Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.

The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.

Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.

President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.

The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.

Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.

“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.

Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.

Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.

Jimothy isn’t just a viral internet sensation — he’s a cause for good.

A painting of the beloved raccoon by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward attracted a winning bid of $6,543.21 in an informal Instagram auction this weekend, with all proceeds directed to the Ballard Food Bank.

The winning bidder for the 24-by-24-inch painting was identified by Ward as Angela Galdabini, who posted a picture of the painting hanging on her wall.

Now the auction gift is going viral in its own way, attracting a matching donation from Amazon, which encouraged other Seattle-area companies to follow suit. According to the tech giant on Monday, T-Mobile, Alaska Air and Brooks have all gotten on board.

“When we saw a local artist giving back to the Ballard Food Bank, inspired by a little raccoon that’s brought so much joy, we wanted to help,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement. “Amazon is proud to match the winning bid, and we’re calling on other Seattle-based companies to join us.”

Update: On Tuesday, Microsoft let us know that they, too, had committed funds to the food bank.

Jimothy seemed destined to be captured by Ward, a prolific muralist whose colorful, whimsical work is seen across the Seattle region on buildings, fences, garage doors and elsewhere. His art frequently features a variety of animals and other characters, including Sasquatch.

Ward called Jimothy “the hero we needed” in his Instagram post on Saturday, and said he was giving to Ballard Food Bank because the organization helped him through some of his hardest times.

The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when the raccoon was spotted in Ballard and a video attracted millions of views on Instagram. The craze spread around the world and other videos have emerged online, sparking immense curiosity and adoration, and a flood of memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry, songs and more. 

Jimothy, the short-spined Seattle raccoon, has become a global sensation whose likeness has been immortalized in artwork, clothing, songs and tattoos — and now a video game created in the creature’s hometown.

Tech enthusiast and entrepreneur Chris Pirillo launched an 8-bit NES-style video game called “Jimothy” this weekend in which players can control the movements of the critter as he raids trash cans, crosses streets to the park, sneaks past the paparazzi, and climbs to the safety of a big tree.

Pirillo says the missions are pulled straight from Jimothy’s real life. No doubt the animal is busy these days trying to dodge curious onlookers who are hoping to capture the next photo or video that feeds the masses on social media.

The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when Kiana Hall spotted the raccoon in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and posted a video on Instagram — viewed by millions since — asking the question heard around the world: “What am I looking at?”

An earlier video of Jimothy, captured by a home security camera and posted on Reddit, ignited further curiosity and adoration, and now Reddit is flooded with sightings, memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry and more. The Mariners put a Jimothy mascot in the Salmon Run. There’s even a Lego Jimothy.

Pirillo told GeekWire the game idea came to him on Saturday afternoon after seeing so many creatives flood his feeds with their own Jimothy fan art. He started to build a not-so-live tracker and realized it was a not-so-great idea. He hopes internet creativity is enough of a fix for the Jimothy-curious.

“This game is as close as any of us should ever get to him,” the game site states. “If you find yourself in his neighborhood: don’t go looking for him, don’t feed him, don’t try to touch him, and don’t crowd him for a photo.”

The game is easy enough to play, with challenges that are reminiscent of classic 1980s games “Frogger” and “Donkey Kong.”

Pirillo’s “Vibe Arcade” is loaded with other games he’s created. Earlier this year he vibe-coded a Resume Analyzer app and a pre-rejection letter generator called Dear Applicant to channel his frustrations with searching for a job.

Pirillo credits AI with changing the speed and ease with which a moment can go viral and be captured in new and creative ways.

“I remember when every big moment had a video game. But by the time a studio could create a video game around a meme pre-AI, the meme’s energy would have dissipated,” he said. “We are now at a day and age (certainly with AI as a tool) where almost literally anybody of any age or tech experience level can bring full-fledged experiences to life in just a few hours. We can simply talk our solutions into existence. It’s astounding.”

Pirillo built the game as a single HTML page, pitting OpenAI GPT 5.6 against Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. One of the bigger challenges was getting the look of Jimothy right, as multiple AI models kept returning regular-looking raccoons.

Pirillo said he looks forward to sharing more about it all during a free vibe-coding community workshop in Seattle this Saturday.

His final takeaway for anyone looking to get in on the Jimothy hype — or whatever creature emerges next — is to not wait for the moment to pass.

“While it’s never been easier to make something, it’s also never been more challenging to get attention,” he said.

A technological time capsule of artifacts from the Seattle region’s aerospace history was saved from the waste bin by an electronics recycler this week. Now he’s trying to solve the mystery: Who owned them, where did they come from, and what exactly are they, anyway?

Computer and electronic parts dating back nearly 50 years were among a donation of items dropped off at the Bellevue, Wash., location of Living Green Technology. Instead of the usual assortment of obsolete laptops, gaming consoles and tangled cords, the lot was like a pristine engineering archive consisting of gold-plated prototype chips, raw silicon architectures exposed under glass, and experimental fiber-optic cables used to pioneer early flight control systems.

Tyler Rivers, founder and CEO of the 13-year-old company, personally inspects weekly collections from his company’s public drop-off sites, and he instantly realized the pieces were far too rare to be shredded for their precious metals.

“I’m kind of the nerd for all this stuff,” Rivers told GeekWire on Wednesday. “I go down many, many rabbit holes with different things.”

Rivers was looking into whether the donor could be tracked down to help piece together the high-tech puzzle. He did his own digging and GeekWire also leaned on Google’s Gemini AI to help identify items in photographs Rivers shared. We’re hoping readers might also email us with their own insights.

For now, we’ve determined that the collection paints a picture of a highly specialized, Cold War-era engineering workspace focused on the physical dawn of modern aviation, spacecraft engineering, and early fiber-optic data networks. It includes:

Texas Instruments SBP9900X microprocessor: A rare, military-grade 16-bit processor from 1977 marked “Experimental.” Built using a specialized architecture resistant to extreme temperatures and ionizing cosmic radiation, this line of chips was famously utilized by NASA and military defense contractors for deep-space and missile guidance systems. (Check out this report on testing radiation-hardened microprocessors.)

Canstar 8×8 optical star coupler: A beautifully preserved, heavy-duty glass-and-metal fiber-optic coupler stamped “8X8 100/120/140.” This component physically fused fiber-optic strands together to split and route light signals — a critical building block for prototyping early, interference-proof “Fly-by-Light” flight control systems.

DDC Total-AceXtreme avionics module: A mechanical engineering sample marked by Data Device Corporation (DDC), a pioneer of 1970s and ’80s military flight systems. The component is designed for MIL-STD-1553, the standard data bus protocol that allows cockpit flight computers, sensors, and avionics to communicate with one another on military aircraft and spacecraft.

Un-lidded hybrid microcircuits: Custom-engineered ceramic and metal cavities housing bare silicon architectures connected by microscopic, gold-bonded wire arrays. These high-reliability hybrids were custom-crafted by hand for military and aerospace programs to pack dense electronic circuitry into compact, hermetically sealed packages.

Rivers has no formal aerospace, computer science or electronics background — he’s a 2012 University of Washington graduate in economics. He started his company as a college student while working at a UPS Store, setting up a drop-off bin on the counter to collect, repair, and resell old cell phones and iPods.

Today, in addition to public e-recycling, Living Green Technology assists businesses, government agencies and others in secure data destruction, asset recovery and more.

