Sophia Space and SLI, an aerospace leasing venture based in Washington, D.C., say they’ve agreed on a $300 million asset-financing framework that will support the creation of a 10-satellite constellation for high-performance computing.

The details of the arrangement are as notable as the bottom line: Sophia Space will build the satellites, leveraging the startup’s patented TILE technology for modular in-space data processing. SLI will purchase the satellites under the terms of a financing agreement.

“SLI as the lessor will purchase the satellites from Sophia, hold title to the assets, and lease them to the end user on a long-term basis in exchange for fixed monthly or quarterly payments,” Max Yergan, the company’s senior vice president for investments, explained in an email. “Full control and operational responsibility for the assets sit with Sophia and the end user, who will determine between them how operations are handled.”

Sophia’s satellites are designed to deliver on-orbit edge data services for a wide variety of applications. “The demand we are underwriting exists today,” Yergan said. “Earth observation, weather and supply-chain analytics, disaster response and defense ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] users all face the same constraint now: They collect far more data than they can bring to the ground, and its value decays while it waits to be downlinked. Processing on orbit addresses that directly.”

The constellation’s first launch is targeted for as early as 2028. SLI would pay out funds linked to development and launch milestones, all the way through verification that the on-orbit network performs to pre-agreed standards.

The arrangement is laid out in a non-binding letter of support. “The non-binding nature is a reflection of where we are in the process, and is typical of large asset financings,” Yergan explained. “It sets the commercial framework so both parties can commit resources while definitive documentation is negotiated.”

Leasing arrangements are often seen in aviation and the maritime industry, but this is a relatively new concept for satellite ventures.

“This is the first time that this approach has been applied to this kind of constellation, but not the first time for in-space assets,” said Gareth Zundel, SLI’s senior vice president for communications. “In December 2025 we announced the acquisition of two AscendArc satellites that will be offered to operators on leasing terms. Then, in March this year, we did a similar deal with ReOrbit. We do believe, however, that we are the first leasing company to specialize in the space sector.”

Rob DeMillo, Sophia Space’s CEO and co-founder, said the arrangement demonstrates how far the commercial space industry has come.

“Asset financing didn’t invent aviation or shipping, but it accelerated them at scale,” he said in a news release. “We’re doing the same for orbital computing. This approach with SLI signals that Sophia Space’s space infrastructure is mature enough to attract the capital structures that have historically built terrestrial infrastructure.”

The approach also gives Sophia Space — which is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., but also has strong ties to the Seattle area — access to capital without diluting the equity held by current investors, including Unlock Venture Partners in Seattle.

“Sophia has the technology, the team and the vision. What had been missing was access to scalable, non-dilutive capital,” said Praveen Vetrivel, SLI’s CEO. “This framework provides it, giving them the capacity and flexibility they need to build the next layer of digital infrastructure.”

Each of the 10 satellites in the constellation will link together six of Sophia’s TILE (Thermal Integrated LEO Edge) modules, with four Nvidia Jetson processors on each module. That adds up to 240 edge computing servers in orbit.

“These 10 spacecraft are dedicated to this transaction,” Yergan said. “Sophia’s other programs and partnerships involve separate spacecraft and separate funding and are not directly affected by this facility.”

Sophia Space has previously said that it plans to start selling TILE systems and related components to customers in 2028. The company is also collaborating with Axiom Space, Armada and Kepler Communications on separate in-space computing initiatives.

In June, Sophia Space announced the conclusion of a $7 million financing round that brought the company’s total funding to $22 million. That round took advantage of an arrangement known as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE, in which investors provide cash to a startup in exchange for the right to receive stock later.

Nearly 25 years after enrolling at Dartmouth College to study psychology and embarking on a path that led him to co-found Seattle fintech giant Remitly, Matt Oppenheimer has been inducted into the Ivy League school’s Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.

The honor, presented Thursday night in San Francisco as part of Dartmouth’s annual Entrepreneurs Forum, comes seven months after Oppenheimer stepped down as Remitly’s long-time CEO to become chairman of the board.

Created by the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, the Hall of Fame honors Dartmouth alumni who have made lasting positive impacts through their ventures. Oppenheimer joins a select group of honorees with Northwest ties — including Smartsheet co-founders Brent Frei and Mark Mader — and used his acceptance remarks to express deep gratitude to the admissions officers who took a chance on a kid from Boise, Idaho, with “OK grades” and “below average SAT scores.”

Speaking with GeekWire ahead of the event, Oppenheimer recalled how his early college years studying social psychology helped shape his understanding of business.

“I think a lot of business and entrepreneurship does come down to interpersonal dynamics,” Oppenheimer said. “I am a people person. But how do you find what I call career-market fit when it comes to really understanding and connecting with people? That’s ultimately my strength, but it was really hard to define earlier in my career.”

After graduating from Dartmouth in 2005, Oppenheimer earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked in Kenya for Barclays Bank, where seeing families hit with steep fees on cross-border money transfers inspired him to start Remitly in 2011.

He served as CEO for nearly 15 years, guiding the company through its 2021 NASDAQ IPO and building it into a fintech powerhouse serving over 9 million customers across more than 170 countries before transitioning to chairman in February.

In his acceptance speech on Thursday, Oppenheimer focused on a central philosophy he calls leading authentically through “towering strengths and shadows.”

“Each of us has a few towering strengths — things we are in the top 10% of the world at doing. Not good at. Towering,” he said. “And almost always, that tower casts a shadow. The same trait that makes you exceptional at one thing quietly makes you a liability at another. They aren’t two traits. They’re one trait, seen from two sides.”

He pointed to his own extreme tenacity as an example, noting how it helped him build Remitly through years of investor rejections and early product stumbles, but how it also had a darker side.

“That same tenacity can lock onto things that are unhealthy, or unchangeable, or both,” Oppenheimer shared, candidly discussing his personal experiences with OCD-related anxiety and depression. “This isn’t a character flaw sitting next to my strengths. It is the shadow of my greatest strength, from the same place. Which means it’s something to work with … harness the tower, manage the shadow … rather than something to be ashamed of.”

Seven months into his transition from operational CEO to board chairman, Oppenheimer says the shift has felt surprisingly comfortable. Free from managing daily execution, he now channels that same intensity into coaching current leaders and serving on corporate boards.

“I have so much trust in Sebastian [Gunningham], our CEO, and it’s super exciting to support him in a chair capacity,” Oppenheimer told GeekWire. “I get to share reflections on the journey, mentor, and coach. I didn’t know that would be the case, because you hear so many examples of founder-CEOs who transition and have a really hard time with it.”

That mentorship extends to Seattle’s broader startup community, where Oppenheimer is an active member of Foundations, a collective of local tech founders and AI leaders. When advising early stage entrepreneurs, he urges them to remain hyper-focused on solving a single, deep customer problem rather than spreading themselves thin.

And while AI has vastly accelerated product development, Oppenheimer notes that the core fundamentals of building a business haven’t changed.

“With fintech, you still have to build the trust, get the licensing, and build out the compliance infrastructure and banking relationships,” he said. “The actual building and deployment of product got a lot faster, but if you don’t have great judgment, you can go down the wrong path pretty quickly.”

Looking back 25 years later, Oppenheimer noted that the Dartmouth admissions officers who took a chance on him didn’t look past his test scores by accident — they told him years later that they were drawn to his personal qualities and humanity.

“Two strangers in an office in Hanover found my tower before I had any idea what it was, and then they handed me the place to build on it,” Oppenheimer said in his closing remarks. “That isn’t a debt. It’s a privilege. And the only sensible thing to do with a privilege is use it well.”

Hector Rivas spent a decade building ThriftBooks into one of the country’s largest used-book sellers, before an unlikely second act: co-founding a sports agency representing NFL players.

That career change led him to the problem behind his newest startup, and to the Las Vegas Raiders running back who just invested in it.

Nukleus, based in Issaquah, Wash., is building what Rivas calls an operating system for the business of sports. The idea is a single workspace for everyone in an athlete’s orbit: agent, lawyer, CPA, financial advisor, marketing team, and others. It lets them all work from the same contracts, deadlines and records, rather than each keeping a separate pile of emails and spreadsheets.

The idea came out of Rivas’s years at Disruptive Sports, the agency he co-founded in 2020 and left earlier this year.

Ashton Jeanty, who signed a four-year, $35.9 million rookie contract with the Raiders in 2025, has taken equity in the company and signed on to serve as its public face.

Nukleus has also named four strategic investors: Mat McBride, Microsoft’s executive vice president and CFO for commercial products and infrastructure; WaFd Bank President and CEO Brent Beardall; investor Skyler Nelson, previously of Vulcan Capital and its successor firm Cercano; and Dr. Brett Kindle of the Andrews Institute in Gulf Breeze, Fla.

