Highspot’s branding is still everywhere inside its longtime headquarters at World Trade Center East, overlooking the Seattle waterfront. But outside the corner office that once belonged to the sales software company’s co-founder and CEO, “Seismic” is scribbled on the whiteboard.

That’s how fresh the merger is. Two weeks after San Diego-based Seismic took over its Seattle-based rival, Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff is in town this week for the first board meeting since the combination was completed, and the inaugural gathering of the combined company’s senior leadership team.

Highspot and Seismic sell sales enablement software: systems that manage the pitch decks, case studies and training materials salespeople use, and track which ones help close deals.

Founded in 2011 by Robert Wahbe and two former Microsoft colleagues, Highspot raised $650 million and held the top spot on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s privately held tech companies, prior to the merger. Wahbe, its CEO until the deal closed, is now on Seismic’s board.

Tarkoff, a lawyer by training who spent much of his career in corporate development and M&A, became Seismic’s CEO in October 2025, succeeding co-founder Doug Winter. He had previously spent seven years running Oracle’s customer experience business.

The Highspot deal was announced in February, four months into his tenure.

Tarkoff addressed a wide range of questions from GeekWire in an interview Monday afternoon in Wahbe’s former office, which now serves as an ad hoc meeting room.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

A $600 million company: Tarkoff disclosed the combined company’s annual recurring revenue for the first time, putting it at about $600 million, with about $200 million of that coming from Highspot.

That makes the combined business three times the size Highspot was on its own and 50% bigger than Seismic. Tarkoff said the larger size will be an adjustment for people across both companies as they come together. “We’re getting closer to being a billion dollar company,” he said.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, and Tarkoff declined to say whether the transaction put Highspot above or below the $3.5 billion valuation it reached in 2022.

Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona, which led Highspot’s Series A in 2014, called it a “multi-billion-dollar merger” in a post after the deal closed. Porter, who serves as a board observer at Seismic following the combination, wrote that Madrona hopes to help build the combined company into “a truly iconic AI software company, through a potential IPO and beyond.”

Permira, the private equity firm that has backed Seismic since 2020, remains the controlling shareholder of the combined company.

Impact on jobs: Seismic said when the deal closed that Highspot had more than 700 employees and that the combined company would have about 1,700 total. Tarkoff said in a statement at the time that the companies were “carefully evaluating our organizations to identify areas of overlap,” and that “any decisions will be communicated directly and proactively to employees.”

Since then, word of initial job cuts has started to emerge on LinkedIn and other online forums, but the company has not provided specifics or disclosed any numbers.

Asked for an update on job reductions this week, Tarkoff said, “We did our best to try to find roles for everybody that we could, but there’s always some level of overlap where you don’t need two people doing a task that requires one.”

Tarkoff did not provide numbers or address the question of whether more job cuts are coming. He said the company feels “really good about where we are from a go-forward staff perspective,” while adding: “We will continue to push performance and push growth and acceleration.”

Seismic’s future in Seattle: Tarkoff said Seismic will keep Highspot’s Seattle offices at World Trade Center East, where the company has a long-term lease. He called Seattle “one of the top centers of excellence for tech talent,” citing the ability to recruit from Amazon, Microsoft and others.

There will be no designated Seattle site leader, he said, describing the office as one of the company’s major centers rather than a headquarters.

However, several senior leaders of the combined company are based in Seattle, including Kurt Berglund, who led engineering at Highspot and is now Seismic’s senior vice president of AI.

Others include chief human resources officer Kimberly Schultz, who joined Seismic in June after 11 years at Amazon, where she led the team responsible for integrating acquisitions and divestitures, and Lucas Welch, VP of brand and communications, who spent nearly eight years at Highspot.

Tarkoff said a number of the company’s top engineers are based in Seattle as well.

Seismic’s other major locations include San Diego, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, B.C., London and Hyderabad, India, where Tarkoff said the company has more than doubled its presence. Gurpreet Singh Pall, who was Highspot India’s chief operating officer, now leads Seismic’s India operations.

Product plans: The current Highspot and Seismic platforms both will continue to be sold and supported for the time being, Tarkoff said. He declined to set a timetable for eventually consolidating them, saying customers will move to a new platform when one is ready.

Now that the companies are able to work directly together, he said they’ve come to see that the two products are closer than he understood before the deal closed. Seismic has focused on complex enterprise workflows and regulated industries, financial services in particular, while Highspot built for a broader market of upper mid-market and lower enterprise customers.

