Last year, lifestyle icon Martha Stewart created an internet sensation when she told a podcast host that she would pick composting over burial or cremation after she dies. She has Seattle entrepreneur Katrina Spade to thank for making that option an available, legal choice.

While a graduate student studying architecture, Spade set out to create an alternative for putting people to rest — one that offered a climate-friendly, sustainable solution while remaining practical in urban settings and palatable to loved ones.

“Cremation and burial, both are polluting in their own way,” Spade said. “And I don’t want my last gesture to pollute the earth.”

So in 2020, Spade launched her company, Recompose, becoming the first in the U.S. to develop the technology needed for the commercial composting of human bodies. Now 14 states have legalized the practice and more than a dozen others are considering it. Additional companies have joined Recompose in providing the alternative “death care” service and all are looking to scale. One, Earth Funeral, earlier this year opened the first human composting facility on the East Coast.

In comparing funeral options, a cremation produces about 530 pounds of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a fuel-efficient car from Seattle to San Diego. Burials consume land and can rely on toxic embalming chemicals, chemically treated caskets, and concrete vaults. Composting requires almost no energy input and produces clean soil.

The process is relatively simple: A deceased person is put in a vessel with natural materials that create the conditions needed for composting. But Spade had to navigate technical and legal hurdles to turn the concept into a business, sparking a new sector within the funeral field.

The science and the law

Stewart and Spade both came to champion human composting by way of horses. When Stewart’s equine pets die, she wraps them in linen and buries them on her land to naturally decay into soil in a process akin to composting.

During her research, Spade discovered a video on horse composting from Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Carpenter-Boggs is an expert in the practice, which is routinely applied to livestock like cows and horses. Spade wanted to refine the approach for humans, and the two began collaborating.

They developed a strategy using stainless steel vessels and a blend of straw, alfalfa and wood chips.

“We determined… the best kind of recipe of plant materials that would have the right ratios of carbon and nitrogen, and also the right structural properties to allow air to permeate, because oxygen is critical to this process,” Spade said.

The vessels include thermometers to ensure the body reaches and holds a temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit for three consecutive days to destroy pathogens. The heat is generated entirely by naturally occurring microbes.

Before Spade could deploy the technology, she had another problem to solve. She was contacted by Tanya Marsh, a professor and expert in human remains law, who informed Spade that her plan was “completely illegal” in all 50 states, but offered to help her change that.

Spade then turned to her Seattle neighbor, state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was coincidentally pursuing another climate-friendly end-of-life alternative called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation. Pedersen sponsored legislation to legalize composting, and it passed in 2019 with bipartisan support, paving the way for Recompose.

An unexpected appeal

Recompose has created an environment that Spade hopes is comforting for grieving friends and families. The facility features a room for sitting with the deceased, who is wrapped in a natural linen shroud, and a memorial space with vaulted ceilings and green and golden stained-glass windows.

Beyond that is the “greenhouse,” a soil- and straw-scented space containing 33 vessels for composting. Active composting takes about one month; the resulting soil is then removed to “cure” for an additional month to cool and dry out. Bones are broken down mechanically and added back to the soil, while non-organic materials like artificial joints are recycled.

The process creates 20 to 30 bags of a mulch-like material. Friends and families take as much as they like, and Recompose can donate a portion to its partners in land restoration and conservation.

Other companies offering human composting include Return Home and Earth Funeral, which are both based in the Seattle area.

Interest in the death-care alternative has been surprisingly broad.

“I really thought that this was going to be for the Subaru-driving urban Seattle dwellers, and they certainly exist,” said Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home. “But we get as many people from ruby-red Eastern Washington as we do from Seattle or Bellevue.”

While liberals are drawn to the climate benefits, conservative farmers and hunters often feel deeply connected to returning to the land, Truman said. A third segment of customers simply finds traditional burial and cremation unnerving.

Younger generations opt in

In an unexpected turn, younger adults are opting in, too. Elyssa Tappero, a 30-something tsunami program manager for Washington state, is pre-funding her $7,000 Recompose service via $100 monthly installments.

“When I learned how much of an environmental impact there is from cremation, and how expensive some of those things are — and just the entire approach by the funeral industry — I knew that wasn’t something I wanted,” Tappero said.

Spade recognizes that addressing climate change requires much bigger actions than human composting, but is eager to do her part.

“If we can truly and meaningfully change the funeral industry, the way we care for our bodies, and … connect humans even more to the fact that we’re part of that ecosystem, we’re part of the natural world, that would be hugely satisfying,” she said.

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose
• Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home
• Elyssa Tappero, customer of Recompose and tsunami program manager for the Washington Emergency Management Division

Additional sources:

• Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University
• Inside Recompose, where the human composting startup is ready to grow its formula beyond Seattle (GeekWire)
• 50+ & Unfiltered with Shawn Killinger, Episode 124 with Martha Stewart
• The environmental toll of cremating the dead (National Geographic)
• The Potential of Our Decay: Cemeteries That Save the American Landscape (Smithsonian)

Sila, a startup producing next-generation battery materials, on Tuesday announced $300 million in new funding.

The company previously raised $1.3 billion and was valued at close to $2 billion two years ago, according to PitchBook. It has 400 employees.

