The patents behind PicoBrew, the Seattle startup that once promised to do for home beer what Keurig did for coffee, are up for sale again — six years after the company collapsed into receivership and after two changes of ownership.

Hilco Global, an Illinois-based diversified financial services company, announced this week that its Intellectual Property Services group has been retained by PicoBrew’s current owner to market the startup’s technology to potential buyers.

The sale includes 17 patents and patent applications, two of them pending, along with engineering and design files and product concepts. Buyers can bid on all or part of the portfolio, and non-binding indications of interest are due Nov. 18. Hilco is pitching the assets to companies in coffee, tea, kombucha, spirits, beverage appliances and housewares.

The seller is Pico Craft Group, which Hilco described as led by a former PicoBrew investor. After PicoBrew’s 2020 collapse, its bridge lender took over the assets. That lender, PB Funding Group, was managed by former Microsoft software developer Greg Whitten, The Seattle Times reported at the time. Pico Craft Group bought the assets from the lender in 2024 for an undisclosed amount, according to Hilco, which did not say who runs the group.

“PicoBrew was a true innovator in the consumer and commercial craft beverage space, and its portfolio has applications well beyond beer,” Eric Hurwitz, a senior director at Hilco, said in a news release.

The portfolio covers technology from PicoBrew’s full product line, according to the release, including the Pico Pro and Pico C home brewing appliances, the PicoStill accessory for spirits, the Pico U Multibrew platform for beer, coffee, tea and kombucha, and Z-Series brewing machines and KegSmarts kegerators for commercial use.

Bill Mitchell, a former Microsoft vice president and longtime homebrewer, founded PicoBrew in 2010 with his brother Jim Mitchell, a food scientist, and Avi Geiger, an engineer who also worked at Microsoft. Their countertop machines automated the brewing process using PicoPaks, ingredient packs based on recipes from craft breweries.

The startup became a Kickstarter regular. Its 2017 campaign for the Pico Model C raised $1.93 million from 4,301 backers, a record at the time in the site’s food category, and the $549 machine landed at retailers including Best Buy, Williams-Sonoma and Amazon. A 2018 campaign for the Pico U pushed PicoBrew into coffee, tea and kombucha.

But the company struggled to land more funding. In February 2020, after failing to close a new round, PicoBrew entered receivership. It had raised more than $15 million and cut its staff to fewer than 40, down from a peak of more than 80.

PicoBrew ceased operations in 2020, and no one has supported existing devices since, according to Hilco. Any decision about future support would be up to a buyer. The King County Superior Court approved the 2020 sale, which freed PicoBrew’s bridge lender from the company’s liabilities and from responsibility to past customers, The Seattle Times previously reported.

Some owners kept their machines brewing without the company’s servers by using a workaround developed by a Facebook group of PicoBrew users, The Spoon reported in 2020. The founders were let go after the receivership, according to the site.

When PicoBrew went up for sale in 2020, Mitchell told GeekWire that hardware takes time and multiple funding rounds backed by firm investor commitment.

He shared advice he’d gotten from Dan Leviton of Maveron: “Startups only fail for one of two reasons — they run out of heart, or they run out of money.”

Blue Origin is taking over an industrial building in Des Moines, Wash., where the Jeff Bezos-founded space company plans a mix of lab, development and light production work, the company confirmed to GeekWire.

The 265,922-square-foot facility, known as Prologis Park SeaTac 3, was previously a Bartell Drugs distribution center just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Blue Origin said that at full capacity over the long term, the site is expected to support hundreds of employees.

KING 5 first reported the news Tuesday, citing a state environmental application filed in September that lists Blue Origin Manufacturing LLC at the building’s address, 21202 24th Ave. S. A pre-application under review by the city indicates the property could be used for research and development of commercial satellites, the station reported.

Commercial real estate firm Newmark announced a lease for the entire building last week without naming the tenant.

“The manufacturing project that will be using this property is cutting-edge and we are excited about the job growth and possibilities that it represents for our region,” Newmark Executive Vice Chairman Thad Mallory said in a news release.

With roughly 33,000 residents, the small city of Des Moines is becoming something of an aerospace hub.

Blue Origin’s new location is around the corner from where Shield AI is building X-Forge 3, a 420,000-square-foot facility that will make the company’s X-BAT autonomous fighter jet. Shield AI said last month it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s, and that it’s looking for another 1 million square feet.

“It’s all about labor and access to power,” Mallory told KING 5, referring to the advanced manufacturing projects coming to the area.

Blue Origin is headquartered in nearby Kent, Wash., about 5 miles from the Des Moines site.

The company is working to get its New Glenn rocket flying again after one exploded during a ground engine test in May, which damaged its Florida launch pad. New Glenn is slated to carry Blue’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, a test in Earth orbit planned for mid-2027 ahead of a crewed moon landing targeted for 2028.

Avante, the maker of an AI platform to help companies manage employee health care and other benefits, has landed a $30 million Series A round.

Frist Cressey Ventures led the round, with participation from Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures, Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and existing investor Fuse. The new funding, announced Tuesday, brings Seattle-based Avante’s total raised to $40 million, following a $10 million seed round led by Fuse in 2024.

Benefits are one of employers’ biggest costs. Avante’s AI agents do work like comparing vendor contracts against actual claims, reviewing plan documents for errors and preparing for renewals. Employees can also use the platform to ask questions about their own coverage.

The startup plans to use the cash to expand internationally and develop more AI agents, building on a beta release of its “Ava Agents” last week.

Avante says it now has more than 70 customers, including Samsung Semiconductor, Real Chemistry, Zscaler and News Corp, and that bookings grew nearly fivefold over the past year. The platform reaches more than 385,000 employees and family members, according to the company.

Avante was founded in 2023 by CEO Rohan D’Souza; Carly Eckert, a physician and epidemiologist who serves as head of innovation and impact; and executive chairman Kabir Shahani, the co-CEO of Amperity.

D’Souza and Eckert previously worked as executives at health care automation company Olive AI, which shut down in 2023. The startup emerged from stealth in early 2024 and launched publicly in April 2025.

“Benefits teams are responsible for one of the largest and most consequential investments their companies make, yet they’re still operating with outdated information, archaic spreadsheets, and technology built for another era,” D’Souza said in a statement.

Avante is pitching its software as employers face rising health care costs. Large employers are projecting a median 9.2% increase for 2027, the company said.

The startup competes with benefits and HR software providers such as Workday, ADP, Deel and Rippling. It has also signed partnerships with benefits advisory firms including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden and USI Insurance Services.

Avante ranks No. 156 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space has secured a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital to build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral for a larger version of its fully reusable rocket.

The loan isn’t final until Stoke meets a list of financial, legal, technical and due-diligence requirements. The announcement Monday comes less than two months after Stoke raised roughly $1 billion in a Series E round, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion.

The new pad would serve Stoke’s Nova Block 2 rocket, which is designed to carry up to 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit. That’s five times the capacity of Nova Pathfinder, which Stoke plans to launch for the first time from its existing pad in early 2027. Block 2 is slated to debut in 2029.

The loan would be paired with private capital to pay for the pad, according to the Department of War. Jordan Sebold, senior managing director for investments at the Office of Strategic Capital, said in a statement that adding launch infrastructure would “enhance the overall capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base.”

The Office of Strategic Capital was set up in 2022 to draw private investment into technologies seen as critical to national security. The following year, Congress gave it the power to make loans and loan guarantees to companies in those fields. Space launch is one of the technology categories it targets.

“By expanding domestic launch facility capacity, this investment enables launch service providers to ensure our commercial and defense partners have reliable, high-cadence access to space,” David Lorch, the office’s director, said in the news release.

Stoke is already lined up for military launch work. In 2025, the Space Force added the company to a pool of providers that can compete for national security missions under Lane 1 of the program’s third phase. Lane 1 is the tier meant for newer launch companies and less demanding payloads. Stoke can’t bid on those missions until it completes a successful orbital flight.

The company has other federal ties as well. The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Stoke a $4.5 million contract in 2024 to study rapid delivery of cargo to orbit, and possibly back to Earth. In June, Stoke was one of 37 companies NASA chose for unfunded partnerships. Stoke’s project focuses on returning Nova’s upper stage safely through the atmosphere.

Nova is designed so both of its stages can return and fly again. The booster flies itself back for recovery. The upper stage uses a metal heat shield cooled by liquid hydrogen that circulates through channels inside it, to survive the heat of reentry. Only SpaceX, with its much larger Starship, is pursuing the same goal, and it hasn’t fully achieved it yet. Stoke has yet to launch a rocket to orbit.

Stoke was founded in 2019 by two Blue Origin veterans: Andy Lapsa, the CEO, and Tom Feldman, the chief technology officer. The company has about 400 employees. Most work at its 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters in Kent, and about 50 are at its test site in Moses Lake, which is expanding from 75 to 550 acres. About 50 more work at Cape Canaveral.

GeekWire reached out to Stoke Space for comment and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

For years, Aigen has been building and tweaking solar-powered robots designed to pull weeds on farms. But the Redmond, Wash., startup is also raising a crop of its own: a growing, AI-generated collection of digital weeds and plants that teaches those robots what to pull.

That synthetic data, which Aigen calls Alchemy, is changing what the company can sell. Training its robots on a new crop used to require three to four years of collecting and labeling real-world images, co-founder and CTO Richard Wurden said. Now it takes about a week, helping Aigen attract growers of asparagus, hops, flowers, lettuce and more.

Wurden spoke with GeekWire by phone from FIRA USA, a three-day agricultural robotics expo at Yakima’s State Fair Park that wrapped up Thursday. He said Aigen made several sales at the show, including to growers it previously couldn’t serve.

“Now we’re saying yes to a bunch of crops, where previously we were locked into just doing a few,” he said.

Aigen is nearly sold out of robots for the 2027 season following the show, according to the company.

Aigen’s solar design is also getting more attention as fuel costs climb. U.S. diesel prices are up roughly 70% from a year ago, according to EIA data, and averaged nearly $6.30 a gallon this month, according to AAA. Many rival weed-control machines are pulled by diesel tractors, Wurden said, while Aigen’s robots run entirely on solar panels with a battery backup.

“It just so happens running a solar-powered robot without pesticides is the best possible timing right now,” he said.

Wurden and CEO Kenny Lee founded Aigen in 2020 after meeting in a climate-focused Slack group and discovering they lived about five minutes apart. Wurden, a mechanical engineer, previously worked on battery systems at Tesla and at Seattle electric boat maker Pure Watercraft. Lee is a cybersecurity veteran who co-founded Weblife.io, which Proofpoint acquired in 2017.

The mission is personal for both founders. Lee had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Wurden has type 1 diabetes — diseases Wurden said have been linked to herbicide use.

The startup raised a $4 million seed round in 2022 and a $12 million round in 2023 led by ReGen Ventures, with participation from NEA and others. Wurden said the company has raised about $26 million in total. The startup now has about 15 employees.

Aigen’s Element robots are about 6 feet wide and topped with a roughly 400-watt solar panel. Cameras and AI distinguish weeds from crops, and mechanical arms pull the weeds out at the root. The robots cost $50,000 to $70,000 each depending on configuration, and Aigen typically sells them in packs of five, Wurden said.

Aigen has built more than 100 robots, all assembled in Redmond, and logged more than 15,000 hours in fields in California, Minnesota and North Dakota. Customers include organic soybean growers in North Dakota and tomato growers in California, Wurden said, and the company is expanding a recent pilot with an unnamed Fortune 500 company.

Alchemy has also become a product in its own right.

Large agribusinesses are using Aigen’s synthetic data, Wurden said. Because the plants are generated in simulation, each one comes perfectly labeled. That matters when weeds and crops overlap in ways that are hard to sort out from real photos, especially under shifting daylight. Aigen’s robots don’t use artificial lights. Wurden said the startup built the system out of necessity, because it couldn’t afford to pay people to label images by hand.

“Our AI now labels the data for us,” he said.

The company is choosy about who gets that data. Wurden said the company would work with precision-spraying companies that use less herbicide, but not with operations that broadcast-spray fields.

Next up: robots on Washington farms early next year, the company says. It’s also developing an orchard version with arms that reach out to weed between trees. And a next-generation robot is in the works.

Aigen is one of several Washington startups using AI to fight weeds. Issaquah-based TerraClear maps individual weeds so farmers’ existing sprayers hit only those spots. Seattle-based Carbon Robotics zaps weeds with lasers and trained its AI on 150 million labeled images of real plants. Aigen is betting synthetic data can teach its robots new crops faster.

Wurden said it’s refreshing to see technologists working on these problems rather than focusing on ad clicks or another gadget or service that may not be good for society.

“I support every company working on ag technology and things that help farmers, because farmers have felt like they’re left behind for a long time,” he said. “It’s a good way to cross the aisle in politics, too. Everybody needs food.”

Loomerang made its first sale less than 12 hours after it went live in June. A customer in Houston bought a shirt designed by Joe, an independent artist in Japan.

Four months later, the Seattle-based marketplace for artist-designed T-shirts has 40 artists from 15 countries and recently expanded to India.

Loomerang works by handling everything but the art. Artists open storefronts for free, set their own prices, and get 60% of what’s left after manufacturing costs. The company prints, inspects and ships every order, for now out of co-founder Matt Koyama’s garage.

Koyama described Loomerang as an attempt to run a more responsible business in a capitalist system, one built around people who spend their lives working on a craft.

“How can we reward them for that rather than making them feel like they’re being pushed to the margins constantly?” he said.

Loomerang was started in early 2024 by CEO Vijay Roy, a nearly 11-year Amazon veteran. He and Koyama had worked together on Amazon’s print-on-demand book business. Koyama joined as a co-founder a few months later and went full time this spring after leaving Xbox. A third co-founder, Arka Majumdar, leads design.

The company is bootstrapped. Its 14-person team is spread across Seattle, Minnesota and Kolkata, India, and the founders aren’t taking salaries.

Koyama, who also spent time in gaming, sees the same pattern across creative industries.

“The best stuff comes out of the indie space because these are the people that are willing to take risks, to invent, to revolutionize,” he said.

We caught up with Loomerang for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

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

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Loomerang connects people with the artists and stories behind their clothes: a tattoo artist in Seattle, a painter in Pune, India, an illustrator in Ibaraki, Japan. Artists launch apparel brands for free and keep most of the profit. We print, inspect and ship every shirt.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Starting an apparel brand is expensive. You need inventory, a manufacturer, a storefront and a way to reach customers. Most talented artists can’t take that risk. The ones who license their work to big brands usually get a small cut. We want to flip that by removing the upfront cost, handling production with real care, and making sure the artist keeps most of the profit.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Almost nobody knew who designed their clothes. The exceptions were luxury pieces from designers who were already famous, or a shirt someone bought directly from an artist at a market or art fair. Those people could tell us the artist’s name and why the piece mattered to them. We’re trying to give every Loomerang purchase that same feeling.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

We’re very intentional when using AI, because it’s a threatening presence for many of the artists we work with. We don’t use it to make art. We use it behind the scenes in our code and operations, and in tools that help artists with practical work like upscaling files. Keeping our overhead low means more of each sale goes to the artist.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

People think it’s too good to be true. Artists pay nothing to join and keep 60% of the net profit on every sale. The first question is usually, what’s the catch? There isn’t one. The fashion industry has trained artists to expect a small cut of what their work earns. We think that’s backwards.

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

Holding off on new products. We planned to add hoodies and crewnecks before the holidays, but we decided to prioritize our artist roster and our quality promise. We’d rather ship fewer things we can stand behind than have a wide product range we aren’t fully ramped up on.

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

Build something that creates value for people instead of taking it from them. It’s slower and harder, but those are the kinds of companies we need in today’s world. Technology keeps making it easier to cut people out. The best businesses will find ways to bring more of them in and lift them up.

We’ll know our company has made it when… 

An independent artist’s first thought for launching a brand is Loomerang, not a big platform that pays them a fraction of what their work is worth. When artists in Seattle, Pune and everywhere else make a real living through us. And when “who made this?” becomes a normal thing to ask about your clothes.

Watchtower Labs, a Bellevue, Wash.-based defense tech startup, emerged from stealth Wednesday with $35 million to build AI software that helps military planners make faster decisions about logistics and operations.

Shield Capital and Conviction co-led the seed round, with participation from Founders Fund and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm that supports the U.S. intelligence community. It’s the first outside funding for Watchtower, which was incubated inside Shield.

Watchtower was co-founded by CEO Akhil Iyer, a former Marine Corps infantry and special operations officer who said that like many veterans, he was frustrated that the technology on commercial iPhones wasn’t making it into the field with troops.

After leaving the military, Iyer worked on counter-drone technology and later invested in defense startups at Shield Capital, where he watched senior military leaders try to figure out how to put AI to practical use.

“One of those key problems is how do we best allocate scarce resources across the globe,” Iyer said. “Planning for that is really hard.”

Iyer’s Watchtower co-founders are CTO Souren Aghajanyan and head of engineering John Morman, longtime Microsoft engineering leaders who worked on large distributed systems and fraud protection. Iyer said his first call after deciding to build Watchtower went to Lou Manousos, who founded security company RiskIQ, sold it to Microsoft in 2021 and later became a corporate vice president there. Aghajanyan and Morman had worked on Manousos’ team, and they were already thinking about how simulation and AI could improve planning.

The company’s software lets planners ask questions in plain language, then runs simulations to map out possible scenarios and options, starting with military logistics: moving fuel, spare parts, munitions and people where they’re needed in time. Watchtower models hundreds of possible futures against real-world constraints and shows the assumptions and tradeoffs behind each option, while decision makers stay in charge of the final call.

Iyer said the platform pairs agentic AI with heavy-duty math.

“You can’t LLM your way to a really complicated math problem, yet at least,” he said. “It needs to be set up in the right way, and you need to do some real analysis behind it.”

Many existing military tools focus on giving commanders a clear picture of what they have right now and where it is, Iyer said. Fewer look ahead to what’s coming. Watchtower’s bet is that it can bridge AI and simulation and optimization software to do that.

Watchtower is starting with logistics, but Iyer said supply decisions are tied to operations, so the company plans to broaden its software into wider operational planning.

Watchtower has several military contracts, Iyer said. The most important is a prototype contract it won in January through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Joint Sustainment Decision Tool program, which is building AI tools to help the military forecast logistics needs weeks in advance.

Watchtower and Air Space Intelligence were picked after a competitive process, according to the DIU. The program’s partners include U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (the lead partner), U.S. Northern Command and the Defense Logistics Agency. The tools are meant to track and forecast critical supplies such as munitions, fuel, medical materiel and spare parts.

Iyer said the $35 million will go first toward building out the team, then toward delivering on the contracts Watchtower has won and expanding its platform beyond logistics. The startup has revenue but isn’t disclosing figures.

Watchtower has about 30 employees across offices in Bellevue, the Bay Area, Hawaii and the Washington, D.C., area, with more than a dozen in Bellevue. Iyer, who is based in San Francisco, said the company is moving to a larger Bellevue office and hopes to double its headcount. The Seattle area is a core focus for hiring, he said, because of its density of “very technical folks that maybe wanted to work on things with a little bit more mission impact.”

Recruits don’t need a military background, Iyer said. He noted that quite a few team members immigrated to the U.S. and see the work as a way to give back.

Watchtower is hiring for in-person roles in Bellevue that require U.S. citizenship, according to a LinkedIn post from Aghajanyan, including engineers for its simulation engine, distributed systems and machine learning work.

Watchtower joins a growing defense tech cluster in the Seattle area that includes:

• Overland AI, a University of Washington spinout that builds autonomous ground vehicles, raised $100 million this year and landed a Marine Corps production contract worth nearly $20 million.
• Shield AI picked Des Moines, Wash., to build its X-BAT autonomous fighter jet and expects 4,000 local workers by the early 2030s.
• Anduril has about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle and sees a path to 1,000 engineers, though its expansion has drawn protests.
• Echodyne opened a $40 million drone-detection radar factory in Woodinville this summer.
• Exia Labs, led by former Army officer Jonathan Pan, is building AI software to speed up military planning and simulate missions.
• Microsoft and Amazon signed deals in May to put their AI systems on the Pentagon’s most classified networks.

Portal Space Systems has reached Earth orbit for the second time this year, successfully launching the startup’s first free-flying spacecraft, Starburst-1, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Portal’s Starburst-1 lifted off Tuesday at 7:04 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The spacecraft separated from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission about 57 minutes later.

Within hours of deployment, the Bothell, Wash.-based company reported that the desk-sized craft had established ground communications, stabilized itself, and successfully deployed its solar array to become power positive.

It marks the second significant milestone for Portal this year, following the March debut of Mini-Nova — a tissue-box-sized technology demonstration payload that flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission to test critical control and power systems in orbit.

Portal self-funded Starburst-1 to accelerate its flight timeline and prove out hardware for prospective customers, achieving orbit in less than a year since introducing the Starburst vehicle concept in November 2025.

Co-founder and CEO Jeff Thornburg emphasized that urgency is baked into the startup’s operational philosophy, noting that customers require spacecraft that can shift rapidly in orbit.

“Speed can’t just be part of the product. It has to be part of the company building it,” Thornburg said in a statement. “Our customers need spacecraft that move quickly in orbit and a company that moves with the same urgency to get them there. We put our own capital behind Starburst-1 because proving hardware in flight is how we earn their confidence.”

Thornburg shared video of the launch and deployment of Starburst-1 on LinkedIn.

Starburst is an ESPA-class spacecraft designed to execute rapid maneuvers within a specific orbital regime, giving commercial and defense operators greater operational flexibility. The vehicle shares the majority of its core systems and manufacturing processes with Supernova, Portal’s larger upcoming spacecraft built for rapid travel across different orbital regimes, with flight data from Starburst-1 directly informing both platforms.

Starburst-1 is carrying experimental technologies from three partner companies to test in orbit:

• Zenno Astronautics’ Supertorquer: A superconducting magnetic attitude-control system designed to orient the spacecraft using Earth’s magnetic field — conserving onboard propellant — while testing whether its magnetic field can shield sensitive electronics from radiation.
• TRL11’s Fovea M1: A specialized camera system providing live video of Starburst-1 and its surroundings, including visual confirmation of the solar array deployment.
• Atomic-6’s Space Armor: Protective tiles engineered to shield the spacecraft from high-speed orbital debris without creating additional secondary debris.

Since emerging from stealth in 2024, Portal has raised $75 million in funding — including a $50 million round in April — from investors including Geodesic Capital, Mach33, Booz Allen Ventures, AlleyCorp, and FUSE, alongside receiving critical SBIR and STRATFI support from the U.S. military.

GeekWire got an inside look at Portal’s 8,000-square-foot Bothell development and testing lab earlier this year. To prepare for future demand — including a dedicated 2028 Falcon 9 mission known as Motus Via Sol that will carry multiple Starburst spacecraft and the first Supernova — Portal has been expanding its footprint.

The company — No. 107 on the GeekWire 200 index of top-ranked Pacific Northwest startups — is in the process of transitioning its satellite manufacturing operations into a new 65,000-square-foot facility in Bothell, which is slated to be fully operational by next year and capable of producing up to 16 Starburst and 12 Supernova spacecraft annually.

Carbon Robotics, the Seattle-based agricultural technology startup known for its AI-powered, laser-weeding farm implements, has trimmed its workforce.

The company did not disclose the total number of layoffs, but confirmed to GeekWire on Monday that the cuts affected employees across multiple departments both in the U.S. and internationally.

Carbon Robotics currently employs 275 people worldwide, according to Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing, who attributed the decision to a need to “realign costs due to broader economic conditions.”

The cuts come after a period of rapid momentum for the startup. The company raised $20 million last year to support the development of an undisclosed AI-powered farm robot. Carbon also unveiled an autonomous tractor kit in 2025.

The company’s signature product is its LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses AI to detect and map plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The most recent iteration is the LaserWeeder G2.

Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Paul Mikesell, Carbon Robotics has raised about $177 million to date from investors including BOND, NVentures, and Anthos Capital.

In a recent interview with AgFunder, Mikesell noted that the startup crossed the $100 million revenue threshold, stating, “We intend to keep scaling from there — it’s our intention to get to the point that we’re an independently publicly traded company, so that would involve going through an IPO.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, earlier this year touted Carbon Robotics’ machines on an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” as a possible solution in cutting pesticide use.

Carbon Robotics was named Next Tech Titan at the 2026 GeekWire Awards earlier this year. The company is currently ranked No. 8 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Darko Mesaros used to park a car in the garage of his Maple Valley, Wash., home. These days, it’s wall-to-wall computers.

A towering server rack glows with red LEDs. CRT monitors are stacked beside vintage workstations, and a workbench overflows with tools, cables, and half-repaired components.

“I started getting stuff, and then … it just kind of snowballed to a point I actually had to slow down because I legitimately don’t have space for it anymore,” Mesaros told GeekWire during a recent tour of his retro hardware labyrinth.

The lore of tech innovation is full of suburban garages where visionary founders tinkered their way to world-changing companies. Mesaros, a distinguished developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, isn’t launching a startup out of his. Instead, he’s using it as a living museum to rescue, repair, and resurrect the discarded digital ghosts of computing history — and then daring them to run modern artificial intelligence.

The collection has spilled into an upstairs office and now spans more than 100 full computers, from an early-1970s minicomputer to Silicon Graphics workstations from the ’90s and HP workstations from the 2000s. Add roughly 25 vintage video game consoles, rescued software, peripherals, a leather-bound TRS-80 owner’s manual, and nearly a decade of 1980s Byte magazines, and the total tops 1,000 items.

Most of it arrives broken, and that’s the point.

“Buying a mint old system is not fun,” he said. “Buying something that’s broken and then having that excitement of fixing it is just fantastic.”

He finds gear at Goodwill, through local Facebook Marketplace groups, and through Seattle’s large retro computing community. Sometimes it takes a rescue mission: when a man in Washington, D.C., was about to throw away a pallet of 1980s computers, Mesaros had a friend there grab it, then paid to ship the whole load to Seattle.

At one point, he had seven Commodore 64s. He gives extras to other collectors, and he’s never sold a single piece.

“That’s been my little pride,” he said.

From a Commodore 64 in Serbia to the AWS cloud

Mesaros’ fascination with vintage hardware goes beyond nostalgia; it’s the foundation of a lifelong obsession with how things work under the hood.

Growing up in Serbia, he faced an economic reality where cutting-edge tech was out of reach. From 1991 to 2003, his only computer was a Commodore 64 — a machine released in 1982. While the rest of the computing world sped through the 1990s and early 2000s, Mesaros skipped straight to modern PCs.

“I feel like I missed that whole thing,” he said. “I missed the whole, you know, Sun workstation, Silicon Graphics, HP 9000, all of those things … and I just wanted to explore how that was.”

So he bought a couple of Sun workstations to see what he’d missed. Then he kept going.

“It’s a hobby, but it’s also a problem,” he said with a laugh.

If the garage caught fire, the one machine he’d grab? A bright blue Silicon Graphics Indy, the 1990s workstation from the very era he missed growing up. It was the first SGI he bought.

“It showed me how this amazing workstation worked!” he said. He still fires it up from time to time just to enjoy its IRIX operating system.

Still on his wish list: a DEC VT520 terminal with an amber screen. Working units only seem to turn up on the East Coast, and he won’t risk shipping a fragile CRT across the country.

Before joining Amazon nearly a decade ago, he held system administration and engineering roles at companies including AT&T and Tipico. Now at AWS, his day job involves leveraging his experience to help developers and customers adopt and use AWS services via blogs, webinars, code, and technical advocacy. The garage doubles as his set: he records AWS videos and live streams there.

Mesaros moved to the Seattle area around the start of the pandemic, arriving with a couple of workstations, a monitor, and a handful of laptops before his collection expanded. He soon realized gear was far cheaper here than in Europe.

“Most of these things are older than me. Especially older than my tech career,” the 38-year-old noted. “Actually, all of these things are older than my career. However, again, I find it fascinating how computer history has evolved.”

His arrival timing meant he narrowly missed the chance to visit Seattle’s beloved Living Computers: Museum + Labs before it permanently closed its doors. But in his own home, he’s essentially built a private version of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s former institution.

Beyond the vintage hardware, Mesaros’ appreciation for computing history is permanently etched onto his body.

He sports a collection of retro tech tattoos on his arms, including symmetrical DOS and Linux terminal prompts (C:\WINDOWS> and root@localhost), a classic Windows 95 logo, MS-DOS branding, a shebang and a quit command that mark the start and end of a script, and detailed microprocessors like the Zilog Z80 and MOS 6502 paired with assembly code — a setup he jokingly calls his literal “ARM CPUs.” He’s still waiting, he said, on his check from Microsoft.

“I only tattoo ancient technology on myself,” Mesaros said, noting that people frequently stop him at airports to take pictures. “Old technology will stay with me … I feel like this is an investment in my career.”

He has plans for more ink during his next trip home to Serbia.

Wiring vintage hardware to modern AI

For Mesaros, collecting vintage computers is about more than admiring silent plastic shells on a shelf; it’s about making them talk across the digital chasm. In his garage and upstairs office, he routinely bends ancient hardware to modern purposes — proving that an 8-bit machine or a mechanical teletype can still interface with the cutting-edge cloud.

Mesaros has chatted with an AI coding agent from a Commodore 64 and deployed Kubernetes via a 1986 Tandy 102 portable computer. He wired a 1984 DEC DECwriter IV teletype to Amazon’s Kiro coding agent, explaining in a blog post how he talks to Kiro through the clacking machine — and he’s even deployed AWS infrastructure from it.

“Should this be done? Probably not,” he said. “But is it fun? Absolutely.”

In a demo for GeekWire, we watched the teletype clatter out the agent’s answer to his query, “What is GeekWire?” After a few seconds of hammering, it printed: “Seattle-based tech news site covering Pacific Northwest startups, Amazon, Microsoft and the broader tech industry.”

Not bad for a machine older than its operator.

Mesaros also spent a weekend trying to get stuck in 1999, using a Windows 98 machine as his only computer and documenting it on a VHS camcorder.

“The only window into the future was Kiro,” he said.

While these stunts might sound like elaborate practical jokes, Mesaros believes they serve a vital purpose in the age of AI. In a modern development landscape where tools let programmers “build a to-do app and walk away,” he argues that developers are losing the art of paying attention.

He likes to point out that a 2017 Google paper titled “Attention Is All You Need” helped kick off today’s LLM boom. “Now in 2026, to be a really successful developer,” he said, “attention is all you need.”

“I think being curious and paying attention are the two most important skills for a developer these days because it is so easy not to do those things,” Mesaros said. “And if you want to be relevant, if you want to be good at your job, especially with AI, I think those are the two important things that are critical.”

When he isn’t troubleshooting an obscure serial card data-ready pin or attempting to hook up a military field phone from his native Serbia to an LLM, he balances his digital obsession with analog pursuits. He wrenches on an old Jeep TJ — parked in the driveway because there’s no room in the garage.

He’s not the only tinkerer in the house. His wife is a fashion designer who 3D prints clothing and purses on a farm of printers in one of the upstairs rooms.

“She’s more creative than I am,” he said. “I get to tinker with old things that don’t want to work, and she uses technology to actually make new things.”

When it comes to the tech he lets into his own life, Mesaros is choosy. He wears a classic analog Timex and bought Meta’s smart glasses when they came out — then sold them within a month. “I don’t like the camera on my face,” he said. (He does use a camera-free pair that can display real-time translated subtitles when he travels abroad.)

That same instinct is why he doesn’t see screens going away, even as AI agents take on more work. “We still have the need for control,” he said. “Being able to observe and see, visualize what’s happening is still important.”

Old tech offers something else modern tech rarely does: a slower pace. Computer manuals once took months to produce because they’d stay accurate for years. “Today, if you create a manual that’s printed, it’s going to be valid for a week,” he said.

That’s what makes his garage an antidote to the endless scroll, a place anchored to the glowing screens and clacking keys of computing’s past. The hobby is his “computer away from a computer.”

“I spend my days in the email factory … and then in the afternoon, I just come here and tinker with something ancient that shouldn’t work anymore,” Mesaros said.

Keep scrolling for more GeekWire photos:

Amazon is bringing a new AI-powered camera system to the court as the tech giant gets ready to tip off its second season of basketball coverage on Prime Video.

Called Prime 360, the technology uses an array of high-resolution cameras positioned around the arena to capture plays from multiple angles. Amazon’s proprietary AI models then process the footage to create highlight replays that the company says traditional cameras can’t replicate.

The feature will appear during live games and as an analysis tool on the pregame, halftime and postgame shows for select broadcasts. Amazon said it built the system with a team of producers, engineers and AI scientists, using its in-house AWS Trainium chips.

“Think of it like a video game camera,” Josh Green, an associate producer, said in an Amazon video describing the tech (below).

The cameras are calibrated and synchronized, and their footage is sent to the AWS cloud, where each play is reconstructed as a 3D scene — opening up possibilities beyond a normal replay.

“I want to see this play again, and you could actually fly the camera through the play,” said Wade Wakashige, a director of product. The view gives fans at home “something that the customer in the arena can’t see,” he added.

Introducing Prime 360 🎥

Prime Video's proprietary, AI-powered technology that utilizes an array of high-res cameras around the court and AWS Trainium chips to deliver cinematic highlights you've never seen before! pic.twitter.com/mOlikDb45u

— Sports on Prime (@SportsonPrime) October 14, 2026

Prime Video is also adding a fantasy basketball integration with Yahoo Sports. Viewers who link their accounts will see their fantasy rosters and real-time stats on screen during games. They’ll also get recommendations for live and upcoming games featuring players on their teams.

Amazon debuted “NBA on Prime” last October with a Celtics-Knicks game — reviewed by GeekWire — the first under an 11-year deal that gives the company exclusive rights to select regular-season and playoff games. Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying about $1.8 billion annually for the rights.

This season, Amazon says it will stream more than 100 regular-season and postseason games. In the playoffs, that includes the Play-In Tournament exclusively, select first- and second-round games, and, for the first time, exclusive coverage of the Eastern Conference Finals.

Several tech-driven extras from the first season are back. Fans can again track their active FanDuel bets during broadcasts, though they still can’t place wagers through Prime Video. The Prime Vision alternate stream returns as well, serving as a testing ground for AI-powered stats and graphics, such as flagging offensive players in position to score, that can graduate to the main broadcast.

The “NBA on Prime” season opener is Oct. 23, with a doubleheader: the defending champion New York Knicks host the Boston Celtics at 4 p.m. PT, followed by the Houston Rockets against the San Antonio Spurs in Austin at 6:30 p.m. PT.

The programming is included with a Prime membership, which costs $139 a year or $14.99 a month. Games stream in English and Spanish on the Prime Video app and the web.

Lime riders in Seattle have already outpaced last year’s entire ridership numbers, logging more than 10.5 million trips into October — surpassing the city’s 2025 full-year total more than two months ahead of schedule.

Powered by a massive surge during the summer’s FIFA World Cup matches in Seattle and a record-breaking Seahawks Super Bowl parade, the milestone highlights how deeply e-bikes and scooters have embedded themselves into Seattle’s daily commute and transit network.

The summer soccer tournament alone accounted for more than 1.7 million trips, headlined by an all-time single-day high of 83,000 rides on June 19 for the USA vs. Australia match — a record notably boosted by Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch joining the “march to the match.”

That single-day mark shattered the previous high-water mark of nearly 60,000 rides set during the Seahawks parade in February. Four of Lime’s top five all-time ridership days in Seattle occurred during the World Cup stretch.

“We’re extremely proud of our partners at SDOT, who have spent years building a program and infrastructure that compelled our CEO to call Seattle ‘the next micromobility-first city,'” Lime’s Hayden Harvey, a regional director of government relations, said in a statement. “We’re also grateful to our riders, the Seattleites who choose day in and day out; rain or shine, two wheeled transportation instead of four.”

The record-setting volume reflects Lime’s position as the only game in town. After rival operators exited the market, Lime became the exclusive vendor in the City of Seattle’s micromobility share program.

Lime has since scaled its footprint to 15,000 active devices that are serviced and staged out of a sprawling warehouse south of downtown in Georgetown.

Beyond fleet expansion, Lime is leaning into affordability to convert event riders into daily commuters. Alongside its existing LimeAccess program for low-income riders and its $5.99 monthly LimePrime subscription — which now counts more than 38,000 monthly subscribers in Seattle — the company rolled out a new commuter-hours pricing pilot this week that lowers per-minute rates during daytime travel windows.

Seattle-area innovators made a strong showing on Time’s 2026 Best Inventions list released Thursday, claiming spots for breakthroughs ranging from a tactile sports tablet for low-vision fans to an ultrasonic chef’s knife.

The annual roundup — featuring 300 innovations, with Apple CEO John Ternus and the new iPhone Duo gracing the cover — includes startups like Yoodli, Tin Can, and OneCourt, alongside major regional hardware operations like SpaceX’s Redmond-based Starlink team and Bellevue’s Valve.

While the main headline focused on Apple’s leadership transition and new flagship hardware, the Pacific Northwest’s outsized presence on this year’s list highlights the region’s growing influence across everything from consumer AI and assistive hardware to outdoor gear.

Among the region’s tech giants, Amazon landed two spots on the list, for both its Amazon Pharmacy Kiosk in the medical category and its voice-directed Proteus warehouse robots in logistics. But Microsoft was shut out entirely, missing a placement in both the main 300 list and special mentions.

“These are creations changing how we live, work, play, and think about what’s possible,” Time’s editor’s wrote, adding that each contender was evaluated on key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition, and impact.

Here’s a breakdown of regional innovations honored by Time:

OneCourt (Accessibility): Developed a tactile tablet that translates real-time player and ball data into physical vibrations, allowing blind and low-vision fans to track live sports action with their fingertips.

Yoodli (Education): Recognized for its AI platform for human skills, which uses realistic AI roleplays and real-time coaching to help users build and practice workplace communication skills.

Tin Can (Parenting): Earned a spot for its landline-style home phone built specifically for kids, offering a safe way for families to stay connected without screens.

Seattle Ultrasonics C-200 (Food & Drink): Created by Modernist Cuisine alum Scott Heimendinger, this ultrasonic chef’s knife vibrates tens of thousands of times per second to slice effortlessly through food.

SpaceX Starlink V5 (Connectivity): Engineered by SpaceX’s team in Redmond, the newest internet terminal is roughly 35% smaller and 52% lighter than its predecessor, making on-the-go satellite connectivity easier to mount and deploy.

Valve Steam Machine (Entertainment & Gaming): The Bellevue-based gaming giant made the list for its latest hardware push to bring PC gaming into the living room.

NBBJ (Architecture): The legendary Seattle-founded architecture firm was recognized for its design of the Life and Mind Building at the University of Oxford.

Pebblebee Halo (Privacy & Security): Created by the Issaquah-based startup founded by former Boeing engineers, earning a special mention for its latest tracking and safety hardware.

Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft (Outdoors): Honored for its ultra-comfortable sleeping pad, designed under Seattle-based parent company Cascade Designs.

Superfeet ME3D (Sports & Fitness): Selected for its personalized 3D-printed insoles, crafted by the Ferndale, Wash.-based footwear innovation company.

Several other Pacific Northwest companies made the cut. Three Vancouver, B.C., startups earned recognition: Moment Energy for its clean energy storage made from second-life EV batteries, Glüxkind for its AI-powered self-pushing stroller, the Rosa, and Form for its Smart Swim 2 Pro real-time coaching goggles. And in Oregon, Nike secured a spot in apparel for its innovative ACG cooling running shirt.

The Oct. 26 issue of Time goes on sale on Friday.

Space propulsion company Agile Space Industries is expanding its footprint to the Pacific Northwest, signing a sublease for a new engineering office in Bellevue, Wash.

Situated in the Sunset North office complex along Interstate 90, the nearly 5,740-square-foot space will initially house a half-dozen existing employees while scaling up to accommodate an engineering team of 20 to 30 people.

The effort is being led by Chief Technology Officer Jake Mills, a former propulsion engineer and crew member at Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based Blue Origin space venture. Mills joined Durango, Colo.-based Agile in June and the Bellevue hub will try to tap into more of the Seattle region’s deep aerospace talent pool for systems, design, and propulsion engineering.

Started in 2009 as Advanced Mobile Propulsion Technologies, Agile specializes in in-space chemical propulsion systems for satellites, lunar landers, and national security missions. Unlike booster rockets that launch payloads off the planet, the company’s hardware — including thrusters, propellant tanks, and integrated propulsion systems — takes over once spacecraft reach orbit, navigating everything from commercial constellations to lunar exploration.

“The talent pool there, manufacturing capabilities there, customer base there, supply chain based in Seattle, all make it very attractive to go there, and that is the reason we’re opening up the engineering office,” Mills told GeekWire.

Agile joins a bustling Pacific Northwest aerospace cluster anchored by heavyweights like Blue Origin, SpaceX’s Starlink engineering operations in Redmond, and a growing wave of startups and orbital logistics companies like Starfish Space.

Overall, Agile employs 178 people across the business. The majority of its workforce is based at its Durango headquarters, alongside an additive manufacturing center in Pennsylvania and a 25,000-square-foot test center breaking ground in Tulsa, Okla.

The Bellevue office is located at 3120-3180 139th Ave SE.

Backed by a $17 million Series A funding round earlier this year, Agile has scaled rapidly, and revenue over the last three years has more than tripled. Investors include Caruso Ventures, Howdy Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Veteran Ventures, Denver Ventures, and Cortado Ventures, among others.

Even as Agile plants a flag in the region, the expansion comes amid growing caution over Washington state’s business climate. Mills noted that the company shares the same concerns recently voiced by Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa — who warned during Seattle Space Week in September that if starting over today, “I’m not sure we’d make the same decision” to build in Washington, given local tax and political pressures.

While Agile is eager to tap into the local engineering talent for its Bellevue office, Mills cautioned that future investments, such as a prospective manufacturing and system integration facility, could face headwinds if Washington doesn’t match the aggressive incentives and welcoming posture shown by competing states like Oklahoma.

“I’m just biased towards the opportunity that when you get all the right people in the right place and you have that competition, you have all the capabilities that you need in one place, great things happen,” Mills said. “As people disperse from that, you start to lose that opportunity.”

Replicating the power of the sun to generate clean energy is hard enough, but Helion Energy just achieved another rare feat: making it onto the iconic “Jeopardy!” clue board.

During Tuesday evening’s episode, the $800 clue was featured in a category titled “Y Combinator” and read: “Helion says it’ll build the 1st power plant using this process, fission’s opposite with no uncontrolled chain reactions.”

Three-day champion Greg Monson, a videographer from Portland, Ore., buzzed in first with the correct response: “What is fusion?”

The shoutout didn’t go unnoticed in Everett, Wash., where Helion is based. CEO David Kirtley shared a video of the moment on LinkedIn, writing that it was “surreal to see Helion featured on Jeopardy! last night. And in great company with Y Combinator!”

Kirtley added, “Clean, safe, reliable power is getting a little more mainstream.”

Helion is a Y Combinator alum, having gone through the famed Silicon Valley accelerator’s Summer 2014 batch. Other correct responses in the category included Airbnb, The Athletic, Coinbase, and Twitch.

The game-show spotlight comes as Helion races to master fusion, which produces energy by smashing together light atoms. No one has been able to create a commercially viable amount of energy from fusion here on Earth, though notable progress is being made by research institutions and private companies.

Helion has generated plenty of momentum of its own in the process. In June, the startup announced $465 million in new funding, bringing its total capital raised to more than $1.5 billion and its valuation to 10 times that figure.

The company also recently expanded into a new 15,000-square-foot office in downtown Seattle and pushed its total headcount past 800 employees. Helion currently holds the No. 2 spot on the GeekWire 200 ranking of top Pacific Northwest startups.

USAFacts — the nonpartisan civic data initiative founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — is stepping out of its usual spreadsheet-and-report routine and onto the debate stage, launching its first-ever YouTube debate special titled “The American Dream at 250: Data doesn’t argue. They do.”

The 75-minute program pairs conservative commentator and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro with progressive author and NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway to hash out escalating cost-of-living pressures and the viability of homeownership — all while tethering their arguments to official government numbers. PBS NewsHour co-anchor Geoff Bennett moderated.

Ballmer steers the effort from the organization’s Fact Desk, leaning into USAFacts’ core mission of grounding national political flashpoints in verified government numbers rather than partisan rhetoric.

“Americans can disagree about the role of government in their lives, but productive debate begins with a shared understanding of the numbers,” USAFacts President Lauren Woodman said in a news release Wednesday, explaining that the project is designed to give the public a common factual baseline to evaluate competing policy choices.

The debate focused on three core economic questions, using federal data as a launching pad:

Capitalism vs. government intervention: The debaters tackled whether free markets or government programs are better equipped to preserve the American Dream and address mounting economic pressures.

The scale of government: They sparred over whether Washington is currently doing too much or too little to intervene in the everyday lives and finances of citizens.

The housing crisis and homeownership: The discussion zeroed in on whether homeownership remains a realistic milestone of the American Dream for younger generations, and whether the government should step in to make housing more attainable.

Founded by Ballmer in 2017 with $10 million of his own money, Bellevue, Wash.-based USAFacts operates like a reporting unit for the public sector, aggregating statistics from over 70 federal sources.

The organization is best known for publishing annual corporate-style “10-K” reports on government revenue and spending, as well as running a data-driven “State of the Union” companion timed to the president’s annual address to Congress.

Watch the full debate below:

Bellevue, Wash.-based hiring technology company Humanly has acquired CareerArc to merge its artificial intelligence screening tools with software that helps employers attract job applicants.

The deal announced Wednesday brings together Humanly’s automated chat and interview systems with CareerArc’s social media recruiting and career-site mapping platforms.

The transaction follows an aggressive M&A streak for Humanly, which includes its acquisition of employee engagement platform Anthill earlier this year and a trio of other recruiting tech acquisitions in 2025 — Sprockets, Qualifi, and HourWork.

Founded in 2018, Humanly builds software designed to automate candidate engagement, screening, and interviewing for high-volume employers.

“High volume employers have had to piece together their hiring process with a collection of disconnected tools,” Co-founder and CEO Prem Kumar said in a statement, noting that the deal helps bridge the gap by reaching candidates earlier in the search process.

Founded in 2009, Burbank, Calif.-based CareerArc provides recruitment marketing tools — including social recruiting software and interactive career-site mapping — to help employers reach and convert job seekers.

Its core offerings include HireSocial, a social media recruitment platform designed to automate job postings, and Job Maps, an interactive career-site tool that lets candidates explore open positions visually by location.

Humanly, which is No. 147 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, raised $25 million in Series B funding in April. The startup has raised $52 million to date.

Humanly counts Microsoft, Domino’s, Massage Envy, Worldwide Flight Services, and MGM Resorts and Casinos among its more than 120 customers.

Nine of CareerArc’s 13 employees are joining Humanly, which now employs 50 people.

Seattle embraced the global spotlight and rode a wave of economic euphoria when the FIFA World Cup came to town this summer, but according to new voter data out Tuesday, the city let that momentum slip away just as downtown businesses and major tech employers grapple with an ongoing economic squeeze.

The eleventh edition of The Index, a semiannual survey tracking voter sentiment commissioned by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, reveals a sharp erosion in public confidence regarding the city’s economic trajectory.

According to polling of 700 Seattle voters conducted from Sept. 23 to Oct. 1 by public opinion research firm Fulcrum Strategic Group, 68% believe the city’s economy is getting weaker, 22% think it’s staying the same, and just 10% say it’s stronger.

While voters point to persistent quality-of-life concerns like public safety, homelessness and affordability, the findings underscore growing anxiety over Seattle’s business climate, at a time when major tech employers continue to evaluate their regional footprint and shift jobs across Lake Washington.

Seattle Metro Chamber President and CEO Joe Nguyen said the World Cup brought an energy and excitement downtown that was real and positive. But after a few months, there’s been no sustained honeymoon, and 65% of voters feel Seattle is losing positive momentum on public safety and quality of life.

“We demonstrated as a region what is possible when we all work together, and folks are already feeling that shift away,” Nguyen said during a media briefing Tuesday.

While chief concerns in the survey center on crime and public safety, economic health follows closely behind. In addition to widespread pessimism about the city’s overall trajectory, 71% of respondents agree that businesses are closing down or leaving for nearby cities because the cost of doing business in Seattle has gotten too high. Furthermore, 95% of those surveyed say it is difficult for small businesses to operate in the city.

When it comes to major employers — the tech giants and large corporations such as Amazon that anchor the regional economy and bear the brunt of taxes like the city’s JumpStart payroll levy — the survey reveals a striking disconnect.

The survey found 70% of voters recognize large businesses as essential to Seattle’s success, defying the narrative that the local electorate is anti-business. Andrew Thibault, partner at survey conductor Fulcrum Strategic Group, called it “the most interesting section” in the whole survey.

“Voters here deeply understand that their quality of life is connected to the health of the business environment and our ability to afford the things that we want to afford, like transit and schools, and environmental protections,” Thibault said. “All of those depend on a healthy business environment.”

But a significant knowledge gap persists around tax contributions. Voters estimated on average that large businesses pay just 37% of the city’s total tax revenue, with three-quarters believing that figure sits below 50%. In actuality, businesses pay 68% — more than two-thirds — of all city taxes, according to a recent tax analysis from the Chamber.

Underlying economic anxiety is playing out directly in City Hall’s budget debates. As major employers and tech giants navigate a shifting economic landscape — including recent reports showing downtown Seattle shedding 13,000 jobs in a single year while neighboring Bellevue’s tech hub expanded — voters are demanding a tighter rein on city spending.

The Index reveals that 66% of Seattle voters distrust the city to spend tax dollars responsibly, and nearly eight in 10 support requiring City Hall to prove existing spending is producing results before asking residents or major employers to pay more.

Those sentiments carry heavy weight as the city grapples with its budget. Facing what officials call “seismic shifts” in the tech sector, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed budget attempts to close a massive deficit through spending cuts while freezing the rates for corporate levies like the JumpStart payroll tax.

For Nguyen and the Chamber, the message from voters is clear: City Hall must focus on tangible delivery with existing resources rather than continuous policy shifts and progressive tax increases.

Pointing to the city’s reliance on core revenue streams like business and occupation (B&O), sales, and JumpStart taxes, Nguyen emphasized the risk of over-targeting a concentrated corporate base.

“Finagling with it too much creates a problem where the people who are reliant upon paying the taxes are also the ones being targeted,” Nguyen said. “So if they leave, it creates a multiplier effect in the wrong direction.”

Shoppers navigating aisles of chips and cookies at a Fred Meyer store in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood are dodging more than carts — they’re also sharing space with a smooth-gliding, autonomous robot named Tally.

Equipped with an array of cameras, computer vision and AI, the slender machine pauses briefly near display shelves before beeping like a grocery-focused R2-D2 and zooming down the line to scan digital shelf tags.

During a GeekWire visit one morning last week, Tally sparked a mix of curiosity and pointed questions about the impact of retail automation from shoppers and workers alike.

“It’s kind of wild,” said a shopper named Mark, who, like others we encountered, preferred to give just his first name. “It’s the Jetsons happening right here, right now. If this is what the future is then I guess that’s what it is.”

The future apparently arrived a couple years ago, at least as far as Fred Meyer parent Kroger is concerned. The retail giant began piloting robotic technology in 2024 to “gain real-time insights on product inventory.”

According to a thread on Reddit, Tally robots have been spotted in Fred Meyer stores in Seattle as well as around Washington state, including in Lynnwood, Puyallup, Port Orchard and University Place. Kroger operates more than 50 multi-department grocery and retail stores across the state.

“At Fred Meyer and QFC, we are always exploring new and innovative ways to create a more convenient and friendly customer experience,” Tiffany Sanders, head of public affairs for QFC & Fred Meyer Divisions of Kroger, said in an emailed statement to GeekWire.

Sanders said the technology means “associates can more easily and quickly identify and address shelves where products are low or out of stock” and that teams gain more time “to do what they do best,” which is serve customers.

Sanders did not provide any details about how many stores in the region are using the robots, how many hours per day they roam the aisles, whether any human workers have been displaced, or what Kroger does to ensure customer privacy.

Cincinnati-based Kroger’s automation push does come amid plans announced Monday to slash roughly a third of its corporate workforce over the next three years under a sweeping restructuring led by CEO Greg Foran to lean heavily into technology and streamline operations.

Developed by San Francisco-based Simbe Robotics, Tally is an autonomous mobile robot engineered to help retailers track inventory, check pricing accuracy, and monitor product placement using computer vision and AI. Standing more than 6 feet tall with a slender frame atop a rounded Roomba-like base, the robot navigates store aisles at slow speeds using dozens of onboard sensors designed to safely weave around shoppers and displays.

Rather than sounding alarms or pinging workers in real-time, the robot feeds data into Simbe’s software platform, generating prioritized task lists for store employees to handle out-of-stock items.

Introduced to the market in 2015, Tally is part of a growing wave of automated inventory technology competing for space in grocery store aisles nationwide. Rival systems include autonomous machines from competitors such as Badger Technologies—whose googly-eyed robots are deployed in chains like Stop & Shop—as well as software platforms from companies like Brain Corp.

Simbe has scaled rapidly alongside competitors, recently surpassing a milestone of 3,000 autonomous units under contract globally, anchored by a 500-robot footprint within Kroger’s nationwide ecosystem.

Autonomous robots like Tally may patrol grocery aisles on their own, but some tech companies argue that the best way to track inventory isn’t by adding another machine to the floor, but by empowering the humans already there.

One Seattle startup taking that approach is Augmodo, which develops spatial AI technology designed to capture shelf data through human movement rather than roaming robots.

“Augmodo started by knowing what is actually on the shelf, just like robots, but our vision is to augment the physical workforce,” said Augmodo founder and CEO Ross Finman. “People already go up and down the aisles hundreds of times a day, so enabling the existing workforce with simple, inexpensive smartbadges can provide more frequent, cheaper data while also building an AI assistant to add two years of experience to every associate across back of store, delivery, facility maintenance, and more.”

Unlike autonomous floor bots that have drawn privacy scrutiny from shoppers, Finman emphasized that Augmodo’s hardware focuses strictly on products rather than people.

“Regarding privacy, we focus on products, not people — we actively filter out any people before anything leaves the store,” Finman said. “We do not just filter out anything that could be a person, we filter out anything that is irrelevant.”

Ranked No. 122 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups, Augmodo raised $21 million in a funding round this summer, a year after raising $37.5 million.

For all the futuristic promises of automated inventory, the machines still invite a mix of skepticism from those who share the floor with them.

During GeekWire’s Fred Meyer visit, a number of shoppers gave the robot a bit of side eye or muttered at it for being in the way while they shopped. At one point, Tally paused for several minutes in front of an aisle end cap stocked with Doritos. In other aisles it easily maneuvered around floor displays or paused for customers.

“Right now, it’s a curiosity,” said a Hershey sales rep named Mike who frequently stocks candy in grocery aisles and has watched Tally navigate the store. While he noted that the robot doesn’t personally bother him, he echoed rumors heard among workers about potential labor impacts.

Other shoppers looked past the novelty and expressed concern about broader privacy implications. Patrick, a Seattle resident who works in cybersecurity, said he usually tries to avoid the aisle when he spots Tally rolling past.

“First off, it’s taking jobs, but also it’s just more mass surveillance,” Patrick said. “Every time I pass it, I wonder: Is it collecting Bluetooth pings off your smart devices? … I’d be very surprised if it really was just doing cameras on the shelves versus trying to collect data on actual customers as well.”

The anxiety over data collection comes at a sensitive time for major grocers in the region. The Seattle City Council recently passed a groundbreaking ban on algorithm-based “surveillance pricing,” prohibiting retailers from using personal data and AI tracking to set individual, dynamic prices for shoppers.

Simbe’s Tally website features images of shoppers posing for selfies with the robots, under a headline that reads, “People are more likely to shop at retailers with in-store robots.”

While Tally is officially engineered for inventory management, shoppers like Patrick say roving robots only deepen distrust over how much corporate data is being gathered inside the aisles. Pointing to the cameras mounted on the robots and pairing them with modern AI tracking software, Patrick argued that it feels reminiscent the pushback against Flock automated traffic enforcement cameras.

“I think it’s just another way for them to cut the humans out of the labor force and steal more data from customers,” he said.

Nicolas Cage is drawing a hard line in the digital sand against artificial intelligence, revealing that he likely won’t work with Amazon again after refusing to sign an AI waiver for his now-canceled Prime Video series “Spider-Noir.”

Speaking during a panel at New York Comic Con over the weekend, the actor didn’t mince words about his clash with the studio.

“Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI,” Cage told the crowd, according to The Wrap. “I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it’s like, connect those dots! I’m not a member of their club. I didn’t sign the waiver to let them use AI on ‘Spider Noir.’ I’m probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that’s OK.”

Inspired by the Marvel Comics character, “Spider-Noir” starred Cage as Ben Reilly, an aging, down-on-his-luck private investigator in 1930s New York City who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s lone super-powered vigilante.

Despite garnering 11 Emmy Award nominations, Prime Video abruptly canceled the series after just a single eight-episode season.

Cage is famous for boundary-pushing roles in classics like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Face/Off,” and “National Treasure.” The Oscar winner teased his next pivot to the small screen, hinting that he is set to star in Season 5 of HBO’s anthology crime drama “True Detective.”

And Cage’s anti-AI stance appears to be shaping his future creative ambitions, with Kotaku reporting that the actor expressed a desire to team up with younger, DIY-reared directors — specifically shouting out 21-year-old YouTube sensation Kane Parsons, creator of the viral “Backrooms” series — who honed their skills online and share his deep skepticism toward generative tech.

“They’re doing it from scratch and by hand,” Cage said. “I want to get with that.”