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.

— 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

— 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

Seattle-based TriMagnetix has landed new funding and commitments totaling $1 million to continue developing a semiconductor chip that, according to initial lab testing, consumes 800 times less energy than a traditional chip to process the same amount of data.

The startup uses nanomagnetic technology that requires only electrical pulses rather than the constant power stream traditional chips need, dramatically reducing electricity consumption and heat generation. The design also makes the chip resistant to radiation, and it’s built to integrate with existing computing infrastructure.

The startup has made additional progress beyond the new funding:

• TriMagnetix is partnering with WaveWorks Technologies on its first paid pilot.
• It has joined the Plug and Play Semiconductor Accelerator.
• It was recently accepted into the Nvidia Inception program, which offers support including access to tech experts, introductions to Nvidia’s corporate clients and marketing.

Earthbound data centers struggling to curb energy use and heat output are seeking more sustainable chips, but the startup is particularly interested in satellite applications.

The Pacific Northwest, home to companies including Starcloud and SpaceX, is the “satellite capital of the world,” said Lucas Hahn, co-founder, president and chief strategic officer of TriMagnetix.

Satellite companies have told him they want semiconductors that are energy efficient and resistant to the radiation experienced in space, Hahn said. That makes TriMagnetix’s devices “a no-brainer.”

In addition to Hahn, the startup’s other employee is Madison Hanberry, who launched the TriMagnetix in 2023. Hanberry, who has served as chief of research and development, is transitioning to CEO. His sister, Aspen White, is also a co-founder.

The chips made so far by TriMagnetix are not the high-performance graphics processing units, or GPUs, used for applications such as AI and 3D animation. Nor are they simpler central processing units, or CPUs.

“It’s replacing specific compute in certain devices at a very low level,” Hahn said. “So not quite CPU yet, but it is at the core level doing similar things.”

TriMagnetix has contracted with the Washington Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Washington to use the site’s fabrication equipment. It aims to have a product available for commercial sales within the next year.

The round was led by Acequia Capital with participation from Athenaeum Ventures. Actuate Ventures has also committed to the round. The combined total from the three firms is $1 million. Last year, the startup received a $200,000 investment from climate venture fund SNØCAP.

Yoodli, the Seattle startup that offers AI to help people practice speeches, sales pitches and job interviews, is expanding to pursue a larger vision: AI that can teach people almost any skill they need on the job, and track whether they’re improving.

The company is recasting itself as the “AI platform for human skills” with the launch of new tools that create courses, teach people to use AI and software, answer employees’ questions, coach them during calls and meetings, and show managers whether the training is paying off.

One of the new tools takes the AI personas that companies build for practice sessions and puts them to work elsewhere. Loaded with a company’s own material, they can answer questions on an intranet, a partner site or a live call, handing off to humans when needed.

The move pushes Yoodli beyond practice sessions and into the much larger business of corporate training, where Workday and Microsoft’s LinkedIn are among the larger companies offering AI tools for training and coaching employees.

It also expands the potential market for the company, which counts Google, Snowflake and Databricks among its customers and has raised nearly $60 million from investors including WestBridge Capital, Neotribe, Madrona and AI House.

Varun Puri, Yoodli’s co-founder and CEO, said the goal is to use AI to help people get better at their jobs, at a time when the technology is more often raising concerns and questions about the future of work.

“This is all about upskilling humans and believing in the human potential,” Puri said in an interview this week at the company’s new headquarters on Seattle’s Pier 70. “How do we help humans be the best versions of themselves and get measurably better?”

Esha Joshi, Yoodli’s co-founder and chief customer officer, said the company is taking its cues from what businesses were already starting to do: using Yoodli to teach employees new skills, beyond the situational AI “roleplays” that have fueled the company’s growth.

Many of Yoodli’s first business customers were tech companies, but the list has since expanded to include the likes of governments, pharmaceutical companies and banks.

“There’s a whole world of people that need to develop their skills,” Joshi said.

How Yoodli got here: GeekWire has followed the company almost from the start. Our first story ran five years ago today, when the startup had just spun out of what was then known as the AI2 Incubator, with an AI tool to help people improve their public speaking.