The company has a team of 12 based out of its Issaquah office, plus a supporting engineering team in India. Most of the team is engineering.

Other executives include CTO Eric Ahlstrom, previously at Microsoft, Unity, Oracle and ESPN; chief creative officer Ben Miller, a former creative director at the University of Washington and CAA Sports; and CFO Matt Porter, who worked with Rivas at ThriftBooks, EcoGoodz and Disruptive.

Nukleus closed a pre-seed round from friends and family in 2025 and is raising again now. Rivas declined to disclose the amount raised by the company so far.

From books to football: Rivas was ThriftBooks’ first CEO, running the used-book seller for about a decade after it launched in 2003. Based in the Seattle area, the company grew during his tenure from a storage unit in Kirkland, Wash., to 10 distribution facilities in 10 states, by his account.

He went on to found EcoGoodz, a used-goods and overstock brokerage, and in 2020 co-founded Disruptive Sports Agency with agent Henry Organ.

Rivas, an NFLPA-certified contract advisor, worked the business side of the agency. He left earlier this year to build Nukleus full time.

The years inside the agency are what produced the idea.

Everyone in a player’s orbit was working off “their own version of the truth,” Rivas explained via email: the agent, the lawyer, the CPA, the financial advisor, the marketing team. The athlete, he said, “was the one absorbing the cost of that disconnect,” in slower decisions and deals that fell through the cracks.

The pitch in Las Vegas: Jeanty and Rivas knew each other from Rivas’s years at the sports agency, and Rivas said the running back had been tracking what he was building.

“Because Ashton and I already knew each other, and he’d been aware of what I was building, the conversation came together naturally,” Rivas said.

He flew to Las Vegas to walk Jeanty through the model, the team, and where the company was headed. Rivas said Jeanty’s equity reflects both money invested and his role promoting the platform.

In a statement, Jeanty described the job of running his own career.

“Coming into the NFL, you become a CEO, directing a team of agents, advisors, and marketers, whether you’re ready or not,” he said. “Nukleus is what finally gets them all on the same page, so I can actually run that team the way it should be run. That’s why I invested in it.”

Where things stand: The product is in a free beta with about 30 users, including athletes, agents, agencies, lawyers and marketing staff. Nukleus plans to charge $99 per user per month for a starter plan and $249 for a full-featured one, with custom enterprise pricing. Athletes join free.

Alongside contract storage, deadline tracking and a shared workspace, the company is building AI tools meant to answer questions about contract terms and league rules.

Others are working similar territory. Agent Live 360 sells software built specifically for sports agents, and Opendorse, which says it works with more than 1,000 sports agents, offers tools to negotiate, approve and track deals. Nukleus says it differs from narrower tools by serving everyone in an athlete’s orbit.

The bigger bet: The company is looking well past a single app.

“Long-term, I don’t see this as a tool athletes use, I see it as the infrastructure the entire business of sports runs on,” Rivas said. “Every athlete becomes the center of their own connected team, and every professional working with them, across every sport, at every level, operates on one shared system instead of a hundred disconnected ones.”

Seattle startup veteran Stefan Kalb is back with a fresh brand and an ambitious vision for enterprise automation in the AI era.

Rebranded earlier this year from Super Labs, Kalb’s latest venture, Latch, is positioning itself as the context layer for enterprise AI, helping companies observe, learn and document how work actually gets done.

Kalb launched the startup alongside co-founder and CTO Jared Kofron, a University of Washington physics alum and former principal software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs last year.

Kalb is well known in startup circles. In 2009, the Bainbridge Island resident founded Molly’s, a fresh food supply company that serviced Seattle-area cafes and hospitals. That led him to start Shelf Engine, which used machine learning to drastically reduce food waste for retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart. After raising $60 million in venture funding, it sold to New York retail data analytics company Crisp in 2025.

We recently caught with Kalb to hear more about Latch, his latest startup venture that has the ambitious goal of liberating humanity “from doing work that owns us.”

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
Latch captures how work actually gets done. An employee records themselves doing a task and narrates it like they’re training a new hire. Latch turns that into a knowledge graph of the company’s processes and serves it to your AI agents. Your agents finally know how the business really runs.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Liberating people from work they don’t like. Every job has hours in it that only exist because software never learned how the company runs. I want that work to disappear, and I don’t think anyone will miss it.

What surprised you after talking to customers?
That people are bad at explaining their own jobs, and they know it. Ask someone to document their process and you get a five-step list. Watch them do it and it’s forty steps with a dozen decisions they never mention, because to them it isn’t a decision. It’s just Tuesday.

How has AI changed the way you build?
The obvious stuff is real, but the interesting change is org shape. The ratio of product to engineering has flipped. So has the ratio of SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) to closers. Building used to be the bottleneck, so you staffed for it. Now the bottleneck is deciding what to build and who to sell it to, and you staff for that instead.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
They think we’re Loom. A Loom is a video in a folder waiting for a human to watch it. Latch watches the recording, figures out what you did and why you did it that way, and turns it into something your agents can act on. The video is the input. What we learn from it is the product.

Toughest decision in the past year?
Go to market. AI made reaching customers harder and more expensive, not easier. Every inbox is full of AI-written outbound now, so the cheap channels are gone. We decided to stop competing on volume and spend real money on fewer, deeper conversations. Showing up in person. It costs far more per account than we planned for, and it’s the only thing that works.

One piece of advice for other entrepreneurs?
Look away from the obvious. If someone is telling you about the front of their store, ask them about the loading bay. The best problems are the ones nobody is talking about, usually because they can’t put words to what’s happening. That’s also where you’ll have the least competition.

We’ll know we’ve made it when…
Someone gets furious that we’re down. Not because they lost a file, but because they can’t do their job without us. That’s the moment we stop being a tool and become key infrastructure.

Seattle biotech startup BrainChild Bio has raised $116 million to advance an experimental CAR T cell therapy for one of the deadliest forms of childhood brain cancer.

The Series A financing will primarily fund a pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of an investigational therapy being developed for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. The rare brainstem tumor primarily affects children ages 5 to 10 and has few treatment options.

The financing was led by an undisclosed private family fund and foundation, with participation from BrainChild Bio’s initial investor, Seattle Children’s, and new investor WRF Capital.

BrainChild Bio is building on CAR T cell technology developed at Seattle Children’s and licensed exclusively to the company in 2023. The approach involves genetically engineering a patient’s own T cells to recognize and attack cancer cells.

The company says its new therapy has now entered its ILLUMINATE Phase 2 study, designed as a registration-stage trial that could eventually support an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

DIPG presents a particularly difficult challenge for cancer researchers because the tumors grow in the brainstem, an area critical to basic functions, and the blood-brain barrier can limit the ability of treatments to reach the tumor.

BrainChild Bio’s approach delivers the CAR T cells directly into cerebrospinal fluid through an implanted catheter, allowing the cells to reach the tumor locally and potentially be administered repeatedly.

About 300 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with DIPG each year, a devastating brain tumor with no cure and few treatment options. Radiation is the current standard of care, but children diagnosed with DIPG have a median overall survival of only about 11 months.

BrainChild Bio also plans to use proceeds from the new financing to advance a CAR T therapy designed to target three different cancer markers, toward initial clinical testing in glioblastoma.

The company was founded by Michael Jensen, who previously helped develop the underlying work at Seattle Children’s and was a co-founder of Umoja Biopharma and Juno Therapeutics. The CEO is Steven Brugger, who most recently served as founder and CEO of Affinivax, a biotech company which was acquired by GSK for $3.3 billion in 2022. 

“This financing enables us to chart our path forward to serve the children and families afflicted with devastating brain tumors and represents a new paradigm for treating CNS brain tumors in children and adults,” Jensen said in a statement. “Our team at BrainChild Bio is steadfast in its commitment to harness CAR T cell technology in CNS tumors and we are uniquely positioned to do so.”

[Editor’s Note: Jacob Colker is co-founder and co-managing director of AI House.]

Seattle is one of the most talented, creative and inventive places in the world. But if we want the rest of the country to see us that way, we have to start acting like we believe it ourselves.

First, we need more pride around here.

Let’s talk about what it means to be proud. 

My mother grew up in Tarnów, Poland. She escaped communism and came to the United States in 1978 looking for a better life. She found one, built a family, and has lived in America for nearly 50 years. 

But my mom is still very, very Polish.

Several times a year, I get a message: “Jakub. Did you see this?”

I already know what’s coming. 

