too abstract to be eligible for patent protection. The district court agreed and dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that decision.

Both decisions cited Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for software patent eligibility by holding that an inventor cannot patent an “abstract idea” implemented with generic technology.

Since then, Alice has been used to invalidate thousands of software patents, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to revisit the standard. Now, Kohler is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case, not to overturn Alice, but to clarify how courts should apply it.

“The patent legal system has become hostile to inventors,” Kohler said. “Because of Alice, my case got stopped before it even started.”

How Alice changed patent law

When Alice was handed down, patent trolls were on the rise: shadowy entities that bought vague patents to sue tech companies on shaky claims of patent infringement. 

That changed under the 2014 ruling, which requires that a patent clear two hurdles: the idea cannot be “abstract,” and it must propose a sufficiently “inventive concept.” The standard has become “a crucial tool” for fighting patent trolls, in the words of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But critics say it’s ill-suited to software patents. Because software inventions often rely on pre-existing hardware to run the source code, courts tend to find many of these patents to be insufficiently inventive.

Jon McMichael, an IP lawyer who has written about Kohler’s case, said this challenge is common in patents where inventors rely on general-purpose computers and off-the-shelf hardware to implement their ideas. 

“That’s where those patent holders run into more problems,” he said.

Experts say the courts’ application of Alice has broadened to invalidate the patents of real inventors in addition to those of patent trolls. Toshiko Takenaka, a University of Washington IP law professor who is working on an academic paper about Kohler’s case, said Alice’s ability to quickly defeat bad actors comes “at the expense of the best inventors.”

“Software patents are too frequently being invalidated without giving the owner the opportunity to defend it,” Takenaka said. “This inventor provided something ordinary computers could not do, right? So therefore, in my view, this is an eligible invention.”

Some judges have raised similar concerns, including Federal Circuit Chief Judge Kimberly Moore, who authored the opinion affirming the dismissal of Kohler’s case. In a 2020 concurrence in a separate case, Moore wrote that she and her fellow judges were “unanimous in our unprecedented plea for guidance” from the Supreme Court on how to interpret Alice, which she called a “patent-killing judicial exception of our own creation.”

A quest for legal clarity

After filing his patent, Kohler spent more than 15 years at Microsoft, where he helped launch HoloLens and rose to senior director of product management for the Surface line. He later served as a product leader at Meta for its Horizon platform.

Kohler says he’s hopeful the Supreme Court will agree to hear his case because his petition takes a new approach, asking the court to clarify how to apply the Alice test rather than disputing the test entirely. His new attorney, Kathryn Jean Miller, who does not have prior patent law experience, was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court bar for this case.

“It’s me and my lawyer against the world,” Kohler said. “I never thought I would be doing something like this.”

The Supreme Court has declined more than 89 petitions related to Alice, some of which had the Solicitor General’s endorsement. The justices will decide on Sept. 28 whether to hear Kohler’s case and likely announce their decision the following week.

Kohler is hoping that other inventors will file amicus briefs, which are due by Sept. 23, to illustrate to the court the need for clarification.

“There’s a broad coalition of people who would like some sanity brought back to patent law, from small inventors and startups to former judges,” Kohler said. “That’s what I’m trying to do with my petition.”

— Silvia Candiani has been named corporate vice president of Worldwide Telco & Media within the Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion initiative launched by the tech giant in July to embed engineers inside customers to build and run AI systems. In her new role, Candiani will lead Microsoft Frontier Company’s work with some of the largest telecommunications operators and media conglomerates.

“The momentum across our industry is extraordinary, and I believe we are only at the beginning of what AI can make possible,” said Candiani, who is based in Milan.

Before joining Microsoft in 2010 as a general manager, Candiani was a marketing director for Vodafone in Italy for more than a decade.

— Kevin Frey has been appointed vice president and chief impact officer of Microsoft Elevate, the company’s philanthropic effort providing technology support, donations, sales and AI training for educational organizations and nonprofits. Frey joined from UNICEF, where he was the first CEO of Generation Unlimited, the organization’s skills and employment initiative.

Frey said he was joining Microsoft because it’s “one of the only organizations in the world with the scale, scope and influence to bend the arc of the AI-powered future we are entering.”

“I will be spending my time and energy trying to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared broadly and safely across society — by every teacher, every student and every worker — regardless of their postal code,” he added.

— And while we’re on Microsoft, Anne Linge has been promoted to director of communications for commercial and consumer experiences after nearly 10 years with the company. She previously worked in communications at Weber Shandwick and Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, which has since rebranded as We.

— Alexis Bateman has been promoted to director of global sustainability at Amazon Web Services after more than five years with the company. She was director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics for 14 years before coming to Amazon.

Her work with AWS has given her the chance to help “shape sustainability at enormous scale,” Bateman said. “AI and cloud are transforming technology and society at an unprecedented pace, creating both enormous challenges and incredible opportunities for sustainability.”

— Gradial has appointed Lynn Girotto as chief marketing officer. In June, the Seattle startup announced $65 million in new funding for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing. The company is No. 127 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Girotto joins from Qualtrics, where she was CMO for two years. She has previously led marketing teams at companies including Vimeo, Tableau and Getty Images, and was a senior director at Microsoft for nine years earlier in her career.