Puri had run special projects for Google co-founder Sergey Brin and worked at X, the research arm of Google parent Alphabet. Joshi spent more than four years at Apple as a software engineer and product manager, and was Yoodli’s original chief technology officer.

With its transition to AI roleplays about two years ago, Yoodli shifted to selling primarily to companies and other organizations. Google, Snowflake and Databricks use it to train sales teams, Puri said. The government of El Salvador uses it to train doctors on talking with patients, and the University of Washington uses it to prepare students for job interviews, he said.

The company raised $13.7 million in May 2025 and another $40 million in December, in a round led by WestBridge Capital that valued it at more than $300 million.

Yoodli reported 900% revenue growth when it announced the December round. Puri declined to disclose current revenue or say whether the company is profitable, but said it isn’t actively raising money. “It’s been a very strong year,” he said.

The startup will face plenty of competition as it expands into the broader market. Tech giants Salesforce and Microsoft, for example, both offer AI roleplay coaching as part of their larger platforms.

Workday last year acquired Sana, an AI startup with a corporate learning platform. Highspot, the Seattle company that merged with rival Seismic in August, offers an AI roleplay tool, and startups including Hyperbound and Second Nature focus on sales roleplay.

Yoodli also integrates with some of them, including Workday and Highspot.

Asked what keeps Yoodli from becoming a feature in a larger company’s product, Puri cited the depth of its software, and pointed out that Google, for example, uses Yoodli to train its own teams on Gemini.

The company today: Yoodli has grown to about 100 employees, up from 25 in May 2025. Recent executive hires include:

• Andy Larson, chief financial officer, previously CFO of Remitly in the fintech company’s early years.
• Kartik Murthy, vice president of product, previously head of product at cybersecurity company Coalition, and a key figure in the creation of the new tools.
• Rachel Cougan, vice president of people, previously an HR leader at Hiya, Logixboard and Textio.

Other executives include Josh Vitello, the chief revenue officer, who joined in April 2025 after more than 15 years at Tableau and Salesforce; and Derek Sessions, the chief technology officer since February 2023, previously an engineering manager at video software company Panopto.

Yoodli’s new offices are on the eastern side of Pier 70, sharing a building with AI House, the incubator and venture capital fund formerly known as the AI2 Incubator. Yoodli began at the incubator when it was across town near the northern shore of Lake Union.

The conference room names reflect the company’s culture. “Speakeasy” was Yoodli’s code name before launch. “PlankoClock” honors a daily ritual: at 3:45, the whole company stops to do planks. “Agnes Potts” is named for one of Yoodli’s earliest AI personas — a “customer” so tough that users wanted T-shirts saying they’d booked a call with her, Puri said.

The new tools: Yoodli describes the expanded platform as five products.

• Roleplays: The practice sessions the company is known for, in which an employee rehearses a sales call or other conversation with AI personas. They now teach as well, with an AI tutor that can explain a topic, pull up slides and take questions.
• Personas: AI experts that companies build for practice sessions can now also answer questions on an intranet, a partner site or a live call. Yoodli has an AI version of Puri that job candidates can talk with before they interview with the real CEO.
• Create: Builds a full training program from a single written request, in minutes instead of weeks, Yoodli says. In a demo, Puri typed a request for a course on Google’s Gemini and got back a multi-step training program.
• Coach: A personal coach that works inside apps such as Zoom, Slack and Teams, and learns each employee’s strengths and weak spots. Puri compared it to a friend “kicking you under the table” in a meeting.
• Measure: Reports for employees and managers on whether skills are improving, not just whether the training was completed. For sales teams, Puri said, that can mean tying training to deals closed.

Yoodli’s website lists individual plans at $8 and $20 a month, billed annually, with custom pricing for businesses depending on team size and use case.

When GeekWire visited this week, employees took a quick break from preparing for the new platform launch to gather for an impromptu team photo. They goofed around under a Yoodli sign with the type of energy you’d see at a much smaller startup.

As they headed back to their desks, I mentioned that we’d all remember this moment when the company has its IPO in 10 years. They laughed and groaned at the suggestion that it would take that long.

Editor’s note: Yoodli is a client of GeekWire’s GeekWork recruiting business.