Rivers’ hands-on curiosity regularly follows him home. When unique or puzzling items show up at his public drop-off sites, he often takes them home to dissect them in his garage. Among his previous saves is a NASA laptop, complete with receipts and tagging showing it was modified for spaceflight.

“I pretty much deep dive and gather as much information as I can,” Rivers said. “Usually, sadly after that, I stick it on a shelf in my workshop and just leave it there until I figure out what I want to do next with it.”

This particular assortment of salvaged history offers a physical look at engineering hurdles solved decades ago, representing a transition period when computers were first being ruggedized to survive the extreme environments of military aviation and space flight.

For further insight, GeekWire reached out to Andrew “bunnie” Huang, a renowned hardware hacker, author, and MIT-trained electrical engineering Ph.D. widely known for his pioneering work in reverse engineering and open-source hardware. His blog is a hardware geek’s must-read.

After reviewing photos of the Bellevue haul, Huang pointed out that the collection may not actually be a single, unified archive from a lone aerospace project. Instead, he suspects it is the ultimate “collage” of high-tech souvenirs.

“The random tray of components on the black ESD foam… I almost would be inclined to think this was more of a collage of components kept by a technician from various projects,” Huang said. “There’s some pretty nice optical sensors in there with enormous active areas, a random segmented LED display, and an old 2K EEPROM.”

Given the Seattle region’s history around aviation, aerospace and technology, there are surely countless boxes stuck in garages, attics and storage spaces holding the artifacts of innovation.

Lāth Carlson is the former executive director of Living Computers: Museum + Labs, the now-closed Seattle institution founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a home for vintage computing equipment. Carlson was accustomed to random boxes showing up on his doorstep.

“Many people don’t realize that most museums would not exist without collectors — people that say, ‘well, that seems like it’s worth keeping’ and put it in a box,” said Carlson, who now leads Seattle’s National Nordic Museum. “Sometimes we get really lucky and they end up being more right than they realize.”

Without speaking for local e-recycling outfits, Carlson recommended getting in touch before just leaving things at a museum, because most are bound by policy to dispose of such items.

For now, Rivers’ latest rescue is safe from the shredder, perhaps waiting for its full story to be uncovered.

The best thing about Seattle’s grunge era is that it existed before the internet could completely spoil it — although the mainstream media, MTV and fashion designers eventually did their best.

None of them would be any match today for artificial intelligence.

In a new video we spotted on Instagram, a time-traveling vlogger under the handle Roxy In Time goes back to 1992 Seattle to explore the city’s music scene during its heyday. The result is grunge meets 2026 AI slop.

It’s an interesting study in how technology that’s very much being built and hyped in modern Seattle can be used to illustrate what the city sort of looked like more than three decades ago. In the video, it’s two years before the start of Amazon and another 15ish before cloud computing and a massive tech boom truly reshaped the region.

AI is being both celebrated and derided for its ability to help create content like Roxy’s time-traveling exploits. Where some see an innocent, weirdly educational history lesson, others can’t look past the replacement of human creativity, the excess of such material polluting social media channels, and the tech’s ability to deceive viewers in more dangerous ways.

Roxy is an AI-generated influencer — not a real person — with a penchant for visiting historically significant places, both real and imagined. She recently checked out L.A.’s Sunset Strip in 1987 and a New York speakeasy during Prohibition in 1929. In other videos she runs across fantastical figures including Paul Bunyan and Humpty Dumpty, and she visits cavemen in 30,000 B.C.

In the Seattle video, Roxy is dressed for the era’s part in a flannel, Nirvana T-shirt, ripped jeans and combat boots. She starts her tour by saying she’s in town to see the band Mudhoney play at Belltown’s Crocodile Cafe. But first she heads to Easy Street Records in West Seattle to browse records, tapes and CDs.

The video is populated with images of random musicians carrying guitars down the street, and people drinking coffee and reading actual print publications instead of staring at laptops. At The Central Saloon and OK Hotel in Pioneer Square, everyone has long hair, or a beanie, or both. Sweaty music fans in mosh pits seem to fit the timeline.

AI’s artistic limitations do come into focus in a few spots, especially when written words are displayed. The names of bands and clubs on music flyers — such as Comet Tavern — are a jumbled mess. Same goes for some of the names on record dividers at Easy Street, where the store’s neon wording also breaks apart.

Back at the Crocodile, Roxy is in line to see Mudhoney, and she’s confused by an opening act named Pen Cap Chew. Inside, as the show starts, she realizes that Pen Cap Chew is actually Nirvana, playing under the secret moniker because by that time the band was a worldwide sensation riding the success of the album “Nevermind.”

In perhaps the most realistic demonstration of being in 1992 — in a club where no one knows what a smartphone is yet — Roxy ends the video by saying she needs to stop recording.

“I’m putting this thing away, I’ve gotta watch this,” she says.

No way anyone would do that in 2026.

“Speak softly and carry a big prompt.”

That’s not exactly how Theodore Roosevelt put it, but presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin found herself face to face with an AI-powered version of the 26th president at the newly opened Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D. — and she had questions.

Goodwin is among the high-profile visitors to interact with the lifelike, immersive version of Roosevelt that is able to discuss his life, leadership and legacy.

A week after a visit from President Trump, Goodwin joined Microsoft President Brad Smith at the library to learn how the tech giant’s AI is being used to help the institution — and the Roosevelt avatar — speak directly to future generations.

“Who better to put our avatar to the test than American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn on Sunday, where he shared a video of a clearly giddy Goodwin meeting the digital Roosevelt.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time,” Goodwin said. “I feel like I’ve lived with you for 10 years of my life when I wrote a first book about you.”

Goodwin asked Roosevelt questions about his relationship with JP Morgan, the changing will of the country, and how it was presumed that when he neared death, Roosevelt would still be fighting and still be in the arena.

“I never cared how’d I’d be remembered by the historians,” the avatar said. “Still swinging, still loud, still on your feet. If folks say I managed that, well, I’m glad of it.”

A Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has written extensively about presidents and American history, Goodwin was moved by the interaction.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

The AI works as part of Box 1, the knowledge base backbone of the museum, powered by technology Microsoft helped create. According to a July 1 Microsoft blog post, the system is loaded with hundreds of thousands of archival documents, and AI is used to “organize, enrich and reconstruct fragmented materials into searchable, contextualized historical records.”

Box 1 and AI also power The Campfire Reading Room, a digital research tool that anyone anywhere in the world can use to search through Roosevelt’s writings, letters, images and historical materials.

Microsoft donated much of its work with the library through its AI for Good Lab. The company said it plans to release a paper documenting exactly how the technology works and to open source the software used in the project.

As technology evolves, the library will evolve with it, Microsoft said. When more documents are added to Box 1 or as generative AI improves, the Roosevelt avatar will automatically update with the additional context.

“That’s why we call it a living library,” said Laura Hoffman, senior director of the AI for Good Lab. “One of the most challenging things for cultural institutions is to continue to keep their experiences feeling relevant and fresh. This is what’s great about AI technology: It will continue to get better and better.”

Augmodo, the Seattle startup that straps AI-powered cameras onto retail workers to track store shelves, has raised $21 million as it pushes its technology beyond grocery aisles and into warehouses, factories, and other physical workplaces.

The new funding, led by existing investor TQ Ventures, values Augmodo at $350 million.