Some Polish person did something. A Polish athlete won something. A Polish scientist discovered something. Some guy with a Polish grandmother finished third in a regional Nebraska chess tournament. Doesn’t matter. Poland.

“Jakub. Look at this person.”

Okay, Mom. Who is she?

“POLISH.”

That’s it. That’s the story. 

And I love it, because Mom has this completely indestructible pride in where she comes from. Plenty of us know someone like this: a Greek mom, Vietnamese dad, Indian uncle or Nigerian aunt. Somebody from their corner of the world did something great, and you are going to hear about it.

There is power in that instinct. Not because your people are better, but because you believe your place matters.

Seattle could use more of that.

We are almost pathologically humble. Our response to notable achievements is often a polite nod before everybody gets back to our regularly scheduled Seattle freeze. 

That humility is working against us.

Second, Seattle is awesome and the evidence is everywhere.

I see Seattle’s potential every day working alongside dozens of entrepreneurs building startups. Some of the most ambitious and talented people in the world are already here.

We have many billion-dollar startups across the region and more than 200,000 people working across technology, science, space, health and startups. That is more than enough talent to build yet a dozen more unicorns. 

Nearly 40% of the world flies every day on airplanes built here. Blue Origin and SpaceX build rockets here. Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, REI and Nordstrom reshaped how the world shops. Microsoft helped put computing into our homes. AWS and Azure helped make the cloud the infrastructure of modern life. The University of Washington ranks among the world’s best. Seattle medical breakthroughs have helped save tens of millions of lives. We are pushing forward fusion energy, aerospace and maritime innovation. And let’s not forget: we just won the darn Super Bowl.

And so, so much more. 

So why, despite all the evidence, do we still seem to have a communal case of imposter syndrome?

This is not a city lacking accomplishments.

It is a city with a branding problem.

Third, we have let other people tell our story for far too long. This ends, today. 

Cities have brands whether they intend to or not. Silicon Valley is where ambitious people build companies. Nashville is music. Los Angeles for film and television.

Seattle’s cultural humility mostly assumes our accomplishments speak for themselves.

They don’t.

Reputation gets built one story at a time. You hear one story and it is interesting. You hear 10 and you notice a pattern. You hear 50 and your beliefs begin to change: That’s where important science happens. That’s where talented people live. That’s where I should invest, build or work.

Those beliefs shape real decisions about where people move, where companies get built and where investors put their money.

So to fix Seattle’s branding problem, here’s what we need to do.

Step 1: Let’s tell one clear story — Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous. 

Seattle is where deep technical talent meets deep domain expertise to build consequential things: AI, aerospace, cloud computing, medicine, fusion, robotics, maritime technology and enterprise software.

We do not need 50 slogans. We do not need another consultant-led branding exercise. We need one simple idea that people outside this region can remember: Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous.

There is a reason some of the world’s most important companies have built major engineering centers, research hubs and second headquarters here for decades. They come for the talent.

And that talent is why Seattle will not just participate in the future. We will lead in building it.

Step 2: Let’s use the megaphones we already have.

Seattle already has outlets (including this one) telling this story — publications, podcasts and social channels that document the region’s startups, breakthroughs and product launches. 

Every day, startups are raising money, scientists are making breakthroughs, companies are launching products, engineers are building technology and institutions are pushing this region forward.

That is not just tech news. That is the raw material of Seattle’s reputation. So let’s use it.

When you read or hear about a Seattle startup doing something remarkable, share it. When you see a story about a breakthrough at Fred Hutch or the University of Washington, send it to someone outside the region. When a local company raises money, lands a major customer or gets acquired, don’t just scroll past it. Amplify it.

Step 3: Let’s treat every local win as Seattle’s win.

When a local robotics company ships something remarkable, that is Seattle’s story.

When a maritime startup reinvents how ports operate, that is Seattle’s story.

When our AI research labs, or hometown heroes in Amazon and Microsoft, create breakthroughs, that is Seattle’s story. 

When a biotech company lands a major breakthrough, when a game studio creates a global hit, when a clean-energy company reaches a milestone, that is Seattle’s story.

Our companies, universities, hospitals, labs, investors, civic organizations and business leaders should act like an amplification network for one another. Stop treating somebody else’s success as somebody else’s news.

Their win is our collective proof.

Step 4: Let’s put Seattle on the label.

Founders need to say where they are building. “Made with ❤️in Seattle” should be on the bottom of every website. Put Seattle in the press release. Put it in the LinkedIn post. Mention it onstage. Say it in interviews. Tell investors. Tell customers. 

Silicon Valley companies have spent decades attaching their success to their geography. We should do the same. If you build something extraordinary here, make sure the world knows it was built here.

Step 5: Let’s do a better job of selling Seattle.

Every venture capitalist, founder, executive and civic leader in this region should be able to explain in 60 seconds why somebody should build a company here.

Not defend Seattle. Not apologize for Seattle. Sell Seattle. 

Reminder: It’s the talent. 

(And also cream cheese on hot dogs.)

When investors and founders from New York, Boston or San Francisco come to town, show them the region. Introduce them to engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs. Bring them into the community. Let them see what is happening. 

The best branding campaign is somebody getting on a plane home saying, I had no idea all of this was happening in Seattle.

If we’re going to succeed, we need to believe first.

Insert all the Ted Lasso jokes you want, but this stuff matters. 

There is no giant Seattle marketing department coming to save us. There is no national referee who will eventually review the evidence and declare that Seattle deserves more respect.

When somebody here does something extraordinary, act like it. Read the story. Share the post. Send the article to your team. Text it to your friend in New York. Put it in the group chat. Bring it up over dinner. Tell your kids.

Basically, become my Polish mother.

My mom doesn’t give a hoot that Kraków ranks No. 6 on some list or Warsaw is No. 8 on another. She doesn’t need a clickbait listicle to tell her Poland matters. She already believes it does.

We have to build our reputation ourselves. The good news is that we already have everything we need: extraordinary companies, world-class institutions, ambitious people, groundbreaking science and media documenting it all.

What we have been missing is the confidence to start being more loud. Stories become patterns, patterns become reputation, and reputation becomes gravity. 

Gravity is what creates influence and respect.

Pride is not something somebody else gives you. You don’t wait until the rest of the country decides your home is important. YOU decide it is. Then you act like it.

Let’s get to work. 

A Redmond, Wash., robotics software startup founded by former Microsoft researchers says its platform can now handle much of the work of getting a robot up and running in a factory, warehouse or other industrial setting, a job that used to take a team of engineers.

General Robotics said Wednesday that advances in GRID, its robot intelligence platform, have cut the process of onboarding a new robot from about a month to as little as two hours. The company calls the approach “Auto Engineering,” with each onboarded robot and diagnosed failure feeding back into the system and speeding up the next deployment.

“Before this moment, it would take us a team of experts to go and execute on behalf of our customers,” said General Robotics CEO and co-founder Ashish Kapoor in an interview. “Clearly non-scalable, clearly very expensive, and clearly will take a long time.”

With Auto Engineering, he said, “we can magnify and accelerate each engineer’s capability.”

Founded in 2023, the company has grown to about 50 employees, primarily engineers. It has raised nearly $34 million, most recently in an April round led by Construct Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Nvidia and Valo Ventures. PitchBook put the size of the round at $25 million; the companies didn’t disclose terms at the time.

Kapoor said General Robotics has roughly a dozen customers — large enterprises across manufacturing, logistics, energy and defense — and revenue in the millions of dollars.

Customers include HTX, the science and technology agency of Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which Kapoor said has been working with General Robotics for about a year and a half.

The company’s platform works with robot types including industrial arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled robots and drones, according to the company.

General Robotics is operating in a competitive and well-funded sector. Physical Intelligence, which builds foundation models for robots, has raised more than $2 billion. Nvidia — an investor in General Robotics, and the maker of the Isaac Sim simulation software built into GRID — is developing its own robot models and deployment tools.

Robot makers build good hardware, Kapoor said, but often lack the expertise to put it to work in a specific setting like a shipping terminal. “That last layer is missing.”

Before co-founding the company, Kapoor spent 17 years at Microsoft, ultimately as general manager of its autonomous systems and robotics research group in Redmond, where he created the open-source drone simulator AirSim. General Robotics co-founders Sai Vemprala (CTO) and Shuhang Chen came from the same Microsoft team.

GeekWire covered the launch in 2023, when it was Scaled Foundations and billed itself as “ChatGPT for robots.” It had five employees at the time, focused on aerial robotics and drones, with backing from Khosla and E14 Fund. It later renamed itself General Robotics.

— Telecom giant T-Mobile announced that Jessica Uhl will join as chief financial officer-designate later this month, and succeed Peter Osvaldik as CFO in February. Uhl served as CFO of Shell and worked for the global oil and energy giant for more than 17 years. She joins T-Mobile from GE Vernova, where she was president.