“The best marketers I know want to build ideas and customer relationships, not manage processes,” Girotto said. “Gradial is the first company I’ve seen that’s built to give them that time back.”

— A Seattle-area nonprofit group known as the Fermi Explorer Mission announced that Kam Ghaffarian has joined as co-founder. Earlier this month, the organization shared its plans to send a spacecraft on an 80,000-year trip to the nearest alien star system, Alpha Centauri.

Ghaffarian is a billionaire who helped launch companies including X-energy, Axiom and Intuitive Machines. “By committing to launching a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri by 2029, we are not just pushing the boundaries of current technology; we are inspiring a new generation to look up and dream of interstellar exploration,” Ghaffarian said.

Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of the Fermi Explorer Mission, also leads Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, a startup aiming to launch up to 88,000 satellites to serve as AI data centers.

— Yoodli, the Seattle-based AI roleplay platform for enterprise training, has named Rachel Cougan vice president of human resources. Cougan previously served as a fractional HR leader through her consultancy, Possible HR. Before that, she was VP of people for Logixboard and Hiya, and also served as VP of talent for Textio.

Yoodli, which launched in 2021, has grown to more than 100 employees. The company is No. 17 on the GeekWire 200.

— Kestra Medical Technologies has promoted Daniel Finney to vice president of research and development. The Kirkland, Wash.-based company sells cardiac monitoring and therapeutic devices. It raised $202 million in its IPO in March 2025 and was nominated for Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

Finney has been with Kestra since 2019. CEO Brian Webster praised his role in developing the company’s FDA-approved monitoring device, adding that his “technical depth, product experience, and demonstrated leadership positions him to guide our next phase of innovation.”

Finney succeeds Phillip Foshee, Jr., who recently retired after leading Kestra’s R&D organization for nearly a decade.

— PATH has named Dr. Jeremy Farrar chief of its Asia, Middle East and Europe regional division. Farrar, a globally recognized leader in public health and clinical medicine, will join PATH effective Oct. 1 and be based in Geneva. His past roles include assistant director-general at the World Health Organization and director of the Wellcome Trust.

PATH CEO Nikolaj Gilbert praised the appointment, and noted that Farrar “possesses deep knowledge of the realities that prevent access, the people that make health care possible, and the need for PATH’s mission of ensuring breakthrough innovations reach all who need them.”

— American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced that University of Washington scientist Emily Levesque is the next editor in chief of the AAS journals. She will succeed Ethan Vishniac, who is stepping down from the role at the end of summer 2027 after 12 years.

“In the writing and publishing landscape we’re facing today, sharing information has never been easier, but trusting information has never been harder — which makes the AAS journals’ combination of rigorous peer review and accessible science more valuable than ever,” Levesque said.

Levesque has been an assistant astronomy professor at the UW for 11 years. She leads the massive stars research group, which studies the evolution and death of the largest and “most extreme” stars in the universe.

— The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber has added eight members to its board of trustees:

• Deniz Anders, Nordstrom’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer
• Reuven Carlyle, founder of Earth Finance and former state senator
• Carl Gipson, vice president of government and community affairs for Comcast
• Trevor Gooby, executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Seattle Mariners
• Daniel Huber, BNBuilders’ vice president of operations for the Northwest and Colorado
• Karen Lee, CEO of Plymouth Housing
• Holli Martinez, vice president, head of belonging, recognition and corporate responsibility for T-Mobile
• Rajat Puri, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Premera Blue Cross

Sophia Space and SLI, an aerospace leasing venture based in Washington, D.C., say they’ve agreed on a $300 million asset-financing framework that will support the creation of a 10-satellite constellation for high-performance computing.

The details of the arrangement are as notable as the bottom line: Sophia Space will build the satellites, leveraging the startup’s patented TILE technology for modular in-space data processing. SLI will purchase the satellites under the terms of a financing agreement.

“SLI as the lessor will purchase the satellites from Sophia, hold title to the assets, and lease them to the end user on a long-term basis in exchange for fixed monthly or quarterly payments,” Max Yergan, the company’s senior vice president for investments, explained in an email. “Full control and operational responsibility for the assets sit with Sophia and the end user, who will determine between them how operations are handled.”

Sophia’s satellites are designed to deliver on-orbit edge data services for a wide variety of applications. “The demand we are underwriting exists today,” Yergan said. “Earth observation, weather and supply-chain analytics, disaster response and defense ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] users all face the same constraint now: They collect far more data than they can bring to the ground, and its value decays while it waits to be downlinked. Processing on orbit addresses that directly.”

The constellation’s first launch is targeted for as early as 2028. SLI would pay out funds linked to development and launch milestones, all the way through verification that the on-orbit network performs to pre-agreed standards.

The arrangement is laid out in a non-binding letter of support. “The non-binding nature is a reflection of where we are in the process, and is typical of large asset financings,” Yergan explained. “It sets the commercial framework so both parties can commit resources while definitive documentation is negotiated.”

Leasing arrangements are often seen in aviation and the maritime industry, but this is a relatively new concept for satellite ventures.