A new hub for women entrepreneurs is taking shape in Seattle and will host its official launch party tonight. Less than 10 weeks after opening, The SWELL has 53 members and quickly evolving programming that includes an accelerator, its own consulting startup and weekly “hot seats” where founders hash out challenges.

“What we’ve created is a community that happens to have a co-working space,” said founder Sally Revell. “I am not in the business of co-working. I’m in the business of building a women’s founder community, and we have a space that we convene in.”

Revell decided to launch The SWELL after 25 years in marketing leadership roles for tech companies including Google, Amazon Web Services, Philips and Intuit. Her parents’ deaths in 2024 were a “catalyst for change,” she said, prompting her to strike out as an independent consultant. But she still craved an in-person professional community.

The SWELL, an acronym for “Seattle women entrepreneurs leading and lifting,” is based at SURF Incubator, a longtime co-working and events venue in downtown Seattle.

Revell said the organization is built on three pillars:

• A shared physical workspace
• A structure that supports bootstrapping rather than pressuring founders to seek venture capital
• Programming supportive of women, including daytime sessions in a central location that leave evenings free for childcare, eldercare, pets and other obligations, as well as integrated self-care offerings such as midday meditation breaks

A membership costs $200 a month and includes access to the co-working space Monday through Friday. The hub is currently capped at 75 members, and Revell is exploring a virtual program.

A survey of participants found that 40% resigned from corporate roles to launch their own ventures and 30% were laid off. An overwhelming majority have worked for big companies, and the cohort has a median of 17 years of work experience.

About 60% said they never want to return to corporate roles, and all are using AI in their business.

“There’s this movement of middle-aged women [feeling] like, ‘I’m empowered. I can choose to do something different,'” Revell said. “And when they get together, then the magic starts to happen.”

The SWELL is part of a broader push toward women-led companies. Women launched 44% of new businesses last year, according to Gusto, a payroll and HR platform. A key reason mid-career women are leaving corporate roles for entrepreneurship is that the jobs “did not line up with their needs, values, or realities,” as they struggled to balance work and caregiving, said researchers from the Rutgers Center for Women in Business.

Seattle has long been the birthplace of ventures supporting women founders and leaders. The Riveter, a pioneering, investor-backed co-working space for women, launched in 2017 but shuttered its physical locations in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It pivoted to an online community with expert webinars, mentoring and retreats.

Other related efforts include Female Founders Alliance, which has grown into a national organization operated by its own investment fund, Graham & Walker; TheWMarketplace, an e-commerce platform promoting women’s businesses; and Intentionalist, a site highlighting small businesses with diverse owners.

Revell is working with other women-focused efforts in the city, including the University of Washington’s Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program. The SWELL recently announced a partnership with Formidable Media, a Seattle-based media and membership organization that helps women nationwide promote their businesses. And Nicole Doyle, who leads the Founder Institute’s Pacific Northwest cohort, created a custom accelerator for SWELL members that kicks off in January.

AI House brought investors from as far as Boston, New York, Colorado and the Bay Area to Seattle this week for something the city’s startup scene has rarely tried: a demo day meant to help bring outside money to local founders.

Twenty-five early-stage startups pitched at the event, held Wednesday at the startup incubator and venture capital fund’s offices on Pier 70. Many of them weren’t part of AI House’s own portfolio, and that was by design, said Yifan Zhang, an AI House managing director, who came up with the idea for the event.

“We all complained about not having enough capital here, but no one was doing anything about it,” Zhang said. So AI House tapped its own connections to investors in other parts of the country, she said, and “people flew in from all over for this.”

Investors in attendance included Mike Vernal, a partner at San Francisco-based Conviction; Emily Melton, founder and managing partner of Threshold Ventures; and Rob Go, co-founder of Boston-based NextView Ventures. Many well-known Seattle-based venture capitalists also attended the event.

Zhang said she wanted the lineup to show multiple sides of Seattle: startups built around real problems and revenue, and technologists doing “crazy ambitious things.”

Theo Ellis, CEO of Seattle mortgage-tech startup Friday Harbor, called it “Seattle’s answer to YC Demo Day,” a reference to Y Combinator’s showcase in the Bay Area.