“I am thrilled to welcome Jessica to T-Mobile,” Srini Gopalan, president and CEO of T-Mobile said in a statement. “She brings deep financial and strategic acumen, capital allocation expertise and an innovative growth mindset that is a perfect fit for T-Mobile’s next era.”

Osvaldik will transition to strategic advisor and retire from T-Mobile in July. He joined the company in 2016 and became chief financial officer in 2020. Osvaldik’s tenure “has been defined by disciplined financial stewardship, consistent financial outperformance, and an unwavering commitment to T-Mobile’s mission,” the company said.

The move marks the latest leadership shakeup at the Bellevue, Wash.-based company. Mike Katz, T-Mobile’s chief business and product officer, announced his departure in July, and Chris Sambar was named chief enterprise officer. T-Mobile has cut 470 jobs in its home state this year and closed numerous retail locations.

— Brent Colburn, Microsoft‘s vice president of global public affairs, is resigning after three years, effective mid-October.

“Stepping away from Microsoft is not a decision that I made lightly, but ultimately it is the right one for me and my family,” said Colburn, who has been commuting weekly between his home in Oakland, Calif., and Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

Colburn’s career has spanned leadership roles in government, academia and philanthropy. That includes serving as principal advisor to the secretary of defense for communications and chief of staff to then-Secretary Shaun Donovan. More recent roles include communications vice president for the University of California in Oakland, Princeton University and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

— After nearly 13 years, Audrey Powers has left Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos that develops reusable rockets, spacecraft and rocket engines. She was on Blue Origin’s October 2021 spaceflight that also carried “Star Trek” star William Shatner and two others.

“Hopefully, I’ve helped change peoples’ impressions of rockets (they land, too), astronauts (they are everyone), and our Earth,” Powers said, adding that she was sad to leave, but grateful that she took a chance on “a little startup no one had heard of.”

Powers held the title of deputy and vice president of the New Shepard Business Unit, which is the program that carries people and research payloads into suborbital space. She is an attorney who has previously worked at NASA as a flight controller and as a senior systems engineer at Lockheed Martin.

— Michael Levi has joined AZX as chief commercial officer of the Bellevue-based startup, which works with utilities and other industries to build in-house AI technologies supporting their missions.

Levi is based in San Francisco and was previously vice president of marketing and growth for KloudGin, where he helped reposition the company’s field service software into an AI-native platform for utilities and the public sector. He earlier founded L1CG, a go-to-market advisory, and has held leadership roles in energy, renewables, supply chain and fintech.

— Jason Alafgani was named head of marketing for Caddi, a Seattle startup that launched out of AI2 Incubator and is automating basic business operations with generative AI. Alafgani is the co-founder of startups including the podcast company Jellypod and worked as marketing leader for Appwrite, Dodgeball, Mode and others.

— Dr. Amir Iravani has joined Los Angeles-based UCLA Health as director of the theranostics program, which focuses on treating cancer using targeted radiation therapy. Iravani previously served as theranostics clinical director at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and was an associate professor of radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

— Portland Metro Region Innovation Hub has hired Kelly Lyons as director of the organization, which provides networking, coaching, funding and other support to entrepreneurs. Lyons is the founder of two startups and has served in leadership at Core Education, Umpqua Bank and Development House, a social services nonprofit.

— DigiStor, a Vancouver, Wash.-based provider of secure data-at-rest protection solutions, appointed Michael Callahan to its board of directors. Callahan co-founded Awake Security and PolyServe, which was acquired by HP.

Nine years after setting out to tackle unsheltered homelessness with rapidly deployable, hard-panel micro-shelters, Everett, Wash.-based social purpose corporation Pallet is closing its business.

In a post on its website, Pallet said the landscape surrounding the homelessness response has evolved significantly since the company was founded in 2017.

“Communities understand the challenge differently,” Pallet’s statement says. “Customer needs have become more complex. Funding environments and political priorities have shifted. And through nine years of working alongside communities across North America, we have learned an extraordinary amount about what works, what doesn’t, and what is needed next.”

Since launching, the company deployed over 100 transitional villages across North America, providing more than 6,000 temporary beds and serving an estimated 30,000 individuals. To support that scale, Pallet raised more than $18 million in venture and impact funding — including a $15 million Series A round in 2022.

Pallet was founded by husband-and-wife team Amy and Brady King, who grew the social purpose company out of their work in general contracting and a desire to build fast, dignified, individual emergency shelter alternatives.

The pair designed modular, panelized shelter units that could be assembled on-site in under an hour without specialized tools — incorporating climate control, lockable doors, and cleanable hard surfaces to serve both natural disaster relief and city homelessness responses.

Pallet was the Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year winner at the 2022 GeekWire Awards.

“We exist because communities cannot quickly build enough affordable, permanent housing to meet the needs of their residents,” Amy King, Pallet’s CEO, said in 2022.

GeekWire reached out to Pallet for comment on Tuesday and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

In a report on the closure, Seattle news outlet PubliCola noted that Pallet’s plastic and fiberglass panel units ran roughly $20,000 each — nearly five times the cost of a traditional wooden tiny home built by the Low-Income Housing Institute.

In Seattle, where the city recently partnered with Pallet on a 75-unit shelter in Interbay, the contract budget with the city’s Human Services Department roughly tripled from $1.3 million to nearly $4 million as the scope expanded, PubliCola reported.

With Pallet shutting down, operators of existing sites will now be left to perform their own ongoing maintenance and source replacement parts independently.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who pledged to open 1,000 new units of shelter and emergency housing during her first year in office, called Pallet’s closure unfortunate.

“My understanding is that Pallet shutting down is really due to shifts in the availability of public funding,” Wilson told PubliCola. “They just don’t have the demand, in terms of purchasing their shelters, that they need to keep them in business.”

Pallet noted that its team members plan to carry their operational experience into new initiatives within the homelessness space, while pointing to lasting systemic changes — such as updated building codes and policy shifts — that helped legitimize rapid-deployment shelter alternatives.

“Our goal was never to defend one solution. Our goal is to solve the problem,” the company wrote on its website, framing the closure not as a retreat, but as a necessary evolution.

Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads.

To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.

“We have confidence in the foundation that we’ve laid today, and now it’s time to scale,” Stoke Space CEO and co-founder Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.

The newly announced Series E financing round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other investors.

The final figure will be “within rounding error” of a billion dollars, Lapsa said. “Not quite, or a little more,” he said. “The speed with which this has come together is very fast.”

Lapsa said that scaling up the Nova rocket’s design was always part of Stoke Space’s game plan, but that the timeline is being accelerated in response to the growing demand for launches and the shrinking availability of launch opportunities.

The timing of Stoke’s pivot to a bigger launch vehicle wasn’t sparked by a single event, Lapsa said. “The pressure has been growing over the last couple of years,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t slowed down recently.”

From Pathfinder to Block 2

The revised plan calls for Stoke to begin launching missions with the initially designed rocket, now known as Nova Pathfinder. Pathfinder’s first stage will be powered by seven of Stoke’s Zenith engines, and the upper stage’s Andromeda engine will have a ring of 24 thrust chambers integrated into an actively cooled metallic heat shield. The rocket will be capable of putting 3 metric tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or LEO.

Pathfinder’s first launch is now scheduled for early 2027 — a slight slip from earlier expectations. It will carry a spacecraft for AstroForge, a California-based asteroid mining company. “We’re going out to the asteroid belt, and yeah, Astroforge is our partner for that one,” Lapsa said. “They’re looking to prospect and ultimately mine asteroids, and bring back rare earths and other important materials.”

The super-sized version of Stoke’s rocket, known as Nova Block 2, is due to make its debut in 2029. Its first stage will have twice as many Zenith engines as Pathfinder. Its upper stage will have 12 independent engines, each with two thrust chambers. That will increase Nova’s lift capability by a factor of five, enabling up to 15 metric tons of payload to be delivered to LEO. More than 4 tons can be sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit, or GTO.

In comparison, SpaceX says its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 18.5 tons to LEO or 5.5 tons to GTO in reusable mode.

Both versions of the Nova rocket are designed to be fully reusable, with the first-stage booster flying itself down to a recovery ship and the upper stage making a separate re-entry. Stoke is only the second company in the space industry to pursue that strategy. SpaceX has designed its Starship launch system for dual-stage reusability but hasn’t yet reached that goal.

Stoke is developing an active-cooling system for upper-stage reusability. Some of the rocket’s cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen propellant is circulated through channels in the upper stage’s metallic heat shield to absorb the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. SpaceX has been experimenting with different heat shield strategies for Starship, but some experts have expressed doubts about SpaceX’s approach.

