— Ravi Vedula, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 26 years. Vedula, who is based in the Seattle area, led an organization of more than 1,000 people that runs the data and analytics platform behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

“26 years. It’s time,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Goodbye and thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a privilege. I gave it my all.”

Vedula joined Microsoft in 2000 and was the first engineering manager for Exchange Online.

His memoir, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” was published in March by Microsoft’s 8080 Books. It recounts his childhood in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, with each chapter followed by a lesson about leadership, engineering or life, as GeekWire reported at the time.

“I leave with gratitude for the people and experiences that shaped those years,” Vedula told GeekWire.

He said he is leaving room for “another professional chapter if the right opportunity comes along,” but for now plans to focus on travel, ways to contribute and writing, including a possible book based on his experiences receiving a heart transplant in 2017.

— AI and robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Rohit Prasad as its new CEO, effective Oct. 7. Prasad, who is based in the Boston area, was Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence until he left the company at the end of 2025.

He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, after Robert Playter retired in February following more than 30 years at Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group holds a controlling stake in the company.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and oversaw the creation of its Nova AI models. Boston Dynamics makes the Spot and Stretch robots and is developing the Atlas humanoid. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.

“Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise,” Prasad said in the announcement.

— Qualtrics has appointed Mike Potter chief technology officer of the experience management company. He joins from Petal, an Ontario healthcare company, and has worked in leadership at Qlik, IBM and Cognos.

“I have spent the better part of my career building platforms at scale, the kind of work that requires deep technical conviction, strong collaboration, and a relentless focus on what customers actually need. That is what drew me to Qualtrics,” Potter said.

Qualtrics has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah. It recently cut 117 jobs connected to its Seattle operations, largely affecting engineering and product teams. Last year, the company spent $6.75 billion to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.

— Shawn Stapleton has been named vice president and chief AI and innovation officer, a newly created role at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He joins the Seattle nonprofit from MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he led AI lifecycle management for more than three years. Before that, he was the Seattle-based head of data science for Philips.

Stapleton helped scale MD Anderson’s AI initiatives across clinical, research and administrative settings, Fred Hutch said, adding, “His experience at the intersection of strategy, governance and implementation will be instrumental as we continue building the foundation for AI-enabled medicine and discovery.”

— Seattle-based defense tech startup Overland AI has named Jon Abramovic as vice president of international growth. Abramovic has held sales leadership roles in Taiwan, Prague and Beijing. He was most recently director of global defense sales at SIG Sauer and spent eight years at Oshkosh Defense leading business development across Europe and Asia.

“Having spent years operating overseas, I’ve seen firsthand what our allies face against near-peer adversaries and what it takes to stay ahead. Overland AI’s technology represents a generational leap in the ground domain,” Abramovic said.

Overland AI is No. 7 in the GeekWire 200, a ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.

— Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area AI startup first covered by GeekWire in August, has announced its leadership team. The company, launched by former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg, is pursuing “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.

Its team includes:

• Tyler Simpson, co-founder and chief operating officer, who left Meta to start Noosphere Labs. He previously was co-founder and CTO of Luum by HealthEquity and spent more than 11 years at Microsoft.
• Andrew Ma, engineering leader, has more than 20 years’ experience across Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, most recently leading Google Cloud’s Apache Spark teams.
• Joshua Walton, founding design partner, was a director at Meta Reality Labs Research and worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Louis Barinaga, founding hardware partner, spent the bulk of his career at HP and more recently held leadership roles at Meta’s augmented reality program, Valve and Microsoft.
• Andrew Smith, founding AI engineer, led Zillow’s first agentic AI system and previously worked for Amazon and Sandia National Laboratories.
• Michael Iuzzolino, founding AI engineer, joined from Meta, where he worked on large language models, and previously held roles at Google Brain and Microsoft Research.
• Mikhail Shashkov, founding architect, was at Amazon Lab126 for more than seven years and previously at Sandia.