Many of the city’s startups are “not necessarily in the flashiest spaces,” he said, but they have real customers and are growing fast. For his part, Ellis said, mortgage lending technology is “not exactly nuclear-powered robots landing on Jupiter, but it’s an enormous market with a lot of businesses willing to pay for it.”

Ellis told the crowd during his pitch that Friday Harbor underwrote 0.6% of all U.S. residential mortgage applications in August, and that the company is starting to raise its Series A round.

Many of the companies that pitched have been covered by GeekWire. In addition to Friday Harbor, they included Optimly, Vantari, Jinn Labs, GateIn, Casium, Orbital Robotics, Viata, Ridge AI, Caddi, Lev, Aria (formerly Alpyne Labs) and Synthesize Bio.

Others were new to us, at least in their current incarnations:

• Moria, co-founded by Chris Mutzel and Jimmy Voorhis, uses AI to produce technical studies for mining companies. Voorhis said one customer expanded a $100,000 contract to $900,000 in two months.
• Hubble, a Y Combinator Summer 2026 company co-founded by CEO Prabha Dublish and CTO Aaron Leon, is building an API to retrieve patients’ medical records.
• Atlas, co-founded by CEO Chandra Bhagavatula, a former Ai2 researcher, and Martín Ramírez, is developing AI to run much of a company’s day-to-day operations.
• Reflection Robotics, led by co-founder and CEO Arsalan Mousavian, a former Nvidia robotics research manager, is building AI models that let factory robots learn precise tasks from a single demonstration.
• Eidol, an AI House portfolio company based in Los Angeles, makes software that listens to a live singer and keeps pre-recorded vocal tracks in sync with the performance. Founder and CEO Clayton Janes pitched alongside the company’s chief artist officer, Letters to Cleo singer Kay Hanley.
• Comment.io, co-founded by CEO Jon Gordner, a former Microsoft and Textio product leader, and CTO Max Winderbaum, a longtime Textio engineering leader, is building a tool for people to review and approve work produced by AI agents.
• Axel, led by founder and CEO Stephen Grabowski, is an AI travel agent that says it finds flight and hotel deals below public prices. Grabowski said it has about $30 million in annualized travel bookings.
• Suede, founded by Danielle Dantche, a former merchandising director at Seattle retailer Pipe and Row, automates product listings and purchase orders for independent boutiques. Dantche said it has processed $9.9 million in inventory over the past 90 days.
• Ergoly, co-founded by AJ Gleser and Dan Moore, helps small service firms train and deploy AI workers for each of their clients.
• Finch, founded by former Brightflow AI CEO Jeffrey Priebe, is building AI to plan and run in-person events that companies use to meet potential customers.

Closing the event, Jacob Colker, AI House co-founder and managing director, made his pitch to the out-of-town investors, building on the themes in his recent GeekWire guest column and a rallying cry he delivered during Seattle Tech Week in July.

The region is full of “space, science, tech, bio, health, startup builders,” he said, with far more good ideas than local investors can fund. “The reality is there’s just not enough capital in the Pacific Northwest.” That’s where the visitors come in, he said, predicting that they’ll find “great investment opportunities and great deals.”

Seattle, Colker said, “is worth your time, your investment, your focus, your energy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plug and Play Seattle selected 11 startups for the fourth batch of its accelerator program, bringing together a group of founders building everything from space-servicing robotic arms and data-center optical links to opioid-countering antibody therapeutics.

The 12-week program kicks off today and runs through mid-December. Ten of the participating startups are based in Seattle, joined by Tokyo-based wireless power developer Aeterlink, which is participating in an exploratory international track to support its expansion into the U.S. and Pacific Northwest.

Programming will mix virtual sessions with in-person work across Plug and Play Seattle’s regional hubs at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs and the SNBL Global Gateway in Everett, Wash. The cohort will present their progress to investors and corporate partners at a Dec. 3 expo at the Boeing Future of Flight in Mukilteo.

“Seattle has the talent and research depth to build companies that shape entire industries,” said Jack Callaghan, director of Plug and Play Seattle, in a statement. “This cohort reflects that potential, from advancing drug discovery to building the infrastructure behind AI.”