“This is the first time that this approach has been applied to this kind of constellation, but not the first time for in-space assets,” said Gareth Zundel, SLI’s senior vice president for communications. “In December 2025 we announced the acquisition of two AscendArc satellites that will be offered to operators on leasing terms. Then, in March this year, we did a similar deal with ReOrbit. We do believe, however, that we are the first leasing company to specialize in the space sector.”

Rob DeMillo, Sophia Space’s CEO and co-founder, said the arrangement demonstrates how far the commercial space industry has come.

“Asset financing didn’t invent aviation or shipping, but it accelerated them at scale,” he said in a news release. “We’re doing the same for orbital computing. This approach with SLI signals that Sophia Space’s space infrastructure is mature enough to attract the capital structures that have historically built terrestrial infrastructure.”

The approach also gives Sophia Space — which is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., but also has strong ties to the Seattle area — access to capital without diluting the equity held by current investors, including Unlock Venture Partners in Seattle.

“Sophia has the technology, the team and the vision. What had been missing was access to scalable, non-dilutive capital,” said Praveen Vetrivel, SLI’s CEO. “This framework provides it, giving them the capacity and flexibility they need to build the next layer of digital infrastructure.”

Each of the 10 satellites in the constellation will link together six of Sophia’s TILE (Thermal Integrated LEO Edge) modules, with four Nvidia Jetson processors on each module. That adds up to 240 edge computing servers in orbit.

“These 10 spacecraft are dedicated to this transaction,” Yergan said. “Sophia’s other programs and partnerships involve separate spacecraft and separate funding and are not directly affected by this facility.”

Sophia Space has previously said that it plans to start selling TILE systems and related components to customers in 2028. The company is also collaborating with Axiom Space, Armada and Kepler Communications on separate in-space computing initiatives.

In June, Sophia Space announced the conclusion of a $7 million financing round that brought the company’s total funding to $22 million. That round took advantage of an arrangement known as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE, in which investors provide cash to a startup in exchange for the right to receive stock later.

It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.

Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.

“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”

He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.

Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.

A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”

A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.

He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.

As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.

Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.

“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”

He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”

He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.

Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.

Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.

Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”

He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.

Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.

He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.

“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.

“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”

Nearly 25 years after enrolling at Dartmouth College to study psychology and embarking on a path that led him to co-found Seattle fintech giant Remitly, Matt Oppenheimer has been inducted into the Ivy League school’s Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.

The honor, presented Thursday night in San Francisco as part of Dartmouth’s annual Entrepreneurs Forum, comes seven months after Oppenheimer stepped down as Remitly’s long-time CEO to become chairman of the board.

Created by the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, the Hall of Fame honors Dartmouth alumni who have made lasting positive impacts through their ventures. Oppenheimer joins a select group of honorees with Northwest ties — including Smartsheet co-founders Brent Frei and Mark Mader — and used his acceptance remarks to express deep gratitude to the admissions officers who took a chance on a kid from Boise, Idaho, with “OK grades” and “below average SAT scores.”

Speaking with GeekWire ahead of the event, Oppenheimer recalled how his early college years studying social psychology helped shape his understanding of business.

“I think a lot of business and entrepreneurship does come down to interpersonal dynamics,” Oppenheimer said. “I am a people person. But how do you find what I call career-market fit when it comes to really understanding and connecting with people? That’s ultimately my strength, but it was really hard to define earlier in my career.”

After graduating from Dartmouth in 2005, Oppenheimer earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked in Kenya for Barclays Bank, where seeing families hit with steep fees on cross-border money transfers inspired him to start Remitly in 2011.

He served as CEO for nearly 15 years, guiding the company through its 2021 NASDAQ IPO and building it into a fintech powerhouse serving over 9 million customers across more than 170 countries before transitioning to chairman in February.

In his acceptance speech on Thursday, Oppenheimer focused on a central philosophy he calls leading authentically through “towering strengths and shadows.”

“Each of us has a few towering strengths — things we are in the top 10% of the world at doing. Not good at. Towering,” he said. “And almost always, that tower casts a shadow. The same trait that makes you exceptional at one thing quietly makes you a liability at another. They aren’t two traits. They’re one trait, seen from two sides.”

He pointed to his own extreme tenacity as an example, noting how it helped him build Remitly through years of investor rejections and early product stumbles, but how it also had a darker side.

“That same tenacity can lock onto things that are unhealthy, or unchangeable, or both,” Oppenheimer shared, candidly discussing his personal experiences with OCD-related anxiety and depression. “This isn’t a character flaw sitting next to my strengths. It is the shadow of my greatest strength, from the same place. Which means it’s something to work with … harness the tower, manage the shadow … rather than something to be ashamed of.”

Seven months into his transition from operational CEO to board chairman, Oppenheimer says the shift has felt surprisingly comfortable. Free from managing daily execution, he now channels that same intensity into coaching current leaders and serving on corporate boards.

“I have so much trust in Sebastian [Gunningham], our CEO, and it’s super exciting to support him in a chair capacity,” Oppenheimer told GeekWire. “I get to share reflections on the journey, mentor, and coach. I didn’t know that would be the case, because you hear so many examples of founder-CEOs who transition and have a really hard time with it.”