The California-based startup has developed a silicon-carbon material that replaces graphite traditionally used in the anodes of lithium-ion batteries, delivering better performance and significantly higher energy capacity.

Last fall, Sila opened its manufacturing facility in Moses Lake, Wash. — the first automotive-scale silicon-anode plant for both the company and the nation. It’s shipping sample anode material from the facility to a variety of customers.

The cash infusion will help fund a planned expansion of its Central Washington operations.

The current plant has a production capacity of about 2 gigawatt-hours of anode material, which, depending on its application, could supply 20,000 to 50,000 EVs. The expanded facility could increase that volume to tens of gigawatt-hours.

EV sales cooled in the U.S. after President Trump returned to office and federal support for battery-powered cars waned. But new models are still entering the market and demand is growing for other battery applications.

“Anything that AI is touching right now is driving tremendous need for better batteries,” said Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO.

That includes drones, hardware deployed in outer space, robotics, autonomous vehicles, wearable consumer devices, and batteries used at AI data centers. All of those uses require higher performing batteries, he added.

It’s also essential that the U.S. bolster its domestic manufacturing of battery components given national and economic security concerns, Berdichevsky said. Because while the U.S. is racing to strengthen its AI sector, if the nation has to import all of the equipment and hardware systems that it needs, “you really don’t have an AI industry,” he added.

Sila’s round was led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures. It was joined by 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, and other existing and new investors.

Moses Lake is also home to Group14, which is producing its own version of a silicon anode material. The Washington-based competitor to Sila has put its U.S. manufacturing on pause as it focuses on its South Korean plant, which is delivering commercial-scale volumes of material for customer performance testing.

Editor’s note: Story updated at 9:25 a.m. July 21 to add comments from Gene Berdichevsky and to clarify that the next phase of manufacturing expansion will increase production into tens of gigawatt-hours of material.

Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa faced a barrage of pointed questions from the audience Friday during a session at the annual Pacific Northwest Climate Week in Seattle.

Protesters challenged Nakagawa through most of the 30-minute session held in a conference room at Seattle’s City Hall, calling out the company’s use of fossil fuel energy sources to power its AI data centers and challenging Microsoft’s commitment to climate goals set years ago.

As a reporter covering sustainability issues for GeekWire, I moderated the session. Many of the issues raised by the crowd were on my list of questions for Nakagawa. The disruptions also included chants from protesters seated among attendees, at times going beyond climate issues to condemn Microsoft’s technology deals with Israel.

Security guards ultimately ushered some protesters out of the space, while others remained. Interruptions from the audience continued for all but the final 10 minutes of the session.

The event capped off Pacific Northwest Climate Week, which included conversations around the city and region about climate change solutions, policies and innovations.

Microsoft has for many years been viewed as an environmental corporate leader, setting an ambitious goal in 2020 to become carbon negative within a decade. It created an internal carbon tax — one of the corporate world’s largest — that charges individual Microsoft divisions for emissions from sources like air travel to fund climate-friendly initiatives. The company is credited with helping create and sustain the carbon dioxide removal sector, among other roles.

But the rapid expansion of AI data centers and their huge energy demands are undercutting Microsoft’s standing. The company recently released its annual sustainability report, disclosing that its carbon footprint grew 25% last year, moving it further from its 2030 target.

One protester’s question was about a deal announced earlier this year in which Microsoft is partnering with Chevron to build a 2.7 gigawatt natural gas facility to power a data center campus in Texas. I asked Nakagawa how the company defends the agreement, and she pointed to the 4.7 gigawatts of renewable energy that Microsoft has supported in the state. I followed up by asking about the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s commitment to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects given recent reports about a pause on new deals.

Nakagawa was unable to answer before the crowd drowned her out with a call-and-response chant: “Microsoft, you can’t hide. We can see your dirty side.”

Another protester criticized the escalating pursuit of AI. “You’re selling us a product that we don’t even need, and we never should ask for,” he said. “No one wants AI. You’re destroying the climate with AI.”

I brought up legislation proposed earlier this year in Washington to mandate clean energy use and bring transparency to data center impacts in the state. Microsoft opposed and helped defeat the bill, though the company says it wants to work with lawmakers to pass rules next year. I asked what needed to change in the legislation for Microsoft to support it.

Nakagawa didn’t provide specifics, but noted that this year, for the first time, the company shared facility-level information in its annual report on electricity and water use for data centers worldwide.

“People want to know more about the data, and we believe you can have an honest and candid conversation with transparency and access to that information and data,” she said.

Given the obvious public concerns, I asked Nakagawa, “Do you really honestly believe that by 2030, the company can hit that carbon-negative goal?”

Nakagawa pointed to wide-ranging initiatives that are starting to help curb specific emissions, including investments to make Xbox devices lower carbon and financial support for the recent opening of a production plant in Moses Lake, Wash., for sustainable aviation fuel company Twelve.

“There are a couple areas where we’re seeing a lot of promising progress,” she said. “Look, this is going to be a hard target. We’ve not been at all shying away from the fact that this is a difficult goal.”

Anand Subbaraman is departing as CEO of Icertis, the Bellevue, Wash.-based contract management software company said Friday. Chief Financial Officer Rajat Bahri and longtime executive and Icertis board member Jim Moffatt will serve as interim co-CEOs as Icertis searches for its next CEO.