Both versions of Stoke’s rocket are designed to fill a market niche that’s different from Starship’s. The Nova rockets’ capabilities fall close to both ends of the medium-lift spectrum, while SpaceX’s super-heavy-lift Starship is designed to loft 100 to 150 tons of payload to LEO.

Expanding the infrastructure

Stoke Space’s 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters facility in Kent was designed from the beginning to manufacture rockets that are bigger than Nova Pathfinder.

“We bring in raw sheet metal, we build our core and we ship a rocket,” Lapsa said. “We can use the same methods and effectively the same tooling to build larger diameters and larger lengths, and that’s very intentional.”

The company’s rocket test facility in Moses Lake is being expanded from 75 to 550 acres to accommodate work on two types of rockets simultaneously.

“We’ve done, I would say, an extremely efficient job at leveraging the 75 acres that we use today,” Lapsa said. “The expansion across the street is going to enable us to test again at rate. … Certain of our facilities have an overlapping blast radius, so they interfere with each other. A big advantage of being able to spread our wings a little bit, and get a little bit more space, is that those test stands can operate in full independence of each other.”

Stoke’s launch facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida can also accommodate a dual-track approach. A new payload processing facility at the Cape is intentionally sized to support both Nova Pathfinder and Block 2.

In June, Stoke Space’s Moses Lake facility completed what the company called proto-qualification testing of the first-stage booster for its first Nova Pathfinder rocket. “The second stage will ship out pretty soon,” Lapsa said. “That goes to Moses Lake. … This will be acceptance testing of the structure, and then we’ll do a static hot-fire test out there to fully shake down the second stage, and then it ships out to Cape Canaveral.”

The booster is being prepared for shipping to the Cape as well. “We’ll repeat the wet dress rehearsals that we did in Moses Lake, but we’ll do it on the launch pad itself,” Lapsa said. “Then we’ll do the same thing: static fire test on the first stage down there, and then the two stages go together, and we go to space.”

Stoke Space has been on a phenomenal growth curve since Lapsa and his fellow co-founder, chief technology officer Tom Feldman, left Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in 2019 to create the company.

Lapsa said Stoke currently has about 400 employees. “It’s approximately 50 in Moses Lake, 50 in Cape Canaveral. We have a handful of remotes, and then everybody else is in Kent,” he said.

Even though Stoke Space hasn’t yet launched a rocket, the startup’s steady progress toward that milestone — and its long-term vision for total rocket reusability — have been impressive enough to keep investors on board.

“Having supported Stoke through multiple stages of its growth, we believe this company has demonstrated both the exceptional technical progress and the ambition to build a launch system capable of serving the market at industrial scale,” Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures, said today in a news release.

“Full reusability is the inevitable end state of the market, providing an order-of-magnitude cost and service advantage over partially reusable rockets,” said Clay Fisher, general partner at Spark Capital. “Stoke had the right thesis seven years ago and has paired that prescient vision with a blistering pace of execution. As a result, they stand uniquely positioned to give customers more choice and capacity when they need it, and to unlock an enormous new economy in space.”

Lapsa said he’s grateful for the vote of confidence.

“We’re humbled by the investment, having great partners behind us,” he said. “It’s an incredibly critical and important moment for us as a civilization to get right. I think space development is really, really important for our ability as a civilization to continue to scale and continue raising the quality of life that we enjoy — and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”

California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.

“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.

The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.

Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.

The city of Kent, which is about 20 miles south of Seattle, is one of the hotspots for space companies in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing’s Kent Space Center remains active more than 50 years after building NASA’s Apollo moon rovers. The city also hosts Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Stoke Space, which was founded by Blue Origin alumni.

Cowboy Space, previously known as Aetherflux, plans to send its own rockets into low Earth orbit starting as early as 2028, with the upper stages outfitted to serve as solar-powered orbital data centers. The Stampede constellation is one of several planned projects aimed at getting around the land, power and water constraints that have made ground-based AI data centers increasingly controversial.

“We are building what I call the last big clean-sheet launch vehicle in my lifetime, so it’s going to be a very big heavy-lift vehicle, and we’re working every day to bring it to reality,” Warren Lamont, Cowboy Space’s head of launch and propulsion, said this week in a LinkedIn video. Lamont, who previously worked for IonQ and Blue Origin, is one of the executives heading up Cowboy Space’s engineering hub in the Seattle area.

The company announced in May that it raised $275 million in a Series B funding round, in part to expand its production capability. Cowboy is collaborating with Nvidia to deploy the chip giant’s Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in orbit. And in July, it secured a deal to test its propulsion system at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

“We’re really excited to get into first engine hot-fire next year,” Lamont said.

Cowboy Space’s potential competitors include SpaceX, which wants to launch up to a million AI-processing satellites; and Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is setting up a production facility in Woodinville, Wash., and seeking authorization for up to 88,000 data center satellites.

Update for 3:30 p.m. PT Sept. 13: Cowboy Space confirmed the opening of its Kent facility in a post to LinkedIn. “Kent will be our launch vehicle and satellite design hub, and we will be building our rocket engines and solar systems here too,” the company said:

Longtime Seattle food photographer Scott Pitts spent 25 years capturing commercial imagery for major brands, and now he’s using that quarter-century archive to train Pallat. The new AI-powered production system is designed to eliminate costly reshoots while keeping real studio craft at the center of generative creative tech.

The platform combines fine-tuned open-weight models with Pitts’ extensive archive, allowing art directors to modify existing campaign assets — like swapping a topping, adjusting lighting, or changing a backdrop — in minutes through software rather than starting from scratch back on set.

Pitts, a non-technical founder operating Pallat out of his Seattle photo studio, SP Studio, leads a nimble five-person team and believes domain experience is key to competing with generic AI platforms.

“We are close to the problem, and we’re looking at it from a photographic eye,” he said. “We’re making sure those outputs look photoreal, that they’re not going to get labeled as AI slop.”

To show how the tech works in practice, Pitts points to a recent shoot for a national steakhouse client. After completing a complex setup for a burger — carefully layering the bun, patty, sauce, and greens — the brand asked if they had shot a version with tomatoes. Rather than calling back the food stylist and rebuilding the set, Pitts dropped the final image into Pallat, prompting it to add two tomato slices with subtle condensation, natural translucency, and accurate drop shadows cast onto the cheese below.

In another instance, a commercial seafood brand prepared packaging imagery for a buyer presentation, only for the client to ask to see the fish presented on a white plate instead. Pallat to the rescue.

Commercial photographers have long tweaked images using tools like Photoshop, but Pitts sees AI as the natural next step for advertising workflows — distinct from news photography, where image manipulation remains out of bounds. Where Photoshop requires painstaking manual editing to adjust a scene, Pallat handles complex lighting, translucency, and material physics in minutes based on a simple prompt.

The startup recently signed its first enterprise customer and is currently working directly with brands as a hands-on production partner while building toward full software access.

Pitts sees the technology not as a threat to his craft, but as a natural progression. He started his career shooting four-by-five film, then transitioned to digital and video. AI is another progression.

“My hope is that me building Pallat is sort of this bridge between tech and creative,” Pitts said. “Craft is still important. Judgment and taste are still probably some of the most important things.”

Continue reading for Pitts’ answers to our Startup Spotlight questionnaire.

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

Pallat is a photographer-led AI production system built for food and beverage brands, born from a working photo studio. It combines licensed photography with generative workflows to help brands scale photo-centric content while maintaining the creative control expected from commercial photography.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

I’ve spent 25 years watching brands solve the same problem: invest in a shoot, then ultimately need more usable imagery than the initial shoot was designed to deliver. Generic generative tools can create images, but weren’t built around the quality, control and production standards food and beverage brands require.

I’m obsessed with using AI to close the gap. Pallat gives brands a way to extend photography they’ve already invested in and create new production-ready imagery grounded in a licensed dataset and the standards of a traditional photoshoot.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Because we’re so close to the problem we’re solving, their need for a solution and high bar for quality didn’t surprise me. 

What did was how much generated imagery disrupted their existing workflows. There is no obvious owner, no review path and no shared vocabulary for feedback and approvals. Brands are asking us to help establish new workflows, and that has turned out to be almost as important as building the tech itself.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

AI is a big part of why a five-person team can build something like this. Our tech stack is built on open-weight models that we fine-tune using proprietary training data, while foundation models support planning and a handful of day-to-day operations.

Not to oversimplify it, but in many ways my role at Pallat parallels production. I built a team of experts, defined the problem we’re solving and established the criteria for the output. A growing part of my work is getting those standards out of my head and structuring evals so they hold when I’m not in the room.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That Pallat is trying to replace photography. It’s far from it.

