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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did not announce a specific next role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company has approximately 50 employees, including clinicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft President Brad Smith says someone apparently “failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers” before the Trump administration cut off the company’s ability to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency.

In an interview with Politico, published Thursday, Smith rejected Vice President JD Vance’s accusations of fraud and called his claim that Microsoft replaced laid-off Americans with foreign workers “completely off base.” He said Microsoft has “always been committed to a high integrity and high compliance” approach to immigration.

“We will stand by our record,” Smith said. “And I hope that folks at the White House might look again and look at what we think is a more accurate picture.”

At a White House news conference last week, Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year while receiving 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said, after asserting that there “has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft.”

Critics of the visa programs say tech companies have used them to displace U.S. workers, and that the job ads companies must run before sponsoring workers for green cards often appear in places few American job seekers will see. Labor Department records show Microsoft’s required print ads ran mostly in The Seattle Times.

Smith said most of Microsoft’s recent visa and green card applications were for people already working at the company, many of them for years, because of long green card backlogs. He also said Microsoft hired 9,200 American workers in its last fiscal year, a number he said was “left out of the narrative.”

The Microsoft executive also rejected the idea that the company pays visa holders less. “It doesn’t matter whether you came on a visa or you’re an American worker,” he said. “Everybody has the same compensation system.”

He warned that the crackdown could send “the most talented next wave” of engineers to other countries. Five of the six tech leaders President Trump honored with national medals last week, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, came to the U.S. as immigrants, Smith noted, and their companies together account for more than 25% of the value of the S&P 500.

“Let’s not put that at risk,” he said.

The suspension doesn’t stop Microsoft from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. Those are temporary work visas, typically granted for three years at a time and generally limited to six.

Amazon led in H-1B approvals for new employment in fiscal 2025, with 4,644, followed by Meta with 1,555 and Microsoft with 1,394, according to an analysis of USCIS data by the National Foundation for American Policy.

What Microsoft lost is access to a key step toward permanent residency. The program, known as PERM, is run by the Labor Department. Companies use it to sponsor foreign employees for permanent residency, also known as a green card. The employer has to advertise the job and show the department that no qualified, available U.S. worker can fill it.

PERM is commonly used for employees already working in the U.S. on temporary visas, including H-1Bs.

The interview didn’t address Microsoft’s outsized use of PERM. The company had more PERM cases decided than any other employer in fiscal 2025 and the first nine months of fiscal 2026, according to a GeekWire analysis of Labor Department data. Other big tech companies, including Amazon and Google, sharply reduced their PERM filings after early 2023.

— Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has named Joe Levy chief revenue officer. Levy joins from Peregrine, a public safety data platform, and early in his career was a drill sergeant and combat engineer for the U.S. Army Reserve.

Levy praised the Brinc team, saying, “They’re passionate about what they do with a vision that will change the public safety landscape. I’m grateful to join them and help scale what they’ve built.”

Brinc announced a $125 million funding round in July, bringing its total raised to more than $280 million. The startup is hiring for numerous roles and is No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Jessie Minton vice president and chief digital and information officer, a new position that brings the roles together.

Former Chief Data Officer Jeff Leek stepped down and is now a professor in the Fred Hutch Public Health Sciences Division and CEO of Synthesize Bio, a startup he co-founded in 2023. Last month, Fred Hutch announced Shawn Stapleton as VP and chief AI and innovation officer, another new role.

Minton joins from Washington University in St. Louis where she has been vice chancellor for technology and chief information officer since 2022. She was previously VP and CIO at the University of Oregon.

Fred Hutch praised Minton’s track record “of modernizing complex technology organizations, strengthening cybersecurity, governing large-scale Epic environments and aligning technology strategy with clinical, research and academic priorities.” The new role is effective Dec. 7.

— Jason (JJ) James has been named chief information officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners. James has more than 25 years in technology leadership and was previously CIO at companies including Aptos Retail, Net Health and Optima Healthcare Solutions.

“My focus is putting AI to work across Acumatica while keeping security at the core, so we can move fast without compromising the trust our expanding community of customers, partners and developers places in us,” James said in a statement.

— Seattle tech leader Andrew Bennett has joined San Francisco-based Motive as chief marketing officer. Bennett was with Smartsheet for a decade, leaving as CMO in 2024. He is also a limited partner with the investment firm Stage 2 Capital.