Here are the 11 startups in Batch 4:

• Aeterlink (Tokyo): Develops wireless power systems that deliver electricity to devices without physical cables, targeting applications in industrial automation, buildings, and medical devices.
• Athanor AI (Seattle): Builds Kairos, a verification platform using mathematical proofs to validate AI-generated chip-design code.
• Coda AI (Seattle): Creates an AI-native vehicle diagnostics platform combining language models with deterministic computation to help automakers analyze vehicle data across cloud and onboard systems.
• CounterX Therapeutics (Seattle): Develops antibody therapeutics and vaccines designed to blunt the effects of opioids and help prevent accidental overdose in high-risk patients.
• DiffBio (Seattle): Bridges computational protein design with wet-lab testing via gene synthesis, cloning, and automated screening to help researchers evaluate designed protein functions.
• Mindmorphic (Seattle): Builds foundation models for brain signals that function across individuals, reducing the need for person-specific retraining in neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
• Orbital Robotics (Seattle): Builds AI-powered robotic arms for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing using vision-based control to capture objects without specialized docking hardware.
• Q-Immune (Seattle): Analyzes protein interactions in live cells to predict treatment toxicity and guide the creation of safer cell therapies.
• Raydx (Seattle): Develops silicon-photonics interconnects using optical links to replace copper connections, speeding up AI inference in data centers.
• Talus Bio (Seattle): Measures compound effects on hundreds of gene-regulating proteins inside live human cells to accelerate drug discovery for hard-to-drug targets.
• Thoron (Seattle): Manufactures U.S.-made enterprise drones paired with Commander, an AI-powered data-processing software platform.

Silicon Valley-based Plug and Play launched its Seattle presence in March 2025.

In addition to startup accelerators, Plug and Play runs corporate innovation programs and has an in-house venture capital fund that has backed companies such as including Dropbox, Guardant Health, Honey, Lending Club, N26, PayPal, and Rappi. 

As public concern grows about the environmental impact of AI data centers, the University of Washington is launching a startup incubator to support climate tech innovations addressing those challenges.

UW CoMotion Labs is partnering with Microsoft and the investment network E8 to create a four-month program targeting technologies in areas including backup energy storage, grid improvements, efficient data center cooling, electronics waste reduction and low-carbon building materials.

“This is a really important initiative,” said Karin Kidder, executive director of E8. “The other really great part about this is it’s elevating the Pacific Northwest. There’s so much good work happening here.”

CoMotion has previously run two climate tech incubator cohorts, the second of which wrapped up Tuesday with a public demo event. The new effort is the first to focus on a specific industry within the climate space. Organizers are seeking early-stage applicants with technologies ready to commercialize, deploy as pilot projects or scale.

“Meeting growing demand for digital infrastructure requires continued innovation across energy, water, materials, and cooling,” said Brandon Middaugh, Microsoft’s general manager for sustainable markets, in a statement.

E8, which has invested $77 million in climate startups over two decades, will provide an investor-in-residence to advise founders and a representative on the startup selection committee. Microsoft will share technical and industry expertise and other support. Both organizations are providing funding for the effort, but the UW did not say how much.

In addition, the climate tech investment group Elemental Impact previously launched a Data Center Innovation Initiative to similarly address these challenges and will offer advisory support for the Seattle-based program.

The kickoff for the CoMotion Labs initiative coincides with a poll released Wednesday finding that 53% of Americans are “extremely or very concerned” about the environmental impacts of AI, up from 41% a year ago.

The survey, from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, found that 80% of adults are concerned about data center effects on electric bills, power outages or water supply. The computing facilities are a central issue in the upcoming elections.

When it comes to technologies to lessen the burden of data centers, “these solutions are needed today,” Kidder said. “So I’m hopeful that while some of these solutions may be a couple years out, some may be relevant for today.”

Sarah O’Sell, manager of CoMotion Labs’ climate tech incubators, said one strategy will be connecting startups with partners and customers to speed deployment of new technologies.

“We recognize that climate solutions aren’t necessarily always looking for venture investment,” she said. “They might be looking for a strategic partner or customers or grant funding. There’s all kinds of ways to scale these businesses.”

The 2027 Data Center Innovation Cohort will be based at the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub downtown.

An information session is set for Oct. 15, and applications are due Nov. 15. The cohort begins in February.