CEO Ross Finman, who told GeekWire he wasn’t even looking to raise fresh capital, said he was motivated by interest in the startup’s technology from customers beyond retail, including automotive settings and hospitals.

“Fundamentally, someone grabbing a wrench at an automotive factory isn’t that different from someone grabbing a Cheerios box,” Finman said. “Turns out the algorithms work pretty well across all of those.”

Founded in 2023, Augmodo builds AI-powered “Smartbadges” — lightweight wearable devices with dual cameras — that store employees wear passively as they move through aisles. The badges use computer vision, 3D mapping, and spatial computing to track shelf inventory in real time, building what the company calls a digital “Realogram” of each store.

Augmodo raised $37.5 million a year ago in a round that came after Australian pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse — the startup’s first big customer — moved from a pilot to a full contract and validated the technology at scale. Now others want in on the action.

“Our whole mission statement is AI systems for the physical workforce,” Finman said. “Everyone’s focused on the 20% of the workforce that’s knowledge work, and we’re focused on the 80% of the workforce that’s physical work.”

That demand has pulled Augmodo into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery operations, and even employee training — verticals the company didn’t originally set out to serve. Existing retail customers, Finman said, kept expanding their contracts to cover new parts of their operations, from auditing warehouse pallets to logging maintenance work like HVAC repairs.

The Smartbadge itself has evolved, too. Finman said it’s now lighter than an iPhone Air and has grown into what he calls an “everything device,” adding walkie-talkie capabilities, an opt-in panic button, and a digital ID display, on top of its original inventory-tracking function.

“That’s actually become a really big selling point,” Finman said. “You don’t need to buy five or six different devices, you buy one at cost, and then here’s all the different features that you can get out of it.”

The company says it has grown 10x in revenue over the past year and now maps more than 186 million square feet of retail space monthly — a figure it expects to cross 1 billion square feet per month by year’s end. Augmodo is adding 50 to 100 new store locations a month.

The company’s headcount has grown 5x over the past year to more than 50 employees, including new CTO Bradford Snow, who joined in January after previous stints at Axon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

Augmodo is ranked No. 145 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups and was a finalist in the Hardware, Robotics, and Physical AI of the Year category at the 2026 GeekWire Awards.

Beyond TQ Ventures, backers include Lerer Hippeau, Jefferson River Capital, Arena Holdings, Chemist Warehouse, New Fare, Interlace, and Webb Investment Network.

Andrew Marks, co-founding partner at TQ, called Finman an “exceptional” leader and said every board meeting reinforced that demand for Augmodo’s tech was outpacing the team’s ability to serve it.

“When you pair a truly special founder with customers lining up around the door and pulling you into new markets, it was obvious we should propose putting more fuel on the fire,” Marks said.

Augmodo said it plans to use the new capital to expand its global enterprise footprint, invest further in its core AI models, and grow its engineering team — with a particular focus on hiring for computer vision and machine learning roles as the company scales its data processing beyond retail.

Vinod Khosla has spent four decades building and funding companies around a single idea: hire the right people and get out of their way. He’s one of the most respected and influential investors in Silicon Valley, with a track record of big bets and a habit of not backing down.

On Saturday, a group led by the billionaire venture capitalist and his family agreed to buy the Seattle Seahawks from the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for a reported $9.6 billion, which would be the highest price ever paid for an NFL team.

Khosla, 71, was born in Pune, India. He earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and Carnegie Mellon before getting his MBA at Stanford, where he landed in Silicon Valley for good. After co-founding Sun in 1982, he spent nearly two decades as a partner at the legendary venture firm Kleiner Perkins before launching Khosla Ventures in 2004.

His firm now manages roughly $15 billion and has backed companies including DoorDash, Affirm, and Opendoor. Khosla was the first VC to invest in OpenAI, putting in $50 million in 2019. Forbes ranked him No. 1 on its Midas List of top tech investors this year and estimates his net worth at $15.6 billion.

But the Seahawks deal isn’t just about Vinod. The Allen estate’s public statement confirming the formal sale agreement described the buyer as “an ownership group led by the Khosla family,” and Vinod’s own quote in the statement was delivered “on behalf of the Khosla family.”

Estate of Paul G. Allen Reaches Agreement to Sell Seattle Seahawks pic.twitter.com/Pmv8i6FEp8

— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) July 11, 2026

An NFL memo sent to all 32 teams Saturday, reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and others, identified his wife, Neeru Khosla, as the controlling owner, and said their son, Neal Khosla, “would be expected to have a significant leadership role in the ownership group.”

Neal may be the one to watch. He has described himself on his personal website as “an obsessive sports fan” who likes “bringing a quantitative and analytical lens to understanding the game within the game,” the Seattle Times reports.

He and his father have been San Francisco 49ers season ticket holders for 30 years, and Neal has consulted for both the 49ers and the Miami Heat. The Khosla family last year bought a 3.1% stake in the 49ers — the Seahawks’ NFC West division rivals — which they’ll now have to sell.

But Vinod Khosla’s track record is the clearest window into how the family will approach its Seahawks ownership. Here’s what we know about him based on his long career in tech.

He focuses on people and talent above all else. “A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes,” Khosla said in a 2016 Startup Grind interview.

“Experience doesn’t matter. The rate of learning matters,” he told Sam Altman in a Y Combinator interview the same year, using a football analogy (fittingly as it now turns out): “Pick for the best athlete, not the person who’s the most established wide receiver who knows how to run one pattern.”

At Sun, Khosla spent an inordinate amount of his time on recruiting. He personally reconstructed the org chart of competitor DEC to identify talent that the company could poach.

Speaking at Seattle’s AI House in March 2025, Khosla’s main advice for startup founders was that their success will be driven by the people they hire and the questions they ask.

“The single most important decision by far you will make is the team you build,” he said at the time. “The more questions that get asked around your conference table, the better it will go, the faster you will learn, and the faster you will accumulate advantages.”

“Talent drives everything,” he said at another event in Seattle last summer, the Bloomberg Green Seattle conference on climate change.

For the record, the Seahawks’ current leadership is ostensibly locked in: general manager John Schneider is under contract through 2031, and head coach Mike Macdonald, who led the team to its Super Bowl win in February, is signed through 2029, according to The Seattle Times.

Whether the trademark Khosla obsession with talent will translate into getting involved with draft picks and player personnel will be an interesting question to watch.

He’s a Bay Area guy, not a Seattle guy. Khosla has lived and worked in Silicon Valley since earning his MBA at Stanford in 1980. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park. The family’s 49ers ties underscore that this is not a homegrown owner.

Khosla has made a handful of appearances in the Seattle area over the years. His firm led a $11 million round for Seattle-based AI legal startup Lexion in 2021, and a $15 million round in Viome, the wellness startup co-founded by Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain, in 2017.

But he has no deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, which is a major difference from Seattle native Paul Allen and his family. How quickly the Khosla family builds a connection to the city and Seahawks fans may matter as much as anything they do on the football side.

He supports the people he picks, but tells it like it is. In more than 30 years on startup boards, Khosla says he has never once voted against a management team, even when he strongly disagrees.

“I’ll argue with them, I’ll debate with them, I’ll push them, but I will not vote against them,” he said in the Startup Grind interview. The Khosla Ventures website puts it more plainly: “Once we pick a management team, we back it and don’t second-guess it.”