With two teams no longer building the same things, he said, engineering can move to new work — more AI agents, additional content governance features, and deeper industry-specific workflows such as archiving and records retention.

Rivals are making the opposite case. Ali Akhtar, CEO of Letter AI, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that mergers in the category turn companies inward for quarters or years, predicting “stalled innovation, layoffs, and distractions from delivering customer value,” and a period of reduced support for customers on legacy platforms. Akhtar is offering to buy out their contracts.

Pricing: Tarkoff said seat-based subscriptions aren’t going away, because enterprises want predictable costs. He said he’s skeptical of the usage-based pricing some AI vendors have adopted, pointing to high-profile examples of companies blowing past their budgets.

“Token-maxing is not really a good model long term, because it’s just going to force enterprises to use less,” he said.

He said Seismic is working toward pricing tied to outcomes rather than usage.

The Salesforce question: A week after the Seismic-Highspot merger closed, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, making Claude the default model across Slack and parts of Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.

Salesforce is both a channel and a rival for Seismic. Seismic’s software sells through the Salesforce AppExchange, and its Aura AI runs inside Agentforce, Salesforce’s agent platform. At the same time, Salesforce’s Sales Cloud includes its own sales enablement tools. And Agentforce agents increasingly do work that enablement platforms have owned.

Asked whether the partnership makes Salesforce a tougher competitor, Tarkoff said no.

As sellers start working inside Claude rather than inside individual applications, he said, the assistant will call each company separately — Salesforce for customer records, Seismic for approved content and sales materials. That makes Seismic a peer of Salesforce inside Claude, rather than an add-on inside Salesforce’s own product.

“It actually puts us more on an even playing field with Salesforce,” he said.

But Salesforce is considerably further along. Claudeforce launched with a Salesforce plugin carrying 37 prebuilt sales skills, in pilot now and due in open beta this month.

Much of the early analysis of the Salesforce-Anthropic partnership saw it as evidence that enterprise AI is consolidating around a few deep platform alliances rather than opening up.

Seismic’s next fiscal year begins Feb. 1. Tarkoff said he expects to spend much of the intervening months on the road with customers and employees. Seismic plans to give the first detailed look at its new product roadmap at its Shift conference, Oct. 12-15 in Carlsbad, Calif.

Highspot’s merger with Seismic was completed Tuesday morning, ending the Seattle-based sales software company’s run as an independent business and folding one of the region’s biggest enterprise technology players into a San Diego-based rival.

The combined company is now operating under the Seismic name, led by Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff. Highspot co-founder and former CEO Robert Wahbe is expected to join Seismic’s board of directors, as announced in February. Permira, the private equity firm that has backed Seismic since 2020, remains the controlling shareholder.

The Highspot name isn’t disappearing entirely. Its product is now branded “Highspot by Seismic.”

Tuesday’s announcement named Seattle as one of the R&D locations — along with San Diego, Boston, Vancouver, Toronto, London and Hyderabad and other sites — where the combined company’s 700-plus product, engineering, data science and AI employees are based.

Seismic will keep Highspot’s Seattle and Vancouver offices, adding to its global footprint, Tarkoff said in a statement responding to GeekWire’s questions.

The combined company has about 1,700 employees globally. Highspot’s total headcount was more than 700 at the time of the deal closing, according to Seismic. The company didn’t say how many of those employees are in Seattle.

“As with any merger of this scale, Seismic and Highspot are carefully evaluating our organizations to identify areas of overlap and integrate our company for near and long-term growth,” Tarkoff said. “Any decisions will be communicated directly and proactively to employees.”

Seismic says it has 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users, and plans to invest more than $100 million a year in research and development.

Financial terms of the deal, originally announced in February, were not disclosed. Highspot had raised $650 million since launching in 2011. Its last publicly disclosed valuation was $3.5 billion, set in 2022 when it raised $248 million in a round led by B Capital Group and D1 Capital Partners.

Other backers included Madrona, ICONIQ Growth, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Tiger Global Management.

Highspot held the No. 1 spot on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top privately held tech companies in the Pacific Northwest, until the merger was announced in February. Companies come off the list after mergers and acquisitions that fold them into other entities. Everett-based fusion energy company Helion Energy took over at No. 1 in the March update.