Motive provides software, hardware and AI-powered tools to help businesses manage physical fleets of vehicles and heavy equipment.

— Steven Chen has left LinkedIn, where he served as director and head of corporate legal and sustainability, to become a senior director at Rubrik.

— Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, has appointed John Barrow as director of a new initiative enabling the purchase and sale of data center projects under development.

Barrow joins from CyrusOne, a global data center developer and operator, and was with CPS Energy for more than 15 years.

“In my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the data center boom,” Barrow said. Participants are struggling to quickly secure locations and energy, he said, adding that LevelTen “can solve those problems for industry participants at scale.”

— Certivo, a Seattle startup building technology to automate supply chain compliance, has named Jeffrey Bornstein to its board. Bornstein was with GE for nearly three decades and served in roles including vice chairman and chief financial officer.

“He has run the numbers for some of the most complex industrial supply chains in the world while regulators checked every one of them,” said Certivo CEO Kunal Chopra. Certivo is No. 194 on the GeekWire 200.

— Convera, a Seattle-based fintech company helping businesses transfer money across borders, has added to its leadership team. All four will work out of Convera’s other offices.

• Mike Cahill has been appointed EVP and chief operating officer after joining in June as interim chief product and technology officer. Past employers include Early Warning Services, the company behind Zelle, as well as PayPal, Boku and American Express.
• Jon Southall has been named SVP and chief technology officer. He joins from PayPal and has also worked for Boku and Braintree.
• Tui Allen has joined as SVP and chief product officer. She previously worked for employers including Ticketmaster, Shopify and Blackbaud.
• Chris Steinig has been named CIO after leading Convera’s technology operations for four years.

— Portable Consultants a Redmond, Wash., enterprise telecommunications and data connectivity provider, has named two leaders.

• Carrie Ferrero has joined as VP of product and marketing development. She previously served as VP of sales engineering at Connectbase.
• Troy Brockway has been named director of client development, joining from SpikeUp Media.

— Reperio Health, a Portland, Ore., startup bringing preventive health check-ups into the home, has named Brad Nations to its board of directors. Nations is CEO and founder of JB Advisory.

— iQmetrix, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company building point-of-sale and retail management software for cell phone and wireless stores, has appointed Beniamin Longodor as VP of global growth. Longodor, who is based in Austria, was previously with NTS Retail.

Amazon’s Kindle is joining the ranks of TVs and garage doors.

The company on Thursday unveiled the Kindle Click, a $34.99 Bluetooth remote control that lets readers prop up their e-readers and turn pages without holding or reaching for them. It’s the first official Kindle remote, debuting alongside a redesigned lineup of Kindle e-readers.

Amazon says it’s meant for reading under the covers, on a treadmill, or on an airplane tray table. It’s available for preorder and ships Oct. 28. It recharges over USB-C, includes side buttons for adjusting brightness, and works with Kindles released in 2024 or later.

The company cited BookTok as an inspiration, Bloomberg reported, a reference to the community of readers on TikTok who post book recommendations, reviews and their reading setups. Kindle fans there have been showing off third-party clickers for years.

Amazon is also bringing back physical page-turn buttons, which disappeared when the company discontinued the Kindle Oasis in 2024. This time they come in a separate $79.99 magnetic cover, which works only with the new Signature Edition versions of the Paperwhite and Colorsoft.

The new Kindles have screens that sit flush with the edges, colors that wrap around to the front, and optional aluminum housings. They also have user-replaceable batteries to comply with European Union rules, Amazon told The Verge.

The base Kindle starts at $149.99, or $189.99 in aluminum. The Paperwhite starts at $199.99 and the Colorsoft at $289.99, with Signature Editions at $249.99 and $319.99. Those prices match what Amazon has charged since August, when it raised Kindle prices by $40 to $50, citing memory and storage costs. The base Kindle is available now. The Paperwhite and Colorsoft ship Oct. 28.

Amazon doesn’t disclose financial results or unit sales for its devices, but Kindle device sales hit their highest point in more than a decade last year, with three straight years of double-digit growth, Kevin Keith, Amazon VP of devices, said at a media preview, according to Bloomberg.

Chris Green, Amazon VP of industrial design, also told Bloomberg where he’d like to take the design next: “At some point we will get to something more like a credit card that’s all display that you’ll be able to flex with your hand for a page turn.”

Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external and legal affairs organization led by Brad Smith, its vice chair and president, according to internal emails Thursday from Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Brent Colburn, Microsoft’s VP of global public affairs, was named interim communications leader, effective next week, reporting to Smith. Colburn announced this month that he was leaving the company in mid-October. He will now stay through December and is not a candidate for the permanent role.

Frank X. Shaw, the longtime Microsoft communications chief who announced earlier this month that he would leave the company at the end of the year, will step away from his current responsibilities and serve as an advisor to Smith and Colburn during the transition, according to the memos.

Building in public: Nadella’s memo described the change in the organizational structure as a response to a shifting media environment, and said the larger plan is to make employees a bigger part of Microsoft’s public voice.

He said Microsoft needs to “find new ways to connect directly with all of our constituencies” in a media environment he called “increasingly fragmented and noisier than ever.”

“In many ways, the people closest to the work have the best opportunity to shape how Microsoft is understood,” Nadella wrote. He said he wants to help engineers, sellers, partners and others “closest to our products and customers” become “an even bigger part of how we tell our story, all connected by a shared strategy and set of principles.”

The approach Nadella described is closer to how AI labs and startups operate. OpenAI and Anthropic tend to be more fluid with their blogs and livestreams, and AI researchers and leaders are more likely to post directly and informally in their own voices.

Microsoft has been working to make more of a mark of its own in AI, building in-house models under Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI group, while Copilot trails ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in consumer adoption. In recent weeks, Meta has made a splash with its Muse AI assistant and a new device called Muse Charm, a palm-sized gadget it previewed Wednesday.

Nadella and the company’s engineering leadership have been pushing to modernize Microsoft’s communications, moving toward a more direct approach and building in public, according to a person familiar with the situation.

“We will learn, we will experiment, and we will evolve,” Nadella wrote. “There is a fundamentally new way to think about communications, and this team will be central to building it.”

Smith echoed the point, writing that Microsoft will “likely have more employees and executives acting as part of Microsoft’s public voice, including on social media.”

The timing: Shaw’s shift to an advisory role surprised some inside the company. Announcing his exit two weeks ago, he said he would be at Microsoft “through the end of the calendar year.” Microsoft said at the time that it would take “the coming months” to determine its future communications leadership.

Contacted via phone, Shaw described this as the formalization of the plan that was announced. He will still be at Microsoft through the end of the year in an advisory role.

In a statement, Microsoft said Shaw “has been a trusted counselor and leader at Microsoft for more than two decades, and we’re grateful he will continue to act as an advisor during the transition.”

Nadella thanked Shaw in his memo, saying he has “made tremendous contributions to the company and to our communications function over the last 17+ years” and has been “a great source of counsel to our leadership team and to me personally, across the company’s biggest moments.”

In his memo, Smith wrote of Shaw that he has “worked as closely with him as almost anyone” over those years, and that Shaw’s “enduring impact on Microsoft and this team will be felt for years to come. I will miss him.”

Smith said Microsoft has launched a search for a new chief communications officer that includes internal and external candidates. He will work on the selection with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, and Amy Coleman, its chief people officer.

The next chief communications officer is also expected to report to Smith, which indicates the change is permanent and not just for the interim period.

The new structure: Nadella called Smith one of the few leaders who “embody Microsoft’s voice” authentically, citing his “rare ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity, conviction, and trust.”

Smith’s organization handles Microsoft’s legal, regulatory and public policy work, including antitrust matters, litigation and government relations. Communications will now sit alongside those functions rather than with marketing and product, although both memos emphasize continued coordination between the two.

The communications leadership team will expand to include Caitlin McCabe, Carol Ann Browne and Dave Imperiale, according to Smith’s memo, citing the communications roles they play for Nadella, Smith and Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business. Kate Frischmann will also join the team, reflecting her role on the public affairs side of Smith’s organization. In his interim role, Colburn will join Numoto’s leadership team in addition to Smith’s.

Nadella wrote that Microsoft’s upcoming fall events present “a real opportunity to bring together our product story, our marketing, and our communications in new ways.”

Seattle-based Hubble Network has reached a $1.6 billion valuation after raising $200 million in new funding to power its satellite-based Bluetooth connectivity network. The fresh capital propels the startup into unicorn territory as it works to connect billions of everyday, off-the-shelf devices directly to space.