Practical photos are important inputs, and our studio continues to create net-new ones to expand the system. Visual trends are always evolving, so datasets powering creative tech cannot be static. The future of production is hybrid: practical photography and generative imaging working together, with each deployed where it creates the most value. 

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

Resisting the urge to broaden Pallat before we establish product-market fit. The goal isn’t to automate every step as quickly as possible. It’s to understand which problems in the workflow are best solved through software.

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

I truly believe some of the most interesting AI companies will come out of service businesses where the founder knows the industry exceptionally well — where the friction lives, which shortcuts a client will notice, and what excellence looks like in their vertical.

I spent a long time assuming my 25 years in photography was the past and AI was the future, and I had that backwards. The years on set that sharpened my taste and judgment, our dataset and the client relationships are the true compounding assets.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

When an art director at a food or beverage brand drafts a shot list dividing it into two columns: “Capture as Practical Photography” and “Generate in Pallat.”

When that becomes a normal way of planning, Pallat will have done what we set out to do.

Resect AI, an artificial intelligence startup led by a team of scientists and engineers in Washougal, Wash., launched out of stealth Thursday with $25 million in funding to commercialize an open-source technology designed to catch AI hallucinations before they happen.

Unlike traditional AI monitoring tools that evaluate generated text after the fact, Resect AI says its patented technology operates in-stream — looking deep inside large language models in real time to observe, detect, interpret, and modify model behavior before a hallucination can occur.

By intervening directly within the model’s internal decision-making process rather than running post-hoc checks, the platform stops fabrications at the source while simultaneously generating an audit trail for enterprise compliance and due diligence.

“AI has prematurely been put in a position of trust. Adding labels such as ‘use at your own risk’ flies in the face of proper governance or compliance,” Kevin Owens, co-founder and CEO of Resect AI, said in a news release. “We are building the next large enterprise AI company to bring transparency and accountability to AI for industries such as publishing, finance, healthcare, research, and education where factual accuracy is absolutely critical.”

Beyond its tech, the startup’s leadership is also bullish about its small-town presence.

Washougal is a city of roughly 18,000 residents, 175 miles south of Seattle, tucked along the Columbia River across from Portland. Resect AI employs four people at an office on Main Street — including its co-founders — out of a 30-person workforce spread across the Seattle area, California, New York, and Texas.

“We believe the talent is up to par and we loved the sense of community that we found when we first came up here,” Owens told GeekWire. “We have been coming to the greater Washington and Oregon areas on and off over the years and finally decided this needed to be our headquarters.”

Owens said the decision has already paid off, noting that the startup has quickly tapped into the region’s talent pool by recruiting PhDs from both the greater Seattle and Portland markets while connecting with Northwest capital markets leaders.

Resect AI is also planning to open an office in the Seattle area in the near future for engineering and to serve as a business hub.

Alongside Owens, Resect’s other co-founders include Tim Walton, chief artificial intelligence officer; Tyler Gerber, chief operating officer; and Tommy Lofgren, chief product and marketing officer.

The company plans to use the funding to accelerate research and development, expand its go-to-market initiatives, and fuel talent acquisition — bringing its total headcount to 50 by the end of 2026.

— Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years.

The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for workers and workforces alike,” Raman said.

Raman, who is based in San Francisco, began his career as a TV journalist and served as a speechwriter for President Obama and other political leaders. More recently he was an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom and led economic impact for Facebook.

— Jenny Lay-Flurrie was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft‘s Trusted Technology Group. In February, she had taken the role of vice president and head of Trusted Technology, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, responsible AI use and related topics.

Lay-Flurrie announced the change on LinkedIn, saying that she was “honoured, humbled and a little lost for words (yes,, it does occasionally happen ;)).”

The tech leader has been with Microsoft since 2005, and led the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion for more than a decade.

— Brian Gill has resigned as chief product and technology officer for DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based freight company. Gill was with DAT for more than three years and previously served as CPO for Nordstrom.

In a LinkedIn post, Gill did not give specifics on his next move but said he would be “rolling up my sleeves and building the many ideas that are suddenly so much easier to bring to life.”

Gill’s other past roles include executive positions at Hotwire and nearly a decade at Expedia. Last month DAT announced multiple promotions and hires to its leadership team.

— Colin Newman has joined Zillow Group as head of public policy. He was previously director of U.S. public policy for Amazon, leading initiatives on employment, workforce transformation, AI, transportation and economic development. He first took a government affairs role with Amazon’s Audible business in 2015 and moved to Amazon five years ago.

“I look forward to leveraging my government, legal, and public policy experience to support our efforts to simplify and democratize the housing process for everyone,” Newman said. His background includes legal counsel for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

— Lisa Finnegan is returning to Microsoft as vice president and human resources business partner for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Finnegan, who is based in Dublin, was previously with LinkedIn for more than eight years, departing in March 2025. Her interim role was with Lumera HR Consulting.

“It’s a pretty incredible time to (re)join Microsoft and the opportunity to help shape the people and organisation agenda across EMEA at this critical moment is incredibly compelling,” she said.

— James Lau, chief product officer at Hiya, announced this is his last week at the Seattle startup, which battles fraudulent calls and provides technology to protect voice identity. He’s been in the role for three years and previously worked at Microsoft over multiple stints.

Lau is launching a company called Entrovox, which he describes as an AI phone team that helps insurance agencies land new customers through state-of-the-art AI voice agents, branded caller ID and smart campaigns.

“There has never been a more exciting time for building, and I am deeply passionate about voice AI. Making AI sound genuinely human is a challenge I find irresistible,” Lau said.

— Jason Wilbur has left Oracle to join OpenAI‘s Seattle office as a leader in cloud partnerships.

Wilbur was with Oracle over two stints spanning more than six years and leaves the role of senior director of product management. Past jobs include CEO at Aarno Labs, co-founder of Require Security, and senior product manager at Amazon.

— Julia Liuson was appointed to Elastic’s board of directors. Earlier this year, Liuson resigned from Microsoft after more than 34 years. She was most recently president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. San Francisco’s Elastic bills itself as the “search AI company.”

— Dan Walter was promoted to vice president of fission technology for Everett, Wash.-based Zap Energy. Walter joined Zap earlier this year as the clean power startup announced it was expanding to pursue fission micro-reactors as well as fusion-based nuclear energy. Zap is No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Walter was previously at TerraPower for nearly a decade, most recently in a director role for the nuclear power company.

— Kelsey Wolf has joined next-gen battery company Group14 Technologies as director of communications and marketing. Wolf was previously the communications lead for Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that went bankrupt and was acquired this past spring. Group14 is No. 34 on the GeekWire 200.

“I’ve spent my career telling exciting stories about technology that changes how we work, how we find home, and how we move around the world. Up next, I will get to tell stories about the technology and materials powering our world,” she said.

— Tin Can, a Seattle startup selling Wi-Fi-enabled landline phones for kids, announced three hires:

• Evan Jacobs has joined as head of engineering, previously serving as a software development manager at Amazon Web Services. Jacobs is also a startup founder.
• Quinn Hawkins was named head of communities, joining from First Street, where he was chief product officer. His background includes leadership at Redfin and Microsoft.
• Masud Khan was named staff software engineer. Past employers include Apple, Databricks, Meta and Amazon.

Tin Can, which launched last year, is No. 153 on the GeekWire 200.

— EchoMark, ​the ​Bellevue, Wash., startup using forensic ​watermarking ​to identify ​the ​source of information leaks, ​has named Alex Gamoran vice president of enterprise sales. Gamoran was previously at Smartsheet for nearly a decade, leaving as regional vice president of commercial sales for North America.

“It struck me that every security-conscious enterprise is going to need a solution to the types of information leaks that conventional security software is blind to — and that’s when I knew I wanted to be part of EchoMark,” Gamoran said via email.

— Sara Dutta was named director of AI innovation and partnerships for Seattle biopharmaceutical company Omeros. She previously founded the life sciences consultancy Ocilisni and was a director at Novo Nordisk, focused on external partnerships and emerging technologies.

Last year, Omeros struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with Novo Nordisk, giving the latter exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize a clinical-stage drug candidate that treats rare blood and kidney disorders. Omeros won Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

— Rebekah Bastian announced that she is leaving mpathic as chief marketing officer. She joined the Bellevue, Wash., startup working to make AI safe in December. Bastian previously launched and was CEO of the life-and-career social platform OwnTrail. She was with Zillow Group for more than 14 years and also worked at GlowForge.