Post updated with comment from Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff on the Seattle offices and workforce.

Amazon’s Disaster Relief team responds with emergency supplies to support victims of crises around the world. Recent efforts have provided aid following a hurricane in Jamaica, earthquakes in Venezuela and wildfires in France.

Devastation from wildfires on the eastern side of Washington hit especially close to home — for Amazon and number of companies in the state.

The Seattle-based tech giant announced this week that it is donating a range of supplies to assist nearly 65,000 people who have been evacuated from their homes in the Spokane area, as crews battle three major wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses.

“Washington is home to Amazon and to tens of thousands of our employees. As the situation evolves, we remain committed to supporting our employees and the wider community affected by the Spokane wildfires,” Abe Diaz, Amazon’s head of Disaster Relief, said in a statement.

Through its work with the American Red Cross, Save the Children, and local nonprofits in Spokane, Amazon is helping to donate and deliver more than 26,000 emergency supplies, including air purifiers, masks, diapers, and hygiene kits for displaced families. Heavy-duty gloves, boots, and hydration packets for firefighters are also arriving this week, and a second wave of donated supplies will follow.

Amazon relies on 12 Disaster Relief hubs across seven countries, and aid for Spokane is coming from a hub that opened in California’s San Bernardino Valley in 2024.

The global network first launched in the U.S. in 2021 and enables the company to respond to natural disasters in just a couple of days or less. The company says that since 2017, it has donated and delivered more than 30 million essential supplies in response to over 200 disasters around the world. 

In a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday, Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon, said the fires created “a living nightmare” in Eastern Washington.

“Every natural disaster is one too many, but the latest one hits especially hard,” she wrote.

Amazon is not alone in providing aid.

Boeing announced that it’s donating $250,000 from its Charitable Trust to assist those impacted by Washington wildfires.

The aerospace company said the funding will support the Innovia Foundation of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho, to help nonprofits, businesses and community organizations provide relief. 

Boeing employs more than 65,000 people in Washington. The company said it will match qualifying employee contributions made to charitable gift match programs in support of relief efforts.

F5 is assisting its employees and others in the broader Spokane community impacted by the fires, the company told GeekWire Wednesday.

The Seattle-based networking and security giant has a significant presence in Spokane Valley.

“The safety and well-being of our team members are our highest priorities during this challenging time of rapid evacuations and profound uncertainty,” an F5 spokesperson said, adding that the company is committed to ensuring employees have the resources they need to recover and rebuild.

To assist those directly affected, F5 said it is actively mobilizing support through two primary avenues:

• Direct Employee Assistance: Offering immediate aid to impacted employees through the F5er Emergency Relief Fund. Fully sustained by F5, the fund delivers direct financial relief to employees facing hardships, emergency evacuations, and long-term recovery efforts due to natural disasters.
• Community Donation Matching: F5 launched dedicated donation campaigns to nonprofits actively providing on-the-ground relief and matches employee donations and volunteer time — up to $5,000 USD annually per employee. 

Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab is putting its technology to use in the form of a building damage visualizer that uses satellite imagery to show the effects of the Spokane fires.

The lab supports HASTE (High-speed Assessment and Satellite Tracking for Emergencies), an open-source, no-code platform that turns vast amounts of data into actionable insights. Responders can assess destruction faster and more accurately, supporting relief and recovery efforts.

So far in the Spokane area, 16,171 buildings have been analyzed, with 624 buildings (3.9%) identified as damaged. Another 49 (0.30%) could not be analyzed due to smoke, haze, or clouds. Microsoft stresses that the results are considered preliminary and on-the-ground validation will be needed for an accurate understanding of the full impact.

Microsoft also told GeekWire that an employee giving campaign was launched to raise funds for the American Red Cross’s wildfire relief fund and the Innovia Foundation’s Spokane Complex Wildfire Response Fund. “With all employee donations fully matched by Microsoft, we remain committed to assisting those directly affected,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

T-Mobile is providing a range of services to help keep communities, customers, and first responders stay connected in the wake of the disaster. These include:

• Free Wi-Fi, device charging and supplies at its Five Mile Plaza Experience Store at 1910 W. Francis Ave. in Spokane.
• Unlimited talk, text and data to T‑Mobile, Metro by T‑Mobile, USCellular, Assurance Wireless, Mint and Ultra customers in impacted areas who don’t already have it. 
• Activation of T-Satellite with Starlink in impacted areas, enabling compatible devices to send basic text messages and text-to-911 if traditional connectivity is disrupted, while also delivering Wireless Emergency Alerts. 
• Wi‑Fi, device charging support and power packs at the Spokane Convention Center.