The Series C round, led by Smith Point Capital, with Seraphim, Carthona Capital, Earthshot Ventures, Y Combinator, and RPM Ventures, brings total funding to $300 million. Hubble Network raised $70 million a year ago.

Hubble currently operates six satellites in low-Earth orbit and plans to expand to a full 60-satellite constellation built with satellite operator Muon Space by 2030. The company says its hybrid network — which blends ground-based tracking with satellite coverage — is live for pilot customers today, including software firm Samsara, with data speeds and update frequencies set to increase as more spacecraft launch.

“When we said we’d connect Bluetooth chips to satellites, most of the industry said the physics wouldn’t allow it,” Alex Haro, CEO and co-founder, said in a news release on Wednesday. “Today we’re turning that early skepticism into a global opportunity.”

Hubble’s swift rise underscores the Seattle region’s growing status as an epicenter for low-Earth orbit satellite development. While heavyweights like SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond and Amazon’s Leo satellite division in Kirkland focus on high-bandwidth orbital internet, Hubble is carving out a distinct niche in low-power, direct-to-satellite IoT connectivity — reinforcing the Pacific Northwest’s footprint across commercial space technology.

The company, which employs about 70 people, is No. 135 on the GeekWire 200, our ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Hubble’s system works via a software update, allowing standard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips — found in everyday items like package trackers, vehicles, and pharmaceuticals — to broadcast signals directly to space. By pairing a ground-based network of nearly 90 million scanners with its satellite constellation, Hubble aims to replace costly cellular trackers with a setup running on roughly 50-cent chips and $4 monthly subscriptions.

Founded in 2021 by Haro, who previously co-founded location-sharing app Life360, and CTO Ben Wild, who invented Amazon Sidewalk, Hubble is positioning itself to disrupt traditional asset tracking by making global monitoring economically viable for everyday goods.

Haro noted that combining terrestrial and space networks drops tracking costs low enough to extend real-time visibility beyond high-value cargo to routine consumer items, like tracking a new pair of shoes directly from a warehouse to a front doorstep.

The company has no connection to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Instead, Hubble Network’s name plays off the idea that its network can serve as a hub for BLE transmissions.

Seattle health-tech startup DexCare today announced it’s acquiring Mila Health, a fellow Seattle-area company that has built AI agents to call and text patients seeking medical appointments.

The startups did not disclose the terms of the deal.

DexCare, which spun out of Providence’s digital innovation group a decade ago, helps healthcare organizations fill appointment slots and manages information including patient referral requirements, insurance and scheduling protocols. The company serves 57 million patients nationwide, and customers include Kaiser Permanente, Piedmont, Texas Health Resources and Tampa General.

Mila’s technology can help answer questions related to available appointments and patient qualifications. The startup said it takes only hours to embed its technology into existing systems and launch AI agents.

“Healthcare can’t rely on out-of-the-box large language models because they’re unpredictable and can’t be audited,” said Shailu Verma, co-founder and CEO of Mila, in a statement. “With DexCare, providers and payers can configure an AI agent to complete the tasks they can’t staff for.”

Added Matt Blosl, CEO of DexCare: “AI solutions are everywhere, but health systems quickly realize that building the infrastructure, scaling the pilot, and managing the agent’s boundaries is untenable.”

Providence initially started DexCare to help with digital patient acquisition by better coordinating health system capacity and appointment booking. The startup has raised $146 million, with its most recent round totaling $75 million in 2023. It previously acquired Womp, a Bellingham, Wash.-based online commerce platform, in 2022.

The company was also a finalist for Health Innovation of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards. It’s No. 43 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, and has approximately 133 employees, according to PitchBook.

Verma helped launch Mila in January 2024 and previously served as chief product officer of strategy and innovation at UnitedHealth Group. He spent five years at Amazon Web Services as a product manager, leaving in 2021.

PitchBook reports that Mila participated in the Advanced Technology Development Center accelerator and that no equity or funding was exchanged as part of the program. The startup appears not to have raised any venture capital and has 25 employees.

The Gates Foundation is pledging to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence for health workers, farmers and teachers, largely in the world’s poorest countries, funding AI tools for people the market would otherwise overlook.