— Liz Pearce has been named Earth Finance‘s first chief commercial officer. She joined from Ever.green, where she was chief revenue officer. Past roles include CEO of LiquidPlanner, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, and vice president of marketing for GoDaddy.

Earth Finance, a Seattle-based startup helping businesses reduce their climate impacts, recently launched a platform called SpatiaFi that enables customers to make location-based capital decisions.

“Earth Finance is already delivering game-changing results for customers,” Pearce said. “I can’t wait to get to work with this team to scale that impact.”

— Charlie Bell, the longtime Amazon Web Services executive who left to run security, compliance and identity at Microsoft, has been appointed to the board of directors at the cybersecurity firm Tenable. The appointment was disclosed in an SEC filing and framed as “reinforcement for Tenable’s AI-driven exposure management push.”

— Two notable Amazon moves:

• Fırat Güder, a professor and chief engineer of Güder Research Group at Imperial College London, has joined Amazon as a scholar in the tech giant’s special projects organization. “Here, we are building the next generation of cutting-edge technologies that define the future of humanity. It is an incredible honor to join a small, elite group of innovators and researchers pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Güder said.
• Leonardo de Moura has been promoted to vice president and distinguished scientist with AWS in Seattle. He joined the company in 2023.

— Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has named Amelia Marckworth director of programs, innovation and entrepreneurship. She joins from Seattle University, where she has held leadership roles for more than a decade and also served as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Albers School of Business and Economics.

“Amelia has a proven track record of launching and growing startup programs, coaching founders directly, and being part of WTIA as a committee member and mentor. We’re excited to bring that experience and talent onto our startups team,” Randa Minkarah, WTIA’s executive director and CEO, said in a statement.

— Hernan Alvarez has taken a role at Seattle-based Hyperparam to lead product and go-to-market at the startup, which is building tools for collecting, storing and analyzing the data that AI systems produce. The company recently launched a product called HypAware to improve oversight of AI agents and catch their errors.

Alvarez joins from Great Expectations, where he was CEO. He earlier worked with Hyperparam founder Kenny Daniel at Algorithmia, a machine learning company co-founded by Daniel and acquired by DataRobot.

— Philip Jensen has joined Zap Energy as vice president of fuel programs and operations. Zap, an Everett, Wash.-based fusion startup, announced in April that it was expanding its focus to include nuclear fission. Jensen was previously at First American Nuclear and spent more than seven years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Zap said Jensen “brings deep expertise in nuclear fuel design, testing, and manufacturing, and a track record of launching new fuel programs and partnerships.”

— Christie Johansen-Pinney has joined Noble Studios as its Seattle-based vice president of client experience. She has held VP roles at firms including Rooster Punk, DEPT and The Marketing Practice.

— Anders Mortensen, formerly CRO at The Trade Desk, has been appointed to the advisory board of Scowtt, a Seattle startup helping advertisers optimize their ad spending. Mortensen spent more than 13 years at Google, leaving as vice president of U.S. mid-market sales lead generation.

Inside a sprawling former industrial building just a chip shot from the Lake Washington Ship Canal, a Seattle tech veteran and his longtime friend are building the kind of golf and social sanctuary that they feel modern Seattle is missing.

Founded by tech veteran Shankar Sundaram, a former Boeing engineer and enterprise sales leader, alongside co-founder Ryan Schaffer, a University of Washington grad who also worked at Boeing, East West Club aims to reimagine the traditional country club.

Inspired by the multi-generational Indian household Sundaram grew up in as well as the close-knit neighborhood clubs of his East Coast youth, the name East West is a nod to bridging those traditional cultural values of family, community, and hospitality with a modern Pacific Northwest lifestyle.

The ultimate goal is to create a “third place” centered around genuine, family-friendly connection rather than corporate networking or status.

“A lot of the clubs in Seattle are a little bit older and maybe just built for a different time, for a different demographic, and we’ve changed,” Sundaram told GeekWire during a tour of the space this week at 10 Dravus St. in the Queen Anne neighborhood. “We don’t have six hours to go spend at a country club. We also don’t have $100,000 to go join.”