“I’m giving myself some intentional time to explore ideas and let them incubate before deciding where they lead,” she said. That could include new companies or initiatives within existing companies, and her areas of focus span “human agency, creative entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and generally how humans find meaning and thrive in the age of AI.”

— Seattle-area wine recommendation startup Theodora has appointed Heather Stephens founding marketing lead. Stephens has worked for more than a decade in consumer and B2B marketing, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy development.

— Marc Brown, former global head of M&A and strategic investments at Microsoft and now managing director of venture capital coverage at JPMorgan, has joined the board of trustees of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, an organization supporting civic engagement for young people.

— Adrienne Lopez, a Seattle-based marketing leader who has worked on initiatives with organizations including Meta, WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, was named executive vice president of WH Inc.

— Washington Research Foundation announced its new cohort of venture analysts: Jessica Ayers, Ankit Azad, Nello Gu, Michael Malone and Elya Shamskhou. The program helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gain expertise in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.

NewDays, a Seattle startup using a generative AI therapy to treat people with mild dementia, has raised additional funding and closed its seed round with $16 million. The funding was led by Madrona and General Catalyst.

The company also announced on Wednesday that it has expanded its services to Nevada, joining Washington, California, Florida, Texas and New York. NewDays offers telehealth visits with human clinicians once or twice a month alongside unlimited conversations with an AI companion named Sunny.

“Our goal isn’t to add years — it’s to add quality to the years people have,” said CEO and co-founder Babak Parviz.

The startup is addressing a widespread issue: one in three Americans over 65 experiences cognitive decline, with 11% living with dementia and another 22% with mild cognitive impairment. Patients use Sunny to engage in conversational topics, memory exercises, and language or reasoning games designed to strengthen cognitive function.

While these cognitive strategies are clinically proven, they have historically lacked broad accessibility, Parviz said. NewDays aims to make treatment scalable using AI and demonstrate measurable improvement.

This past July at the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, the company presented research showing that NewDays patients with dementia performed better on cognitive tests than expected historical decline curves — translating to roughly 18 months of preserved cognitive function. The study was limited to 24 patients, half of whom have dementia and the other half experiencing other cognitive impairment.

“Generative AI under the guidance of an expert human clinician is what finally lets us deliver a medically proven intervention at that scale. That’s the whole thesis of the company,” Parviz said via email.

To further validate its platform, NewDays is currently running a randomized controlled trial with Kaiser Permanente in California.

Users can try Sunny for free. If they’re interested in the full program, there is a free 20-minute assessment to evaluate suitability. NewDays is covered by traditional Medicare and working to secure in-network status with private insurers and Medicare Advantage plans. Participants in the program also have the option of paying $150 out-of-pocket for each clinical session.

Smart home device maker Wyze wants to end notification fatigue by turning security footage into something more akin to an Instagram feed.

The Kirkland, Wash.-based company launched “Wyze Stories,” a new AI-powered feature that stitches together clip sequences from multiple cameras into a single, chronological event.

Instead of firing off separate alerts as a visitor moves from the driveway to the front porch, the system uses multi-camera grouping and event importance filtering to deliver a unified highlight reel alongside a descriptive, text-based summary.

“Honestly, the number one thing people complain about with security cameras is getting blown up with notifications,” Dave Crosby, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Wyze, said in a news release Tuesday. “Instead of digging through a mess of clips, you just tap through daily stories like your house is your favorite social feed.”

Within the app, stories are indicated by glowing green-and-purple rings on the home tab, allowing users to tap through footage, hold to pause, or watch events at double speed. The feature also uses AI to generate instant written summaries of detected activity — such as noting when a delivery driver leaves a box at the door — and automatically highlights high-importance events while suppressing repetitive, minor alerts.

The new feature is available as part of Wyze’s top-tier “Cam Unlimited Pro” subscription, which costs $19.99 a month and includes features like cross-camera grouping, 24/7 emergency dispatch, and 60 days of cloud storage.

Wyze Stories works across most of the company’s hardware lineup, with the exception of older legacy models like the original Wyze Cam, Doorbell v1, and Outdoor v1 and v2.

Founded in 2017 by a trio of former Amazon employees, Wyze originally launched with a $20 smart camera before expanding into a broader lineup of sensors, lighting, and home security systems. The company raised $110 million in 2021 and ranks No. 20 on the GeekWire 200 index of top Pacific Northwest startups.

Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona released its sixth annual Intelligent Applications 40 list this week, naming 45 private AI companies (the five extras come from ties) that have collectively raised $410 billion from investors across the industry.

Three of them — Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks — account for 92% of that total.

The uneven distribution of funding reflects a larger split in the tech industry, as the largest AI companies make huge bets on the computing capacity needed to meet demand for their models, while almost everyone else builds businesses on top of them.

The frontier labs are “increasingly funded by strategic capital from the likes of Amazon, Google, Nvidia and SoftBank rather than traditional venture,” Madrona’s Matt McIlwain and Rolanda Fu wrote in a post accompanying the list. That scale, they added, “makes every other category on this list look capital light by comparison.”

On top of that, he said, hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into OpenAI and Anthropic.

“And what I say to both the big tech companies and to the people funding the model companies: thank you very much,” McIlwain said on Bloomberg TV, noting that the five largest tech companies will spend an estimated $750 billion in capital expenditures this year.

But even setting those big three aside, McIlwain said, the rest of the winners have raised an average of more than $800 million each. That’s a total of $34 billion combined. Companies across the list are raising far more than they used to, enough that Madrona had to redraw its own categories.

The list sorts companies by total capital raised, and this year the ceiling for “early stage” rose to $50 million, up from the $30 million threshold that held for the previous five lists. The cutoff for “emerging enablers,” its category for smaller infrastructure companies, doubled to $100 million.

“Companies across the board are raising more money, and the definition for what ‘early’ means continues to shift higher,” McIlwain and Fu wrote.

Madrona has published the IA40 since 2021 as a roster of the private companies it considers most important in building and enabling AI applications. According to the firm, this year’s list drew on input from 72 investors representing 54 venture and corporate firms, who nominated and voted on more than 450 companies, with PitchBook data factored into the scoring.

Two Seattle-area companies made this year’s list:

• Clarify, which builds an AI-native CRM, appears in the early-stage category for the second straight year, with $23 million raised. It acquired San Francisco’s Seam AI in July.
• Gradial, which builds AI agents for enterprise marketing, is a first-time winner in the mid-stage category; it raised $65 million in June at a $675 million valuation, bringing its total to $120 million.

Last year’s list included two other Seattle-area companies in addition to Clarify.

• OpenAI acquired one of them, Bellevue-based Statsig, for $1.1 billion in September 2025, making Statsig founder Vijaye Raji its CTO of applications.
• Security startup Dropzone AI, which was on the list last year, did not repeat this year.

Madrona, one of the Seattle region’s largest and oldest venture capital firms, is an investor in all four — Clarify, Gradial, Statsig and Dropzone AI — although it also invests outside the region, and many of the companies on the IA40 are not in its portfolio.

Several of the companies on this year’s list have engineering centers in the Seattle region, including Anthropic, which leased 113,000 square feet in South Lake Union this year; OpenAI, which expanded to nearly 300,000 square feet in downtown Bellevue after the Statsig acquisition; and Anduril, which employs about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle.

Databricks, the San Francisco-based data and AI company (which leased 142,000 square feet in Bellevue this year), is the only company to appear on all six IA40 lists. That said, 23 of last year’s 40 winners returned this year, a 58% repeat rate, up from 33% the year before.

McIlwain and Fu wrote that the biggest and most established companies on the list are holding their spots, noting that “the age of experimentation is giving way to an age of enterprise readiness,” with buyers and investors “paying premiums for companies that can demonstrate real ROI.”

Madrona will recognize the winners at its IA40 Summit in Seattle on Sept. 29 and 30.

Updated with Matt McIlwain’s comments to Bloomberg TV.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Tukwila, Wash.-based Juno Propulsion to support the startup’s development of a non-toxic propulsion system for in-space applications.

The two-year Phase II project, funded through NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, will be conducted in partnership with the University of Washington and UW Professor Carl Knowlen’s lab. The focus of the funding is to support work on Juno’s Product Development Unit (PDU), which uses rotating detonation rocket engine technology.

By combining high-efficiency propulsion with non-toxic propellants, Juno aims to enable spacecraft to maneuver farther and faster while reducing the risks associated with traditional toxic propellants. Work on the PDU is intended to advance Juno’s system to Technology Readiness Level 8, positioning it near production-ready status on the standard 1-to-9 TRL scale.