The bet is that AI can help reaccelerate the world’s progress against child mortality, poverty and disease, which has slowed sharply as governments cut global health funding.

The Seattle-based foundation’s new financial commitment, released Monday evening in conjunction with its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, illustrates the double-edged sword of AI at a moment when the U.S. in particular is preoccupied with what the technology might damage or destroy.

Bill Gates, who issued his own AI warnings in an essay three weeks ago, writes in the new report that the risks “are real and deserve serious attention.” He adds, “AI could be a great equalizer — or widen the gap. This is not a long-range prediction. It’s a present-tense choice.”

In this case, Gates writes, he’s focusing on “the possibility that AI, if shaped well, could expand who has access to solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that has too often been out of reach.”

The window is short, he writes: “I believe that the decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months — about how AI is built, funded, and deployed — will determine whether this technology primarily benefits the people who already have the most or reaches those who have the least.”

Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, in an interview with GeekWire, called the $1 billion a “down payment,” saying he expects the figure to grow significantly after the first two years.

For this first installment, 40% of the money will go to education, 40% to health care, 10% to agriculture and 10% to digital infrastructure, including datasets in languages the models don’t handle, according to the foundation.

More than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, according to the report. Leading AI speech recognition systems make errors less than 6% of the time in English and more than 60% of the time in Yoruba, a West African language spoken by tens of millions of people, for example.

Most people in Africa use feature phones rather than smartphones, Suzman said, so the tools have to work by voice. That means collecting recordings of speech, not just written text, in local accents and including children’s voices. He said the foundation works with Google and Microsoft on AI language initiatives.

Winding down: Gates announced in May 2025 that he would give away virtually all his wealth and close the foundation in 2045, which requires doubling its spending over those 20 years. The foundation had previously planned to close 20 years after his death.

As part of that plan, the foundation will need to give away $200 billion before it shuts down. Its budgeted payout is $9 billion this year, the largest in its history. Suzman said the $1 billion over two years comes out of its core budget.

Goals for its final two decades include cutting preventable child deaths in half again, eradicating polio and malaria, and bringing tuberculosis and HIV under control.

The report’s data section shows how far off the pace the world is. Child mortality, neonatal mortality and HIV are all projected to miss their 2030 targets. HIV incidence is on track to fall only to 0.22 new cases per 1,000 people, more than 10 times the target of 0.02.

Early AI results: The report makes the case that AI could change those trajectories. It points to a number of tools already in use in different settings:

• Penda Health, a network of affordable clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, where an AI tool built into patient records has raised diagnostic accuracy by 16 percentage points.
• In the U.S., seventh graders using a tool called Kiddom Atlas across 21 middle schools gained the equivalent of six extra months of learning in a single year.
• In India, the state of Maharashtra runs a free AI advisory service called MahaVISTAAR that has signed up more than 740,000 farmers, with 70,000 more joining every month.

The foundation has supported all three, according to the report’s endnotes. The endnotes also cite OpenAI’s account of its work with Penda Health on the clinical copilot.

One caveat: the evidence behind the examples is early. Suzman said the education work is “still on a relatively small scale,” and pointed to agriculture as the area already operating at size.

Suzman said the foundation spent years experimenting with AI without committing at this scale, wary of getting ahead of what the technology could actually deliver in its areas. Progress in the models over the past year, and results from early investments, convinced him otherwise.

“We now can state with a pretty high degree of confidence there are real deliverables that we can see across health, across education, across agricultural development,” he said.

What AI won’t fix: Asked whether AI can substitute for the money the U.S. and other governments have cut from global health, Suzman said: “Sadly, no.” The cuts run to “tens of billions of dollars,” he said, and they are hitting basic services now. He cited the purchase of bed nets and antiretroviral drugs, and care for mothers before and after birth.

“That’s affecting families right now with a real impact,” he said. “Ideally, you combine the two [AI and aid funding], and that’s how you get hugely accelerated progress.”

Suzman said the foundation will keep pressing the U.S. to remain a leader in global health. Despite the cuts, he said, it has been encouraging to see the country stay a partner in programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and he noted that Congress has moved to fund these areas more fully than the administration has.

“We believe that currently reflects the U.S. public’s broad view and support for these areas, when you can see the concrete results,” he said.

The Epstein review: Asked how the scrutiny of Gates’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein has affected the foundation’s work, Suzman pointed to the external review the foundation released in July.

Conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, it found no evidence that Epstein received foundation money or that the foundation knew of his crimes. It counted roughly 30 meetings from 2011 to 2014, involving Gates and nine other foundation leaders and staff, and found that staff had repeatedly raised concerns about associating with him.

The board adopted the recommendations that followed, among them centralized vetting of brokers and co-funders and tougher conflict-of-interest rules.

Suzman expressed optimism that the review has cleared the way for the foundation to keep working across the full range of governmental and philanthropic partnerships. “Hopefully it’s full speed ahead,” he said, “and with these AI shifts, that’s more important than ever.”

Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh each had their moment in the sun a century ago, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said Monday — and then the warning lights started flashing, and their leaders at the time failed to heed them.

“Well, here we are. It is 2026,” Smith said at a press conference, flanked by dozens of regional leaders, with the Seattle skyline behind them. “And the warning signs are flashing on our economy.”

Smith was speaking at the launch of the Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound, a Challenge Seattle initiative that brought together roughly 50 elected officials from King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties — two county executives, around 20 mayors, port commissioners and about a dozen state legislators — along with labor leaders and business executives, behind a 20-point plan for reversing the region’s slide.

The region lost nearly 7,000 jobs in 2025, according to a report issued by the group, the first time in two decades outside a recession or the pandemic that Seattle-area employment growth has trailed the nation’s. Washington has fallen from 32nd to 47th in CNBC’s ranking of states by cost of doing business since 2017.

An ‘intentional’ regional tech strategy: The report makes a pointed observation about technology: aerospace has a coordinated regional agenda and tech doesn’t, despite tech accounting for nearly one in 10 regional jobs and about 24% of total payroll.

Aerospace knows what it’s working on: the next airplane, the space industry, sustainable fuels, supplier diversification. Technology, “despite being one of Puget Sound’s defining economic anchors, does not yet have an equally intentional regional strategy,” the report says.

Without one, it adds, the region risks losing “jobs, technology investment, headquarters, talent, and company growth” to the Bay Area, New York, Boston and Austin. The goal is “not simply to promote growth, but to protect and strengthen the region’s position as a leading technology center.”

Challenge Seattle says it will write that strategy with the Puget Sound Regional Council, built around two priorities: keeping the big tech companies investing here, and making it easier for startups to scale. Related recommendations target industrial space for AI hardware startups, commercial space, and the region’s fusion cluster.

The report sets no budget or measure of success for the tech strategy, and no deadline beyond its general goal of progress within three years.

A regional wake-up call: Many of the recommendations are changes to how local government operates, not new spending: deadlines for permit decisions, a designated business contact in every city and county, and a strategy for dealing with the way taxes stack across state, county and city.

“This is, for us, a wake-up call,” said former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, CEO of Challenge Seattle, launching the initiative during the press conference. “We cannot resort to relying on yesterday’s success while tomorrow’s jobs go somewhere else.”

April Sims, president of the Washington State Labor Council, said businesses need predictability and enough margin to invest, innovate and take risks — but “working people need margins, too.”

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said his office has hired an economic development team and is beginning an internal permitting audit. “AI is transforming our economy seemingly overnight,” he said, calling the 7,000 lost jobs “quite alarming.”

The group also released a playbook for Puget Sound mayors, drawn from interviews and surveys with local leaders, on building what it calls a culture of partnership with business.

Seattle as a Microsoft litmus test: Asked by GeekWire during the press conference what it would take for Microsoft to return and grow in Seattle proper, where it previously had offices in South Lake Union, Smith first pointed out that he was standing in front of Redmond Mayor Angela Birney.

“We have a great mayor, and every day we get up and we’re excited to go to work in Redmond, Washington,” he said, to laughter from the assembled officials.

Smith also pushed back on the premise: Microsoft moved to the Eastside from Albuquerque in 1979 and never had a large presence in Seattle, so he wouldn’t use the city as the point of comparison.

Then he turned to Seattle’s JumpStart payroll expense tax.

As structured, the payroll tax “is really a tax on tech jobs,” Smith said, “and that’s why you’re seeing more tech jobs move from Seattle to places like Bellevue and the Eastside.” He noted that San Francisco abolished its payroll tax the same year Seattle adopted one, in 2021.

“You should tax things you want to discourage, like cigarettes, not jobs,” he said.