The Bellevue-based wireless provider, which is relaying updates online at its Emergency Response Hub, said it is also working to ensure that cell tower sites remain in operation after having restored service at each site. And T-Mobile is coordinating with state and local agencies to assess community needs and identify additional opportunities to support first responders and residents.

Starbucks is providing support through its foundation to the American Red Cross and World Central Kitchen, and the Seattle-based coffee giant said it’s continuing to assess additional opportunities to support recovery efforts in Spokane. 

Customers at Starbucks coffeehouses across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska are invited to join in giving to the Red Cross’s Washington Wildfires 2026 campaign, a spokesperson told GeekWire.

Starbucks partners (employees) who are looking to help during times of need, or year-round, can contribute to the Caring Unites Partners (CUP) Fund, a financial assistance program funded by partners, for partners.

The company is also offering a double match for Starbucks partner donations made to American Red Cross – Disaster Relief; Feeding America – Disaster Response; and World Central Kitchen – Disaster Relief Efforts.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs announced that his office has activated its Disaster Relief Center (DRC) to encourage donations for communities hit by wildfires across Central and Eastern Washington.

The DRC operates as a specialized program under the Office of the Secretary of State’s Combined Fund Drive (CFD). The portal aggregates verified, registered crisis-relief nonprofits so state employees, retirees, and the broader public can quickly connect with vetted organizations providing immediate aid.

“In times of crisis, I know Washingtonians’ first thought is ‘How can I help?'” Hobbs said in a statement. “Anyone looking for a way to support our neighbors in Eastern Washington can feel confident their donations will go directly to organizations doing life-saving work on the ground.”

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown’s office is also encouraging people to take precautions to ensure wildfire relief donations go to reputable charities.

“The destruction in Spokane is heartbreaking, and generous people across our state want to help,” Brown said in a news release Wednesday. “It’s important to give safely to ensure your hard-earned money is helping those in need.”

The city of Spokane is accepting donations through its H.O.M.E. Starts Here Fund, which had attracted $234,000 from more than 1,100 donors by Wednesday.

The AG’s office is providing online tips to guide those giving to non-profits or charities.

Most climate news these days is grim. But at a rooftop happy hour during Pacific Northwest Climate Week, the mood in Seattle was upbeat — and not out of wishful thinking or environmental altruism. The hope was rooted in business fundamentals.

“We actually have all the tools right now to decarbonize,” said Mike Dieterich, an executive with Decarb Advisory. “We just need to focus on how to scale what’s working.”

Beneath the enthusiasm, however, investors and founders were clear about where capital should and shouldn’t flow. While pushing back against a wave of “tourist cash” chasing AI data centers and nuclear startups, attendees argued that profitable climate innovation often sits in essential infrastructure: grid upgrades, EVs, next-generation solar and ag-tech.

Karin Kidder, executive director of E8, a climate-focused angel-investing organization, is buoyed by the commitment from her group’s increasing membership. While decreased federal support and global politics are straining sustainability companies, “on an individual level, people are stepping up,” she said.

The annual climate tech event spanned Seattle, Portland and two Vancouvers — one in Washington, the other in British Columbia — with 313 events and nearly 7,000 participants.

GeekWire pulled attendees at the kickoff happy hour aside to ask about the most overhyped and underappreciated technologies, as well as what made them optimistic about the planet’s climate prospects, and what worried them.

Here’s what we heard.

The data center ‘cash grab’

“Data center solutions are probably overhyped at this point,” said Jonathan Azoff, co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm SNØCAP. “There’s a million of them, and they’re all trying to cash grab the big AI race.”

Azoff and others acknowledged that AI data centers, with their carbon-intensive building materials and huge energy demands, need innovation. But the concern is that some entrepreneurs are rushing into the space with half-baked, undifferentiated ideas that draw outsized dollars.

“They’re solving big problems for hyperscalers, and it’s worth a lot of money to [the tech giants],” said Yi Jean Chow, investment partner with Clean Energy Ventures. “So there are definitely investment opportunities there, but overhyped and high valuations for sure.”