For a Seahawks fan base that watched Paul Allen’s sister Jody Allen take a largely hands-off approach as chair of the Allen estate, the philosophy may sound familiar, although Khosla’s version would also come with a willingness to challenge leaders behind closed doors.

For example, Khosla has said he deliberately takes positions he doesn’t believe in when coaching founders — not to mislead them, but to force them to think through risks they haven’t considered.

The Khosla Ventures approach, as explained on its site, is “brutal honesty over hypocritical politeness.”

He’s not without controversy. In 2008, Khosla bought a 53-acre property south of Half Moon Bay, Calif., that included the only access road to Martins Beach, a stretch of coastline that surfers and families had used for decades. He locked the gate and blocked public access, setting off a legal battle that has lasted more than a decade and drawn widespread criticism.

The case has gone to the California Supreme Court and back.

“Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves,” the New York Times headlined a 2018 story about the dispute. Khosla has argued it’s a private property rights issue. Critics see it as a billionaire putting his own interests above the public.

The takeaway: he doesn’t back down, even when public opinion is against him.

He’s persistent in business, as well. That habit of not backing down has been consistent throughout his tech and investing career.

When Sun was told it had lost a critical early deal to a rival, Khosla flew from San Francisco to Boston and camped out in the prospective customer’s office until the CEO agreed to see him. By the end of the day, the company had signed with Sun, according to The Generalist.

When defective Philips monitors nearly bankrupted Sun, Khosla went home at 3 a.m. and was back by 7 a.m. for months until the crisis passed, he said in the Y Combinator interview.

“Survive long enough in your field to have time to get lucky,” he told founders at one meetup.

During a 2011 appearance in Seattle, Khosla offered this take on betting big: “I don’t mind the low probability of success, but I better be impactful if we do succeed.” He was talking about startups, but the same idea no doubt applies to chasing another Lombardi Trophy.

Seattle Seahawks head coach and self-professed football nerd Mike Macdonald just doesn’t understand why any coach or team would ignore the chance to lean into data and analytics.

“Why wouldn’t we use the best information out there?” he said during an interview this week on the Dan Patrick Show. “Why would you be scared about things that are going to possibly help you?”

Macdonald called himself a “psycho data guy” who needs “numbers and tendencies.” He has a new Super Bowl ring to show for his coaching style, but he’s also clear that while advanced technology and metrics may help support the team’s planning and in-game decisions, they don’t drive those decisions completely.

“You don’t have to do what the numbers say,” Macdonald said, adding that variables such as how a game is going, the feel for your own team, and gut instinct can all cancel out data suggestions.

That data-be-damned mentality came into play at the start of last season when the Seahawks, facing a 4th-and-1 from the San Francisco 49ers’ 19-yard line, ignored the analytical model that said to go for it. Macdonald opted to kick a field goal for a three-point lead and ended up losing when the 49ers came back and scored a touchdown.

Seattle started 0-1 and six months later won its second NFL title.

This year, Seattle opens against the New England Patriots, the team they beat 29-13 in Super Bowl LX.

Macdonald hasn’t learned much yet from that game, because he said he’s only watched it once, via tape and not the standard TV broadcast.

“Are you worried there’s a different ending?” Patrick laughed.

Echodyne, the Seattle-area radar-platform company, cut the ribbon Wednesday on a new $40 million manufacturing facility designed to meet growing demand for its drone-detection and airspace-monitoring systems.

Headquartered in Kirkland, Wash., Echodyne is opening an 86,350-square-foot manufacturing and operations hub in nearby Woodinville, Wash., that it says will eventually be able to produce more than 2,500 radars each month — or roughly 30,000 radars annually.

Echodyne says the expansion is fueled by U.S. and global demand for safety and security radars that can detect and track drones, driven in part by their proliferation on the battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine War and the fast-growing “low altitude economy” of commercial drone operations that require airspace monitoring.

Echodyne currently employs 260 people, and the new facility will support more than 100 new jobs and up to 200 as the facility reaches full production capacity, according to the company.

“Our global customer base is demanding more radar to be delivered as fast as possible,” CEO Eben Frankenberg said in a news release, adding that the proliferation of drones requires reliable, at-scale production. “The only way to defend against mass is with mass.”

Echodyne was spun out of Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures in 2014 and has drawn backing from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, along with NEA, Madrona Venture Group, Baillie Gifford and Northrop Grumman, among others. The company raised $135 million in a 2022 investment round and total funding is $200 million.

The company’s radar systems rely on patented “metamaterials” technology — a flat-panel antenna that can electronically steer its beam without any moving parts — which Echodyne says allows for smaller, cheaper radar than conventional designs.

Echodyne originally focused on using compact radar to help drones detect and avoid obstacles in flight, before pivoting toward counter-drone security as demand grew for systems that could track other drones — including cheap, mass-produced ones deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Echodyne’s radar technology is integrated into systems from Anduril, Axon, Moog and Northrop Grumman, among other defense companies, the company said. Most recently, Echodyne was selected as the primary radar provider for Trust Automation’s drone-detection platform, which is being delivered to the U.S. Air Force under a $490 million contract.

Wednesday’s ribbon cutting was attended by Sen. Maria Cantwell, U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, Woodinville Mayor Sarah Arndt, and Michael Robbins, president and CEO of AUVSI, the trade association for the uncrewed systems, autonomy, and robotics industry.

The new hub allocates approximately 74,350 square feet to manufacturing space and 12,000 square feet to warehousing.

Perhaps the only downside to building a golf-focused startup is that it leaves less time to actually play golf.

Dane Renkert will take that tradeoff, for now, as he works on something that he says will change the way people play and interact around the game.

Renkert is co-founder and CEO of Barkie, a Bellingham, Wash.-based startup building an app that aims to be a true AI caddie in every golfer’s pocket — one that tracks scores by voice alone, settles betting games automatically, and rarely requires a golfer to look down at a screen.

Renkert is no slouch as an athlete and golfer. A Washington State University graduate, he played professional baseball for the Milwaukee Brewers before moving into tech and sales leadership roles at Docugami, Komiko, and Ben Kinney Companies. As a competitive golfer, he placed 13th at the 2009 World Long Drive Championship and now boasts a scratch handicap.

The name of the company is a nod to golf terminology — a “barkie” is an honest, hard-fought par saved after a golfer’s drive ricochets off a tree.

The inspiration for the startup stems from Renkert’s own frustration with existing golf mobile apps, which he argues have essentially operated as digital spreadsheets for the last decade. Incumbents like 18 Birdies, The Grint, and Golf Genius require constant manual data entry throughout a round, Renkert said.

Noting that seven out of 10 golfers still use a paper scorecard and pencil because they like the tradition or want to avoid screen distraction, Renkert set out to build a platform centered on a simple philosophy: “keep your head up and not down.”

To translate that concept into software, Renkert initially teamed up in 2025 with co-founder Zubin Wadia, an MIT grad whom he worked alongside for five years at Docugami, the Bellevue, Wash.-based AI startup. Wadia remains a strategic advisor to Barkie.

To achieve the “heads up” experience, Barkie is differentiating itself by launching a full voice user interface that eliminates manual typing entirely. Using standard gear like an Apple Watch or AirPods, golfers can simply speak the outcome of a hole to dynamically update a digital scorecard in the background.