He tied the issue to the larger impact of AI on jobs. “We need people to succeed to some degree in a world of AI,” Smith said. “And you don’t want to make the cost of employing people more expensive, at the same time that AI is increasingly adding its own new form of competition.”

“There’s nothing that would lead to the decline in jobs in this state faster than a replication of the JumpStart tax,” he said. “And if Seattle wanted to do one thing to increase jobs in Seattle, it ought to revisit whether a payroll tax makes any sense.”

Then he added a caveat: “That’s probably something that would impact other companies more than Microsoft.”

Amazon, which has been reported to be the largest payer of the tax, did not have a speaker at Monday’s event. Individual Amazon execs are listed in the acknowledgments in the Challenge Seattle report, though the report says participation doesn’t imply endorsement.

View from Olympia: During the press conference, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, was asked whether Washington risks becoming an outlier among states on taxes. The Legislature has been correcting course, he said, pointing to two moves from this year’s session.

One was the estate tax. Lawmakers raised the top rate to 35% in 2025, the highest in the country, and reversed themselves this March, returning it to 20% as of July.

The other was the millionaires tax — a 9.9% tax on household income above $1 million, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson and projected to raise roughly $3 billion a year. It doesn’t take effect until 2028, and Seattle tech leaders warned it would push founders and investors out of the state.

Pedersen cast it as the fix for a different kind of outlier status: Washington’s business and sales taxes are high because it’s one of the few states with no personal income tax at all. The new tax would let Washington “join 41 other states that have a personal income tax,” he said.

Voters get the last word in November. Initiative 645, backed by Let’s Go Washington, qualified for the ballot in July and would repeal the tax. If it survives, Pedersen said, a statewide payroll tax is “vanishingly unlikely” next session.

Seattle’s mayor weighs in: Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who was an architect of the JumpStart tax before running for office, was not among the speakers at the press conference. She opened the regional session that followed, and said the region needs to do a better job telling its own story.

“There are some forces and interests that are pushing a narrative that does not want Seattle or our region to succeed,” Wilson said, “and we must counter that with a new commitment to a shared sense of destiny, because Seattle’s success is Bellevue’s success, Pierce County’s success is Snohomish County’s success.”

She called it a fragile moment and said the time to act is now, pointing to the economic actions she announced last week in conjunction with an independent report commissioned by the city and released by Seattle’s Office of Economic Development.

That report, “Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy,” found Seattle’s tax structure unique among peer cities in the way it “specifically penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers,” with the burden falling overwhelmingly on large tech employers.

Hiring a software engineer at $650,000 in total compensation costs about $17,000 more a year in Seattle than in Bellevue at JumpStart’s top rate, the researchers found.

The city report, conducted by the economic consulting firm Formation, said Seattle should bet on cleantech, the sector where the city owns the utility, writes the building codes and controls permitting and land use. It’s one place where Seattle has real leverage over its own economy, the researchers argued.

“It’s striking how much agreement we share across labor, businesses, and government,” Wilson said. “This is not a call to ignore our challenges, but to tackle them with a shared sense of possibility.”

She did not address the payroll tax in her remarks.

— Silvia Candiani has been named corporate vice president of Worldwide Telco & Media within the Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion initiative launched by the tech giant in July to embed engineers inside customers to build and run AI systems. In her new role, Candiani will lead Microsoft Frontier Company’s work with some of the largest telecommunications operators and media conglomerates.

“The momentum across our industry is extraordinary, and I believe we are only at the beginning of what AI can make possible,” said Candiani, who is based in Milan.

Before joining Microsoft in 2010 as a general manager, Candiani was a marketing director for Vodafone in Italy for more than a decade.

— Kevin Frey has been appointed vice president and chief impact officer of Microsoft Elevate, the company’s philanthropic effort providing technology support, donations, sales and AI training for educational organizations and nonprofits. Frey joined from UNICEF, where he was the first CEO of Generation Unlimited, the organization’s skills and employment initiative.

Frey said he was joining Microsoft because it’s “one of the only organizations in the world with the scale, scope and influence to bend the arc of the AI-powered future we are entering.”

“I will be spending my time and energy trying to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared broadly and safely across society — by every teacher, every student and every worker — regardless of their postal code,” he added.