Susan Su, partner at the venture capital firm Toba Capital and founder of the Climate Money podcast and Substack, also cautioned that data centers are stoking interest in costly nuclear fission and fusion energy. Customers and investors “think that nuclear is just going to be the end-all, be-all to power demand, and in reality it’s … taking the most time, costing the most money,” Su said.

That said, Azoff was excited to invest in an even riskier, more controversial form of nuclear — something called muon-catalyzed fusion. If the company, called LazeraH, were to succeed, “I can look back at and say this was my mark on clean energy,” he said.

Promising economics in sustainability

Companies in climate, sustainability and clean energy technologies are succeeding because they’re more affordable and perform better.

“People are choosing climate solutions, climate products, not because of the climate value, but because they offer other value propositions, too,” Chow said.

That includes the economics of electric vehicles, said Duncan Logan, co-founder and CEO of 9Zero, a climate innovation hub with Seattle and San Francisco locations. EVs are a “cheaper, better, faster way to move around” compared to combustion engine vehicles, he said.

Logan contrasted the U.S. with China, which is adopting electric semis, buses and scooters at lower costs. “We are falling so far behind,” he said. “So it’s a competitive thing.”

Don’t underestimate longstanding solutions

Longstanding climate-tech workhorses like solar, ag-tech and green construction are no longer shiny new sectors, but they’re still undergoing innovative breakthroughs.

Su said Chinese solar is becoming more expensive, and there are increasing opportunities for U.S.-made solutions beyond traditional photovoltaic panels. The emerging standard for solar is “silicon perovskite tandems” — a solution that stacks a thin layer of perovskite on a traditional silicon solar cell to capture much more sunlight. That transition, she said, “completely levels and reopens the playing field for new players to come in.”

Logan called out robotic farming devices, such as weed-zapping and rock-moving machines. Dieterich pointed to the use of AI to efficiently design sustainable buildings.

“We can build zero-carbon buildings at the same price point as code-built buildings,” he said. “So [AI] would allow us to do that faster and probably even cheaper.”

An unprecedented time for the grid and batteries

The electrical grid is the linchpin for many areas of clean energy deployment, and opportunities to address that long-overlooked infrastructure can be game changing.

“We need to triple our grid by 2050, and for the first time, we now have people with large bags of money showing up to get the power now,” said Ben Shwab Eidelson, co-founder and partner of Stepchange Ventures and co-host of the Stepchange Show podcast. That influx of resources can create a “magic moment.”

Darian Parrish, founder of PwrOn, a Seattle startup developing portable clean power, is eager to see more batteries paired with grid operations, but worries about overblown safety concerns when the impacts of burning oil, gas and coal are more dangerous in many regards.

“Do you want a bunch of fire risk from fossil fuels and the inhalation of all those chemicals and exhaust, or do you want a lesser risk [from batteries] that might be hyperbolic in the media at the moment, but actually net safer?” Parrish said.

Kidder highlighted a company called It’s Electric that provides EV charging by plugging into buildings with excess energy available, bypassing the wait for additional grid capacity.

Tech alone won’t save us

Climate-friendly technologies that outperform polluting solutions are catching on and adoption is expanding. But human actions pulling in that direction are still essential.

“Technology alone will not, and was never going to save us,” said Su, of Toba Capital. “Only we can do that, and we have to do that through policy, through collective action, through awareness, and through behavior change. And those things are really hard. In many ways, they’re much harder to crack than nuclear fusion.”

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Jonathan Azoff, co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm SNØCAP
• Yi Jean Chow, investment partner with Clean Energy Ventures
• Mike Dieterich, author and sustainability executive for Decarb Advisory
• Ben Shwab Eidelson, co-founder and partner of Stepchange Ventures, co-host of the Stepchange Show podcast
• Karin Kidder, executive director of E8, a Pacific Northwest-based climate angel organization
• Duncan Logan, co-founder and CEO of 9Zero, a climate innovation hub with Seattle and San Francisco locations
• Darian Parrish, founder of PwrOn, a Seattle startup developing portable clean power
• Susan Su, partner at the venture capital firm Toba Capital and founder of the podcast and Substack Climate Money

Additional sources:

• PNW Climate Week, organizer of the annual event
• It’s Electric, an EV charging startup mentioned by Karin Kidder
• LazeraH, a nuclear startup pursuing muon-catalyzed fusion mentioned by Jonathon Azoff