According to Renkert, Barkie is the first to market with an AI-native, voice-first caddie that allows for natural, fluent speech on the course rather than forcing players to toggle through menus and hit arrows to log data.

“The voice thing, in particular, I believe is a massive lift technically, but it’s a big lift from a user experience side as well,” Renkert said, adding that the platform is designed to seamlessly augment the traditions of the game rather than disrupt them.

Under the hood, Barkie relies on a patent-pending dual-layer system to prevent the application from making mistakes or hallucinating numbers. A guardrailed large language model handles the conversational front end — interpreting natural voice requests, answering rules questions, or trading friendly banter.

A separate, rules-based engineering backend handles all the scoring, strokes-gained calculations, and betting math. This split ensures that while golfers can talk to the app like a human caddie, the actual bookkeeping remains completely accurate.

When the betting function comes online, that same backend will settle real-money side games — Nassau, skins, wolf, hammer bets — instantly once a round ends, sparing golfers the aggravation of hashing out who owes what on the 18th green.

Barkie’s simplest use case doesn’t require voice at all. Through a feature called ScoreShot, golfers can snap a photo of a paper scorecard. The app digitizes it and pushes the data directly to GHIN, the USGA’s official handicap system, via a partnership Renkert says gives Barkie access to course-specific data like slope rating and tee-box selection. Golfers without a club membership or GHIN account can still generate a handicap through the app, calculated according to World Handicap System guidelines.

Either way, the result is hole-by-hole performance data that Renkert says no other golf app currently offers — letting players see which holes they’re strongest and weakest on, and, he added, which holes they should be pressing their buddies on.

Barkie is available for download on iOS (optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch companion setups) and Android devices via the App Store and Google Play Store.

The app offers a free tier that includes GPS mapping features. The premium tier unlocks unlimited hands-free voice tracking, advanced Strokes Gained analytics, the Barkie Betting Engine, and full GHIN integration. Limited-time pricing is available at $4.99 monthly or $29.99 annually.

Barkie has attracted seed funding from friends and family and notable investors, including Rob Gough, an entrepreneur and collector perhaps best known outside tech circles for his record-setting $5.2 million purchase of a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card. According to his LinkedIn, Gough is also an investor in Jeff Bezos’ AI startup Prometheus, which raised $12 billion in Series B funding last month.

“I invested in Barkie.ai because I believe they’re building something that delivers real value to golfers, not just another AI demo,” Gough said in a statement. “Great companies have an unfair advantage, and Barkie has exactly that: a founder with deep domain expertise as a scratch golfer who genuinely understands the game, combined with a world-class AI team recruited from companies like Meta, Google, and NASA.”

Barkie’s cap table also includes former Seattle Seahawks linebacker Lofa Tatupu, who serves as an advisor to the company.

Armed with high-profile backing and a team recruited from tech giants, Renkert isn’t shy about his ambitions to disrupt the entrenched players in the space.

“I want the incumbents to know I have a lot of backing, and I’m coming for you,” Renkert said. “I’m not trying to compete with you, I’m trying to take it over.”

For now, taking over means grinding behind a desk instead of on a fairway. Renkert admits that building the startup cut heavily into his own time on the course this past year — even leading to a rough showing when he tried to qualify for the U.S. Amateur.

But the grind is the point.

“I’ve done a lot of cool things in my life, but this is the hardest I’ve ever worked for something,” Renkert said. “I believe, hopefully, this will be my mantle piece.”

Seattle’s Cascade PBS has spun out its streaming app technology into a standalone company called Local Public, which is now building connected-TV and mobile apps for public media stations across the country.

The goal is to provide local PBS stations nationwide their own branded, station-curated streaming apps — plus tools for fundraising and audience data — as an alternative to a one-size-fits-all national app.

Local Public was originally created within Cascade PBS (KCTS-TV channel 9) to build apps for that station, which serves Western Washington and part of British Columbia. Supported by 10 Founding Sponsor partner stations, a Local Streaming Initiative (LSI) was launched to expand the platform to serve stations nationwide.

On July 1, Local Public launched as a public benefit corporation. Cascade PBS owns 100% of Local Public, but it’s expected to take on investment and be co-owned by a coalition of other PBS stations in the near-future.

In a blog post announcing the launch, Local Public CEO Kevin Colligan wrote that the company is aiming to build “a growing coalition of independent public media organizations working together while remaining deeply rooted in their own communities.”

Eighteen stations are currently using Local Public, according to Cascade PBS, including Arizona PBS (Phoenix), Houston Public Media, OPB (Oregon), Rocky Mountain PBS (Denver), Vegas PBS, WETA (Washington, D.C.), WHYY (Philadelphia), WQED (Pittsburgh), and others.

Colligan framed the launch against the backdrop of media consolidation, arguing that a shrinking number of corporations increasingly control what Americans watch and read, while local newsrooms have been gutted and replaced by centralized programming.

He also pointed to the rise of low-effort, AI-generated content as a further threat to authentic local journalism and storytelling — one he said makes trusted, community-rooted public media more valuable, not less.

“We bring a startup mentality to public media’s longstanding tradition of community service,” Colligan wrote. “We are building technology that allows stations to move faster, collaborate more effectively, and reach audiences wherever they are.”

Local Public apps currently run on 10 platforms, including Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Google TV, Android TV, LG and Samsung smart TVs, iPhone, Android and a web video portal. NPR, radio and podcast integration is in development and expected to launch in fiscal year 2027.

The apps run on a centralized content management system, letting stations publish their own programming, build featured-content carousels and pull real-time viewer analytics. Stations can also message members and prospective donors directly within the app. The platform fully supports PBS Passport, the streaming benefit for recurring donors, and PBS Media Manager, the system stations use to manage and distribute video.

TheDesk.net reported that Sacramento’s KVIE has already relaunched its streaming app through Local Public as KVIE Plus (stylized KVIE+), offering free access to the station’s full lineup of broadcast channels over streaming alongside local programming and acquired shows, movies and documentaries. Denver’s KRMA has relaunched its connected-TV app through the platform as well

Pricing for Local Public is tiered by station size, based on how many Passport-eligible members a station has at signup. Small stations (fewer than 15,000 members), for instance, pay an $8,000 onboarding fee and $60,000 annually.

Amish Patel knows his neighbors by their dogs’ names before he knows their own. It’s a pattern he noticed in his Seattle neighborhood — and one he’s now built an app around.

Patel’s newest pet project — born out of his Conduit Venture Labs startup studio, is Sniff, an iOS app that turns the everyday moment two dogs greet each other on a walk into a lasting connection between their humans.

The idea traces back to Patel’s own block in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood, where he moved with his standard poodle, Chewie, right before the pandemic. With no kids and limited ways to meet people, the neighborhood park became the default hangout — and a group text thread became, in Patel’s words, a real sense of community. The catch: most of those contacts were saved under names like “Glory’s mom” or “Louie’s dad.”

“The five people in Madrona that I hang out with, more often I met through him,” Patel said of Chewie.

Beyond widening Patel’s own social circle, Sniff has a greater societal objective — taking on loneliness and isolation, an epidemic cited in the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on social connection.

“Younger people are having kids less, getting more isolated … we’re sitting on our phones, even though we’re all next to each other,” Patel said. “One out of four people don’t know their neighbors or talk to their neighbors.”

Dogs — and Sniff — could be an answer.

Sniff verifies that users are real people who actually live in the neighborhood they claim, using address and location data, and the app is geofenced so members can only discover dogs nearby. Inside the app, users see only dog profiles and photos — no human names or personal details — until a connection is made. Patel said artificial intelligence plays a role only on the trust-and-safety side — confirming identity and location — rather than in matching people up.

Once connected, neighbors can message through the app, arrange meetups, and lean on each other for help — dog walking, sitting, or just a hand when something comes up. Patel said the trust that builds from already knowing someone’s dog often translates directly into people who are willing to help.

The pilot is open in Madrona, Leschi, Madison Park, the Central District and Capitol Hill, but pet parents anywhere in Seattle can sign up today. Each neighborhood stays geofenced until it reaches enough engaged sign-ups, at which point Sniff opens it up — Madrona, the first to launch, already has about 100 people on the platform.

To help build momentum in each neighborhood, Sniff is partnering with the Seattle Chamber of Connection — where Patel sits on the board — to recruit “Pack Leaders”: local dog owners who help organize meetups and informal introductions as their neighborhood’s user base grows.

Patel is a Microsoft vet who spent eight years on projects including Xbox Kinect and Microsoft Band, before moving into the startup world with stints at fitness wearable maker Katalyst and football helmet manufacturer Vicis. He landed an entrepreneur-in-residence role at Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs in 2020, and two years later co-founded Conduit Venture Labs with Susan Paley, the former first CEO of Beats by Dre.

Conduit focuses on “hard-tech” ventures that blend hardware and software. Sniff is Conduit’s fourth in-house startup, following Fluffy — a computer vision platform for doggy daycares — and an audiobook AI venture in the loneliness space that Patel said is preparing for a public seed round this fall. A fourth project, in health tech, remains under wraps for now.

The Sniff app itself was built lean: a couple of developers, a product lead, and Patel splitting his time across the studio’s other projects. Patel said the team has since shifted to AI-assisted development to move faster, and is now searching for a CEO to take the project in-house full time as it raises capital and pursues some hardware-related features.

For all the talk of trust layers, geofencing and future hardware, Sniff’s entire premise still comes down to a dog doing what dogs do. The humans get the friendships, the favors, the group texts. The dogs, Patel said, get something simpler.

“They just get to be more social,” he said, “because we don’t keep them in our house with us while we’re doom scrolling through everything.”

Startups innovating across advanced manufacturing and computational health made up the latest cohort of the Seattle accelerator run by Creative Destruction Lab (CDL).

The nine-month, nonprofit program based at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business graduated 17 early stage companies. It’s the fifth cohort since CDL launched its Seattle hub in 2021.

CDL, which runs startup programs around the world, does not take equity from companies and relies on funding from founding members such as the UW and Microsoft. Founders in the cohort get access to mentors including startup founders, investors, and other leaders from across the Pacific Northwest.

Startups that have participated have collectively raised more than $330 million in follow-on venture capital funding since 2022, according to CDL.

The list below includes the companies that just graduated, with descriptions provided by CDL. See past graduates here.

Manufacturing

• 3D Spark — An AI-powered B2B platform that lets engineering, procurement, and sales teams rapidly evaluate and compare manufacturing methods for custom parts by analyzing manufacturability, cost, lead time, and CO₂ footprint. 
• Outrun Robotics — An industrial automation company that builds and deploys capable, flexible, intelligent robotic workstations to automate stationary, repetitive work in factories. 
• Xronos — Empowers developers to rapidly and confidently design, test, and deploy software to automate the physical world. 
• Loadsters — A lightweight, rechargeable, modular conveyor-belt system that makes it easier for ramp agents to load and unload cargo and luggage in narrowbody aircraft, for airlines and ground handlers. 
• Velodex Robotics — Building general-purpose robotic manipulation, initially targeting high-volume production in the food industry. 
• AILOS Robotics — Builds the gearboxes robots need at every joint, making modern robotics lighter, faster, safer, more sustainable, and more affordable. 
• R2 Labs — Redefining industrial automation with the R2 Autonomy Controller (RAC), bringing vision, AI, and real-time intelligence to existing PLC-based systems. 
• Neuramill — AI tools for high-precision manufacturing; the copilot for CNC, sitting between CAD and CAM. 

Computational health

• Navis Bio — Software and AI tools for highly-customized intelligence on biopharma assets.
• Cubtale — The first parenting platform integrated with healthcare systems, delivering AI-powered, personalized care guidance and rich behavioral data analytics from birth to early childhood. 
• Vocxi — A breath-based diagnostic platform that enables rapid, noninvasive detection of multiple diseases. 
• EloraHQ  — The operating system for frontline care: 90% less paperwork, 10x clients, and full revenue capture. 
• Vivo Surgery — A cloud platform that captures and organizes surgical video into AI-ready data, accelerating precision training, connected operating rooms, and the future of autonomous robotic surgery. 
• LIND AI — Helps health systems accelerate trial accrual by automating screening and surfacing the most eligible patients, with source-verified evidence at their fingertips. 
• Adentris — An AI-powered platform that integrates with EHR systems to continuously scan for quality-measure adherence and documentation issues before they lead to patient-safety risks or financial losses. 
• Exin Therapeutics — Develops gene therapies to repair circuit dysfunction, powered by an AI drug discovery platform. 
• Therassist.AI — Helps psychotherapists close the quality gap by automating notes and guiding expertise in evidence-based psychotherapy.

Applications are now open for the 2026-27 cohort, with a July 24 deadline to apply. The program is conducted virtually with three in-person session days in October, February, and April. Founders can apply here or reach out to CDL Seattle venture managers: cdl-seattle@creativedestructionlab.com.

Common Room, the fast-rising Seattle startup that built an AI-powered platform to help sales and marketing teams track buying signals across their customers, is being acquired by Zoom.

Terms of the deal were not revealed in a news release on Thursday.

“When we founded Common Room in 2020, we set out with a simple vision: to transform how organizations connect with people,” Common Room co-founder and CEO Linda Lian wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Over the past six years, we’ve had the privilege of building alongside our customers through one of the biggest shifts in enterprise software, the rise of AI.”

Zoom said the acquisition will extend its Zoom Revenue Accelerator platform “upstream,” pairing Common Room’s buyer intelligence with the conversation data Zoom already captures from sales calls — giving reps insight into which accounts are in-market and why to reach out before a call even happens.

“Revenue teams will now have a single, unified platform that will help them reach the right person at the right moment with the right message at every stage of a deal, cutting busywork,” Abhisht Arora, Zoom’s chief strategy officer, said in a blog post.  

Common Room emerged from stealth in 2021 with $52 million in funding from investors including Index Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Next Play Ventures, Greylock, 01 Advisors and a bevy of angel investors — Etsy CEO Josh Silverman; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; and former Axiom CEO Elena Donio.

Early customers included Notion and Pulumi, and the roster has grown to include enterprises large and small.

Lian, a former associate at Madrona Venture Group and senior product marketing manager at Amazon Web Services, co-founded the company alongside three other Seattle tech vets: CTO Viraj Mody, a former engineering director at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO at Convoy; chief architect Tom Kleinpeter, previously a principal engineer at Dropbox; and design chief Francis Luu, who spent 10 years at Facebook.

Common Room was the 2022 GeekWire Awards Startup of the Year and is No. 80 on the GeekWire 200, our ranked index of Pacific Northwest startups.

Zoom, the San Jose, Calif.-based company best known for its video conferencing platform, has expanded in recent years into AI-powered tools for sales, customer service and workplace collaboration. The publicly traded company reported nearly $4.9 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and has a market capitalization of roughly $25 billion.

“Joining Zoom connects our graph to the conversations sellers have every day where deals are actually won and to the AI that can act on it,” Lian said in a statement. “With Zoom’s scale, resources, and global reach, we’ll be able to accelerate our roadmap while continuing to serve and innovate for our customers.”

Arjun Bhatia, an equity analyst with William Blair, said in a report Thursday that the “transaction aligns with Zoom’s M&A strategy and priority of embedding AI more deeply into workflows and advancing its vision of becoming a broader system of action for enterprises.”

Add another name to Bellevue’s growing list of AI tenants.

Taiwan-based eNeural Technologies is setting up its North American headquarters in the city, joining a wave of AI companies — from CoreWeave to xAI to OpenAI — that have staked out office space east of Seattle over the past year.

eNeural plans to invest $3.5 million in the Seattle region over the next three years and create about 30 jobs, more than 20 of them AI engineering positions, according to Greater Seattle Partners, the regional economic development group that announced the expansion.

The company said it eventually envisions its Bellevue office growing into a core edge AI research and development center with more than 500 employees over the next decade.

The company builds lightweight, low-power AI software and chips that let devices — logistics equipment, vehicles, smart city infrastructure — run AI directly on-site rather than relying on the cloud. eNeural says its portfolio spans model optimization tools, self-learning edge platforms, and neural processing unit silicon IP, along with vision-language and large language model tools built for private, secure deployments.

eNeural founder and Chairman Jiun-In Guo called the region “one of the most innovative technology ecosystems in the world” and said establishing an HQ in Bellevue gives the company access to “a unique combination of world-class AI talent, global technology leadership, and proximity to key enterprise customers.”

eNeural’s path to Bellevue ran through Greater Seattle Partners’ SelectUSA Seattle Spinoff program, which introduced the company to the region’s AI and tech ecosystem in 2025.

eNeural’s arrival adds to a run of AI companies moving in alongside tech giants Amazon and Microsoft and staking claims on the Eastside over the past year:

• CoreWeave recently doubled its footprint to 36,000 square feet at One Bellevue Center, expanding its engineering hub with dozens of open roles in the region.
• Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled a 25,000-square-foot office in the former Epic Games space at Lincoln Square South.
• OpenAI moved into a new engineering office at City Center Plaza, a space built for 250 employees with room to grow to as many as 1,400.
• Denver-based Crusoe opened a 7,400-square-foot office in the Key Center building.

Seattle did notch a win of its own this week with the news that Anthropic is leasing 113,000 square feet of space across multiple floors in a South Lake Union development.

The Bellevue office will serve as the eNeural’s primary hub for customer engagement, strategic partnerships, business development, and advanced AI engineering across North America.

Ballmer Group, the Bellevue, Wash.-based philanthropy founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, is spinning out its Washington state work into an independent organization, one of three new regional groups launched Wednesday as part of a broader restructuring.

The new organization, MoveUp Washington, will be led by Andi Smith, who currently heads Ballmer Group’s Washington regional office. It will operate independently from Ballmer Group but continue to be funded by the Ballmers, carrying on the philanthropy’s existing mission of improving economic mobility for kids and families in the state.

Similar organizations are launching in Southeast Michigan and Los Angeles County — MoveUp Southeast Michigan and MoveUp LA — led by Kylee Mitchell Wells and Nina Revoyr, respectively, who currently lead Ballmer Group’s regional offices in those areas.

As the three regional groups become independent, Ballmer Group said in a news release that it will narrow its own focus to a smaller set of large, scalable initiatives aimed at improving economic mobility for kids and families nationally.

“Our intention is to ensure that these local philanthropies can be permanent, ongoing resources in each region, while we concentrate our national efforts on advancing economic mobility in new ways,” the Ballmers said in a statement.

Ballmer Group CEO Terri Ludwig, who helped guide the shift, will serve as a founding board member for all three new organizations while continuing to lead Ballmer Group.

Each organization will establish its own independent board and continue its existing regional work while evolving to meet local needs, according to Ballmer Group.

“Across these regions, our teams have demonstrated exceptional leadership and have distributed more than $1.5 billion in grants over the past decade,” Ludwig said in a statement.

Examples of past giving include:

• $38 million to strengthen mental health services in Washington, including graduate-level clinical education scholarships coordinated through the University of Washington’s School of Social Work.
• $43 million to the UW and other groups to boost early childhood education, including more than 1,500 scholarships over eight years.
• $400 million toward Black investment fund managers and Black businesses, working with firms including Fairview Capital and Goldman Sachs.

Ballmer Group team members currently working in Washington, Southeast Michigan and Los Angeles County will transition to the new organizations over the next year. Current grantees will continue to be supported throughout the process, with no disruption to existing commitments, according to Ballmer Group.

The Ballmers are still determining the long-term financial structure for the new organizations — an endowment is one option under consideration, though not something being established at launch.

Steve Ballmer, who served as Microsoft CEO from 2000–2014, is founder of USAFacts, a nonpartisan organization founded in 2017 to make government data more accessible and understandable. He’s also chairman of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team.

Shawn Mrzena is trading the AI firehose for a welding torch.

In his nearly 25 years at Microsoft, Mrzena has lived through the industry transitions that defined the company’s modern era: the move from on-premises software to hosted services and then the cloud, a succession of CEOs, and now the all-out push into AI.

He also reinvented himself, starting in sales, moving into a business-architect role, then helping to establish and build the company’s data-privacy business. He’s grateful for everything he experienced, likening his Microsoft career to an MBA that no paid education could match. 

But AI is moving faster than anything before it, and in his late 50s, he decided he didn’t need to chase the next big thing again. He has accepted Microsoft’s voluntary retirement offer. 

In the process, he’s taking matters into his own hands, literally. Mrzena, the kind of person who’ll spot a discarded pallet and haul it home to build a table, plans to go to school for welding and metal fabrication, with an eye toward doing part-time fabrication work. It’s a return to his early career, when he worked in the arts and ran printing presses.

“I love the trades,” he said, “because I can feel it and touch it.” 

Mrzena is part of roughly 7% of Microsoft’s U.S. workforce, an estimated 8,750 employees, deemed eligible for its first-ever voluntary retirement program, announced in April.

Over the past few weeks, GeekWire has interviewed and emailed with several longtime Microsoft employees who took the offer — from sales, engineering, marketing and other corners of the company — to find out what drove their decisions and what’s next for them. 

Their specific reasons for taking the offer vary, but a few themes run through their stories: gratitude for long careers at the company, a sense that the timing was finally right and, in some cases, ambivalence about where Microsoft and the industry are headed in the AI era. 

For some, the decision was also shaped by a steady drumbeat of layoffs at Microsoft and across the tech industry. Rather than wait to find out whether the next round of cuts had their name on it, they chose to take their fate into their own hands and leave on their own terms.

The program is part of Microsoft’s effort to trim costs and reshape its workforce while pouring tens of billions into AI. For a company that laid off more than 15,000 people last year, with additional cuts possible, a voluntary offer is also a gentler way to thin its ranks. 

It’s open to U.S. employees at the senior director level and below whose age and years of service add up to at least 70. The package includes a lump-sum payout reaching up to about 39 weeks of pay, or roughly nine months’ salary, depending on level and tenure. 

For many, the bigger draw is health coverage. Microsoft pays it in full for the first year, then lets retirees and their families stay on its plans at COBRA rates for up to four more. The tradeoff: because they’re leaving voluntarily, those who take it generally can’t collect unemployment. 

The “VRP,” as the voluntary retirement program is known inside Microsoft (yes, there’s even an acronym on the way out the door), has received widespread attention inside and outside the company, driven in part by people dreaming of leaving their own workplaces behind. 

Update: About 33% of eligible employees took the retirement, which was within a range of about 30% to 40% that executives had been expecting, according to a person familiar with the numbers. (Microsoft previously declined to provide official numbers.)

Business Insider reported Tuesday evening and GeekWire confirmed that Microsoft plans to cut thousands of jobs next week, less than 2.5% of its global workforce.

Judging from LinkedIn, at least, it has seemed like half the company is leaving, given the crush of longtime Microsofties saying goodbye in advance of the July 1 departure date. The public farewells are largely grateful and often nostalgic, and the responses celebratory. 

But the program has also surfaced concerns. 

Some of those eligible for early retirement were frustrated with the rollout, saying the gap between the announcement and the details fueled weeks of speculation and left people confused. 

Others, reflecting on their careers, point to deeper, longer-running issues inside the company: the constant churn of managers and reorgs that made it hard to finish anything, and a sense that the collaborative culture of Microsoft’s recent era is slipping away.

For those staying behind, there’s another worry: the loss of institutional knowledge and experience as so many longtime employees head for the door at once.

The program puts no restrictions on future employment, and some of those GeekWire interviewed say they aren’t really retiring at all. They range in age from their late 40s to their 60s. One is heading to a startup, another is finishing a doctorate, and a third is moving into conservation work. Others will take a breather before deciding on a second act. 

Aileen Hannah spent 24 years at Microsoft in a range of marketing and partner roles, joining the company’s U.K. subsidiary in 2002 and moving to Redmond in 2010. Along the way she changed countries, raised a daughter and made lifelong friendships.

Now in her mid-50s and divorced, her daughter grown and back in London, she had long been working toward a move into conservation work somewhere in the world, just on a longer timeline. She has no regrets about the years or the pay: she put her daughter through college, has a home she loves, and gets to leave while she’s “still young enough to enjoy it all.” 

When the offer came, she decided a financial and healthcare cushion to make the leap now was worth more than maximizing her final paychecks.

She doesn’t consider it retirement at all. “I consider that Microsoft is releasing me back into the wild,” she said, with no fixed plans beyond “a plate full of possibilities.”

Justin Long spent his entire 28-year career in Microsoft’s Office and M365 engineering organization, with a hand in building, testing and shipping every version of Office since Office 2000. For the last seven years, he was a people manager.

In his early 50s, married 27 years with no children and debt-free, he had been working with a financial adviser and planning to retire at 55. The timing worked out: he was already stepping back into an individual-contributor role and had lined up a strong new manager for his team, so his departure wouldn’t leave them in the lurch. 

The payout, he says, means he won’t have to touch his 401(k) for roughly a decade.

The offer flipped his thinking, he said, from “I’ll put in a few more years” to “hey wow, I can actually retire now.” He intends to make it a true retirement, starting with a trip to Kauai, scuba lessons, and more time on photography, 3D printing and gardening.

James Whelan grew up near Manchester, England, and joined Microsoft’s U.K. arm in 2000, transferring to Redmond in 2012. He moved from enterprise messaging support to a field-engineering role that sent him across Europe, then into partner work and identity engineering, in organizations now part of Microsoft’s Entra and Azure groups.

His retirement comes strangely early. He’s 49, and started just before his 24th birthday. “I’ve been at Microsoft for half my life,” he said. He first heard about the program from a neighbor’s text while visiting friends in Arizona.

When he crunched the numbers, the timing made sense. He wanted to choose his own moment, he said, rather than have it chosen for him.

He isn’t leaving the workforce. The payout isn’t enough to retire on, but it lets him “control my own destiny” and pick his next move. First, a short vacation to mark the start of the next chapter.

Denise Hazlick spent 17 years at msnbc.com, the former Microsoft-NBC venture, before joining Microsoft’s partner organization in 2013, where she ran marketing and communications through the company’s pivots to the cloud, to skilling and certification, and lately to AI.

A former journalist, now 61, she counts nearly three decades tied to Microsoft. She was promoted three times and leaves as a director, and after moving to Texas under the hybrid-work policy in 2023, she had been planning to retire this year anyway. 

Procrastinating just long enough to qualify made the package “a no-brainer,” with the extended healthcare a significant draw. More than the package, though, she was ready. 

“The industry and the company are changing,” she said, “and frankly, I just don’t have the energy or desire to shift yet again.” 

She doesn’t think of herself as fully retired, “just retired from Microsoft.” Her immediate plan is no plan: six months to reset before deciding what comes next.

J.P. Szambelan spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, starting in its consulting arm and working across the Office, Windows and Surface teams, including work on Windows 10, Surface devices and HoloLens. For his last eight years, he focused on the security business and its relationships with industry analysts. 

Szambelan found the work fulfilling and felt fairly rewarded, he said. Two to three years ago, he began planning his exit in earnest, working with a financial adviser toward what he called “vocational freedom.”

He didn’t think he qualified at first, since his age and years of service fell just short of 70, but the company rounded up, pushing him past a financial milestone he’d been aiming for. After nearly 16 years, he also felt a sense of completion.

It isn’t a true retirement. He’ll be starting work at a startup in July, one he chose for its equity upside. “I’ve still got the fire and strong desire to go build something new,” he said.

Scott Thurlow joined Microsoft in 1993 as one of the original program managers behind Outlook, shipping its first versions before leaving for Expedia in 2003. He returned in 2007 and worked on Bing, the messaging backend behind Teams, and, most recently, the Copilot team.

Married, with a daughter in college, he lives in Bellevue. About three years ago, he started chipping away at a doctorate in his spare time, which he jokes turned his decision into “a race condition between finishing my degree or retiring.” The offer answered it.

The healthcare offered under the Microsoft package gives him the runway to finish the degree without wrestling with Washington’s insurance marketplace. Leaving Microsoft also frees him to pursue his research, which focuses on how organizations can keep humans overseeing engineering work as AI takes on more of it. As an outsider, he can finally interview competitors like Google, Amazon and Meta without the baggage of a blue badge.

Beyond the degree, he’s keeping things open: “True retirement plans? No freaking clue.”

Briand Sanderson joined Microsoft in 1998 as a program manager on Internet Explorer, shipping IE5 through 6, after helping build the pioneering Mosaic browser at the University of Illinois. Over 25-plus years he also helped launch the original Microsoft Surface and, more recently, worked on the company’s Cloud and AI organization.

Now almost 59, he says the decision was “less about leaving and more about timing.” Treated fairly and leaving on good terms, he wanted to go out “on a high note, on my own terms, and with gratitude rather than burnout.”

It’s a true retirement from corporate technology, although he says he would “be a terrible retiree if I just stopped.” He’s turning to photography, which he taught before the pandemic, along with gardening and travel. 

“After a career spent building windows so other people could see more,” he said, “I’m picking up a camera and framing the view myself.”