— And while we’re on Microsoft, Anne Linge has been promoted to director of communications for commercial and consumer experiences after nearly 10 years with the company. She previously worked in communications at Weber Shandwick and Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, which has since rebranded as We.

— Alexis Bateman has been promoted to director of global sustainability at Amazon Web Services after more than five years with the company. She was director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics for 14 years before coming to Amazon.

Her work with AWS has given her the chance to help “shape sustainability at enormous scale,” Bateman said. “AI and cloud are transforming technology and society at an unprecedented pace, creating both enormous challenges and incredible opportunities for sustainability.”

— Gradial has appointed Lynn Girotto as chief marketing officer. In June, the Seattle startup announced $65 million in new funding for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing. The company is No. 127 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Girotto joins from Qualtrics, where she was CMO for two years. She has previously led marketing teams at companies including Vimeo, Tableau and Getty Images, and was a senior director at Microsoft for nine years earlier in her career.

“The best marketers I know want to build ideas and customer relationships, not manage processes,” Girotto said. “Gradial is the first company I’ve seen that’s built to give them that time back.”

— A Seattle-area nonprofit group known as the Fermi Explorer Mission announced that Kam Ghaffarian has joined as co-founder. Earlier this month, the organization shared its plans to send a spacecraft on an 80,000-year trip to the nearest alien star system, Alpha Centauri.

Ghaffarian is a billionaire who helped launch companies including X-energy, Axiom and Intuitive Machines. “By committing to launching a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri by 2029, we are not just pushing the boundaries of current technology; we are inspiring a new generation to look up and dream of interstellar exploration,” Ghaffarian said.

Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of the Fermi Explorer Mission, also leads Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, a startup aiming to launch up to 88,000 satellites to serve as AI data centers.

— Yoodli, the Seattle-based AI roleplay platform for enterprise training, has named Rachel Cougan vice president of human resources. Cougan previously served as a fractional HR leader through her consultancy, Possible HR. Before that, she was VP of people for Logixboard and Hiya, and also served as VP of talent for Textio.

Yoodli, which launched in 2021, has grown to more than 100 employees. The company is No. 17 on the GeekWire 200.

— Kestra Medical Technologies has promoted Daniel Finney to vice president of research and development. The Kirkland, Wash.-based company sells cardiac monitoring and therapeutic devices. It raised $202 million in its IPO in March 2025 and was nominated for Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

Finney has been with Kestra since 2019. CEO Brian Webster praised his role in developing the company’s FDA-approved monitoring device, adding that his “technical depth, product experience, and demonstrated leadership positions him to guide our next phase of innovation.”

Finney succeeds Phillip Foshee, Jr., who recently retired after leading Kestra’s R&D organization for nearly a decade.

— PATH has named Dr. Jeremy Farrar chief of its Asia, Middle East and Europe regional division. Farrar, a globally recognized leader in public health and clinical medicine, will join PATH effective Oct. 1 and be based in Geneva. His past roles include assistant director-general at the World Health Organization and director of the Wellcome Trust.

PATH CEO Nikolaj Gilbert praised the appointment, and noted that Farrar “possesses deep knowledge of the realities that prevent access, the people that make health care possible, and the need for PATH’s mission of ensuring breakthrough innovations reach all who need them.”

— American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced that University of Washington scientist Emily Levesque is the next editor in chief of the AAS journals. She will succeed Ethan Vishniac, who is stepping down from the role at the end of summer 2027 after 12 years.

“In the writing and publishing landscape we’re facing today, sharing information has never been easier, but trusting information has never been harder — which makes the AAS journals’ combination of rigorous peer review and accessible science more valuable than ever,” Levesque said.

Levesque has been an assistant astronomy professor at the UW for 11 years. She leads the massive stars research group, which studies the evolution and death of the largest and “most extreme” stars in the universe.

— The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber has added eight members to its board of trustees:

• Deniz Anders, Nordstrom’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer
• Reuven Carlyle, founder of Earth Finance and former state senator
• Carl Gipson, vice president of government and community affairs for Comcast
• Trevor Gooby, executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Seattle Mariners
• Daniel Huber, BNBuilders’ vice president of operations for the Northwest and Colorado
• Karen Lee, CEO of Plymouth Housing
• Holli Martinez, vice president, head of belonging, recognition and corporate responsibility for T-Mobile
• Rajat Puri, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Premera Blue Cross