Subbaraman took the helm in August 2025 when Icertis co-founder Samir Bodas stepped down. Bodas had been the company’s only CEO since launching the business in 2009. Bodas shared at the time that he was resigning due to a health concern, and passed away in January after a battle with cancer. 

Subbaraman, who joined Icertis in 2024 as chief operating officer, will serve as an advisor during the leadership transition. No reason was provided for his exit. We’ve asked the company for further details.

“We are grateful for Anand’s service and his work to expand the company’s AI capabilities and scale operations,” Moffatt said in a statement. “As our Board conducts its search for the next CEO, Rajat and I will ensure we do not miss a beat during this important time for our company.”

Founded in 2009, Icertis has raised more than $500 million and was valued at $5 billion four years ago. Its investors include SoftBank’s Vision Fund, SAP and PSP Partners, the firm chaired by lead independent director Penny Pritzker.

Bloomberg reported in February that Icertis was working with Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale that could value the company at as much as $5 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. Buyout firms had shown preliminary interest, and no final decision had been reached, according to the report.

The company said Friday that Bahri will hold dual roles as interim co-CEO and CFO. He joined Icertis in 2022 and previously served as CFO at several companies, including ID.me; Wish, where he helped lead the company’s IPO; and Jasper Technologies.

Moffatt has served on the Icertis board since 2022, after previously serving on its advisory board, and is a member of the board’s audit and compensation committees. He has also been appointed chair of the board, in addition to his interim leadership role. Moffatt spent more than 35 years at Deloitte, leaving the company as vice chairman and global CEO of Deloitte Consulting. He is now president of JSM Advisors.

— F5 named former Amazon executive Cathy Peterman as executive vice president and chief people officer of the Seattle-based application-delivery and security company. In May, F5 celebrated its 30th year in business.

“Cathy brings a rare combination of strategic depth and genuine humanity that will raise the bar for how we invest in our people,” said CEO François Locoh-Donou in a statement. “She and I share a reverence for culture and its impact on driving sustained results.”

Peterman joins F5 from Wayfair, where she served as CPO for the retail company’s technology organization. Prior to that, she was with Amazon for more than five years, departing as the HR executive for advertising products and technology.

— After more than 27 years at Microsoft, Rudra Mitra has announced his departure. He leaves the role of corporate vice president and head of Microsoft Security Purview, a team addressing data security and governance focused on artificial intelligence and AI agents.

Mitra joined the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant straight out of college as a software engineer. He has led work on products including Office, Windows Live and Microsoft 365 Cloud Infrastructure.

“Microsoft is a very special place full of incredibly talented people, and this decision comes with gratitude, happiness, and optimism for the future,” he said on LinkedIn. Mitra did not share his next move, saying only that there is “more on that soon.”

— Markham McIntyre, who previously led Seattle’s Office of Economic Development, is now executive director of Climate Surge, which is described as a “project built to accelerate the deployment of climate policies and market solutions in Washington.”

The effort works with corporations, heavy industry, government, developers, advocates, and philanthropy, and is a partnership between Earth Finance, Climate Solutions and Stolte Foundation.

Prior to his role with the city of Seattle, McIntyre was at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber for more than eight years, leaving in 2022 as executive vice president.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, announced a slate of new hires, all of whom appear to be working remotely:

• Adam Block was named chief sales officer, joining from Motive where he was chief revenue officer.
• Ken Coleman was named senior vice president of marketing, coming from Ramsey Solutions.
• Khoi Hoang was named leader of the global sales engineering organization, joining from Salesforce.
• Aaron Ellis was named leader of corporate sales, joining from Workday.

Qualtrics previously shared news that it promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product.

— Jay Shankar, Amazon’s former vice president of global talent acquisition, has joined Uber in a comparable role. Shankar, who is based in San Francisco, resigned from Amazon in December. Past employers include Adobe and BMC Software.

“When I joined AWS almost 8 years ago to lead recruiting, I had never run a talent acquisition organization. What I discovered was a team of builders who showed me that this work is fundamentally about investing in people and obsessing over customer needs,” Shankar said on LinkedIn.

— Jamie Boyd has joined the advisory board for Seattle’s GemaTEG, a startup building technology to manage the heat produced by computer chips. Boyd is a founder of Cypress Capital Holdings and previously helped build Cascadia, an investment banking franchise focused on energy and climate technologies.

— Seattle immigration tech startup Casium named Kat Kelley as its founding go-to-market lead. Kelley joins from Teaching Strategies, a digital education company, and past employers include Rectxt and brightwheel.

— Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm that specializes in corporate and technology-focused legal work, announced that Ty Kayam has joined as counsel in Seattle, expanding the firm’s healthcare regulatory team.

— Rogo named Joe Xavier as chief technology officer of the New York-based finance platform. Early in his career, Xavier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft, and more recently served as Grammarly’s CTO. At Rogo, he will help establish a San Francisco office.

— And in case you missed it: Dave Brown, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services leading its compute, AI and machine learning operations, is leaving after nearly 19 years. He is departing at the end of this month, and Amazon exec Dave Treadwell will take over the group. Read more in this GeekWire story.

While working for PwC in Jamaica early in her career, Meagan Breidert focused on international development clients. There, she learned about a Caribbean-wide initiative to make the region’s communities more resilient to climate change — adapting infrastructure and building warning systems to withstand stronger storms and rising sea levels.

Breidert left Jamaica with a new direction: a career in sustainability where she could tackle “big, challenging, complex problems,” she said.

Now senior director of sustainability and impact at Seattle-based Slalom, Breidert works out of the Washington, D.C.-area office for the global business and technology consulting firm. In her role, she leads Slalom’s internal climate programs and shapes how the company engages with community members and supports its employees.

Keep reading to learn more about Breidert’s sustainability journey. Her quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

What’s your biggest concern when it comes to addressing climate change?

I worry that the discussion and the divide are being driven by the language we use. If we speak in plain language, we’ll see we all want the same things. We want clean air, we want clean water, we want our kids to grow up healthy. We don’t want toxins in our backyard. It doesn’t matter where you fall on a political spectrum, we as humans want the same things for our families.

What gives you the most hope for the planet?

I’m going to paraphrase the convener and architect of the Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres. She says, “I focus on the signals, not the noise,” and I really took that to heart. There’s this incredible economic benefit to supporting climate-positive practices and a more sustainable way of living. Renewable energy is more economical, new jobs are being created with the green economy. Companies are actually saving money, the air is cleaner, quality of life improves.

There’s just an abundance of upside, no matter what the motivation is. We’re seeing more and more renewable energy being used, and I think that’s a signal versus the noise.

What is a habit you’ve changed personally because of climate concerns?

My home has solar panels and I can cover my family’s energy load with them. Regardless of my beliefs, economically it’s beneficial and my bills have decreased. My kitchen and home goods are plastic-free to the extent possible, so all glass. And my family’s clothes are sustainable. My son is younger, so he has more churn on clothes — but my clothes are generally natural fibers and secondhand or vintage where possible. And we eat an abundance of beans and tofu.

If you could wave a wand and invent one climate solution, what would it be?

I would love to have ready-made, at-scale solutions for plastic pollution and single-use plastics. At Slalom, we have a plastics commitment on removing problematic and single-use plastics from our operations, especially in our kitchens and break rooms, but for me personally, plastic is a visual, physical problem. People see it on vacation, when they go to the beach, or in daily life, walking down the street.

I would love solutions — whether it’s better recycling mechanisms or advances with bacteria, enzymes, fungi, that are able to break down plastics, or plastics made from less harmful components like seaweed or sugarcane — I would love to see those things come to the market tomorrow.

If you could have coffee with any climate leader, past or present, who would you pick?

I would love to have coffee with the chief sustainability officer at Mars, Alastair Child. M&M’s, particularly peanut, are my favorite candy. But I think the interesting intersection is chocolate, coffee and vanilla grow together in tropical locations that are being the most affected by climate change and extreme weather. What is the plan to secure those supply chains and work with local and Indigenous communities on some of the traditional knowledge for growing those?

We all need to eat, and the planet is changing, and how our food grows, the price of commodities, the quality of those things are going to change. I would love to have this very deep-dive conversation around how my chocolate is going to continue, and my coffee and vanilla!

How do you approach this work and not get overwhelmed?

I really chip away at problems and usually start on the data side, start with the stakeholders and just chip away. My team is great because we like to celebrate the little things, like, “Hey, that stakeholder answered the phone today, that vendor that we’ve been asking for data got us this information.” Before you know it, you look up and you’re like, “Oh, I just talked to 50% of our supply chain and now they’re providing us data.” Those small pieces add up to a lot. We can’t do it alone. It’s an entire ecosystem issue, so one at a time, chipping away.

What impact do you hope your work has in 20 years?

I don’t want to say working myself out of a job because I need a job, we all need jobs, but I would say I look forward to sustainability no longer having to prove its business case. It’s on the checklist. It’s already in there. Nobody has to say, “We’re making a business decision — oh, did somebody check with the sustainability people?” It should just be, “Here’s a business decision. It’s all in here, it’s all embedded, and there’s no question about the sustainability pieces.” Once that happens, then we’ll start to see some of the real gains.

General Fusion’s stock is trading up after it became the first fusion energy company to go public on a major exchange, debuting Monday on Nasdaq.

The launch of GFUZ stock coincided with the release of the Fusion Industry Association’s annual report, which reflected that same investor enthusiasm: private funding for fusion companies totaled $4.5 billion over the past 12 months. One of the biggest rounds went to Helion Energy, a Seattle-area company that raised $465 million last month, bringing its total investment to $1.5 billion.

Soaring energy demand from AI data centers has helped drive interest in the sector as an ambitious slate of companies is building devices that create and contain plasma — a super-hot, fourth state of matter required for atom-smashing fusion to occur.

For decades, researchers have chased this clean energy source, aiming to replicate the reactions that power the sun, a churning ball of plasma. While significant progress has been made, big technical hurdles remain, and it’s uncertain when the goal will be reached.

But the promise of fusion is so enticing that the risks appear worth it for many investors.

“A commercial fusion industry is a world-changing industry, and the returns on investment will be massive,” said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, in the foreword to the report.

The sector has landed more than $13.3 billion from venture capitalists over the past five years, according to the annual survey. After decades of government support via national labs and R&D grants, the private sector is now picking up the majority of the tab for fusion’s progress.