“This award represents an important milestone in taking our rotating detonation propulsion technology from development and flight demonstration toward a production-ready product,” Juno Propulsion CEO Alexis Harroun said in a news release. “We’re excited to continue our collaboration with the University of Washington and Professor Knowlen’s lab as we take the next step toward delivering this technology to commercial and government customers.”

The Phase II grant, announced last week, follows up on a $275,000 Phase I SBIR grant that was awarded in 2024.

Juno Propulsion’s team is getting ready for Project Iris, an on-orbit demonstration of its propulsion technology that’s due to fly aboard Momentus’ Vigoride 8 satellite platform in 2027. The lessons learned from Project Iris will feed directly into work on the PDU.

The startup was founded in 2023 by Harroun and chief technology officer Ari Martinez, who met while earning their Ph.D.s at Purdue University. Harroun received her undergraduate degree in aeronautics and astronautics from UW and interned at Blue Origin, Boeing and NASA before heading to Purdue.

In June, Juno Propulsion announced the close of a $1.4 million pre-seed financing round, led by SOSV with participation from Hypernova Fund, Leslie Ventures, Activate, Collaborative Fund, Safar Partners and Cape Fear Ventures.

Seattle-based cannabis data analytics company Headset has agreed to pay more than $1 million to resolve allegations that it improperly received and obtained forgiveness for a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan.

The settlement, announced Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington, stems from a May 2024 whistleblower lawsuit filed by Sidesolve LLC under the False Claims Act. Sidesolve is a data analytics company that uses AI algorithms to hunt for potential pandemic loan fraud across public records.

The government alleged that Headset was ineligible for the Small Business Administration (SBA) loan it received in February 2021 — and had forgiven in August 2021 — because its work supporting the marijuana industry conflicts with federal law.

Under the terms of the deal, Headset paid $100,000 within 30 days of signing the agreement in early August and will pay the remaining balance of more than $900,000 over four years through August 2030. The company made no admission of wrongdoing, stating it agreed to the payments to avoid the risks and expense of litigation.

Headset was founded in 2015 by Cy Scott, Brian Wansolich, and Scott Vickers. The trio previously co-founded Leafly, the popular online cannabis strain database and marketplace, which was acquired by Privateer Holdings in 2011. After departing Leafly, they launched Headset to bring business intelligence and real-time sales metrics to the legal pot industry.

The startup functions like a Nielsen for the cannabis sector, aggregating point-of-sale data from dispensaries and retailers to provide market trends, pricing insights, and consumer demographics.

Over the years, the company has raised $29.4 million in total funding from investors including Poseidon Asset Management and Canopy Rivers, expanding its data coverage across legal state and international markets.

Also, a fast-growing electric micromobility startup born out of Rivian in Silicon Valley, has quietly pulled into Seattle and planted a flag at the epicenter of the city’s bike culture with an office on the north end of Lake Union.

The 17,459-square-foot space at 1300 N. Northlake Way — which previously housed military-grade autonomous vehicle startup Overland AI — is situated directly along the Burke-Gilman Trail at the busy intersection of the Fremont and Wallingford neighborhoods. The headquarters for Brooks Running and the flagship store for outdoor retailer Evo are right across the street.

Ben Steele, Also’s chief commercial officer, is heading up the office. A nine-year veteran of REI, he was attracted to Also’s mission-based vision for the future of micromobility. He’s been tasked with building out the startup’s business operations, marketing, and customer functions from scratch.

First he had to find a dynamic office space. He called the location the hottest spot in the No. 1 bike commuting city in America.

“If you do the heat map in Strava for bike commuting, that is the white-hot spot,” Steele told GeekWire during a tour of the office. “When we said where do we want to be, we want to be where our customers are, where they’re working, where they’re living, where they’re shopping. And we want to be where bike commuters are. And this is that hot spot.”

Founded inside electric vehicle maker Rivian more than three years ago as a special projects group, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Also officially spun out as an independent company in March 2025. The startup is focused on developing software-defined micromobility solutions designed to replace car trips and last-mile commercial delivery, backed by partnerships with Amazon and DoorDash.

Also was co-founded by Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe alongside Chris Yu, Rivian’s former vice president of future programs, who serves as Also’s president. The startup has already commanded major investor backing, achieving a $1 billion unicorn valuation following its spinout to fund vehicle development and scale its commercial operations.

The Seattle space officially opened in April and is currently home to 38 employees, with capacity to grow to around 60 on a second floor featuring sweeping views of Lake Union and the downtown skyline.

Also employs roughly 350 people globally across Palo Alto, Seattle, and a new commercial team in Ghent, Belgium. The hybrid Seattle office requires employees in three days a week — though Steele notes cross-functional visits regularly push daily headcount past 50. The company has drawn talent from Seattle-area giants like REI, Brooks, Rad Power Bikes, Sonos, and Amazon.

Steele pointed to the city’s unique intersection of cycling culture, software technology, and deep consumer retail roots as the primary draw for building a major presence outside Silicon Valley.

“If you think about retail and commercial talent, innovative companies like Nordstrom and Amazon and Starbucks and yes, REI, the talent pool that we have to draw from for this part of the business, this is really the sweet spot to do it,” Steele said.

On the ground floor of the building, Also plans to build out its very first dedicated retail store and customer service bay, complete with space for a co-working or food and beverage partner. Steele called the layout a deliberate move to keep the commercial team grounded in real-world rider interactions.

“The theory is, we want our team really living that experience with our customers,” Steele said. “To have our retail and our office together really means we’re not theorizing about what does that experience look like with our customers. We’re living it every day.”

In the meantime, local riders can try Also’s flagship e-bike, the TM-B, across the street through a pop-up at Evo. Seattle is one of 10 initial U.S. markets where mobile sales teams are conducting test spins out of dedicated vans, coffee shops, and partner locations like Evo and Rivian spaces. Nationwide, the company has already surpassed 10,000 test rides for the high-tech bike, which starts at $3,500.

Beyond personal e-bikes, Also is setting its sights on transforming commercial delivery — a push anchored by a high-profile multi-year collaboration with Amazon, headquartered just across the lake in South Lake Union.

The partnership, announced last fall, centers on a customized pedal-assist e-cargo quad (the TM-Q) designed to navigate dense city centers and operate within dedicated bike lanes. Also plans to roll out prototype units with Amazon in two cities later this year before broader expansion in 2027.

“If you think about a city like Paris, where they’ve closed a lot of Paris down to cars, you can use a vehicle like that to get into the city,” Steele said, pointing out that the quad leverages automotive-grade technology to carry heavy delivery loads up steep hills without the high maintenance of traditional bike chains and derailleurs.

The company is also collaborating with DoorDash to test autonomous last-mile delivery using smaller form-factor vehicles capable of traveling up to 30 mph on streets, hopping curbs, and navigating sidewalks directly to a customer’s front door.

Also enters the market as Seattle’s e-bike landscape undergoes a major shift. The city was once ground zero for breakout success Rad Power Bikes, which helped pioneer consumer e-bikes before suffering a steep post-pandemic downturn that culminated in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and an asset sale early this year.

Steele, who watched Rad’s trajectory from his time leading retail operations at REI, noted that Also is taking explicit notes from the broader e-bike industry’s past missteps. Rather than treating their machines like standard bicycles with added batteries, Also is focusing heavily on custom, automotive-grade hardware and software-defined integration — while staying intentionally lean on retail overhead.

“Building the best e-bike is not our mission,” Steele said. “Building the future of micromobility is our mission. And the first thing we’re building is the best e-bike.”

That philosophy directly shapes how Also plans to roll out its physical footprint. With customer orders now converting and initial Launch Edition bikes shipping over the coming weeks, Steele says the startup is taking an adaptable approach rather than rushing to sign leases on traditional retail store networks.

In addition to fixed hubs like the North Lake Union location, Also is launching a national “test spin tour” using mobile vans to bring 10 bikes and dedicated staff to 20 cities across six weeks.

“I don’t want to be beholden to a single model,” Steele said of the expansion plans. “The thing I wanted to not do is say let’s go build 10 stores and then see if that’s right. Long-term vision is to be really adaptable and really agile with how we do it, and to have what’s the right solution in each market versus a single model that we try to drop in everywhere.”

For Steele, bringing Also to Seattle isn’t just about opening an outpost or testing hardware — it’s about actively shaping the daily routine of local commuters along the lake.

“We want this to be a part of that vibrancy of the neighborhood, not just a place you go by,” Steele said.

That civic integration hits close to home for Steele, who lives near the University of Washington and instead of sitting in his car on Montlake, commutes down the Burke-Gilman Trail on an Also e-bike every morning.

“I arrive at work less stressed out on the Burke-Gilman Trail,” Steele said. “I’m living the product benefit every day. It’s pretty awesome.”