Defense tech giant Anduril, which is rapidly expanding its operations in the Seattle area, is looking to raise a new round of capital that could value the company at about $100 billion, reports Reuters.

That would give the privately-held startup a bigger valuation than Northrop Grumman, the 87-year-old defense company which is currently valued at $77 billion. Boeing’s market value stands at $165 billion, while Lockheed Martin is valued at $134 billion.

Founded in 2017, Anduril is led by the Hawaiian-shirt and cargo-shorts wearing Palmer Luckey, the 33-year-old creator of Oculus VR, whom the New York Times described as the “It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry.”

In May, the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company raised a $5 billion series H funding round — including investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz — that valued Anduril at $61 billion.

Anduril is rapidly expanding in the Seattle area, with offices in downtown Seattle and Bellevue where the company is working on a range of defense technologies, including its Lattice command and control software. That platform is described as an “AI-powered battle management platform built to accelerate complex kill chains.”

It also recently established operations at the historic Foss Maritime shipyard along the southern bank of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, where the company is developing autonomous naval vessels and other maritime technologies.

The company’s expansion in Washington state is not without controversy. Last weekend, protesters handed out flyers outside the company’s downtown Seattle offices that said: “Anduril Out! No AI for War and Plunder!”

Anduril said it recognizes the right to protest, while defending its work supporting the U.S. military and service members.

“We respect the right to free speech and we understand that protests are a hallmark of democratic expression,” Anduril said in a statement provided to GeekWire. “That said, it is perplexing when people choose to protest a company dedicated to supporting the very military that safeguards those rights.”

Earlier this week, Anduril announced a new program called Thunder, an autonomous attack rotorcraft that it said is “designed to multiply the combat power and increase the survivability of current and next-generation crewed attack and assault aircraft.”

The size of the potential funding round hasn’t been determined and the terms are still in flux, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. One structure under discussion would have investors commit upfront to a second financing within a year at a higher valuation, contingent on Anduril hitting certain financial targets.

In a statement, Anduril said the “reporting runs well ahead of the facts.”

“Any details about terms, structure, pricing, or timing of a future financing round are purely speculative,” the company said. “As a private company, we regularly evaluate opportunities to fund the growth of the business. Beyond that, we don’t comment on rumors.”

In a headquarters and lab space formerly occupied by SpaceX in Redmond, Wash., AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM) is focused on solving big problems on Earth. But the startup’s CEO envisions a day when autonomous bulldozers and excavators will dig, haul, and grade on the moon or Mars, and take AIM’s “terraforming mission” off planet.

For now, AIM’s 25,000-square-foot facility in a nondescript business park is a long way from Mars. Inside the sprawling space, there are glimpses of what the rapidly growing company is working on, including the apparatuses that attach to existing machines to make them self-driving.

Around the office, desk cubicles are decorated with tiny yellow excavator buckets, mirroring photos on the walls of heavy equipment operating on job sites worldwide.

The toy excavators are a nod to a massive global market that AIM founder and CEO Adam Sadilek wants to continue to disrupt with modern technology.

Autonomous passenger vehicles have captured the public’s attention for decades, but construction, mining and hauling equipment attracts little fanfare, even as legacy companies including Komatsu and Caterpillar embrace new technology.

AIM’s goal is not to build new machinery, but retrofit existing earthmoving fleets with a physical AI platform — using advanced sensors and edge compute to let heavy iron operate entirely on its own.

Founded in 2021, the startup grew out of Sadilek’s background at Google where he spent nine years working on projects involving AI and autonomous vehicle systems.

Whether building anti-flood structures or wildfire breaks, managing nuclear waste, mining critical materials or clearing land for agriculture or the military, Sadilek views AIM’s work as immediate terraforming on Earth that is necessary to drive down costs for housing and commodities. But the long-term vision remains interplanetary.

“When humanity goes to Mars, the real question is not so much around what the rocket looks like as a vehicle to get us there, but what is going to happen after the rocket lands,” Sadilek said. “You cannot have human operators run there. That’s why this is a very long mission that we are on.”

Building autonomy for heavy equipment presents a paradox self-driving cars never have to face: the ground itself is constantly changing. While a Tesla or Waymo relies on pre-mapped roads and predictable lanes, a bulldozer or excavator’s entire job is to reshape its environment. AIM’s physical AI platform has to continuously build real-time 3D maps using onboard 360-degree LiDAR and edge compute, making split-second decisions without relying on persistent GPS or cloud connectivity on remote job sites.

Furthermore, taking human operators out of cab seats addresses one of the most perilous aspects of heavy industry. By creating “zero-entry” sites where machines operate autonomously, AIM’s platform effectively removes workers from harm’s way — transitioning traditional equipment operators into remote site supervisors who oversee entire fleets from a safe distance.

Beyond early deployments in mining and site preparation for data centers, AIM landed a $4.9 million U.S. Air Force contract earlier this year to deploy autonomous machines for airfield repair and base construction in remote or high-risk zones. The military work builds on the company’s growing momentum following a $50 million funding round backed by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Human Capital.

AIM has risen to No. 110 on the GeekWire 200 ranking on top Pacific Northwest startups.

To support its growth, AIM has rapidly expanded its headcount, doubling in size to about 80 employees in the last few months. Sadilek is attracted to the Seattle area’s intersection of hardware expertise from companies like Boeing and Amazon alongside top-tier software and AI talent.

But while AIM has managed to hire a couple former SpaceX engineers to build out its team, it isn’t the only startup mining that rocket-engineering pedigree. TerraFirma, an Austin-based company founded by two more SpaceX engineers, raised $115 million earlier this month in the burgeoning race to semi-automate physical construction.

For Sadilek, anchoring his team in Redmond rather than Silicon Valley was a deliberate decision to stay rooted in physical engineering. Having spent years in the Bay Area during his time at Google, Sadilek wanted to avoid the tech industry’s “echo chamber.”

“I wanted to be somewhat shielded from the Kool-Aid in Silicon Valley,” he said. “We wanted to build something that’s real and gets in the black really quickly… To do that, you need to do it in an environment that is more anchored in reality.”

That philosophy extends directly into their field testing. AIM’s regional proving grounds in the mountains near Monroe, Wash., expose the autonomous equipment to heavy snow and inclement weather early in development so the physical AI is built for harsh, real-world conditions from day one.

Amid the hard hats, safety vests and construction-related decor in AIM’s headquarters space, one piece of art offers a fun take on where AIM has been and where it’s headed.

The 1949 photograph, titled “Refueling the Sunkist Lady,” shows a Jeep driving beneath a low-flying plane and transferring supplies to aid the crew during an endurance flight.

Sadilek likes it as a reminder of getting started, and what it feels like to build a company from scratch, literally working on the airplane while it’s already rolling down the runway.

“The first years of AIM were exactly like that,” he said. “I think every tech startup is like that in the early days. The problem is that some of them never finish building it before the runway ends.”

— Agility Robotics named Michael Beer as its chief financial officer. Current CFO and chief operating officer Jennifer Hunter will transition to serving exclusively as COO.

“Michael brings outstanding public company finance and capital markets experience, while Jennifer, with her prior experience as a publicly traded COO, will focus exclusively on scaling our operational excellence and manufacturing capabilities,” said CEO Peggy Johnson, in a statement.

The Salem, Ore.-based startup, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, the company announced last month.

Beer joins Agility Robotics from the California energy storage company Energy Vault, where he was CFO for two years. Past roles include venture partner at Vest Coast Capital and CFO at FreeWire Technologies.

— Seattle-area tech veteran Matt Fisher has taken the role of CTO for London-based Efekta Education. The company is developing an agentic teaching and learning platform.

“I’ve spent my career building technologies that help people learn, connect and achieve more. What attracted me to Efekta is its clear vision for using AI to enhance learning, support teachers and
make high-quality education accessible to more people around the world,” Fisher said.

Last August, Fisher joined immersive media startup Adventr as a late-stage co-founder. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CTO at Daydream, a startup that raised a $50 million seed round last year to shake up the way people find and buy clothing online. Other past roles include leadership at Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom and Auth0.

— There is another name to add to the raft of departures from Microsoft‘s security leadership.

Rahul Prakash, head of product for Microsoft Security Copilot, shared that he’s leaving his role after nearly a decade with the company.

“As any Identity professional will tell you, the world of [Identity Access Management] is far more intricate than people realize, and it’s being rewritten for the world of AI agents. At Microsoft, I’ve had the privilege of going deep into this space…” Prakash said on LinkedIn.

On Monday, GeekWire reported that Rudra “Rudy” Mitra, who spent more than 27 years at Microsoft, was joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of security services. Other recent departures include Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy, who resigned at after nearly three decades.

— Nancy Lipson has joined Zap Energy as chief legal officer. The Everett, Wash.-based company is in pursuit of fusion energy, and recently expanded its scope to include next generation nuclear fission.

Lipson was previously executive vice president and CLO for the gold mining giant Newmont Corporation, departing after 18 years in 2023.

“Nancy’s deep expertise in areas of corporate strategy, governance, compliance, and sustainability will be key assets as Zap pursues its integrated approach to advanced nuclear,” Zap posted on LinkedIn.

— Jyoti Shukla was named chief product and technology officer at KEXP, a nonprofit radio station serving Seattle and the Bay Area. The station includes community and performance spaces, and features wide-ranging music genres.

“There is a lot of meaningful work ahead, and I’m excited to keep learning, building, and partnering with an amazing team as we shape what’s next,” Shukla said on LinkedIn.

Prior to taking the role, Shukla served on KEXP’s board of directors and was senior vice president of product design at SiriusXM. She has also worked in tech leadership roles at Nordstrom and Starbucks, and started her career at Microsoft.

— ZEV Co-op, a Washington-based nonprofit EV carshare cooperative, announced Ry Armstrong as its new executive director. Armstrong was previously at Sustainable Seattle, where they served as co-director. 

— Tirzah VanDamme has joined Gagen MacDonald as senior director of AI and digital transformation. She brings more than 20 years of experience and was most recently at Microsoft.

— The Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS) announced the election four new board members. They are:

• Amanda Boyd, executive director of Native American Programs and Professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State Universit
• Mary Czerwinski, former research manager at Microsoft Research
• John Stein, former science and research director of NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center
• Judith Wasserheit, professor emerita of Global Health, Medicine, and Epidemiology at the University of Washington

WSAS also elected 30 new members, who will assist the organization in providing scientific and technical information to state policymakers.

They include 26 scientists and engineers elected by their WSAS peers and four members recently elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, or Medicine or awarded the Nobel Prize and who reside or work in Washington state.

The members include 11 UW professors and eight from WSU, five researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, three from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and three at private companies, with some participants holding roles at multiple institutions.

As AI changes how people discover products online, marketers are rethinking the traditional digital advertising playbook. With AI-generated answers reducing clicks on search results and display ads, brands are looking for new ways to reach customers.

Seattle startup MediaPact wants to capitalize on that shift.

Founded in 2026 by online marketing veteran Lacie Thompson, MediaPact makes finding and signing ad deals quicker, painless, and accountable for both publishers and companies. It has raised $200,000 in a small friends and family round, and recently added companies like BroBible, Gadget Review and Penske Media to the platform.

We caught up with Thompson for GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about her one-person startup, how AI helped her build the business despite having no coding experience and what surprised her most about launching in a market she thought she already knew.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

MediaPact is a marketplace and workflow for flat-fee direct media. Buyers discover publishers, newsletters, and creators, then negotiate terms, sign the IO (insertion order), and pay, all in one place. Seller inventory is standardized to list inventory in a searchable format. It is the direct media buy without the 40-email thread.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Flat-fee media is a massive market that still runs on emails, PDFs, calls, bespoke IOs and a Google Sheet named “final_FINAL_v3.”

Nine out of ten publishers I have interviewed described their flat-fee workflow as exactly that: manual email threads, hand-built IOs, invoices they chase for 60 days. Meanwhile, the buyer on the other side of that thread is sitting on budget and cannot find them.

Programmatic solved this for banner ads 15 years ago. Nobody has ever solved it for this type of media: sponsored articles, newsletters, or podcast reads. I am obsessed with making a direct media buy as easy as booking a flight.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Two things:

Supply is not the problem. I have spent 15 years in this industry, so I can sign publishers all day. Demand is the hard part. Every marketplace founder reads The Cold Start Problem and still thinks they are the exception. I was not the exception.

The buyers are much more broad than I thought. I come from affiliate and performance. Those teams live and die on click-based measurement. While they often purchase flat-fee media, they sometimes avoid the risk of guaranteed placement because of over-scrutinized click-based attribution (especially on a last click).

One hyper-performance-based agency told me flatly that this was not for them. Brand marketers who understand top of funnel growth get it. They are typically at a mid-stage consumer brand that has plateaued on Meta and Google and needs somewhere else to go. Shopper marketers are also very focused on working with partners that can reach their audience, even if they are influencing in-store behavior in ways that are difficult to measure. Said another way, MediaPact is for the marketer who uses art, the marketer who uses science and the marketer who uses both. 

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Two ways, and the second is a strategic angle for the platform, not just an operational efficiency.

The obvious one: I built and shipped (and am continuing to do so) the entire platform with Claude Code. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe Connect, the whole thing. I have zero experience writing code, managing dev teams, or product management. And now I can ship features to production within less than a day. I don’t say this to boast, but rather to show that this is a structural change in who gets to start what kinds of companies.

AI is eating the click. When ChatGPT answers the question, nobody clicks. And the content is so trusted that conversion happens at 4.4 times the rate. So brands stop competing for rankings and start competing to be inside the source material that the models cite, which is high-authority editorial. That is not just SEO anymore. It is Answer Engine Optimization, and the only way in is to be in the content. MediaPact allows buyers to do this.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That it is for affiliate marketers. My résumé makes people assume rev-share, cookies, and last-click attribution.

It is the opposite. Flat fee, guaranteed placement, signed IO, and automated payment. Sellers get paid for their audience and their authority, not for whatever the attribution model felt like giving them that month. Publishers have been shortchanged by last-click for decades and everyone in our industry knows it.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Launching the company and determining the real TAM. 

My network is affiliate. Those are warm calls, fast meetings, and lots of enthusiastic nodding. It would have been very comfortable to build for them. But the customer discovery data pointed toward brand marketers, shopper marketers, and media planning and buying teams—audiences who don’t know me. 

Even though I know this challenge, I’m tackling it by figuring things out as I go, in the same way I did before: by building partnerships and relationships that grant me access to the right opportunities. 

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Ask for help. The key, though, is that you have to give help, you must be someone people want to help and that isn’t just granted—it’s earned over years. I naturally think of asking my network for help: my friends, my family, and my advisors. But now you can also ask Claude (or your preferred AI) for help. While it’s definitely not the same, knowing when to ask whom or what for help is probably the most powerful needle-mover. 

We’ll know our company has made it when… 

I’m the most proud when I know the platform has benefited someone. Usually when that’s the case, they want to tell their friends about it. That part of the growth cycle is always the most fun for me because I have the luxury of getting out of hustle mode and into innovation mode, pushing beyond the beta, dreaming big and taking things beyond my current scope. 

When sellers tell brands “just send it through MediaPact” without me anywhere in the conversation, that will be a milestone. The day the marketplace works without the founder in the middle is the day it is actually a marketplace.

Last year, lifestyle icon Martha Stewart created an internet sensation when she told a podcast host that she would pick composting over burial or cremation after she dies. She has Seattle entrepreneur Katrina Spade to thank for making that option an available, legal choice.

While a graduate student studying architecture, Spade set out to create an alternative for putting people to rest — one that offered a climate-friendly, sustainable solution while remaining practical in urban settings and palatable to loved ones.

“Cremation and burial, both are polluting in their own way,” Spade said. “And I don’t want my last gesture to pollute the earth.”

So in 2020, Spade launched her company, Recompose, becoming the first in the U.S. to develop the technology needed for the commercial composting of human bodies. Now 14 states have legalized the practice and more than a dozen others are considering it. Additional companies have joined Recompose in providing the alternative “death care” service and all are looking to scale. One, Earth Funeral, earlier this year opened the first human composting facility on the East Coast.

In comparing funeral options, a cremation produces about 530 pounds of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a fuel-efficient car from Seattle to San Diego. Burials consume land and can rely on toxic embalming chemicals, chemically treated caskets, and concrete vaults. Composting requires almost no energy input and produces clean soil.

The process is relatively simple: A deceased person is put in a vessel with natural materials that create the conditions needed for composting. But Spade had to navigate technical and legal hurdles to turn the concept into a business, sparking a new sector within the funeral field.

The science and the law

Stewart and Spade both came to champion human composting by way of horses. When Stewart’s equine pets die, she wraps them in linen and buries them on her land to naturally decay into soil in a process akin to composting.

During her research, Spade discovered a video on horse composting from Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Carpenter-Boggs is an expert in the practice, which is routinely applied to livestock like cows and horses. Spade wanted to refine the approach for humans, and the two began collaborating.

They developed a strategy using stainless steel vessels and a blend of straw, alfalfa and wood chips.

“We determined… the best kind of recipe of plant materials that would have the right ratios of carbon and nitrogen, and also the right structural properties to allow air to permeate, because oxygen is critical to this process,” Spade said.

The vessels include thermometers to ensure the body reaches and holds a temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit for three consecutive days to destroy pathogens. The heat is generated entirely by naturally occurring microbes.

Before Spade could deploy the technology, she had another problem to solve. She was contacted by Tanya Marsh, a professor and expert in human remains law, who informed Spade that her plan was “completely illegal” in all 50 states, but offered to help her change that.

Spade then turned to her Seattle neighbor, state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was coincidentally pursuing another climate-friendly end-of-life alternative called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation. Pedersen sponsored legislation to legalize composting, and it passed in 2019 with bipartisan support, paving the way for Recompose.

An unexpected appeal

Recompose has created an environment that Spade hopes is comforting for grieving friends and families. The facility features a room for sitting with the deceased, who is wrapped in a natural linen shroud, and a memorial space with vaulted ceilings and green and golden stained-glass windows.

Beyond that is the “greenhouse,” a soil- and straw-scented space containing 33 vessels for composting. Active composting takes about one month; the resulting soil is then removed to “cure” for an additional month to cool and dry out. Bones are broken down mechanically and added back to the soil, while non-organic materials like artificial joints are recycled.

The process creates 20 to 30 bags of a mulch-like material. Friends and families take as much as they like, and Recompose can donate a portion to its partners in land restoration and conservation.

Other companies offering human composting include Return Home and Earth Funeral, which are both based in the Seattle area.

Interest in the death-care alternative has been surprisingly broad.

“I really thought that this was going to be for the Subaru-driving urban Seattle dwellers, and they certainly exist,” said Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home. “But we get as many people from ruby-red Eastern Washington as we do from Seattle or Bellevue.”

While liberals are drawn to the climate benefits, conservative farmers and hunters often feel deeply connected to returning to the land, Truman said. A third segment of customers simply finds traditional burial and cremation unnerving.

Younger generations opt in

In an unexpected turn, younger adults are opting in, too. Elyssa Tappero, a 30-something tsunami program manager for Washington state, is pre-funding her $7,000 Recompose service via $100 monthly installments.

“When I learned how much of an environmental impact there is from cremation, and how expensive some of those things are — and just the entire approach by the funeral industry — I knew that wasn’t something I wanted,” Tappero said.

Spade recognizes that addressing climate change requires much bigger actions than human composting, but is eager to do her part.

“If we can truly and meaningfully change the funeral industry, the way we care for our bodies, and … connect humans even more to the fact that we’re part of that ecosystem, we’re part of the natural world, that would be hugely satisfying,” she said.

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose
• Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home
• Elyssa Tappero, customer of Recompose and tsunami program manager for the Washington Emergency Management Division

Additional sources:

• Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University
• Inside Recompose, where the human composting startup is ready to grow its formula beyond Seattle (GeekWire)
• 50+ & Unfiltered with Shawn Killinger, Episode 124 with Martha Stewart
• The environmental toll of cremating the dead (National Geographic)
• The Potential of Our Decay: Cemeteries That Save the American Landscape (Smithsonian)

Seattle’s Copper has landed a high-profile new backer as it looks to accelerate growth of its consumer rewards platform, announcing Tuesday that Grammy-winning artist, DJ and entrepreneur Diplo has invested in the company.

Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

“I’m always looking for things that actually make sense for people,” Diplo said in a statement. “Copper’s one of those — you’re already on your phone, you’re already spending money, and this gives something back. That’s real.”

Copper says more than 4 million members use its platform to earn money through mobile games, cash-back offers and purchases.

Copper CEO Eddie Behringer, who previously co-founded Snap! Raise, said the company is building an alternative to consumer apps that monetize users’ attention.

“Most consumer apps are designed to take more from the user — more time, more money, more attention,” Behringer said in a LinkedIn post. “At Copper, we’re building the opposite.”

Founded in 2019, Copper originally launched as a banking app for teenagers. GeekWire covered the startup in 2022 after it raised $29 million in funding to expand into investing products, at a time when the company had nearly 1 million users.

The startup has since evolved into a broader consumer rewards platform. Copper has raised $42 million to date and recently ranked No. 2 among the Pacific Northwest’s fastest-growing companies in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 rankings, based on three-year revenue growth.

Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, has built a business portfolio that extends beyond music, investing in technology and consumer startups while launching ventures such as Diplo’s Run Club, a series of 5K races paired with music festivals.

He’s a three-time Grammy winner, and has collaborated with artists like Labrinth and Sia as part of the musical group LSD and worked with musician Mark Ronson on Silk City. He’s also the founder of record label Mad Decent.

In 2024, Copper discontinued its banking services following the collapse of fintech infrastructure provider Synapse, forcing the startup to pivot away from its original business. “Despite our prior planning, this event has forced us to close banking accounts much sooner than anticipated,” Behringer wrote at the time.

The company has since rebuilt around its rewards platform, which it says now serves millions of users.

Behringer said that the company’s mission was always about helping families improve their financial lives.

“As household costs rose, we saw an even bigger opportunity to help the person making everyday spending decisions earn more from the things they were already doing—from buying groceries to shopping in-store and spending time on their phone,” Behringer tells GeekWire via email. “Diplo’s investment is meaningful validation of how far that evolution has come.”

Clarify, the Seattle-based AI startup that has raised more than $22 million to take on Salesforce and other CRM incumbents, has made its first acquisition: San Francisco-based Seam AI.

Seam’s technology monitors buying signals across the web — such as funding rounds, hiring, website activity, and executive job moves — and surfaces them to sales teams. Clarify plans to fold the technology into a new product called Clarify Signals, slated to launch later this year. 

Clarify is led by co-founders Patrick Thompson (CEO) and Ondrej Hrebicek (CTO), who previously co-founded Iteratively, a Seattle data-analytics startup that was acquired in 2021 by Amplitude, the publicly traded digital-analytics company.

Rationale: Clarify says the deal is part of a shift beyond what it calls a “system of record” that tracks what already happened to a “system of awareness” that flags what’s about to happen. 

Thompson said the Seam deal fills a gap in what Clarify’s own AI can pull from the open web, giving the CRM access to proprietary datasets that can’t be reached with a simple search. 

“The value that Seam is providing is typically the information that’s not necessarily easy to get from the web,” Thompson explained in an interview. “It’s the harder stuff to find.” 

Hrebicek said Clarify’s customers have been looking for a bigger and richer dataset — the ability to “look around the corners on who would be a good lead.” 

Deal points: Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Clarify, which had raised a total of $22.5 million in its seed and Series A rounds from investors including U.S. Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Madrona, said it brought in additional funding as part of the deal but did not disclose the amount. 

As part of the acquisition, five Seam employees are joining Clarify, including Seam co-founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone. With the deal, Clarify is adding a San Francisco office alongside its Seattle headquarters. The company now has 30 people total. 

Backstory: Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he saw teams accumulate many different sales and marketing systems, with customer data scattered across all of them. 

Seam raised $7 million including angel funding and a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2024. It counts Zapier, GoFundMe, Drata, and Betterment among its customers. Existing customers are on hold while the technology is integrated into Clarify, but many have already indicated they plan to move over to the new platform.

Scavone said he had been weighing whether to raise a new round or find a home for the company when he and Thompson, who have known each other for years, began talking about a combination. 

“We’re all going after the same big incumbents here,” he said, explaining that he ultimately decided Seam had a better chance of taking on the market’s dominant players by joining forces with Clarify than as a standalone company. 

In a post announcing the deal, the Seam and Clarify founders said they “realized we weren’t building competing products—we were building different halves of the same future.”

Landscape: Clarify is entering a crowded field. Sales-intelligence platforms like Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo already sell third-party data to revenue teams, and 6sense and Demandbase lead the account-based marketing category Seam had been targeting.

Thompson said one edge for Clarify is that signals arrive inside the CRM sellers already use, not a separate dashboard. 

The company was co-founded in early 2024 by Thompson, Hrebicek, and Austin Hay, a marketing-technology operator who served as co-CEO alongside Thompson. Hay departed in September 2025 and is now with Khosla Ventures, per his LinkedIn.

What’s next: Clarify plans to launch Signals later this year, Thompson said, noting that the company is considering raising additional funds in a Series B round early next year. 

The Seattle Sounders paused before Thursday night’s rivalry match against the Portland Timbers to honor one of their own.

Before the match at Lumen Field, the club paid tribute to S. “Soma” Somasegar, the longtime Microsoft executive, Madrona venture capitalist and Sounders minority owner who died in May at age 59. Fans stood in silence as Somasegar’s image appeared on the stadium video boards.

Somasegar joined the Sounders ownership group in 2019, part of a wave of Seattle tech leaders — including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — who bought in that year.

After his death, the club said Somasegar viewed sports as a way to bring people together, and credited him and his wife, Akila, with strengthening the Sounders and Seattle Reign communities.

GeekWire chronicled the outpouring of tributes after Somasegar’s death, as colleagues, founders and friends remembered the former Microsoft executive and venture capitalist for his humility, generosity and commitment to helping others succeed.

During his 27 years at Microsoft, he helped lead the company’s developer tools business before spending more than a decade at Madrona, where he backed and advised a new generation of cloud and AI startups.

Live-shopping unicorn Whatnot is expanding its AI capabilities with the acquisition of Shaped, a startup that builds real-time recommendation and search technology.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will join Whatnot to lead a new applied AI research team focused on improving how buyers discover live streams, sellers and products across the marketplace. Before co-founding Shaped in 2021, Murrell worked on machine learning and recommendation systems at Meta.

Backed by Seattle venture firm Madrona, Shaped developed AI technology designed to deliver highly personalized recommendations in real time — a key capability for Whatnot’s fast-moving live shopping platform, where inventory and buyer interest change by the second.

The acquisition comes as Whatnot continues to invest heavily in engineering and AI. Last year, the company announced plans to significantly expand its Seattle engineering hub after leasing new downtown office space following a $225 million funding round that valued the company at $11.5 billion.

The company has said Seattle will serve as one of its key engineering centers as it continues to scale its platform. The Whatnot offices in Seattle are led by head of engineering Daniel Bear, the former head of infrastructure at Snap.

Whatnot is based in Culver City, California. The offices in the Seattle area are one of more than 100 engineering centers in the region, as tracked by GeekWire.

For Madrona, the deal represents another exit for a portfolio company applying AI to solve core business problems, reinforcing the firm’s continued focus on infrastructure and enterprise AI startups.

— F5 named former Amazon executive Cathy Peterman as executive vice president and chief people officer of the Seattle-based application-delivery and security company. In May, F5 celebrated its 30th year in business.

“Cathy brings a rare combination of strategic depth and genuine humanity that will raise the bar for how we invest in our people,” said CEO François Locoh-Donou in a statement. “She and I share a reverence for culture and its impact on driving sustained results.”

Peterman joins F5 from Wayfair, where she served as CPO for the retail company’s technology organization. Prior to that, she was with Amazon for more than five years, departing as the HR executive for advertising products and technology.

— After more than 27 years at Microsoft, Rudra Mitra has announced his departure. He leaves the role of corporate vice president and head of Microsoft Security Purview, a team addressing data security and governance focused on artificial intelligence and AI agents.

Mitra joined the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant straight out of college as a software engineer. He has led work on products including Office, Windows Live and Microsoft 365 Cloud Infrastructure.

“Microsoft is a very special place full of incredibly talented people, and this decision comes with gratitude, happiness, and optimism for the future,” he said on LinkedIn. Mitra did not share his next move, saying only that there is “more on that soon.”

— Markham McIntyre, who previously led Seattle’s Office of Economic Development, is now executive director of Climate Surge, which is described as a “project built to accelerate the deployment of climate policies and market solutions in Washington.”

The effort works with corporations, heavy industry, government, developers, advocates, and philanthropy, and is a partnership between Earth Finance, Climate Solutions and Stolte Foundation.

Prior to his role with the city of Seattle, McIntyre was at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber for more than eight years, leaving in 2022 as executive vice president.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, announced a slate of new hires, all of whom appear to be working remotely:

• Adam Block was named chief sales officer, joining from Motive where he was chief revenue officer.
• Ken Coleman was named senior vice president of marketing, coming from Ramsey Solutions.
• Khoi Hoang was named leader of the global sales engineering organization, joining from Salesforce.
• Aaron Ellis was named leader of corporate sales, joining from Workday.

Qualtrics previously shared news that it promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product.

— Jay Shankar, Amazon’s former vice president of global talent acquisition, has joined Uber in a comparable role. Shankar, who is based in San Francisco, resigned from Amazon in December. Past employers include Adobe and BMC Software.

“When I joined AWS almost 8 years ago to lead recruiting, I had never run a talent acquisition organization. What I discovered was a team of builders who showed me that this work is fundamentally about investing in people and obsessing over customer needs,” Shankar said on LinkedIn.

— Jamie Boyd has joined the advisory board for Seattle’s GemaTEG, a startup building technology to manage the heat produced by computer chips. Boyd is a founder of Cypress Capital Holdings and previously helped build Cascadia, an investment banking franchise focused on energy and climate technologies.

— Seattle immigration tech startup Casium named Kat Kelley as its founding go-to-market lead. Kelley joins from Teaching Strategies, a digital education company, and past employers include Rectxt and brightwheel.

— Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm that specializes in corporate and technology-focused legal work, announced that Ty Kayam has joined as counsel in Seattle, expanding the firm’s healthcare regulatory team.

— Rogo named Joe Xavier as chief technology officer of the New York-based finance platform. Early in his career, Xavier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft, and more recently served as Grammarly’s CTO. At Rogo, he will help establish a San Francisco office.

— And in case you missed it: Dave Brown, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services leading its compute, AI and machine learning operations, is leaving after nearly 19 years. He is departing at the end of this month, and Amazon exec Dave Treadwell will take over the group. Read more in this GeekWire story.

The past two years have transformed the world of software development, but there’s at least one area that remains largely untouched by artificial intelligence: the operating-system layer inside phones, vehicles, and other connected devices. 

A Seattle startup called logcat.ai has raised $2.55 million to change that.

Co-founded by CEO Varun Chitre and CTO Tarun Vashisth, two engineers with years of experience building device software, logcat.ai is developing a system of AI agents that autonomously hunt down bugs across the kernel, modem, and firmware of devices running Android or Linux.

The pre-seed round was led by Founders’ Co-op, with participation from Act One Ventures, TheFounderVC, Shorewind Capital, Clayoquot Capital, and Alumni Ventures. 

“It’s one of the toughest areas of software engineering, and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure. Operating-system engineering is virtually hidden today,” Chitre said in an interview.

It’s also a challenge for many companies given a shortage of engineers who specialize in the field, compared to the much larger population of developers who build apps and software that run on top of the operating system.

How it works: An engineer using logcat.ai uploads the log files a device generates when something goes wrong — such as bug reports and kernel logs — and logcat.ai’s software analyzes them together to find the root cause and point to where in the code to fix it. Each finding cites the exact log line it came from, so an engineer can check the work.

Currently, logcat.ai finds the root cause and recommends a fix. The larger plan is to have the AI write the fixes, test them, and eventually build new features on its own, with engineers approving the work before it’s deployed.

The long-term goal, Chitre said, is to become the standard tool for building and maintaining operating systems on new and existing hardware — from smartphones to cars to robots and other embedded systems — so a company can ship without a full-stack specialist on staff.

“We’re moving toward a world where software and intelligence extend far beyond our laptops and phones, yet the tooling to build high-quality products for that world is still missing,” said Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op, in a statement.

He called Chitre and Vashisth “one of the only teams in the world truly up for the challenge.”

Traction: The company says it has served hundreds of engineering teams in a public beta, analyzed more than 10 billion lines of trace data, and run thousands of automated investigations. It’s generating revenue but isn’t ready to disclose numbers or customers. 

Competitive landscape: Chitre said logcat.ai’s main competition isn’t another product but in-house scripts and the knowledge locked in a few senior engineers’ heads. App-level crash tools like Google’s Crashlytics and Sentry stop at the app layer and don’t do the deeper system debugging.

Specialist vendors and the contract manufacturers that build devices are potential partners more than rivals, Chitre said, since they face the same engineer shortage.

GeekWire first reported on logcat.ai in March, in a Startup Radar roundup.

The team: Chitre and Vashisth met at Esper, the Bellevue, Wash.-based device-management company, where they worked together for more than seven years. They started logcat.ai because they had spent years doing debugging by hand and knew what was missing.

Chitre has spent more than 13 years in the field, getting operating systems to boot and run on new hardware and porting new Android releases and Linux kernels onto older devices. He was also a maintainer of LineageOS, a widely used open-source version of Android. 

Vashisth has led engineering teams working across Android, Linux, and iOS, and brings a background in large-scale distributed systems. At Esper, he rose to senior software engineering manager. His prior experience includes platform-architecture engineering at Target.

For now, the company is just the two founders: Chitre in the Seattle area, Vashisth in Bengaluru, India. They plan to hire about 10 people over the next year, with a distributed team working remotely from wherever they can find the specialized talent.

They know those hires won’t be easy to find, given the scarcity of people in the field. “That’s the same shortage our product exists to address,” Chitre said, “and we’re not exempt from it.” 

As AI workloads drive soaring cloud bills, more companies are weighing whether to move computing out of public clouds and into their own data centers. But building and operating AI infrastructure is far more complicated than simply buying servers — networking has become one of the biggest technical hurdles.

That’s the opportunity Seattle startup Hedgehog is chasing.

Founded in 2022 by CEO Marc Austin, a Cisco networking veteran, Hedgehog develops open-source software designed to make private AI data centers operate more like hyperscale clouds. It has raised $11 million in seed funding, with plans to raise a series A financing round.

We caught up with Austin for the return of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about the 20-person company, the AI networking boom and what surprised him most about building a startup in one of tech’s fastest-moving markets.

In 50 words or less, give us your elevator pitch?

Hedgehog is open-source software that makes AI networking simple. AI clouds and enterprises use it to run GPU networks the way hyperscalers do — deployed in hours instead of months, operated by DevOps teams instead of armies of network engineers, on open hardware with no vendor lock-in.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Time to GPU value. A GPU cluster is the most expensive asset most companies will ever buy, and every day it sits idle waiting on the network is money burning. That wait is rarely the hardware — it’s the fabric: weeks or months of scarce network engineers hand-designing, cabling, tuning, and validating it across proprietary CLIs and locked-in vendor gear.

Meanwhile the people told to “own the network” usually aren’t network engineers at all — they’re platform and DevOps teams. We’re obsessed with collapsing that timeline: declare your network like intent in Kubernetes and go from racked GPUs to inference in hours instead of months — on open hardware, no lock-in, no room full of specialists. Cloud-grade networking without hyperscaler headcount.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

How rarely the buyer is a network engineer. It’s platform and DevOps teams, often at AI clouds who just took delivery of thousands of GPUs who are told “you own the network now.” They don’t want to learn BGP; they want a network that behaves like the rest of their cloud-native stack. The other surprise: they don’t just want to run the network, they want to sell it by carving up capacity for their own customers, like a cloud provider does.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Twice over.

Our product exists because AI broke traditional networking. Training and inference traffic melts networks designed for web apps.

And AI changed how we build: we use it heavily across engineering, testing, and go-to-market, which lets a small team continuously test every supported device and configuration in our lab and ship with hyperscaler-grade rigor. AI raised the bar for what a startup-sized team can deliver.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That “open source” means hobbyist. The opposite is true: openness is the enterprise feature. Our customers can audit every line of code that runs their fabric, extend it, and never get locked in. Nearly every competitor markets “open networking” while shipping a proprietary controller. Hedgehog is the only one that actually publishes the repo.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Betting entirely on Ethernet. We decided open, standards-based Ethernet would win AI networking and put everything behind it. Watching the industry’s largest AI operators now standardize on that same approach makes us feel good about the call — but saying no was hard.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Pick the wave, not just the surfboard.

Product decisions are recoverable; betting against a structural industry shift isn’t. Find the standard, the architecture, or the buyer behavior that’s inevitable, align everything to it early, and be patient while the market catches up to your bet.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

Networking is boring again. When a platform engineer stands up a multi-tenant GPU cloud and the network is just a few lines of declared intent that nobody thinks twice about. When “network like a hyperscaler” describes every AI cloud, not just the giants running on Hedgehog, then we will have made it!

General Fusion’s stock is trading up after it became the first fusion energy company to go public on a major exchange, debuting Monday on Nasdaq.

The launch of GFUZ stock coincided with the release of the Fusion Industry Association’s annual report, which reflected that same investor enthusiasm: private funding for fusion companies totaled $4.5 billion over the past 12 months. One of the biggest rounds went to Helion Energy, a Seattle-area company that raised $465 million last month, bringing its total investment to $1.5 billion.

Soaring energy demand from AI data centers has helped drive interest in the sector as an ambitious slate of companies is building devices that create and contain plasma — a super-hot, fourth state of matter required for atom-smashing fusion to occur.

For decades, researchers have chased this clean energy source, aiming to replicate the reactions that power the sun, a churning ball of plasma. While significant progress has been made, big technical hurdles remain, and it’s uncertain when the goal will be reached.

But the promise of fusion is so enticing that the risks appear worth it for many investors.

“A commercial fusion industry is a world-changing industry, and the returns on investment will be massive,” said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, in the foreword to the report.

The sector has landed more than $13.3 billion from venture capitalists over the past five years, according to the annual survey. After decades of government support via national labs and R&D grants, the private sector is now picking up the majority of the tab for fusion’s progress.

One of the important milestones in the pursuit of fusion is “scientific breakeven” — the point at which the output of a fusion reaction matches the energy input to a device’s plasma, without including the rest of the system’s power needs. Scientific breakeven was first hit by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022, but has not been reached by a private venture.

To be financially viable, the fusion companies need to go further, capturing more energy from fusion than required to operate their whole system.

The new report includes profiles of 56 companies worldwide that are pursuing fusion, including four based in the Pacific Northwest: General Fusion, Helion, Zap Energy and Avalanche Energy, as well as Kyoto Fusioneering, which has an office in Seattle.

Here’s a closer look at the four companies based in this region:

Avalanche Energy, Seattle

• Notable fact: Avalanche is unusual for its small-scale approach to fusion, and its plan to launch a pilot plant by 2030 is among the earlier targets in the race.
• Year founded: 2018
• Target uses: Electricity, space propulsion, marine propulsion, off-grid energy
• Publicly shared total funding: $104.2 million
• Target for scientific break even: 2029
• Target for first pilot plant: 2030

General Fusion, Vancouver, B.C.

• Notable fact: General Fusion has made multiple pivots in recent years in its path to commercialization and was the first to go public.
• Year founded: 2002
• Target uses: Electricity generation
• Publicly shared total funding: about $500 million
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed; aiming to produce fusion conditions by 2028
• Target for first pilot plant: Approximately 2035

Helion, Everett, Wash.

• Notable fact: Helion was the first to sign up a fusion customer when it inked a deal with Microsoft in 2023, and aims to be the first to reach commercialization.
• Year founded: 2013
• Target uses: Electricity generation
• Publicly shared total funding: $1.5 billion
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
• Target for first pilot plant: 2028

Zap Energy, Everett, Wash.

• Notable fact: Zap recently announced it will also pursue nuclear fission energy, building small-scale reactors alongside its fusion work.
• Year founded: 2017
• Target uses: Electricity generation, off-grid energy, industrial heat
• Publicly shared total funding: $338 million
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
• Target for first pilot plant: Late 2030s

Vieu, a Seattle startup aiming to replace cold outreach with warm introductions, launched what it calls the “Business Graph,” a live map of trusted relationships that drive business-to-business sales, marketing, recruiting and fundraising.

The 40-person company, which raised an $11 million seed round in October 2024, has grown to more than 100 enterprise customers including a number of well-known companies. Vieu competes with sales-intelligence tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach, and overlaps with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

The company is led by CEO Samir Manjure and CTO Simon Skaria, both Microsoft alumni. Manjure went on to found KenSci, a healthcare AI startup acquired by Providence in 2021. Skaria has also founded and sold two other startups, Office365Mon and Albits.

The Business Graph, which launched Tuesday, maps relationships between people and companies based on observed signals — such as shared work history, co-authored research, board affiliations, and joint ventures — rather than the self-reported connections that populate LinkedIn.

Common use cases include finding someone who can make an introduction to a decision-maker at a target account, quietly checking references on a job candidate, and figuring out which LinkedIn connections a salesperson actually knows versus the ones they simply accepted a request from.

Vieu says the graph can be used inside its own app or queried directly by AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, and it integrates with CRM, email, and Slack.

Manjure said Vieu still has the majority of its 2024 seed round in the bank and has not raised new funding. The company charges customers a platform fee for access to the Business Graph plus outcome-based pricing tied to specific use cases like sales, recruiting, and fundraising.

Sunny Gupta has led two prior enterprise tech companies with backing from venture capital firm Madrona in the past 20 years. iConclude sold to Opsware. Apptio sold to Vista Equity Partners, then to IBM for $4.6 billion.

Now they’re getting the band back together for the AI era. Madrona’s Matt McIlwain is calling it the biggest opportunity “by far.”

Gupta is launching Thira, a Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise AI startup, with Apptio co-founder Kurt Shintaffer, and leaders from companies such as Atlassian, Oracle, and Databricks. Thira announced Tuesday that it raised $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona, with participation from FUSE.

The idea: Thira is building AI to handle the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep big companies running, like setting up a new hire’s laptop, resetting a locked account, or approving a software purchase. The pitch is to enable a “back-office that runs itself,” according to the company.

It’s starting with IT support. The company is building software agents that can take an IT ticket, work it across the systems where the actual fixes happen — such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, and the identity and device-management tools that connect them — and close it out.

Finance and HR systems are also on the roadmap. Thira’s job listings describe agents built to “autonomously run the back-office work that consumes companies today, across IT, finance, HR, and beyond.”

Thira is entering a crowded market. ServiceNow closed its $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks last December to build autonomous IT ticket resolution into its service management platform. Startups including Aisera, Rezolve.ai, and Serval are pursuing similar territory.

Part of Thira’s bet is that Gupta and Shintaffer’s relationships with CIOs, which they built over many years at Apptio, will help to give it a foot in the door. Thira says it’s working with 10 companies as design partners ahead of a broader launch this fall.

In many ways, it’s a step beyond Apptio, which helps CIOs see where their companies spend money on technology. Thira is aiming to go past visibility to the “system of execution,” actually doing the work.

In a post on LinkedIn, Gupta said he began hearing from CIOs during Apptio tenure who wanted not only visibility into spending but also the ability to act on inefficiencies and automate work.

“In early 2026, I asked more than twenty CIO friends a simple question: has enough changed that what they’ve been asking for is finally buildable? The answer was yes, and bigger than I expected,” he wrote.

Thira’s team also includes:

• Mudit Goel, previously SVP of engineering at Atlassian;
• Grant Neuman, who was an AI engineer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure;
• Tarek Madkour, previously director of product management at Databricks;
• and Shashwat Srivastav, previously founder and CEO at AIVOT.

Gupta has been Smartsheet’s executive chair since August 2025, when longtime CEO Mark Mader retired. He also served as acting CEO until Raj Singh was named CEO in October 2025. Shintaffer was Smartsheet’s CFO from July 2025 to May 2026.

McIlwain, the Madrona managing director, is joining Thira’s board of directors. FUSE founding partner Kellan Carter is a board observer.

In a statement, McIlwain said the founding team pairs Gupta and Shintaffer’s two decades of enterprise credibility at Apptio with what he calls “AI-native innovators.” He added, “This is my third time starting and building a company with Sunny and it is by far the largest opportunity we have pursued together.”

Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has raised $125 million in a new funding round led by Motorola Solutions, boosting its ambitions to put a drone on the roof of every police and fire station in America.

The company says it will use the money to expand manufacturing capacity, bring new products to market, and grow its workforce. Later this year, Brinc is set to move into a new headquarters and factory in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood — a former fish cannery on the Lake Washington Ship Canal — with three times the production space of its current factory.

The investment and expansion come as new federal restrictions squeeze Chinese-made drones out of the U.S. market, giving domestic manufacturers a new opening.

Brinc’s drones and devices are used by police, fire, and other emergency responders to reach 911 calls before officers arrive, deliver medical supplies, and assist in hostage negotiations. Founded in 2019 by CEO Blake Resnick, now 26, Brinc moved from Las Vegas to Seattle in 2021.

Existing investors Index Ventures and Figma founder Dylan Field also participated in the latest round, the company said. Motorola Solutions became a Brinc investor in April 2025 as part of a $75 million round that formed a strategic alliance between the two companies.

Brinc didn’t disclose a specific valuation associated with the round but said it nearly doubled from $480 million a year ago, which means it hasn’t quite reached billion-dollar unicorn status. The new capital brings Brinc’s total funding to more than $280 million.

Other investors who’ve backed the company include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, former acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, and former FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.

The company has grown to 187 employees, up from 108 a year ago, and is actively hiring for 41 more. It expects to top 250 employees by the time the new factory opens.

All of its drones are built in the U.S., which is a growing selling point as federal regulators tighten restrictions on Chinese-made drones. The FCC in December 2025 blocked foreign-made drones from receiving U.S. equipment authorization, effectively barring new models — most notably from Chinese giant DJI — from the American market.

Some exemptions have since been granted for certain non-Chinese drones, and DJI is challenging the ruling in court, but Brinc says the shift has prompted more public safety agencies to look at American-made drones like its own.

Brinc’s drones integrate with Motorola’s public safety radios, 911 call systems, and dispatch software. An officer can launch a Brinc drone by pressing a button on a Motorola radio, or have one dispatched automatically when a 911 call comes in.

The company’s drone lineup includes the Lemur 2 for indoor use, the Responder 911 response drone, and Guardian, a larger Starlink-connected drone unveiled in March that the company says is built to replace police helicopters.

The company said it more than tripled revenue in 2025 and has signed nearly four times as many 911 response drone contracts so far this year as it did in the same period of 2025. Newer customers include the Los Angeles Fire Department and St. Louis Police Department.

More than 900 public safety agencies now use Brinc’s products, according to the company, including more than 20% of U.S. SWAT teams. That’s a fraction of the roughly 80,000 police and fire stations across the country that Brinc is targeting.

— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.

The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.

“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.

— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.

The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.

Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.

The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.

Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.

Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.

Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.

— Monica Lazo is now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.

And some departures from Big Tech:

• Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
• Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
• Jeff Nienaber is departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.

Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.

The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.

Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:

• Helion Energy’s $465 million Series G round was the biggest deal of the quarter.
• Starcloud raised $170 million for space-based data centers.
• XBOW pulled in $155 million for autonomous cybersecurity systems.
• Starfish Space closed about $110 million for spacecraft servicing.
• Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.

Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.

Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.

That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.

Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.

OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.

Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.

Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.

Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.

The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.

Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.

The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.

Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.

Augmodo, the Seattle startup that straps AI-powered cameras onto retail workers to track store shelves, has raised $21 million as it pushes its technology beyond grocery aisles and into warehouses, factories, and other physical workplaces.

The new funding, led by existing investor TQ Ventures, values Augmodo at $350 million.

CEO Ross Finman, who told GeekWire he wasn’t even looking to raise fresh capital, said he was motivated by interest in the startup’s technology from customers beyond retail, including automotive settings and hospitals.

“Fundamentally, someone grabbing a wrench at an automotive factory isn’t that different from someone grabbing a Cheerios box,” Finman said. “Turns out the algorithms work pretty well across all of those.”

Founded in 2023, Augmodo builds AI-powered “Smartbadges” — lightweight wearable devices with dual cameras — that store employees wear passively as they move through aisles. The badges use computer vision, 3D mapping, and spatial computing to track shelf inventory in real time, building what the company calls a digital “Realogram” of each store.

Augmodo raised $37.5 million a year ago in a round that came after Australian pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse — the startup’s first big customer — moved from a pilot to a full contract and validated the technology at scale. Now others want in on the action.

“Our whole mission statement is AI systems for the physical workforce,” Finman said. “Everyone’s focused on the 20% of the workforce that’s knowledge work, and we’re focused on the 80% of the workforce that’s physical work.”

That demand has pulled Augmodo into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery operations, and even employee training — verticals the company didn’t originally set out to serve. Existing retail customers, Finman said, kept expanding their contracts to cover new parts of their operations, from auditing warehouse pallets to logging maintenance work like HVAC repairs.

The Smartbadge itself has evolved, too. Finman said it’s now lighter than an iPhone Air and has grown into what he calls an “everything device,” adding walkie-talkie capabilities, an opt-in panic button, and a digital ID display, on top of its original inventory-tracking function.

“That’s actually become a really big selling point,” Finman said. “You don’t need to buy five or six different devices, you buy one at cost, and then here’s all the different features that you can get out of it.”

The company says it has grown 10x in revenue over the past year and now maps more than 186 million square feet of retail space monthly — a figure it expects to cross 1 billion square feet per month by year’s end. Augmodo is adding 50 to 100 new store locations a month.

The company’s headcount has grown 5x over the past year to more than 50 employees, including new CTO Bradford Snow, who joined in January after previous stints at Axon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

Augmodo is ranked No. 145 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups and was a finalist in the Hardware, Robotics, and Physical AI of the Year category at the 2026 GeekWire Awards.

Beyond TQ Ventures, backers include Lerer Hippeau, Jefferson River Capital, Arena Holdings, Chemist Warehouse, New Fare, Interlace, and Webb Investment Network.

Andrew Marks, co-founding partner at TQ, called Finman an “exceptional” leader and said every board meeting reinforced that demand for Augmodo’s tech was outpacing the team’s ability to serve it.

“When you pair a truly special founder with customers lining up around the door and pulling you into new markets, it was obvious we should propose putting more fuel on the fire,” Marks said.

Augmodo said it plans to use the new capital to expand its global enterprise footprint, invest further in its core AI models, and grow its engineering team — with a particular focus on hiring for computer vision and machine learning roles as the company scales its data processing beyond retail.

On this week’s show, we’re on the GeekWire deck for our annual founder open house, where we dig into Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs — including a major Xbox shakeup — and the surprising rise of hardware companies on the GeekWire 200.

Then we sit down with four guests to talk about how AI is reshaping how they build: 

• Jana Schuster of StackIQ, whose AI-native platform helps companies find redundancy in their software spending — like Rocket Money, but for business — with a small team.
• Blake Resnick and David Benowitz of Brinc Drones, whose mechanical engineers are now vibe coding their own prototypes;
• Boaz Ashkenazy of Shift AI, who’s setting up always-on agents and rethinking how we interact with AI tools.

Finally, this week’s GeekWire Trivia Challenge: how a longtime T-Mobile executive got his start in the wireless business, and the star-studded history of T-Mobile celebrity endorsers.

Stories mentioned:

• Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, about 2% globally, revamps salesforce and launches massive Xbox overhaul
• GeekWire 200 update: New unicorns and a hardware surge remake our list of top Pacific NW startups
• Former GitHub CEO’s startup Entire unveils its answer to the crush of AI coding agents
• Chicago software company plants flag in Seattle area as new leadership team seeks AI talent
• T-Mobile exec Mike Katz exits after 28 years, as carrier reshuffles top ranks and taps ex-AT&T leader

Audio editing by Curt Milton.