The vision for East West Club is starting to take shape across multiple indoor and outdoor spaces in what used to be a metal fabrication studio run by the late artist David Gulassa.

Spread across nearly 8,000 square feet between two buildings, the space retains its industrial roots with exposed timber beams, rich wood accents, and high concrete walls. Heavy construction on the primary building hasn’t started yet as the team awaits final permits from the city, but once built out, the footprint will feature a “golf lab” with wide indoor simulator bays and 500 square feet of digital putting space, alongside a private 19-foot immersive simulator bay.

The broader plan includes a quiet library lounge, a pour-your-own-beer wall, a café area, and a back-alley wellness nook featuring dry saunas and red-light therapy.

Sundaram, who is married to Armoire founder and CEO Ambika Singh, wants the club to serve as a convenient, family-friendly extension of members’ homes — a place where people can drop in for an hour rather than committing an entire day.

“We want you to bring as many people as you want,” Sundaram said. “We want you to host meetings here. We want you to actually come here and do your work here.”

East West Club will also function as an events space, where members can come together for curated gatherings, tastings, music, workshops, speaker events and more.

Rather than building out a full commercial restaurant, the club plans to rely heavily on local neighborhood partnerships. Sundaram is leaning on friends for advice on the café and coffee setup and talking to neighborhood spots about possible daily fare, alongside monthly curated dinners hosted by guest chefs.

“A big part of the vision for East West is to use the club as a platform to bring together some of the best of Seattle — partnering with great local restaurants, chefs, wineries, breweries, golf and fitness professionals, and other people doing interesting things around the city,” Sundaram said. “We want the experience to constantly evolve and give members new reasons to come together.”

To fund the buildout, Sundaram and Schaffer are opting for a community-driven bootstrap model rather than taking on heavy debt or institutional equity. They are capping their initial “founder” cohort at 100 members, asking early adopters to buy in upfront.

For the first tier of 25 founding members, a $25,000 buy-in covers four years of all-inclusive family membership, along with a $450 quarterly food and beverage credit. The early bet appears to be paying off: after launching a simple waitlist on LinkedIn three months ago that drew 120 sign-ups, Sundaram invited an initial batch of 14 people to tour the unfinished space three weeks ago — and 13 of them committed on the spot.

“These early folks are taking the biggest risk,” Sundaram said. “Prepaying for something is not very common… but we’re funding this through getting 75 to 100 founders. The total club capacity is 250 people, so the idea is, if every founder goes and gets two people, that’s the club.”

Subsequent founder tiers will gradually increase in price, and once the club opens its doors — targeted for March 2027 — the model will shift to standard initiation fees and monthly dues.

Members won’t have to wait until 2027 to start gathering, either. The team plans to open a temporary “Founders Clubhouse” to early members by the end of September, kicking off a full calendar of social programming, tastings, and events throughout October — including an Oct. 11 open house — while construction proceeds on the other spaces.

If the Queen Anne location reaches its 250-member capacity, Sundaram and Schaffer already have eyes on scaling the concept, perhaps with an Eastside location.

While indoor simulator technology is a core anchor of the space, Sundaram noted that golf is not the sole prerequisite for joining. Roughly half of the initial 14 founding members who signed up do not even play golf, seeing value instead in having a neighborhood spot to host friends, throw parties, or watch sports.

For those who do want to hit the virtual links, the club plans to partner with local instructors for lessons and youth programs, but the broader design caters as much to casual socializing as it does to perfecting a swing.

When asked about competition, Sundaram points out that East West Club isn’t trying to compete with commercial entertainment chains like Five Iron Golf or high-end, pure-play golf training centers like Evergreen Golf Club.

“If you just want to go hit up a sim and go have a burger and fries, there’s lots of spaces for that,” Sundaram said. “In the city, there’s nothing that’s like this. Golf is the glue, but nobody else is really bringing in this modern aesthetic.”

Keep scrolling for more artist renderings of the planned spaces at East West Club: