— Two former Amazon executives who helped build Discovery’s direct-to-consumer operation in Bellevue, Wash., are stepping down from their leadership roles following the company’s acquisition by Paramount Skydance. They will remain in advisory roles during the transition.

Avi Saxena joined Discovery in 2019 as chief technology officer of its direct-to-consumer business and led its new Bellevue office. He became CTO of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) following Discovery’s 2022 merger with AT&T’s WarnerMedia business. Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of WBD on Oct. 6, with the combined company taking the name Skydance Corporation.

Before joining Discovery, Saxena was with Amazon for 19 years over two stints, most recently as vice president of technology for Amazon Marketplace. He also held leadership roles at Microsoft and internet infrastructure startups.

Tyler Whitworth is stepping down as executive vice president and chief product officer for WBD’s streaming business. He led teams working on digital products for HBO Max, discovery+, Eurosport, TNT Sports, Food Network and others. Before joining Discovery, he spent more than seven years at Amazon, leading teams developing products and services for customers and third-party sellers.

Dane Glasgow, Skydance’s chief product officer, announced the departures of Whitworth, Saxena and WBD Chief Information Officer Dave Duvall in a memo shared with GeekWire.

“Much of the strength of WBD’s product and technology organizations reflects their leadership and dedication. Please join me in thanking them and wishing them the very best,” Glasgow wrote.

The company has not responded to GeekWire’s inquiries about the future of the Bellevue office.

— Bahadir Onalan is returning to Microsoft as a vice president in its CoreAI organization, focused on responsible AI, after nearly 10 years at Amazon. Onalan first joined Microsoft in 2005 and worked on Azure teams focused on search, analytics, business intelligence and security. He left in 2017 as a principal software group engineering manager to join Amazon, where he worked on machine learning initiatives.

“This second tenure feels like a true homecoming,” Onalan wrote. “Our goal goes beyond shipping a platform or a product; we are here to define the global standards for AI safety.”

— Naria Santa Lucia is leaving Microsoft after seven years, most recently as a general manager with Microsoft Elevate. She previously served as executive director of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship.

“I’ll carry the lessons I learned from my time at Microsoft as I continue my personal and professional mission to serve people and communities by teaching, advising nonprofits and mission driven organizations, and spreading joy and human connection,” Santa Lucia wrote.

She did not announce a specific next role.

— VertueLab, a Pacific Northwest nonprofit supporting climate tech entrepreneurs, has named Leo Ochoa executive director, promoting him from managing director for Oregon. He succeeds Aina Abiodun, who is transitioning to chair of the organization’s board after more than three years as executive director.

“Leo brings a unique blend of vision, relationships, and entrepreneurship experience,” the organization said, noting his background as a wildland firefighter, startup founder and patent holder for wearable safety gear.

Abiodun’s accomplishments include co-creating the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, launching the Opalene Climate Challenge and helping lead the Just Future Climate Labs initiative.

— Seattle’s Pulse Space has appointed Leah Sardone as vice president of engineering. The startup is developing laser-based systems to deliver power and enable long-distance communications in low Earth orbit and beyond. In July, the company announced a $40 million U.S. Space Force contract to advance its laser-based space power technology.

Sardone brings more than 23 years of experience in hardware, sensors and embedded systems development. She joins Pulse Space from IonQ, where she most recently served as director of quantum networking and interconnects. Her previous employers include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell Aerospace, Blue Origin and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, now known as Amazon Leo.

— Caravel Bio a Portland, Ore., startup developing technology to rapidly test newly designed proteins, has announced Michał Jastrzębski as its CTO. The company says its platform can screen millions of protein designs in parallel at low cost, helping identify promising candidates for applications in human health, pollution reduction and industrial processes.

Caravel also announced a nearly $1.25 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop the platform.

Jastrzębski previously served as a principal machine learning engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks. His past employers also include GitHub and Intel.

— Darick Baker has been appointed the director the University of Washington’s Washington Nanofabrication Facility, which the UW describes as “the largest publicly accessible nanofabrication facility and cleanroom in the Pacific Northwest.” Baker joined the facility in 2012 as a research engineer and has served as acting director since 2025. He previously worked at the Colorado School of Mines

— Technology Alliance announced that Stoke Space director of communications Kyra Jorgensen has joined its board. Jorgeson recently joined the space startup from the fusion company Helion Energy.

Richard Wang, co-founder and former CEO of coding bootcamp Coding Dojo, is launching Idea to Launch, a 30-day program that helps would-be founders turn a startup idea into a working product using AI coding tools and hands-on engineering help.

Nearly four years after selling Coding Dojo to Perdoceo for $70 million, Wang was looking for a way to keep doing work that had a measurable impact on people’s lives. He found it in mentoring aspiring founders.

Wang thinks AI is about to do for software what smartphones did for video. Cheap cameras and cloud platforms gave rise to the influencer economy, and he believes AI will push the cost of building a product close to zero.

“We’re going to create this whole new builder economy that’s about to come in the next three to five years,” he said. “Baby boomers are gifted with cheap housing. I think Gen Z is going to be gifted with a cheap price to build.”

He sees plenty of demand. Citing a Shopify-Gallup study and a Zapier/Harris poll, Idea to Launch says 60% of Americans have a business idea but only 9% launch one. Wang said the reasons people hold back include fear of failure, not knowing how to get started, and not wanting to give up a paycheck or benefits.

Unlike accelerators such as Techstars or Y Combinator, Idea to Launch doesn’t take equity, and participants don’t have to quit their jobs. Over 10 evening sessions, founders get coaching, run customer interviews, build a product with AI tools such as Lovable, Replit and Cursor, and plan a launch. Each founder also gets 10 hours of one-on-one help from professional engineers.

Wang said people without technical backgrounds can now vibe-code 80% to 90% of a product on their own. The hard part, he said, is connecting it to other services, setting up the database correctly and making it secure.

“We’ll provide that type of knowledge with real engineering support,” he said. For engineers who have never done customer discovery or marketing, the program fills in the business side.

Security researchers have found serious vulnerabilities in apps built on vibe-coding platforms. A 2025 scan found 170 of 1,645 apps built with Lovable exposing user data, and another case this year exposed nearly 19,000 user records. Wang said the program’s engineers will make sure security holes are fixed “before they launch or before they get onto the first customer.”

The first cohort starts Jan. 11, followed by three more through April. Each is capped at 15 to 20 founders. Tuition is $3,500 for the inaugural cohort, down from the normal $5,000. Sessions will be held in person in Seattle or Bellevue, and Wang said he expects to pick a space within the next month. He is self-funding the venture.

Wang, who immigrated from China at 13 and was the first in his family to attend college, became Coding Dojo’s CEO in 2015. He left in 2017 for Trupanion and returned in 2019. The company grew to $50 million in peak annual revenue, according to Wang, and had 194 employees at the time of the sale, according to GeekWire’s earlier reporting. It operated campuses in several states before shifting online during the pandemic.

Wang sees Idea to Launch expanding to other tech hubs, then online, and eventually licensing the program globally, much as Coding Dojo grew to multiple campuses. If the first cohorts go well, he can envision a follow-up program, Launch to Traction, to help founders find more customers.

He doesn’t plan to invest in participants’ companies. Having spent years building and selling Coding Dojo, Wang said he knows how hard that road is and would rather “cheer them on from the sidelines.” He said taking VC money at Coding Dojo created pressure to grow 100% a year, something he calls “startup steroids.”

For Wang, the point isn’t to find the next unicorn. It’s to give more people a shot at building something now that AI has made it cheaper and easier.

“I think everyone should try at least once just to bring their idea to reality,” he said.

Next-generation battery materials startup Group14 Technologies today announced $169 million in new funding and plans to build a manufacturing facility in Spain, expanding a production network that includes Washington state and South Korea.

“In order to be a global player in a global industry, we need a global footprint, which means it’s not about picking one specific region and going all in,” Group14 CEO Rick Luebbe told GeekWire. “We really need to grow all regions.”

The startup has developed a silicon-carbon material that replaces graphite in lithium-ion battery anodes, enabling higher energy density and faster charging, according to the company. The material already ships primarily to consumer-electronics customers, while the company pursues automotive and data center applications, Luebbe said.

The funding came from a European investor, Luebbe said, but he did not name the firm. It extends the company’s $463 million Series D round and brings Group14’s total funding to nearly $1.5 billion.

The new facility will be located in Sagunto, near Valencia, with production targeted for mid-2029. Luebbe said the site offers clean energy, skilled labor from the chemical industry and proximity to automotive customers, given that Spain is the second-largest vehicle producer in Europe after Germany.

Group14 already has a presence on the continent, acquiring Germany’s Schmid Silicon Technology Holding GmbH in 2023 to secure a European source of silane gas, a key ingredient in its battery material.

Just as the U.S. has been working to bolster its domestic battery manufacturing and reduce its reliance on Chinese supplies, Europe is doing the same, Luebbe said. The company wants to be part of that solution and is eager to make its move.

“Building chemical plants takes a long time, and so you’ve got to think ahead and be able to establish that global footprint and development strategy,” Luebbe said. “We’ve learned a lot in the lifetime of Group14.”

Group14 was founded in 2015 and six years later began operating its first commercial-scale factory, called Battery Active Materials-1, or BAM-1, at its headquarters in Woodinville, Wash.

In 2023, it broke ground on BAM-2 in central Washington’s Moses Lake with funding that included $100 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The site has two modules that at full capacity will be able to produce up to 4,000 tons of silicon-carbon battery material annually, enough for at least 200,000 electric vehicles.

The company originally aimed to start production by late 2024, a target later pushed to early 2026. Group14 laid off an undisclosed number of Washington workers in July 2025 and furloughed additional employees at Moses Lake in January as it shifted resources toward South Korea. The company’s total headcount is approximately 383 employees.

Luebbe said this week that the company is now targeting mid-2027 to bring the first module online, following equipment installation and commissioning. The second module does not yet have a firm completion date.

“It’s a very complicated infrastructure, and it takes a lot longer than we had anticipated to do the final installation and commissioning,” he added.

The company has at least secured the power it needs. It previously contracted sufficient clean energy to run the site, as well as a planned silane gas facility. Since Group14 began its development, data center deployments have accelerated in the region and projects are competing for clean electricity from hydropower dams.

While BAM-2 has been delayed, Group14’s BAM-3 site in South Korea — which originally began as a joint venture with SK materials — has been producing anode material since 2024. The facility has been scaling up and expects to reach its 2,000-ton annual capacity within about six months, Luebbe said.

Group14 is shipping primarily to consumer-electronics customers, which qualify new materials faster than automakers. Luebbe also sees a growing opportunity in data-center battery backup units, where silicon-anode batteries could help smooth rapid spikes in AI-server power demand.

“I’m anticipating data center batteries, battery backup units, to be the second biggest market for us behind EVs,” he said.

Seattle startup Ganaz, which provides payroll and HR tech for agricultural workers and employers, has been acquired by Beacon Holdings.

Ganaz co-founder and CEO Hannah Freeman announced the deal Wednesday on LinkedIn, saying the public benefit corporation “is in great hands” at Beacon, which “is building momentum for our next exciting season.”

Freeman indicated she is stepping away from the company to “catch my breath, spend more time with my daughter, and dream about what’s next,” she wrote. “I’ll miss our team & customers, but will be cheering you on from the sidelines.”

Ganaz launched in 2017 and has raised more than $10 million, with its last disclosed funding round in June 2021. That financing valued the company at $26 million, according to PitchBook. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Beacon, based in Toronto, buys software businesses serving traditional industries and provides shared technology and operational resources. The company said in September that its portfolio included 45 software businesses.

Ganaz’s platform provides employee onboarding, training, communication and analytics tools. It also offers a Mastercard payroll card that gives unbanked workers access to digital banking. Employers save time and money by skipping paper checks, while workers keep more of their pay by avoiding check-cashing and high remittance fees.

Ganaz received GeekWire’s 2023 Geeks Give Back Award. “We founded Ganaz to make life better for farm workers, and we do that by building technology that agricultural employers love and can’t live without,” Freeman told GeekWire in 2023. “We build our tools to help both workers and employers prosper, and that kicks off a virtuous cycle that helps agricultural communities prosper as well.”

At that time, the startup was serving more than 250,000 agricultural workers in the U.S. and Mexico and 100 employers in the sector.

The company has about 17 employees, according to LinkedIn. Freeman did not say in her post whether Ganaz will continue as a subsidiary or whether its employees will receive job offers from Beacon. GeekWire has reached out to Freeman for comment and will update the story with any reply.

The patents behind PicoBrew, the Seattle startup that once promised to do for home beer what Keurig did for coffee, are up for sale again — six years after the company collapsed into receivership and after two changes of ownership.

Hilco Global, an Illinois-based diversified financial services company, announced this week that its Intellectual Property Services group has been retained by PicoBrew’s current owner to market the startup’s technology to potential buyers.

The sale includes 17 patents and patent applications, two of them pending, along with engineering and design files and product concepts. Buyers can bid on all or part of the portfolio, and non-binding indications of interest are due Nov. 18. Hilco is pitching the assets to companies in coffee, tea, kombucha, spirits, beverage appliances and housewares.

The seller is Pico Craft Group, which Hilco described as led by a former PicoBrew investor. After PicoBrew’s 2020 collapse, its bridge lender took over the assets. That lender, PB Funding Group, was managed by former Microsoft software developer Greg Whitten, The Seattle Times reported at the time. Pico Craft Group bought the assets from the lender in 2024 for an undisclosed amount, according to Hilco, which did not say who runs the group.

“PicoBrew was a true innovator in the consumer and commercial craft beverage space, and its portfolio has applications well beyond beer,” Eric Hurwitz, a senior director at Hilco, said in a news release.

The portfolio covers technology from PicoBrew’s full product line, according to the release, including the Pico Pro and Pico C home brewing appliances, the PicoStill accessory for spirits, the Pico U Multibrew platform for beer, coffee, tea and kombucha, and Z-Series brewing machines and KegSmarts kegerators for commercial use.

Bill Mitchell, a former Microsoft vice president and longtime homebrewer, founded PicoBrew in 2010 with his brother Jim Mitchell, a food scientist, and Avi Geiger, an engineer who also worked at Microsoft. Their countertop machines automated the brewing process using PicoPaks, ingredient packs based on recipes from craft breweries.

The startup became a Kickstarter regular. Its 2017 campaign for the Pico Model C raised $1.93 million from 4,301 backers, a record at the time in the site’s food category, and the $549 machine landed at retailers including Best Buy, Williams-Sonoma and Amazon. A 2018 campaign for the Pico U pushed PicoBrew into coffee, tea and kombucha.

But the company struggled to land more funding. In February 2020, after failing to close a new round, PicoBrew entered receivership. It had raised more than $15 million and cut its staff to fewer than 40, down from a peak of more than 80.

PicoBrew ceased operations in 2020, and no one has supported existing devices since, according to Hilco. Any decision about future support would be up to a buyer. The King County Superior Court approved the 2020 sale, which freed PicoBrew’s bridge lender from the company’s liabilities and from responsibility to past customers, The Seattle Times previously reported.

Some owners kept their machines brewing without the company’s servers by using a workaround developed by a Facebook group of PicoBrew users, The Spoon reported in 2020. The founders were let go after the receivership, according to the site.

When PicoBrew went up for sale in 2020, Mitchell told GeekWire that hardware takes time and multiple funding rounds backed by firm investor commitment.

He shared advice he’d gotten from Dan Leviton of Maveron: “Startups only fail for one of two reasons — they run out of heart, or they run out of money.”

— Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang has suddenly left Microsoft after 21 years with the company, just months after landing the role in July. Her past roles include leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise.

Verge first reported the news on Friday, citing a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that did not disclose the reason for her departure.

An Xbox spokesperson was likewise mum on details. “We don’t discuss individual personnel matters. We’re grateful for Helen’s years of service and wish her well,” the company said in an email to GeekWire.

Xbox has undergone a massive reorganization that included Chiang’s appointment, roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about 20% of the Xbox workforce — the spinoff of four game studios and a plan to dramatically flatten management.

— Seattle-based tech leader Philip Su has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff on beneficial deployments. The management role focuses on AI applications in global health, life sciences, economic mobility and education.

Su started his tech career with 12 years at Microsoft and later worked for Facebook. He has launched multiple ventures, including Audere, a global health software nonprofit, and Superphonic, a podcast player. In 2021, he worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to experience the holiday rush.

Su also created and leads an annual course for University of Washington computer science students on how to maximize their personal and professional growth.

— More leadership changes are underway at SeekOut, a Bellevue-based recruiting startup launched in 2017. The company announced Monday that co-founder John Tippett is now president, moving from his role as chief client officer.

In April, SeekOut CEO and co-founder Anoop Gupta retired and passed the reins to enterprise software veteran Sean Thompson. In August, co-founder and chief technology officer Aravind Bala took over as CEO. Thompson is now listed as an adviser to the board.

Tippett will lead day-to-day operations and work with Bala “on the company’s direction,” according to a press release. SeekOut said it wants to integrate AI tools into customers’ operations to reduce recruiters’ workload.

SeekOut is No. 68 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Michael (Mick) Merritt as vice president of strategy and partnerships, effective Dec. 7.

Merritt joins from Penn Medicine, where he was chief operating officer of Penn Signature Services. He has more than 25 years of experience in academic medicine, consulting, strategy, business development and operations.

— Industrial wastewater treatment startup Membrion has named Alexander Demihovsky as director of applications engineering. He joins the Seattle-based company from Xylem. His past employers include Evoqua Water Technologies and Bechtel National.

“Alex helps turn customer needs into viable project plans, mitigate execution risks and develop competitive proposals,” the company said.

Membrion is No. 160 on the GeekWire 200.

— Marine geothermal energy startup Endurance Energy has named Marty Calvert as the director of turbomachinery. Calvert joins the Seattle startup from Blue Origin. He was previously a turbomachinery engineer at NASA for more than 13 years.

Endurance completed its fifth deployment to the ocean floor last month, testing Adélie, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

— Lattice Semiconductor, a Hillsboro, Ore.-based company, has added two directors to its board:

• Raejeanne Skillern, former VP and chief marketing officer of Amazon Web Services, who returns to Lattice after serving on the board from 2022 to 2024
• John McCool, senior vice president and special adviser to the CEO at Arista Networks

Seattle-based Kivo Health today announced $10 million in funding to help increase access to its services, which target older adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The Series A round brings the startup’s total funding to more than $16 million.

Kivo ships equipment to patients’ homes and provides a nine-week program of therapist-led, live video sessions focused on exercise, breathing techniques and disease management. The company provides ongoing support following the program and says it uses AI to handle administrative tasks and communicate with patients, supporting its clinicians.

“We’re using the funding to build our AI health coach to blend AI-led care with human-led care,” Dr. Victor Sadauskas, Kivo’s co-founder and CEO, said via email. That pairing, he added, will help patients manage their chronic disease over the long term.

The company has approximately 50 employees, including clinicians.

COPD is an incurable lung disease in which damaged airways and air sacs make breathing difficult and can worsen over time. Common symptoms include shortness of breath, a persistent cough and fatigue. COPD is the third leading cause of death globally and the fifth in the U.S.

However, there are effective treatments to improve the condition, though many patients are not able to easily access care. A study of Medicare beneficiaries with COPD found that only 3.7% received pulmonary rehabilitation in 2012.

Kivo reports that a peer-reviewed study of its program found improvements in participants’ symptoms, physical function and mental health. The company also funded an analysis that estimated its model could reduce annual health care spending by $8,245 per member through fewer hospitalizations, ER visits and time in nursing homes.

Kivo says its program is covered by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers including UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross, Aetna and Priority Health.

“By thoughtfully combining high quality clinical care with AI, we can now scale proactive, accessible care to every senior, improving symptoms and reducing avoidable costs,” Sadauskas said in a statement.

Sadauskas launched Kivo in 2023 with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Vaughn Koch. Sadauskas previously was an emergency medicine physician for Kaiser Permanente and a senior investment fellow with Life Science Angels. Koch is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Movity to Trulia in 2010.

While its current focus is COPD, Kivo aims to expand into other costly chronic conditions affecting older adults.

Allumia Ventures led the round, with participation from Corewell Health Ventures, Y Combinator, Heuristic Capital and MassMutual Ventures.

Avante, the maker of an AI platform to help companies manage employee health care and other benefits, has landed a $30 million Series A round.

Frist Cressey Ventures led the round, with participation from Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures, Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and existing investor Fuse. The new funding, announced Tuesday, brings Seattle-based Avante’s total raised to $40 million, following a $10 million seed round led by Fuse in 2024.

Benefits are one of employers’ biggest costs. Avante’s AI agents do work like comparing vendor contracts against actual claims, reviewing plan documents for errors and preparing for renewals. Employees can also use the platform to ask questions about their own coverage.

The startup plans to use the cash to expand internationally and develop more AI agents, building on a beta release of its “Ava Agents” last week.

Avante says it now has more than 70 customers, including Samsung Semiconductor, Real Chemistry, Zscaler and News Corp, and that bookings grew nearly fivefold over the past year. The platform reaches more than 385,000 employees and family members, according to the company.

Avante was founded in 2023 by CEO Rohan D’Souza; Carly Eckert, a physician and epidemiologist who serves as head of innovation and impact; and executive chairman Kabir Shahani, the co-CEO of Amperity.

D’Souza and Eckert previously worked as executives at health care automation company Olive AI, which shut down in 2023. The startup emerged from stealth in early 2024 and launched publicly in April 2025.

“Benefits teams are responsible for one of the largest and most consequential investments their companies make, yet they’re still operating with outdated information, archaic spreadsheets, and technology built for another era,” D’Souza said in a statement.

Avante is pitching its software as employers face rising health care costs. Large employers are projecting a median 9.2% increase for 2027, the company said.

The startup competes with benefits and HR software providers such as Workday, ADP, Deel and Rippling. It has also signed partnerships with benefits advisory firms including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden and USI Insurance Services.

Avante ranks No. 156 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.

Emerald Nuclear today announced a $2.1 million award from The Research Council of Norway to support its efforts to bring nuclear energy to the shipping industry and offshore power. The Seattle-based startup is developing high-temperature gas reactors that use an encapsulated fuel designed to resist meltdowns.

“This award will enable Emerald Nuclear to work directly with our marine partners to validate integration of our technology with their state-of-the-art marine power distribution and control systems,” said Wesley Deason, co-founder and CEO.

The funding supports Norway’s Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project, which is being led by Emerald Nuclear’s Norwegian subsidiary.

Shipping accounts for roughly 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, making it a significant target for lower-carbon energy solutions. Some ferries serving shorter routes are adopting hybrid-electric propulsion. Shipping companies are exploring methanol, ammonia, biofuels and other alternatives to heavy fuel oil, but their climate benefits depend on how those fuels are produced and used.

Nuclear reactors have powered U.S. Navy submarines for more than 70 years. Now, a new wave of companies is working to expand nuclear power’s role in commercial shipping and other marine applications.

The award supports an early development step for Emerald Nuclear, with substantial work remaining before commercial deployment. The company has yet to build its first reactor, and its plans will require additional financing, regulatory approvals and a reliable fuel supply. The startup has previously received an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors.

Emerald Nuclear has five employees, most of them in Norway, and is targeting two applications: offshore ships that help construct facilities like oil platforms and wind turbines and lay deep-sea cables, and floating power plants for remote communities. Each reactor is designed to produce 5 megawatts (6,705 horsepower), according to the company.

Bringing nuclear to the marine environment poses several significant challenges. They include safety issues, regulations for vessels traveling internationally, management of nuclear fuel and waste, and the way shipping companies frequently buy and sell vessels.

Deason said the company’s approach helps address those concerns:

• The reactor will use TRISO fuel, which consists of a uranium-containing kernel surrounded by protective carbon and silicon-carbide layers. The uranium is in short supply, but Deason is confident it will be available by the time the company is ready to deploy.
• Nuclear regulations are still being developed for international vessels, though initial deployments will be within a single country’s jurisdiction.
• Emerald Nuclear will have seaside manufacturing, providing easy access for ships and floating power plants that need installations, repairs and exchanges of fresh and spent fuel.
• The company will lease, rather than sell, its systems, allowing customers to swap nuclear in or out depending on their needs.

Emerald Nuclear is designing its technology “to integrate with the unique power needs of the ship, but also to meet the ways that the maritime industry does business,” Deason said.

Other companies pursuing nuclear ship propulsion include Core Power, newcleo and Blykalla. Core Power, Westinghouse, Saltfoss Energy and Prodigy Clean Energy are also developing floating nuclear power stations. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom already has nuclear-powered icebreakers and a floating nuclear power plant in operation.

Prior to launching Emerald Nuclear, Deason, a nuclear engineer, worked for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. (USNC) developing reactors for space-based applications.

During his tenure at the Seattle company, a professor from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology approached USNC about applications for the maritime sector. USNC declared bankruptcy in October 2024 and the deal wasn’t pursued. But the idea interested Deason and Hallgeir Juliebø, a Norwegian entrepreneur who had been a consultant with USNC. The two co-founded Emerald Nuclear in 2024 and Juliebø serves as chief commercial officer.

Emerald Nuclear has signed a lease for an engineering center in Norway, where it’s designing and building its first prototype, a non-nuclear thermal device that will be used for the Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project.

Other partners for the project are VARD Group, Vard Electro, Island Offshore, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Imperial College London and Maskindynamikk, bringing together nuclear technology, ship design and integration, vessel operations and academic research.

The startup will build its first nuclear reactor, named the Gem Microreactor, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, with 2030 as its goal for completion. Emerald Nuclear will integrate equipment from Peregrine Turbine Technologies in Maine to convert the reactor’s heat into electricity.

The target for the first commercial deployment is 2031, on a Norwegian offshore vessel.

Deason is hoping to open a manufacturing site in the future in Western Washington on Puget Sound with an initial focus on floating nuclear power systems that replace diesel generators. That phase of growth is roughly targeted to the early 2030s.

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space has secured a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital to build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral for a larger version of its fully reusable rocket.

The loan isn’t final until Stoke meets a list of financial, legal, technical and due-diligence requirements. The announcement Monday comes less than two months after Stoke raised roughly $1 billion in a Series E round, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion.

The new pad would serve Stoke’s Nova Block 2 rocket, which is designed to carry up to 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit. That’s five times the capacity of Nova Pathfinder, which Stoke plans to launch for the first time from its existing pad in early 2027. Block 2 is slated to debut in 2029.

The loan would be paired with private capital to pay for the pad, according to the Department of War. Jordan Sebold, senior managing director for investments at the Office of Strategic Capital, said in a statement that adding launch infrastructure would “enhance the overall capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base.”

The Office of Strategic Capital was set up in 2022 to draw private investment into technologies seen as critical to national security. The following year, Congress gave it the power to make loans and loan guarantees to companies in those fields. Space launch is one of the technology categories it targets.

“By expanding domestic launch facility capacity, this investment enables launch service providers to ensure our commercial and defense partners have reliable, high-cadence access to space,” David Lorch, the office’s director, said in the news release.

Stoke is already lined up for military launch work. In 2025, the Space Force added the company to a pool of providers that can compete for national security missions under Lane 1 of the program’s third phase. Lane 1 is the tier meant for newer launch companies and less demanding payloads. Stoke can’t bid on those missions until it completes a successful orbital flight.

The company has other federal ties as well. The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Stoke a $4.5 million contract in 2024 to study rapid delivery of cargo to orbit, and possibly back to Earth. In June, Stoke was one of 37 companies NASA chose for unfunded partnerships. Stoke’s project focuses on returning Nova’s upper stage safely through the atmosphere.

Nova is designed so both of its stages can return and fly again. The booster flies itself back for recovery. The upper stage uses a metal heat shield cooled by liquid hydrogen that circulates through channels inside it, to survive the heat of reentry. Only SpaceX, with its much larger Starship, is pursuing the same goal, and it hasn’t fully achieved it yet. Stoke has yet to launch a rocket to orbit.

Stoke was founded in 2019 by two Blue Origin veterans: Andy Lapsa, the CEO, and Tom Feldman, the chief technology officer. The company has about 400 employees. Most work at its 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters in Kent, and about 50 are at its test site in Moses Lake, which is expanding from 75 to 550 acres. About 50 more work at Cape Canaveral.

GeekWire reached out to Stoke Space for comment and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

A startup led by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke is introducing its own platform for storing, reviewing and shipping code written by AI agents, competing with the company he used to run.

The startup, Entire, on Monday unveiled what it calls a Git forge — a service for hosting code, reviewing changes and running builds, the core of what GitHub does — designed for teams whose AI agents write code faster than people can review it. The company is pitching it as an alternative to GitHub.

The news comes two days before GitHub’s annual Universe conference in San Francisco. Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 and has since folded it into its CoreAI division.

The biggest change is Trails, Entire’s replacement for the pull request, the standard way developers propose and review code changes. The pull request “has become an audit log that only the agent reads,” Dohmke wrote in a blog post Monday. Instead of reading through every changed line, developers see a dashboard of scores from AI agents evaluating the code on each update.

According to Entire, multiple AI agents check the quality of each change, so developers can merge code without reading every line. Teams can also require a person’s sign-off, or passing automated tests, before any code goes in, the company said.

The launch comes as GitHub strains under the load from AI agents. The platform has had several significant outages in recent months, including one in August that lasted nearly eight hours. GitHub is moving from its own data centers to Microsoft’s Azure cloud to add capacity. GitHub said developers and agents made 7.38 billion commits, or saved code changes, on the platform in September alone.

Dohmke, who is based in Bellevue, Wash., left GitHub last year after nearly four years as CEO. Entire says it now has 50 employees. The company is fully remote.

Entire isn’t alone in rethinking code hosting for AI agents. AI coding company Cursor launched its own code-hosting service, Origin, in August. And Anthropic recently described building its own source control system as the number of code changes it merged each day grew from about 2,500 in May to more than 30,000 in September.

With the latest updates, Entire now lets developers host private code repositories directly on its service in the U.S., Europe, India and Australia, and says its service can handle up to 89 times as many code pushes per second as GitHub, based on its own benchmarks. It’s partnering with Buildkite and Depot on build and test pipelines, giving developers a way to move off GitHub Actions. Public repositories and self-hosting are on the roadmap.

Entire is also adding what it calls Continuous Memory, which lets AI agents search past coding sessions for the context behind earlier changes. The company says one part of it, a map of the codebase, cut token use by up to 71% in its testing.

That goes beyond the startup’s July launch, which mirrored existing GitHub repositories on a faster network rather than replacing them. Developers can still mirror from GitHub, or now move their code to Entire instead.

Microsoft’s venture arm M12 was among the backers of Entire’s $60 million seed round in February. Felicis led the round, with participation from Seattle-based Madrona and Basis Set Ventures, along with individual investors such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.

“Code review was always a bottleneck,” Dohmke said at a Madrona event last month. “I’ve never worked in a software company where I didn’t wait for somebody else to review my pull request, and you have to ping people in Slack three times. And there was this one guy that had to review everything because he knew what to look for. And now that bottleneck is 10 times bigger.”

Seattle-based ag-tech startup Strella has landed $4.25 million to expand the reach of its technology that monitors produce to prevent spoilage and food waste.

The investment extends the company’s Series A round and brings its total funding to $26.25 million.

CEO and co-founder Katherine Sizov launched the startup in Philadelphia in 2019 and relocated its headquarters to Seattle four years ago to be closer to Washington’s fruit orchards.

Strella uses IoT devices to measure gases including ethylene, a plant hormone released by ripening fruit, and machine vision to monitor the produce. Its software interprets the fruit’s real-time conditions alongside data such as country of origin, packing date and varietal type.

The 19-person team serves customers in 26 countries and provides information to growers of apples, pears, avocados and citrus. It recently added kiwifruit to the lineup.

“Our vision is to become the system of record for quality in the food supply chain, or the ‘guardian angels’ of produce as it passes from hand to hand,” Sizov said.

The company works with all of the players in the supply chain, including farmers, produce packers, shippers, distributors and retailers.

“The next step for us is to begin stitching all the pieces together to become a one-stop shop for quality and tackle the food waste problem at scale,” Sizov said.

The United Nations estimates that roughly 33% of food intended for humans worldwide is lost or wasted, totaling $940 billion in annual economic losses. Waste in the U.S. is even worse, at about 40% of edible food and $218 billion each year.

The funding was led by SilverBlue, with participation by LeVert Ventures, Beta Milouot and PeakBridge. 

HumanTronik, an AI startup co-founded by Icertis co-founder Monish Darda, has acquired CloudMoyo, the Bellevue tech services firm that Darda helped spin out of Icertis in 2015.

The deal keeps two of CloudMoyo’s co-founders in charge: Darda, who co-founded its new parent company, and Manish Kedia, who continues to run CloudMoyo day to day as CEO. The family of the late Samir Bodas, CloudMoyo’s other co-founder and the longtime CEO of Icertis, sold its stake in CloudMoyo as part of the transaction, Kedia said.

Darda co-founded HumanTronik earlier this year with Singapore-based investor and early Icertis backer Kabir Narang. The company is developing what it calls “human language models,” its phrase for AI that learns how specific executives make decisions and work with others. Those models power AI agents inside Microsoft Outlook, Teams and other workplace software.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. CloudMoyo, as part of HumanTronik, will keep its name and existing customer contracts, and will sell and implement HumanTronik’s technology in addition to its existing lines of business.

The business model: Kedia calls the approach “Service as Software.” Customers pay for software, he said, with ongoing support from CloudMoyo built into the subscription. Pricing is shifting from per-user fees toward fees based on results.

It’s part of a broader blurring of the lines between software and services across the industry, including the rise of forward-deployed engineers who work inside customers’ businesses to put AI to use.

• Sequoia Capital’s Julien Bek argued in a March essay that the next $1 trillion company will be “a software company masquerading as a services firm,” noting that companies spend $6 on services for every $1 on software.
• Anthropic formed a $1.5 billion services venture in May with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, aimed at midsize businesses.
• OpenAI launched its Deployment Company the same month with more than $4 billion in initial investment, embedding its engineers inside businesses.

CloudMoyo has more than 300 consultants. Over the past two years, its work has expanded from mostly implementing Icertis contract software to building AI tools on Microsoft’s Fabric data platform, for customers including Seattle-based Expeditors and Mexican railroad Ferromex. That AI business is growing at about 100%, outpacing the company’s more traditional work, Kedia said.

Kedia gave the example of a procurement director trying to cut spending by two points this year. HumanTronik’s agents would draw on conversations with suppliers and internal discussions, along with the company’s business data, to help the director and their team reach that goal.

How the deal came together: The acquisition moved quickly, Kedia said. He and Darda met in the Bay Area three to four months ago to talk about CloudMoyo’s AI work, and Darda showed him what HumanTronik was building. Negotiations took about two months.

Because Darda was a major shareholder in both companies and on the CloudMoyo board, he was not directly involved in the negotiations, according to Kedia, who noted that each side had its own legal counsel.

The founders have known one another for years, which made the talks easier, Kedia said. “We are staying within the families,” he said.

The Icertis connection: Darda co-founded Icertis with Bodas in 2009 and served as its CTO for about 17 years before stepping back in April to start HumanTronik. His title at Icertis is now chief mentor.

Kedia, who at one point led business development for Microsoft’s SQL Server database software, was president of Icertis for several months before leading the CloudMoyo spinout in 2015.

Icertis has no financial stake in HumanTronik or CloudMoyo, Kedia said, though the companies continue to work together. Icertis has been led by interim co-CEOs Rajat Bahri and Jim Moffatt since Anand Subbaraman departed in July, less than a year after succeeding Bodas. Bloomberg reported in February that Icertis was working with Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale.

Narang led Icertis’s Series A funding round in 2015 while at Fidelity’s venture arm, Eight Roads, and later became a founding partner at B Capital.

Headquarters and headcount: HumanTronik is headquartered in San Francisco, where it plans to open an engineering center. Darda is based in Pune, India, where CloudMoyo has an engineering center, and HumanTronik is setting up a subsidiary in Singapore.

Nearly all of CloudMoyo’s employees are becoming HumanTronik employees, joining a few HumanTronik engineering leaders in the Bay Area, Kedia said. The combined company has about 20 people in the Seattle area, where CloudMoyo has had an office in Bellevue for the past decade. Kedia, who lives in the region, said the company plans to hire engineering, product and sales staff here.

That’s up from about 15 in 2016, when GeekWire last wrote about CloudMoyo. At the time, most of its roughly 200 employees were in Pune.

The name CloudMoyo came from a word the founders picked up while traveling: “moyo” means heart or spirit in Swahili. After the HumanTronik deal, Kedia said, the company’s new motto is “human with a heart.”

For years, Aigen has been building and tweaking solar-powered robots designed to pull weeds on farms. But the Redmond, Wash., startup is also raising a crop of its own: a growing, AI-generated collection of digital weeds and plants that teaches those robots what to pull.

That synthetic data, which Aigen calls Alchemy, is changing what the company can sell. Training its robots on a new crop used to require three to four years of collecting and labeling real-world images, co-founder and CTO Richard Wurden said. Now it takes about a week, helping Aigen attract growers of asparagus, hops, flowers, lettuce and more.

Wurden spoke with GeekWire by phone from FIRA USA, a three-day agricultural robotics expo at Yakima’s State Fair Park that wrapped up Thursday. He said Aigen made several sales at the show, including to growers it previously couldn’t serve.

“Now we’re saying yes to a bunch of crops, where previously we were locked into just doing a few,” he said.

Aigen is nearly sold out of robots for the 2027 season following the show, according to the company.

Aigen’s solar design is also getting more attention as fuel costs climb. U.S. diesel prices are up roughly 70% from a year ago, according to EIA data, and averaged nearly $6.30 a gallon this month, according to AAA. Many rival weed-control machines are pulled by diesel tractors, Wurden said, while Aigen’s robots run entirely on solar panels with a battery backup.

“It just so happens running a solar-powered robot without pesticides is the best possible timing right now,” he said.

Wurden and CEO Kenny Lee founded Aigen in 2020 after meeting in a climate-focused Slack group and discovering they lived about five minutes apart. Wurden, a mechanical engineer, previously worked on battery systems at Tesla and at Seattle electric boat maker Pure Watercraft. Lee is a cybersecurity veteran who co-founded Weblife.io, which Proofpoint acquired in 2017.

The mission is personal for both founders. Lee had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Wurden has type 1 diabetes — diseases Wurden said have been linked to herbicide use.

The startup raised a $4 million seed round in 2022 and a $12 million round in 2023 led by ReGen Ventures, with participation from NEA and others. Wurden said the company has raised about $26 million in total. The startup now has about 15 employees.

Aigen’s Element robots are about 6 feet wide and topped with a roughly 400-watt solar panel. Cameras and AI distinguish weeds from crops, and mechanical arms pull the weeds out at the root. The robots cost $50,000 to $70,000 each depending on configuration, and Aigen typically sells them in packs of five, Wurden said.

Aigen has built more than 100 robots, all assembled in Redmond, and logged more than 15,000 hours in fields in California, Minnesota and North Dakota. Customers include organic soybean growers in North Dakota and tomato growers in California, Wurden said, and the company is expanding a recent pilot with an unnamed Fortune 500 company.

Alchemy has also become a product in its own right.

Large agribusinesses are using Aigen’s synthetic data, Wurden said. Because the plants are generated in simulation, each one comes perfectly labeled. That matters when weeds and crops overlap in ways that are hard to sort out from real photos, especially under shifting daylight. Aigen’s robots don’t use artificial lights. Wurden said the startup built the system out of necessity, because it couldn’t afford to pay people to label images by hand.

“Our AI now labels the data for us,” he said.

The company is choosy about who gets that data. Wurden said the company would work with precision-spraying companies that use less herbicide, but not with operations that broadcast-spray fields.

Next up: robots on Washington farms early next year, the company says. It’s also developing an orchard version with arms that reach out to weed between trees. And a next-generation robot is in the works.

Aigen is one of several Washington startups using AI to fight weeds. Issaquah-based TerraClear maps individual weeds so farmers’ existing sprayers hit only those spots. Seattle-based Carbon Robotics zaps weeds with lasers and trained its AI on 150 million labeled images of real plants. Aigen is betting synthetic data can teach its robots new crops faster.

Wurden said it’s refreshing to see technologists working on these problems rather than focusing on ad clicks or another gadget or service that may not be good for society.

“I support every company working on ag technology and things that help farmers, because farmers have felt like they’re left behind for a long time,” he said. “It’s a good way to cross the aisle in politics, too. Everybody needs food.”

Loomerang made its first sale less than 12 hours after it went live in June. A customer in Houston bought a shirt designed by Joe, an independent artist in Japan.

Four months later, the Seattle-based marketplace for artist-designed T-shirts has 40 artists from 15 countries and recently expanded to India.

Loomerang works by handling everything but the art. Artists open storefronts for free, set their own prices, and get 60% of what’s left after manufacturing costs. The company prints, inspects and ships every order, for now out of co-founder Matt Koyama’s garage.

Koyama described Loomerang as an attempt to run a more responsible business in a capitalist system, one built around people who spend their lives working on a craft.

“How can we reward them for that rather than making them feel like they’re being pushed to the margins constantly?” he said.

Loomerang was started in early 2024 by CEO Vijay Roy, a nearly 11-year Amazon veteran. He and Koyama had worked together on Amazon’s print-on-demand book business. Koyama joined as a co-founder a few months later and went full time this spring after leaving Xbox. A third co-founder, Arka Majumdar, leads design.

The company is bootstrapped. Its 14-person team is spread across Seattle, Minnesota and Kolkata, India, and the founders aren’t taking salaries.

Koyama, who also spent time in gaming, sees the same pattern across creative industries.

“The best stuff comes out of the indie space because these are the people that are willing to take risks, to invent, to revolutionize,” he said.

We caught up with Loomerang for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

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

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Loomerang connects people with the artists and stories behind their clothes: a tattoo artist in Seattle, a painter in Pune, India, an illustrator in Ibaraki, Japan. Artists launch apparel brands for free and keep most of the profit. We print, inspect and ship every shirt.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Starting an apparel brand is expensive. You need inventory, a manufacturer, a storefront and a way to reach customers. Most talented artists can’t take that risk. The ones who license their work to big brands usually get a small cut. We want to flip that by removing the upfront cost, handling production with real care, and making sure the artist keeps most of the profit.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Almost nobody knew who designed their clothes. The exceptions were luxury pieces from designers who were already famous, or a shirt someone bought directly from an artist at a market or art fair. Those people could tell us the artist’s name and why the piece mattered to them. We’re trying to give every Loomerang purchase that same feeling.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

We’re very intentional when using AI, because it’s a threatening presence for many of the artists we work with. We don’t use it to make art. We use it behind the scenes in our code and operations, and in tools that help artists with practical work like upscaling files. Keeping our overhead low means more of each sale goes to the artist.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

People think it’s too good to be true. Artists pay nothing to join and keep 60% of the net profit on every sale. The first question is usually, what’s the catch? There isn’t one. The fashion industry has trained artists to expect a small cut of what their work earns. We think that’s backwards.

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

Holding off on new products. We planned to add hoodies and crewnecks before the holidays, but we decided to prioritize our artist roster and our quality promise. We’d rather ship fewer things we can stand behind than have a wide product range we aren’t fully ramped up on.

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

Build something that creates value for people instead of taking it from them. It’s slower and harder, but those are the kinds of companies we need in today’s world. Technology keeps making it easier to cut people out. The best businesses will find ways to bring more of them in and lift them up.

We’ll know our company has made it when… 

An independent artist’s first thought for launching a brand is Loomerang, not a big platform that pays them a fraction of what their work is worth. When artists in Seattle, Pune and everywhere else make a real living through us. And when “who made this?” becomes a normal thing to ask about your clothes.

Watchtower Labs, a Bellevue, Wash.-based defense tech startup, emerged from stealth Wednesday with $35 million to build AI software that helps military planners make faster decisions about logistics and operations.

Shield Capital and Conviction co-led the seed round, with participation from Founders Fund and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm that supports the U.S. intelligence community. It’s the first outside funding for Watchtower, which was incubated inside Shield.

Watchtower was co-founded by CEO Akhil Iyer, a former Marine Corps infantry and special operations officer who said that like many veterans, he was frustrated that the technology on commercial iPhones wasn’t making it into the field with troops.

After leaving the military, Iyer worked on counter-drone technology and later invested in defense startups at Shield Capital, where he watched senior military leaders try to figure out how to put AI to practical use.

“One of those key problems is how do we best allocate scarce resources across the globe,” Iyer said. “Planning for that is really hard.”

Iyer’s Watchtower co-founders are CTO Souren Aghajanyan and head of engineering John Morman, longtime Microsoft engineering leaders who worked on large distributed systems and fraud protection. Iyer said his first call after deciding to build Watchtower went to Lou Manousos, who founded security company RiskIQ, sold it to Microsoft in 2021 and later became a corporate vice president there. Aghajanyan and Morman had worked on Manousos’ team, and they were already thinking about how simulation and AI could improve planning.

The company’s software lets planners ask questions in plain language, then runs simulations to map out possible scenarios and options, starting with military logistics: moving fuel, spare parts, munitions and people where they’re needed in time. Watchtower models hundreds of possible futures against real-world constraints and shows the assumptions and tradeoffs behind each option, while decision makers stay in charge of the final call.

Iyer said the platform pairs agentic AI with heavy-duty math.

“You can’t LLM your way to a really complicated math problem, yet at least,” he said. “It needs to be set up in the right way, and you need to do some real analysis behind it.”

Many existing military tools focus on giving commanders a clear picture of what they have right now and where it is, Iyer said. Fewer look ahead to what’s coming. Watchtower’s bet is that it can bridge AI and simulation and optimization software to do that.

Watchtower is starting with logistics, but Iyer said supply decisions are tied to operations, so the company plans to broaden its software into wider operational planning.

Watchtower has several military contracts, Iyer said. The most important is a prototype contract it won in January through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Joint Sustainment Decision Tool program, which is building AI tools to help the military forecast logistics needs weeks in advance.

Watchtower and Air Space Intelligence were picked after a competitive process, according to the DIU. The program’s partners include U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (the lead partner), U.S. Northern Command and the Defense Logistics Agency. The tools are meant to track and forecast critical supplies such as munitions, fuel, medical materiel and spare parts.

Iyer said the $35 million will go first toward building out the team, then toward delivering on the contracts Watchtower has won and expanding its platform beyond logistics. The startup has revenue but isn’t disclosing figures.

Watchtower has about 30 employees across offices in Bellevue, the Bay Area, Hawaii and the Washington, D.C., area, with more than a dozen in Bellevue. Iyer, who is based in San Francisco, said the company is moving to a larger Bellevue office and hopes to double its headcount. The Seattle area is a core focus for hiring, he said, because of its density of “very technical folks that maybe wanted to work on things with a little bit more mission impact.”

Recruits don’t need a military background, Iyer said. He noted that quite a few team members immigrated to the U.S. and see the work as a way to give back.

Watchtower is hiring for in-person roles in Bellevue that require U.S. citizenship, according to a LinkedIn post from Aghajanyan, including engineers for its simulation engine, distributed systems and machine learning work.

Watchtower joins a growing defense tech cluster in the Seattle area that includes:

• Overland AI, a University of Washington spinout that builds autonomous ground vehicles, raised $100 million this year and landed a Marine Corps production contract worth nearly $20 million.
• Shield AI picked Des Moines, Wash., to build its X-BAT autonomous fighter jet and expects 4,000 local workers by the early 2030s.
• Anduril has about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle and sees a path to 1,000 engineers, though its expansion has drawn protests.
• Echodyne opened a $40 million drone-detection radar factory in Woodinville this summer.
• Exia Labs, led by former Army officer Jonathan Pan, is building AI software to speed up military planning and simulate missions.
• Microsoft and Amazon signed deals in May to put their AI systems on the Pentagon’s most classified networks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are four departures and arrivals for Microsoft leaders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endurance Energy says its prototype marine geothermal power system generated more electricity than it consumed during a recent deployment 300 miles off the Oregon coast — though the milestone lasted just 8.7 seconds.

The Seattle-based startup landed its 3-ton power plant on the seafloor near a natural vent releasing water at about 538 degrees Fahrenheit. The team operated the system remotely through a fiber-optic network running along the seabed.

The expedition marked Endurance’s fifth deployment to the ocean floor where it tested Adélie — a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

The company is part of a broader race to harness geothermal energy, using heat from water or steam under the Earth’s crust, converted into electricity. But while companies such as Fervo and Sage Geosystems focus on terrestrial sites, Endurance is the first commercial venture pursuing undersea sources.

“The main question we had is can the system generate more power than it uses,” Andrew Redd, Endurance’s founder and CEO, said in a statement about the expedition, which began last month.

“Adélie did,” he added. “Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket flew for two and a half seconds. Our first net-positive run lasted about nine. Our approach is to make it exist, then make it good.”

The test produced only a brief burst of surplus electricity, reaching a peak net output of 16.5 kilowatts. Challenges with the technology and a failure of a power cable cut the dive short.

The team also drilled what it called the world’s first geothermal well. At a site about 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, its machinery created two bore holes that tapped into hydrothermal fluid. It capped one hole and drilled a roughly 2-inch wide, 52-foot deep geothermal well at the other. While the well delivered hot fluid, it wasn’t suited for testing the energy system, sending the team to the natural vent.

Endurance said the expedition included voluntary environmental monitoring. The team mapped the seafloor to select the least disruptive test site, sampled water before and after operations, surveyed marine life and monitored sound.

While the startup has made rapid progress, its approach faces significant challenges: high pressure and corrosive conditions, mineral buildup inside equipment and the risk of costly repairs to seafloor machinery. And although many population centers sit near coastlines, the systems would still need expensive subsea cables to carry electricity over potentially long distances.

The company has raised $63 million from investors and has roughly three-dozen employees.

This winter, Endurance plans to deploy Gentoo, a refurbished and upgraded version of Adélie designed to generate more power for longer periods.

The company is also developing its first commercial project in Tonga, with the goal of delivering its first electricity in 2027.

Editor’s note: GeekWire has been examining the economic challenges facing Seattle and the lessons the region can learn from Cleveland’s industrial decline and ongoing comeback. This three-part series from GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald explores how Seattle can navigate its own economic transition, adapt to a changing technology landscape, and preserve the prosperity that generations of innovation have built.

As you think about Seattle’s next act, let me offer a catchphrase: Don’t be Cleveland.

Before anyone from Northeast Ohio takes me to task again, let me quickly clarify: Don’t be the Cleveland of the last half of the 20th century. Today’s Cleveland is a story Seattle should study.

I’m far from the only one worried about Seattle. City Hall, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, and the newly formed Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound are all sounding alarms about the region’s economic future.

An independent 127-page City of Seattle-commissioned economic assessment — Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy — takes issue with the Cleveland comparison I penned for GeekWire earlier this year. The report says claims that Seattle could become the “next Cleveland” are “likely hyperbolic,” while acknowledging that “Seattle has real economic challenges.”

Hyperbolic is far from the worst thing I’ve been called.

Despite a reluctance to fully embrace Cleveland as a cautionary tale, the city’s report provides more to agree with than disagree with. And kudos to the city for taking an honest look at the economy, including criticism of the mayor’s signature policies.

Preparing for Seattle’s Next Act

Over the past decade, Seattle delivered more broad-based prosperity than almost any U.S. region, according to the Seawall report. Wages rose across the income spectrum, with the biggest gains at the bottom. Even after adjusting for living costs, workers at the 25th percentile earned roughly 15% more than their counterparts in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.

That’s a remarkable record.

It also makes Seattle’s current economic anxiety harder to dismiss — and its prosperity worth protecting. If Seattle’s performance disappoints, where exactly would you rather be? Growth brings problems, especially when poorly managed. But the alternative is worse.

We saw the aftermath firsthand when we visited Cleveland earlier this year. Its story is a reminder that prosperity isn’t permanent — and rebuilding an economy after decades of decline is a lot harder than keeping one healthy.

Much like Seattle today, Cleveland 75 years ago was a very successful city riding decades of strong economic and population growth, and home to some of that era’s Big Tech giants. The Cleveland Browns even dominated the 1950s NFL.

But Cleveland’s prosperity unraveled quickly. 

The world changed. The Rust Belt started to rust. Employers closed down. 

Cleveland’s population dropped 59% from its 1950 peak to 2020 — from 914,808 to 372,624 residents.

It went from one of the nation’s richest cities to one of the poorest. Seahawks fans take note: the Browns have never been to the Super Bowl.

When we visited Cleveland earlier this year, we asked everyone from the mayor to real estate developers to arts leaders what they wish they’d done differently and sought their advice for Seattle. 

We learned a lot from a city hungry, united and focused on building prosperity for its residents.

Seattle rode the software boom to remarkable prosperity. Can it do the same in the AI era?

The warning signs are hard to ignore.

Amazon and Microsoft have cut more than 10,000 jobs across the Seattle metro area since 2023. Downtown office vacancy remains among the highest in the country. And the center of gravity for the AI boom is in the Bay Area, raising questions about Seattle’s ability to capture the next wave of growth.

The city’s economic report puts the challenge bluntly: “The version of the tech sector that drove the last wave of economic growth will not drive the next one.”

The report warns that Seattle’s next generation of startups may not be ready to replace the growth engines of the past. The risk isn’t just layoffs or empty office towers. It’s the company never founded, the midsize business squeezed by rising costs, or the engineer who leaves to build a startup somewhere else.

So how does Seattle prepare for its next economic chapter?

A Grand Unified Theory of Urban Success: Attract People

At its simplest, a city’s job is to attract people — and give them reasons to stay.

Population isn’t a perfect measure of prosperity, but it’s a useful proxy for a city’s appeal. People come for opportunity. They stay when the opportunities and quality of life are worth it. Growth brings challenges, but those are preferable to the alternative.

As Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told us, “I envy problems around growth.”

Seattle’s population has grown nearly 40% since 2000. 

But that growth is slowing as our economic engine sputters.

The Boeing Bust of the 1970s, when Seattle’s population fell 7% and unemployment hit 17%, is a reminder that what goes up can come down.

Today, cities compete globally for talent, entrepreneurs and employers. That competition will only intensify as populations age and immigration restrictions tighten.

The most talented workers and entrepreneurs can go where they see the greatest opportunity — and where they feel wanted.

Consider what Seattle’s last century might have looked like without three people: Bill Boeing, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

Boeing helped turn Seattle into an aerospace powerhouse. Gates chose to move Microsoft from Albuquerque to the Seattle area to usher in the software boom. Bezos and his then-wife, MacKenzie, famously drove their Chevy Blazer from Texas to Seattle to start Amazon.

Each helped shape the region’s economic future. We can’t predict who the next generation of business builders will be. But does Seattle have the same pull today? Or are the people we need choosing Austin, Miami, San Francisco or somewhere else?

Attracting newcomers matters. So does keeping the people who are already here. Do the economic opportunities still justify the cost of living? Is Seattle still a place where people want to live, work and play?

Residents have plenty of reasons to question the deal: public safety, housing costs, homelessness, schools, government services and taxes. Do the positives still outweigh the negatives?

Decades of growth brought extraordinary people and companies to Seattle. Our best chance of building the next era of prosperity is to keep them here — and give them room to build what comes next.

Yet we risk losing people and businesses we can’t easily replace: talented workers, entrepreneurs, executives, inventors, technologists, engineering teams and global headquarters.

As Seattle’s mayor waves goodbye to departing business leaders, the city’s own Seawall report offers a blunt warning: “Headquarters and top-tier tech jobs are very hard to replace.”

The report makes the broader case for growth, too. Losing tech jobs and companies won’t make Seattle more equitable, it warns. “If they leave, Seattle won’t become more equal, it will just become poorer.”

There’s a practical reason for that. Seattle’s fiscal model depends on a growing economy. 

More residents and businesses generate property and sales tax revenue without requiring higher tax rates on those already here. As the report puts it, “it is easier to distribute the benefits of a growing pie than a fixed one.”

That’s another way of saying that when government spending outpaces population growth, a stagnant economy leaves fewer options for paying the bills — a challenge we’ll revisit in the next post.

Thanks to Cleveland for reminding us prosperity is fragile, decline is real, and recovery can take generations. 

Seattle’s next era of prosperity is ours to build — or squander.

In the next post, we’ll look at what Seattle needs to do to get the fundamentals right to ensure the city is a great place to live, work and play.

Aviation startup Reliable Robotics is opening a new engineering hub in the Seattle area, establishing a radar research and development center in Bothell.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced Tuesday that it has raised $115 million, pushing its valuation above $1 billion. The funding will help expand its aircraft fleet, production facilities and engineering team as it works toward federal certification of its autonomous flight technology.

Reliable’s new office in the Bothell Highlands north of Seattle will open with about 25 employees and serve as its Radar Center of Excellence, a facility for developing and testing systems designed to help aircraft detect and avoid other aircraft. The company plans to grow the team and is heavily recruiting in the region, including roles across radar, embedded software, flight controls, guidance and navigation, simulation and systems engineering.

The expansion adds another player to the Seattle area’s growing mix of aerospace, robotics and autonomous systems companies.

Last month, GeekWire reported that San Diego-based Shield AI selected Des Moines, Wash., as the production and engineering hub for its X-BAT, an AI-piloted aircraft designed to take off and land vertically. The heavily-funded company is planning a 420,000-square-foot manufacturing and engineering facility and says it expects to employ about 4,000 people in the region by the early 2030s.

Reliable is developing systems that can automate aircraft operations, including engine startup, taxiing, takeoff and landing. Its longer-term ambitions include enabling aircraft to fly without a pilot aboard, with remote operators overseeing flights from the ground. The company is working toward certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Founded by former SpaceX engineers in 2017, Reliable has spent nearly a decade developing technology designed to work with existing aircraft rather than requiring entirely new planes. Its initial system is intended to keep a pilot in the cockpit while automating key flight operations, with more advanced levels of autonomy planned over time.

The 250-person company’s latest financing, including $90 million led by Nimble Partners and a $25 million term loan from Silicon Valley Bank, brings total funding to $380 million.

The company’s new Bothell lab will bring together engineers to design, build and test radar systems, including its active electronically scanned array air-to-air radar.

The technology is intended to support detect-and-avoid capabilities that would help autonomous aircraft safely operate in the national airspace alongside conventional planes.

“Seattle represents the past, present and future of aviation. For decades, engineers here have developed aircraft and systems that change how the world connects,” Chris Schulenberg, Reliable’s vice president of programs, said in the company’s announcement. “By expanding into the Pacific Northwest, Reliable is uniting the tech talent in Silicon Valley with the aviation expertise of Seattle.”

The Bothell office — located at 21222 30th Drive SE — will be led by Schulenberg and Marc Pos, a senior technical fellow focused on radar who previously spent more than two decades at Honeywell.

“Radar development is a hands-on process,” Pos said in a statement. “By bringing a team together in a centralized lab and engineering environment, with all of the resources we need at our fingertips, we can move from design through development and testing with the rigor, speed and precision unique to Reliable.”

Reliable also plans to expand its engineering operations in San Diego, where it will focus on aviation autonomy for military applications.

The two offices bring the company’s footprint to five locations, joining its headquarters and aircraft hangars in California and the operating hub of its subsidiary airline, Reliable Airlines, in Albuquerque, N.M.