That mentorship extends to Seattle’s broader startup community, where Oppenheimer is an active member of Foundations, a collective of local tech founders and AI leaders. When advising early stage entrepreneurs, he urges them to remain hyper-focused on solving a single, deep customer problem rather than spreading themselves thin.

And while AI has vastly accelerated product development, Oppenheimer notes that the core fundamentals of building a business haven’t changed.

“With fintech, you still have to build the trust, get the licensing, and build out the compliance infrastructure and banking relationships,” he said. “The actual building and deployment of product got a lot faster, but if you don’t have great judgment, you can go down the wrong path pretty quickly.”

Looking back 25 years later, Oppenheimer noted that the Dartmouth admissions officers who took a chance on him didn’t look past his test scores by accident — they told him years later that they were drawn to his personal qualities and humanity.

“Two strangers in an office in Hanover found my tower before I had any idea what it was, and then they handed me the place to build on it,” Oppenheimer said in his closing remarks. “That isn’t a debt. It’s a privilege. And the only sensible thing to do with a privilege is use it well.”

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.

Seattle biotech startup BrainChild Bio has raised $116 million to advance an experimental CAR T cell therapy for one of the deadliest forms of childhood brain cancer.

The Series A financing will primarily fund a pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of an investigational therapy being developed for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. The rare brainstem tumor primarily affects children ages 5 to 10 and has few treatment options.

The financing was led by an undisclosed private family fund and foundation, with participation from BrainChild Bio’s initial investor, Seattle Children’s, and new investor WRF Capital.

BrainChild Bio is building on CAR T cell technology developed at Seattle Children’s and licensed exclusively to the company in 2023. The approach involves genetically engineering a patient’s own T cells to recognize and attack cancer cells.

The company says its new therapy has now entered its ILLUMINATE Phase 2 study, designed as a registration-stage trial that could eventually support an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

DIPG presents a particularly difficult challenge for cancer researchers because the tumors grow in the brainstem, an area critical to basic functions, and the blood-brain barrier can limit the ability of treatments to reach the tumor.

BrainChild Bio’s approach delivers the CAR T cells directly into cerebrospinal fluid through an implanted catheter, allowing the cells to reach the tumor locally and potentially be administered repeatedly.

About 300 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with DIPG each year, a devastating brain tumor with no cure and few treatment options. Radiation is the current standard of care, but children diagnosed with DIPG have a median overall survival of only about 11 months.

BrainChild Bio also plans to use proceeds from the new financing to advance a CAR T therapy designed to target three different cancer markers, toward initial clinical testing in glioblastoma.

The company was founded by Michael Jensen, who previously helped develop the underlying work at Seattle Children’s and was a co-founder of Umoja Biopharma and Juno Therapeutics. The CEO is Steven Brugger, who most recently served as founder and CEO of Affinivax, a biotech company which was acquired by GSK for $3.3 billion in 2022. 

“This financing enables us to chart our path forward to serve the children and families afflicted with devastating brain tumors and represents a new paradigm for treating CNS brain tumors in children and adults,” Jensen said in a statement. “Our team at BrainChild Bio is steadfast in its commitment to harness CAR T cell technology in CNS tumors and we are uniquely positioned to do so.”

Amazon named cybersecurity veteran Kevin Mandia to its board of directors, adding new security expertise a few months after former NSA director Keith Alexander stepped down.

Mandia founded Mandiant, the breach-investigation firm Google acquired for $5.4 billion in 2022, and remained at the search giant as a strategic advisor through July 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile. He now leads Armadin, an AI security startup he started last year.

Amazon said in its announcement that “cybersecurity is one of the most consequential risks and responsibilities organizations face today, and the threat landscape continues to evolve rapidly alongside advances in AI.”

Amazon added a cybersecurity specialist to its board in 2020, when it elected Alexander, who also led U.S. Cyber Command. Mandia comes from the other side of the field, with two decades spent investigating corporate breaches rather than defending government networks.

His appointment also puts an AI security entrepreneur on the board of a company whose cloud infrastructure underpins much of the internet. Armadin, founded in September 2025, uses AI to run attacks against corporate networks, probing defenses the way an intruder would.

The board’s Security Committee, which oversees Amazon’s cybersecurity policies and its response to significant cyber incidents, is now chaired by Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Mandia joins as a member, along with former Bridgewater co-CEO Jon Rubinstein.

Amazon also named Mandia to the board’s Audit Committee, according to a securities filing.

Mandia received 4,086 restricted stock units in connection with his election to the board, vesting in three equal annual installments beginning Nov. 15, 2027, the filing shows. The shares were worth about $1.03 million at Amazon’s closing price Wednesday.

The filing disclosed that his sister-in-law, Kristin Mandia, is an Amazon employee with an annual salary of $185,000. The company said her compensation is consistent with that of other employees at her level with similar responsibilities.

[Editor’s Note: Jacob Colker is co-founder and co-managing director of AI House.]

Seattle is one of the most talented, creative and inventive places in the world. But if we want the rest of the country to see us that way, we have to start acting like we believe it ourselves.

First, we need more pride around here.

Let’s talk about what it means to be proud. 

My mother grew up in Tarnów, Poland. She escaped communism and came to the United States in 1978 looking for a better life. She found one, built a family, and has lived in America for nearly 50 years. 

But my mom is still very, very Polish.

Several times a year, I get a message: “Jakub. Did you see this?”

I already know what’s coming. 

Some Polish person did something. A Polish athlete won something. A Polish scientist discovered something. Some guy with a Polish grandmother finished third in a regional Nebraska chess tournament. Doesn’t matter. Poland.

“Jakub. Look at this person.”

Okay, Mom. Who is she?

“POLISH.”

That’s it. That’s the story. 

And I love it, because Mom has this completely indestructible pride in where she comes from. Plenty of us know someone like this: a Greek mom, Vietnamese dad, Indian uncle or Nigerian aunt. Somebody from their corner of the world did something great, and you are going to hear about it.

There is power in that instinct. Not because your people are better, but because you believe your place matters.

Seattle could use more of that.

We are almost pathologically humble. Our response to notable achievements is often a polite nod before everybody gets back to our regularly scheduled Seattle freeze. 

That humility is working against us.

Second, Seattle is awesome and the evidence is everywhere.

I see Seattle’s potential every day working alongside dozens of entrepreneurs building startups. Some of the most ambitious and talented people in the world are already here.

We have many billion-dollar startups across the region and more than 200,000 people working across technology, science, space, health and startups. That is more than enough talent to build yet a dozen more unicorns. 

Nearly 40% of the world flies every day on airplanes built here. Blue Origin and SpaceX build rockets here. Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, REI and Nordstrom reshaped how the world shops. Microsoft helped put computing into our homes. AWS and Azure helped make the cloud the infrastructure of modern life. The University of Washington ranks among the world’s best. Seattle medical breakthroughs have helped save tens of millions of lives. We are pushing forward fusion energy, aerospace and maritime innovation. And let’s not forget: we just won the darn Super Bowl.

And so, so much more. 

So why, despite all the evidence, do we still seem to have a communal case of imposter syndrome?

This is not a city lacking accomplishments.

It is a city with a branding problem.

Third, we have let other people tell our story for far too long. This ends, today. 

Cities have brands whether they intend to or not. Silicon Valley is where ambitious people build companies. Nashville is music. Los Angeles for film and television.

Seattle’s cultural humility mostly assumes our accomplishments speak for themselves.

They don’t.

Reputation gets built one story at a time. You hear one story and it is interesting. You hear 10 and you notice a pattern. You hear 50 and your beliefs begin to change: That’s where important science happens. That’s where talented people live. That’s where I should invest, build or work.

Those beliefs shape real decisions about where people move, where companies get built and where investors put their money.

So to fix Seattle’s branding problem, here’s what we need to do.

Step 1: Let’s tell one clear story — Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous. 

Seattle is where deep technical talent meets deep domain expertise to build consequential things: AI, aerospace, cloud computing, medicine, fusion, robotics, maritime technology and enterprise software.

We do not need 50 slogans. We do not need another consultant-led branding exercise. We need one simple idea that people outside this region can remember: Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous.

There is a reason some of the world’s most important companies have built major engineering centers, research hubs and second headquarters here for decades. They come for the talent.

And that talent is why Seattle will not just participate in the future. We will lead in building it.

Step 2: Let’s use the megaphones we already have.

Seattle already has outlets (including this one) telling this story — publications, podcasts and social channels that document the region’s startups, breakthroughs and product launches. 

Every day, startups are raising money, scientists are making breakthroughs, companies are launching products, engineers are building technology and institutions are pushing this region forward.

That is not just tech news. That is the raw material of Seattle’s reputation. So let’s use it.

When you read or hear about a Seattle startup doing something remarkable, share it. When you see a story about a breakthrough at Fred Hutch or the University of Washington, send it to someone outside the region. When a local company raises money, lands a major customer or gets acquired, don’t just scroll past it. Amplify it.

Step 3: Let’s treat every local win as Seattle’s win.

When a local robotics company ships something remarkable, that is Seattle’s story.

When a maritime startup reinvents how ports operate, that is Seattle’s story.

When our AI research labs, or hometown heroes in Amazon and Microsoft, create breakthroughs, that is Seattle’s story. 

When a biotech company lands a major breakthrough, when a game studio creates a global hit, when a clean-energy company reaches a milestone, that is Seattle’s story.

Our companies, universities, hospitals, labs, investors, civic organizations and business leaders should act like an amplification network for one another. Stop treating somebody else’s success as somebody else’s news.

Their win is our collective proof.

Step 4: Let’s put Seattle on the label.

Founders need to say where they are building. “Made with ❤️in Seattle” should be on the bottom of every website. Put Seattle in the press release. Put it in the LinkedIn post. Mention it onstage. Say it in interviews. Tell investors. Tell customers. 

Silicon Valley companies have spent decades attaching their success to their geography. We should do the same. If you build something extraordinary here, make sure the world knows it was built here.

Step 5: Let’s do a better job of selling Seattle.

Every venture capitalist, founder, executive and civic leader in this region should be able to explain in 60 seconds why somebody should build a company here.

Not defend Seattle. Not apologize for Seattle. Sell Seattle. 

Reminder: It’s the talent. 

(And also cream cheese on hot dogs.)

When investors and founders from New York, Boston or San Francisco come to town, show them the region. Introduce them to engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs. Bring them into the community. Let them see what is happening. 

The best branding campaign is somebody getting on a plane home saying, I had no idea all of this was happening in Seattle.

If we’re going to succeed, we need to believe first.

Insert all the Ted Lasso jokes you want, but this stuff matters. 

There is no giant Seattle marketing department coming to save us. There is no national referee who will eventually review the evidence and declare that Seattle deserves more respect.

When somebody here does something extraordinary, act like it. Read the story. Share the post. Send the article to your team. Text it to your friend in New York. Put it in the group chat. Bring it up over dinner. Tell your kids.

Basically, become my Polish mother.

My mom doesn’t give a hoot that Kraków ranks No. 6 on some list or Warsaw is No. 8 on another. She doesn’t need a clickbait listicle to tell her Poland matters. She already believes it does.

We have to build our reputation ourselves. The good news is that we already have everything we need: extraordinary companies, world-class institutions, ambitious people, groundbreaking science and media documenting it all.

What we have been missing is the confidence to start being more loud. Stories become patterns, patterns become reputation, and reputation becomes gravity. 

Gravity is what creates influence and respect.

Pride is not something somebody else gives you. You don’t wait until the rest of the country decides your home is important. YOU decide it is. Then you act like it.

Let’s get to work. 

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.

— Telecom giant T-Mobile announced that Jessica Uhl will join as chief financial officer-designate later this month, and succeed Peter Osvaldik as CFO in February. Uhl served as CFO of Shell and worked for the global oil and energy giant for more than 17 years. She joins T-Mobile from GE Vernova, where she was president.

“I am thrilled to welcome Jessica to T-Mobile,” Srini Gopalan, president and CEO of T-Mobile said in a statement. “She brings deep financial and strategic acumen, capital allocation expertise and an innovative growth mindset that is a perfect fit for T-Mobile’s next era.”

Osvaldik will transition to strategic advisor and retire from T-Mobile in July. He joined the company in 2016 and became chief financial officer in 2020. Osvaldik’s tenure “has been defined by disciplined financial stewardship, consistent financial outperformance, and an unwavering commitment to T-Mobile’s mission,” the company said.

The move marks the latest leadership shakeup at the Bellevue, Wash.-based company. Mike Katz, T-Mobile’s chief business and product officer, announced his departure in July, and Chris Sambar was named chief enterprise officer. T-Mobile has cut 470 jobs in its home state this year and closed numerous retail locations.

— Brent Colburn, Microsoft‘s vice president of global public affairs, is resigning after three years, effective mid-October.

“Stepping away from Microsoft is not a decision that I made lightly, but ultimately it is the right one for me and my family,” said Colburn, who has been commuting weekly between his home in Oakland, Calif., and Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

Colburn’s career has spanned leadership roles in government, academia and philanthropy. That includes serving as principal advisor to the secretary of defense for communications and chief of staff to then-Secretary Shaun Donovan. More recent roles include communications vice president for the University of California in Oakland, Princeton University and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

— After nearly 13 years, Audrey Powers has left Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos that develops reusable rockets, spacecraft and rocket engines. She was on Blue Origin’s October 2021 spaceflight that also carried “Star Trek” star William Shatner and two others.

“Hopefully, I’ve helped change peoples’ impressions of rockets (they land, too), astronauts (they are everyone), and our Earth,” Powers said, adding that she was sad to leave, but grateful that she took a chance on “a little startup no one had heard of.”

Powers held the title of deputy and vice president of the New Shepard Business Unit, which is the program that carries people and research payloads into suborbital space. She is an attorney who has previously worked at NASA as a flight controller and as a senior systems engineer at Lockheed Martin.

— Michael Levi has joined AZX as chief commercial officer of the Bellevue-based startup, which works with utilities and other industries to build in-house AI technologies supporting their missions.

Levi is based in San Francisco and was previously vice president of marketing and growth for KloudGin, where he helped reposition the company’s field service software into an AI-native platform for utilities and the public sector. He earlier founded L1CG, a go-to-market advisory, and has held leadership roles in energy, renewables, supply chain and fintech.

— Jason Alafgani was named head of marketing for Caddi, a Seattle startup that launched out of AI2 Incubator and is automating basic business operations with generative AI. Alafgani is the co-founder of startups including the podcast company Jellypod and worked as marketing leader for Appwrite, Dodgeball, Mode and others.

— Dr. Amir Iravani has joined Los Angeles-based UCLA Health as director of the theranostics program, which focuses on treating cancer using targeted radiation therapy. Iravani previously served as theranostics clinical director at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and was an associate professor of radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

— Portland Metro Region Innovation Hub has hired Kelly Lyons as director of the organization, which provides networking, coaching, funding and other support to entrepreneurs. Lyons is the founder of two startups and has served in leadership at Core Education, Umpqua Bank and Development House, a social services nonprofit.

— DigiStor, a Vancouver, Wash.-based provider of secure data-at-rest protection solutions, appointed Michael Callahan to its board of directors. Callahan co-founded Awake Security and PolyServe, which was acquired by HP.

California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.

“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.

The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.

Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.

The city of Kent, which is about 20 miles south of Seattle, is one of the hotspots for space companies in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing’s Kent Space Center remains active more than 50 years after building NASA’s Apollo moon rovers. The city also hosts Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Stoke Space, which was founded by Blue Origin alumni.

Cowboy Space, previously known as Aetherflux, plans to send its own rockets into low Earth orbit starting as early as 2028, with the upper stages outfitted to serve as solar-powered orbital data centers. The Stampede constellation is one of several planned projects aimed at getting around the land, power and water constraints that have made ground-based AI data centers increasingly controversial.

“We are building what I call the last big clean-sheet launch vehicle in my lifetime, so it’s going to be a very big heavy-lift vehicle, and we’re working every day to bring it to reality,” Warren Lamont, Cowboy Space’s head of launch and propulsion, said this week in a LinkedIn video. Lamont, who previously worked for IonQ and Blue Origin, is one of the executives heading up Cowboy Space’s engineering hub in the Seattle area.

The company announced in May that it raised $275 million in a Series B funding round, in part to expand its production capability. Cowboy is collaborating with Nvidia to deploy the chip giant’s Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in orbit. And in July, it secured a deal to test its propulsion system at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

“We’re really excited to get into first engine hot-fire next year,” Lamont said.

Cowboy Space’s potential competitors include SpaceX, which wants to launch up to a million AI-processing satellites; and Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is setting up a production facility in Woodinville, Wash., and seeking authorization for up to 88,000 data center satellites.

Update for 3:30 p.m. PT Sept. 13: Cowboy Space confirmed the opening of its Kent facility in a post to LinkedIn. “Kent will be our launch vehicle and satellite design hub, and we will be building our rocket engines and solar systems here too,” the company said:

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The NBA suspends former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a year and hits the Clippers with $30 million in fines and five lost draft picks over allegedly sham endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard, drawing comparisons to the Microsoft antitrust era.

A new Redfin report says San Francisco’s housing market is booming on AI wealth while Seattle slumps, with the Bay Area-to-Seattle migration pipeline nearly dried up.

And the Seahawks sale to the Khosla family officially closes, ending the Paul Allen era, with two familiar Seattle tech names surfacing in the new ownership group.

Plus, the return of the GeekWire Trivia Challenge.

Related Stories and Links

Ballmer / Clippers

• NBA suspends Steve Ballmer for 1 year, fines L.A. Clippers $30M over salary-cap scheme
• NBA announces penalties and findings arising from investigation of LA Clippers and Kawhi Leonard — NBA
• Read the NBA’s Report on Clippers, Kawhi Leonard, and Aspiration — Front Office Sports
• NBA announces punishments for Clippers after Kawhi inquiry — ESPN
• The Briefcase, Ballmer’s Social Network and Aspiration’s House of Cards: Kawhi-Gate Part VII — Pablo Torre Finds Out

Redfin / SF vs. Seattle housing

• AI wealth fuels San Francisco’s housing boom while tech layoffs weigh down Seattle
• Uber laying off 93 Washington state workers, hitting engineer and management roles at Seattle office
• Qualtrics cut 117 jobs tied to Seattle headquarters, new filing shows

Seahawks sale

• Two familiar Seattle tech figures turn up on Seahawks co-owner list as sale is finalized
• ‘I’m the 12th man … I want to represent that’: New Seahawks co-owner with deep Seattle tech roots
• What to know about Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley legend whose family is buying the Seahawks
• Apptio co-founders reunite to launch enterprise AI startup Thira with $21M in funding led by Madrona

Editor’s note: Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 16 for a live recording of the GeekWire podcast. Co-hosts John Cook and Todd Bishop will discuss the week’s news and interview Zillow’ Senior Vice President of engineering, Toby Roberts, about how AI is changing the real estate business. Details and tickets here.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uber is laying off 93 Washington state-based employees as part of a sweeping global restructuring that will eliminate roughly 10% of the company’s workforce.

The cuts heavily impact the transportation giant’s Seattle hub, targeting those assigned to the downtown engineering center as well as regional remote workers.

The job losses are detailed in a new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice filed by the company with the state’s Employment Security Department, which lists impacted positions ranging from software engineers to senior managers.

Affected staff were notified Wednesday and will receive full pay and benefits through a 60-day notice period ending Nov. 2. The cuts hit technical roles particularly hard, with position titles including software engineers, product managers, data scientists, and a Seattle-based director of engineering.

Nationally, the cuts eliminate about 3,300 corporate jobs — roughly 10% of Uber’s global workforce — in the company’s largest round of layoffs since 2020. In a memo to staff, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi framed the restructuring as a move to eliminate middle-management bureaucracy, flattening reporting structures by reducing management layers and cutting “micro-teams” by nearly half.

As part of the overhaul, Uber is also clamping down on remote work, capping fully remote positions at less than 1% of its total workforce and requiring most employees to move near core office hubs like San Francisco and New York. Khosrowshahi noted that savings from the cuts will help free up capital to invest in core operations, including autonomous vehicle partnerships.

Uber first established its engineering outpost in Seattle in March 2015 to tap into the region’s pool of tech talent. The company expanded significantly in 2018 when it signed a 10-year lease for 115,000 square feet at downtown’s Second & Seneca building at 1191 Second Ave.

Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research initiative that will generate data and train AI models to design proteins and genes that don’t exist in nature — sharing the results freely to help others develop new medicines and materials.

The initiative, called AI BioDesign, brings together the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, with funding from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), created by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

AI BioDesign is led by David Baker, the UW biochemist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computers to design new proteins, and Jay Shendure, a leading genome scientist at the UW and the Allen Institute.

The plan is to “hijack a lot of the machinery that evolution provided us” — the cellular assembly line that turns DNA into proteins — to design and measure millions of novel biological molecules, Shendure said in an interview in advance of the announcement.

That will help AI models learn the rules of biological design from a huge set of examples, instead of inferring them from the relatively limited number that nature has produced.

The field, Shendure said, is “putting too much emphasis on taking the cranks that we have and just running with them, as opposed to building the right cranks.”

The goal is to make designing biology more like ordering a part: a molecule that latches onto a cancer cell, for example, or a genetic switch that fires only inside brain cells and nowhere else.

Potential outcomes could include everything from new therapies for disease, to proteins that dissolve plastic in the environment, to cells that travel through the body in a programmed way, said Sanjay Srivatsan, a Fred Hutch assistant professor who leads the cancer center’s work on the initiative, in a video released with the announcement.

“For the first time, the speed of AI is beginning to match the experimental power of synthetic biology,” Baker said in a statement. “That changes the question from ‘what has nature already made?’ to ‘what else is possible, and how can we test it?'”

Where the money goes

The Fund for Science and Technology is providing $94.6 million for AI BioDesign over five years. The foundation launched publicly last year with a mandate to direct a large share of Allen’s fortune into bioscience, environmental and AI research.

The funding from FFST is allocated as $46.1 million to the Allen Institute, $43.8 million to the UW and $4.7 million to Fred Hutch, according to an Allen Institute spokesperson.

The initiative had 62 people as of mid-August, including some new hires and others redirected from existing projects at the three institutions. The UW accounts for 41 of them, the Allen Institute 13, and Fred Hutch eight. AI BioDesign is expected to continue growing over time.

“AI BioDesign is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science FFST was created to support,” said Marc Malandro, the foundation’s chief programs officer and co-lead, in a statement. He joined FFST in May after nearly a decade at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, most recently as chief operating officer of CZI and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network.

Malandro and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Liz Carey have been leading FFST on an interim basis since founding CEO Lynda Stuart stepped down in May.

Inside the lab

On a recent tour of the AI BioDesign lab, research associate Jack Boylan pulled up results from a run he’d done on their new DNA sequencer that morning — on free kits donated by a neighboring biotech company, a year past their expiration date.

“We decided, let’s give it a roll,” he said. It worked fine.

The sequencer is what makes the whole approach possible. It reads all of the millions of DNA sequences in a single tube at once and reports which ones performed. One recent experiment ran 6 million distinct sequences through it at once.

“The scale comes not from robotics, but from parallelizing inside the test tube,” said Jesse Gray, executive director of strategy and platform for AI BioDesign and the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, and a former Harvard Medical School geneticist.

The lab, at Dexter Yard in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a short walk from the Allen Institute’s headquarters, is organized into teams of five or six people, each working on a different design problem.

A separate four-person team of machine-learning specialists takes the incoming results and works with the bench teams to decide which experiments come next — the ones that will teach the models the most. Each round is judged on how much the models improved.

The Allen Institute calls projects like this “accelerators,” a term Rui Costa, the institute’s president and CEO, traced back to Paul Allen himself. The word came up in early planning sessions, Costa said. Allen wanted to “exponentially accelerate the field.”

Other accelerators at Dexter Yard include the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the Allen Institute’s collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the UW, which Shendure also leads; and Cell Science, which works on engineering cells to assemble themselves into tissues.

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the separate Seattle research organization also founded by Paul Allen, is involved informally rather than as a funded partner, Costa said.

Its robotics team has been talking with AI BioDesign about scaling up the protein work, and the two expect to collaborate on models and on tools that generate research hypotheses.

Why give it away

The decision to focus on open science also came from Allen, Costa said in an interview this week. “He was so visionary in the early 2000s: radically open science to exponentially impact and change fields, not to compete.”

That raises a question the initiative will face as soon as it produces anything valuable: what happens if a company builds a lucrative drug on data given away free? In traditional science, Costa said, being beaten to a discovery counts as a loss. Here it’s the goal.

“We would be so lucky if many companies would be taking this data and changing the world for good,” he said.

At the same time, Costa left open the possibility of the three principal institutions spinning out their own startups, nonprofits, or other initiatives from the work done by AI BioDesign.

Betting against the field

AI BioDesign’s approach runs against much of the current thinking in the field. Costa said most efforts to apply AI to biology are chasing a single general model that could answer questions about how any cell works. AI BioDesign is betting on the opposite: narrow models built for specific design problems, trained on data generated for that purpose.

“This project is a clear bet on a different way of doing things,” Costa said.

The people running the initiative are careful not to oversell. Gray said it remains an open question as to whether their approach beats the alternatives. “The jury’s still out,” he said.

Shendure put it plainly: “It’s never as easy as you think it’s going to be,” he said.

Costa said AI BioDesign needs to show real progress within 18 to 24 months — ideally even sooner — and expand to researchers around the world within five years.