One of the important milestones in the pursuit of fusion is “scientific breakeven” — the point at which the output of a fusion reaction matches the energy input to a device’s plasma, without including the rest of the system’s power needs. Scientific breakeven was first hit by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022, but has not been reached by a private venture.

To be financially viable, the fusion companies need to go further, capturing more energy from fusion than required to operate their whole system.

The new report includes profiles of 56 companies worldwide that are pursuing fusion, including four based in the Pacific Northwest: General Fusion, Helion, Zap Energy and Avalanche Energy, as well as Kyoto Fusioneering, which has an office in Seattle.

Here’s a closer look at the four companies based in this region:

Avalanche Energy, Seattle

• Notable fact: Avalanche is unusual for its small-scale approach to fusion, and its plan to launch a pilot plant by 2030 is among the earlier targets in the race.
• Year founded: 2018
• Target uses: Electricity, space propulsion, marine propulsion, off-grid energy
• Publicly shared total funding: $104.2 million
• Target for scientific break even: 2029
• Target for first pilot plant: 2030

General Fusion, Vancouver, B.C.

• Notable fact: General Fusion has made multiple pivots in recent years in its path to commercialization and was the first to go public.
• Year founded: 2002
• Target uses: Electricity generation
• Publicly shared total funding: about $500 million
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed; aiming to produce fusion conditions by 2028
• Target for first pilot plant: Approximately 2035

Helion, Everett, Wash.

• Notable fact: Helion was the first to sign up a fusion customer when it inked a deal with Microsoft in 2023, and aims to be the first to reach commercialization.
• Year founded: 2013
• Target uses: Electricity generation
• Publicly shared total funding: $1.5 billion
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
• Target for first pilot plant: 2028

Zap Energy, Everett, Wash.

• Notable fact: Zap recently announced it will also pursue nuclear fission energy, building small-scale reactors alongside its fusion work.
• Year founded: 2017
• Target uses: Electricity generation, off-grid energy, industrial heat
• Publicly shared total funding: $338 million
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
• Target for first pilot plant: Late 2030s

— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.

The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.

“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.

— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.

The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.

Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.

The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.

Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.

Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.

Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.

— Monica Lazo is now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.

And some departures from Big Tech:

• Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
• Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
• Jeff Nienaber is departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.

British Columbia-based General Fusion on Friday completed its deal to become first publicly traded fusion stock on a major exchange. The 24-year-old company is trying to harness the atom-smashing reactions that power the sun, aiming to create commercially viable amounts of electricity — a feat no one has yet accomplished.

General Fusion closed its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, allowing it to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The companies first announced the $1 billion agreement in January, months after layoffs and a public plea by its CEO for new investment.

Its shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange Monday under the ticker symbol GFUZ, and its warrants under GFUZW.

Last month, the company announced a partnership with energy infrastructure company Renexia to begin planning commercial deployment of its clean energy systems in Italy, though significant technical hurdles remain.

Editor’s note: General Fusion is set to become the first publicly traded pure-play fusion energy company on a major exchange. In late 2025, Renewal Fuels, which has been trading on OTC markets for more than a decade, agreed to acquire Kepler Fusion Technologies in a reverse merger. The transaction closed in February 2026, and the combined company has rebranded as American Fusion.

Microsoft has just four more years to reach its ambitious goal of removing more planet-warming carbon that it produces. But the company’s annual sustainability report, released Thursday, shows it’s moving in the opposite direction, as its 2025 emissions spiked 25% over the previous year.

Despite the troubling increase, Microsoft leaders say they remain committed to the longer-term goal.

“We continue to really be focused around carbon negativity by 2030,” said Melanie Nakagawa, chief sustainability officer, in an interview with GeekWire.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company is the latest tech giant to fall further behind its climate targets as they invest billions of dollars in new, energy-hungry data centers to power the AI boom. Amazon’s carbon footprint jumped 16% last year, while Google’s greenhouse gas emissions swelled 18%.

The report also shows how much energy use drove that increase, with Microsoft’s total electricity consumption growing by 24% last year.

In total, Microsoft produced 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025, which would have been roughly 34 million metric tons without carbon reducing initiatives including purchasing clean electricity and sustainable fuels, Xbox console efficiency and Surface device decarbonization. The reduced number puts the company’s footprint roughly on par with the total emissions of Panama or Lithuania.

In addition to data center expansion, Nakagawa said, the carbon increase was also driven by Microsoft’s decision to stop buying unbundled, short-term renewable energy certificates, or RECs — a mechanism companies can use to quickly lower their reported emissions for a given year. Microsoft is instead prioritizing longer-term initiatives with bigger impact, she said.

The challenge Microsoft wants to answer, she said, is how to take a “portfolio approach” that spans carbon dioxide removal, carbon-free electricity, sustainable materials, and fuels — addressing all of them together rather than in isolation.

Where Microsoft made gains

The annual report highlighted areas of success. That includes:

• Matching its electricity consumption worldwide with clean energy sources.
• For the first time, replenishing more fresh water globally than it withdrew, making important progress on its 2030 goal of being water positive across operations.
• Achieving 92% reuse and recycling of decommissioned cloud servers and components for the second consecutive year.
• Reaching a total of 40 gigawatts of clean power purchase agreements across 26 countries, with 19 gigawatts currently online. (Forty gigawatts is roughly enough power to serve 30-40 million typical U.S. homes at once.)

Scrutiny over recent moves

Microsoft’s sustainability disclosures come after a series of announcements and news reports that have raised concerns among climate advocates.

• Last month, Microsoft and Chevron announced an agreement to build a natural gas facility in Texas with a 2.67 gigawatt capacity, providing dedicated electricity to the tech company for 20 years.
• In May, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft was considering scaling down or scuttling a pledge to match its electricity use with carbon-free power around the clock by 2030.
• In April, the New York Times reported that Microsoft was pausing future purchases of carbon removal credits, after years as the market’s top buyer.

Nakagawa said the company has not canceled any removal projects, though she did not provide specifics about new purchases going forward. “We’re just continuing to take a hard look at each of the deals that are coming through,” she said, and looking for “credible opportunities to scale.”

Asked about Microsoft’s commitment to purchasing clean energy 24/7 — an approach that would eliminate reliance on coal- or gas-powered energy when wind and solar aren’t available — Nakagawa declined to confirm it. “We still are looking towards opportunities around carbon-free electricity,” while focusing on the 2030 carbon negative goals, she said.

As to the natural gas deal, the chief sustainability officer said Microsoft has also contracted to purchase 4.7 gigawatts of renewable power in Texas alone and that the company evaluates its energy investments as part of a broader mix.

Looking for efficiencies elsewhere

Even as data centers remain the prime driver of Microsoft’s rising energy use and emissions, the company points to other steps aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of the facilities.

That includes increasing the use of lower-carbon steel and concrete and incorporating mass timber into data center buildings. And In the past year, Microsoft has added a seventh Circular Center — one of several facilities worldwide where the company recycles and reuses electronics from data center operations.

Microsoft is also working with developers to use AI models more efficiently and build right-sized products. AI agents can review, test and improve code so it uses less energy when it runs, Nakagawa said.

“I definitely think there’s an opportunity here,” she said.

Editor’s note: A correction was made regarding Microsoft’s total energy use last year, replacing a data point on Scope 2 emission, and clarifying the steps taken to reduce its carbon emissions to 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

— Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer.

“As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this role, my focus will be simple: help Dropbox ship the right things at the right time for our customers.”

Seattle-based Torres comes to Dropbox from Google, where he served as vice president of product for Chrome. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Amazon, most recently as VP of Kindle. At Microsoft, he led teams working on OneDrive, Windows Movie Maker and other products.

— T-Mobile appointed Chris Sambar as chief enterprise officer, effective no later than Oct. 14. Sambar will lead the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s small- and medium-sized business, enterprise and government units.

Sambar joins from Public Storage, where he serves as chief operating officer. He was previously at fellow communications giant AT&T for more than two decades, most recently as a president of the company’s global network organization overseeing architecture, engineering, construction, operations, tower strategy and program management.

“Chris is a seasoned wireless industry leader with proven experience including expanding high-growth businesses and seizing market opportunities,” said Srini Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile.

T-Mobile made two additional C-suite changes:

Chief Business & Product Officer Mike Katz has resigned to “pursue new professional interests,” according to a press release. Katz was with the company for more than 28 years and will remain in a strategic advisory role through the end of the year. Gopalan offered his “sincere gratitude to Mike for his incredible contributions to T‑Mobile.” Read more about his departure in this GeekWire story.

André Almeida‘s C-suite role has expanded and his title has been updated to chief marketing, brand and broadband officer. He previously served as chief broadband, enterprise and emerging business officer. In the new position, Almeida will help oversee the company’s consumer wireless and broadband businesses.

— After 37 years with Microsoft, Xbox Vice President Kevin LaChapelle was among those laid off this week, with the cuts hitting the gaming division particularly hard as the company aims to overhaul the division.

LaChapelle was hired by the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant in 1989 as a software design engineer and joined the Xbox team in 2012.

“I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program,” LaChapelle said on LinkedIn. When Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, announced the program at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2015, LaChapelle added, “The audience’s reaction was unbelievable.”

— Adam Schoenfeld has resigned as chief marketing officer for Inflection.io. In April, the B2B marketing automation company acquired Keyplay, a Seattle startup co-founded and previously led by Schoenfeld. The deal reunited Schoenfeld and Inflection CEO Aaron Bird, who have known each other for many years and have collaborated and invested in each other’s companies.

Schoenfeld said on LinkedIn that he “had the best of intentions” when he committed to the acquisition, but then burnout hit him. “I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I dreaded telling the team. I didn’t want to bail and let people down… I’m sure others have been in this place,” he added. “After facing the hard conversations, I’m excited to look ahead.”

Schoenfeld remains a part-time CMO advisor for the business and also produces Adam’s GTM Report, which provides data-backed research, maps and tools for leaders and builders in the space.

— Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies named former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil to its board. Weil has held leadership roles at Planet, Meta, Instagram and Twitter and also serves on the boards of Cisco and The Nature Conservancy.

Stoke Space builds reusable rockets and raised $860 million from investors in its latest round. It’s No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Skippy Shaw has joined fusion startup Helion Energy as director of Washington government affairs. The Everett, Wash.-based company is working to build what could be the world’s first commercial fusion facility in Central Washington. Shaw joins Helion from The Nature Conservancy, where she led state governmental relations for TNC’s Washington chapter.

— David Langworthy announced that he has resigned from Microsoft after nearly 25 years, leaving the role of architect for Azure OpenAI. Langworthy, who worked as a founding member of Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, GenAI, MAC, and Azure AI Services, is the founder and CTO of a stealth startup based in Bellevue.

— Carissa Allen has also left Microsoft, departing as director of strategy for the company’s events, including Ignite and AI Tour. On LinkedIn, Allen called her resignation after nearly 30 years “my Valiant Reboot Project (no “retirement” here) because you know I’m not finished yet.”

— And in case you missed it:

• Bill Colleran, a veteran technology executive who previously led Impinj, has joined Seattle-based AI coding startup Adronite as CEO. Edward Rothschild, who co-founded and previously led the company, is transitioning to chief technology officer. Read more in this GeekWire story.
• Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who led the company’s worldwide commercial sales business, is leaving to become Nvidia’s new sales chief, effective Aug. 24. Read more here.

The University of Washington’s CoMotion program announced 10 startups that secured UW-licensed intellectual property over the past year. Eight are in healthcare, spanning diagnostic tools, medical devices and new therapeutics. The other two focus on K-12 education or climate change.

CoMotion, which operates as a collaborative innovation hub, reports that it and its predecessors have fostered 310 deep-tech companies over the past three decades, more than one-third of which are still active. Those businesses have raised $1.8 billion from investors in the past five years alone.

Here’s a look at the 10 startups:

CathConnect is a Seattle-based startup making urinary catheters that are easy to insert into a patient’s bladder and will safely disconnect if pulled out accidentally. The devices could help prevent the 450,000 traumatic catheter removals that occur in the U.S. each year, which lead to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs and increased infection risk.

CathConnect was launched by Joelle Tudor, a former UW undergraduate researcher and Michael Malone, a UW doctoral candidate.

Climate Solutions International offers a software platform that helps government employees analyze factors like climate resilience, cost and carbon emissions for proposed infrastructure projects. The startup is the brainchild of Jan Whittington, a UW urban planning professor who previously received funding from the World Bank to apply these strategies across 300 cities in 30 countries.

Climate Solutions International was selected for CoMotion’s second Climate Tech Incubator, a six-month program located at the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, a public-private partnership in the city’s downtown.

Colleague AI created an AI tool and chatbots to assist K-12 teachers craft lesson plans and streamline other classroom operations. The technology was developed by Min Sun, a UW professor of education and Colleague AI co-founder, with substantial research and testing by educators.

The UW College of Education was selected two years ago as a national center for research and development on using generative AI as a teaching tool, a designation that included a $10 million grant to support Sun’s work.

DetellaDx is using AI and single-cell technology — a research tool that allows scientists to analyze genetic information in individual cells — to detect early stage cancers with a high degree of accuracy.  The diagnostic approach is based on research by Scott Kennedy, an associate professor in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology. DetellaDx’s initial focus is on women with a genetic predisposition for ovarian cancer. 

KeenSight Health aims to help clinicians communicate better with patients through its Clinical Intelligence Engine, a coaching software that reviews doctor-patient conversations and gives physicians practical feedback. The platform also incorporates patient history stored in electronic records and other resources.

KeenSight was co-founded by past and current UW professors Dr. Ian Bennett, Dr. Misbah Keen and Larry Mauksch. The startup is based in Bellevue, Wash.

Nanosync Labs has created wearable sensors that monitor brain health and sleep without invasive procedures. The devices and platform allow for continuous tracking of changes in brain pressure and deep sleep, a restorative stage essential for brain health. The sensors enable earlier detection of neurological conditions, benefiting patients with traumatic brain injury and sleep disorders.

The technology was developed in the UW lab of Jae-Hyun Chung, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Viggy Sakthivelpathi, who earned a PhD from the UW, is Nanosync’s co-founder and CEO.

PEAR-Net Society provides resources to help medical and public-health experts understand whether medications, chemicals, infections, vaccines, or other exposures may harm a fetus during pregnancy.

The organization relies on two well-established databases documenting teratogens, factors that can cause birth defects. These include the Teratogen Information System, or TERIS, developed by Dr. Jan Friedman, a UW graduate, and Shepard’s Catalog of Teratogenic Agents.

Precision Cognition Labs has developed a tool for memory assessment that can detect mild dysfunction and track changes in cognitive performance. The assessment is faster and easier to use than tools that require in-person, clinical evaluations, allowing for more frequent checkups and longitudinal studies.

The startup is a joint venture between the UW and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where it is based. Andrea Stocco, a UW associate professor and expert in computational psychiatry, is a co-founder and scientific director.

Prosthetic Fit 360 is building sensors that improve outcomes for patients with lower-limb prosthetics. The devices use trilateration, a technology that measures an object’s precise location by calculating distances from multiple known reference points. The startup was founded by Conor Lanahan, who earned his bioengineering and biomedical engineering doctorate degree from the UW.

Skape Bio is using AI to create new therapeutics that target G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs. The receptors, which are located on cell membranes, detect hormones, neurotransmitters and other signals that trigger biological responses.

The Copenhagen-based startup was founded by Chris Norn in partnership with UW Nobel laureate David Baker and scientists from the UW’s Institute for Protein Design and the BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen.

Amazon has cut a total of 57 jobs in Washington state across various teams, including roles at the director and senior manager levels, according to a filing made public Monday morning.

People impacted by the cuts include 16 software engineers as well as product managers and creative marketing employees working in Seattle and Bellevue offices. Nine remote employees, including investigation specialists and risk managers, were also let go.

Employees were notified of the layoffs throughout May and in early June, according to an Amazon filing with the Employment Security Department, released Monday under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The roles are scheduled to end in August.

“[W]e filed a WARN notice because a few businesses across the company made organizational changes that each impacted a small number of employees — in most cases fewer than five employees per business,” said Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, via email.

WARN notifications are triggered by state law when more than 50 Washington-based employees in total are laid off over a period of 30 days.

“We don’t make decisions like this lightly, and we’re committed to supporting the employees who were impacted,” Glasser added.

It’s a sign of the broader belt-tightening across the tech industry. Microsoft separately cut more than 600 jobs in Washington state on Monday morning, part of global layoffs eliminating 4,800 roles across the Redmond company, primarily in sales, consulting and gaming.

The latest Amazon cuts follow layoffs of 2,198 Washington-based employees in February and 2,303 in October 2025. Globally, the company has eliminated roughly 30,000 positions in the past year, cumulatively amounting to the the largest workforce reduction in its history.

The multiple rounds of layoffs have hit wide-ranging positions and divisions, with software engineers the hardest hit. Corporate support, commercial functions, legal, tax, and ad sales positions have all seen cuts, as have Amazon’s core technology organization, gaming division and robotics unit.

The previous larger cuts were part of an effort to “reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy,” according to a memo sent to employees and posted online earlier this year by Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology.

Amazon’s corporate roles numbered around 50,000 in the Seattle area.

Tech giants nationwide have made round after round of job cuts in the past year as they pour billions into AI data center expansions and gain labor efficiencies through the use of artificial intelligence.

Amazon reported $181.5 billion in sales for the first quarter of this year, up 17% from a year earlier. Profits came in at $30.3 billion, boosted by gains tied to the value of its investment in Anthropic.

AI data centers face mounting community backlash and local moratoriums, while surging power demands knock tech giants off course from their climate ambitions. Could fusion be the solution to both problems, and could two Seattle-area companies provide the fix?

Helion Energy is betting on it. The company signed an unprecedented agreement to sell fusion energy to Microsoft for a Central Washington data center. Armed with a $1.5 billion war chest, Helion is sprinting to reach its 2028 deadline to flip the switch on that power plant, which it hopes will be the world’s first to commercially produce electricity from fusion.

The soaring demand for clean energy is driving interest and investment, said David Kirtley, Helion’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s enabled us to ramp up our timelines and go faster than we had originally planned.”

Nearby, competitor Zap Energy has raised $330 million and secured Department of Energy backing. While ambitious, the startup is taking a more cautious approach. Zap recently announced it will jointly pursue fusion’s conventional cousin — nuclear fission — as a near-term revenue source and a hedge on its fusion bet.

“This isn’t a pivot,” said Benj Conway, Zap’s president and co-founder. “By integrating them into a single platform, we can move faster, reduce risk and build a more enduring company.”

Helion and Zap belong to a global cohort of entrepreneurs trying to harness the power of the sun. Their goal is to create a “star in a jar” here on Earth to produce nearly limitless clean energy. For decades, researchers have chased this milestone — and some believe the industry is finally getting close.

Inside Helion’s sprint to 2028

A visit to Helion starts with a gauntlet of security hurdles: getting past an outdoor guard in a booth, ID checks and stowing phones in locked cubbies. Inside its R&D space in Everett, Wash., Helion operates Polaris, a 60-foot-long, seventh-generation prototype that uses magnets to compress plasma, the super-hot state of matter required for fusion. Here is how it works:

• The Collision: The machine creates magnetic fields at both ends that launch and squeeze tiny blobs of plasma containing light atoms toward the center, where they collide at 1 million miles per hour.
• The Capture: As the ions fuse and release energy, the plasma expands against the magnetic field. This movement creates an electric current captured directly as electricity, similar to regenerative braking in electric vehicles.

The commercial device will ultimately run on isotopes of hydrogen and helium, and aims to reach temperatures of 200 million degrees Celsius — more than 10-times hotter than the center of the sun.

But significant technical hurdles remain. In July 2025, Helion broke ground on its 50-megawatt plant, Orion, in Malaga, Wash. The facility must be operational in two years to meet its contract with Microsoft.

Helion’s approach has been to build larger and larger prototypes as it advances its technology, but the company took a detour this spring to build a fusion device about one-eighth the size of Polaris.

“This is where we’re building the next smaller machine, Tiny Merge,” said Manav Singh, Helion’s director of electrical engineering, on a recent tour. “Step in, right here.”

Behind a massive Wizard of Oz-worthy curtain was the downsized, tubular fusion device. It bristled with metal protuberances that will connect it to power sources to send surges of electricity into the machine.

Tiny Merge could be viewed as a worrisome sign of backtracking to resolve technical issues. However, the company maintains its strategy always left room for smaller devices to allow for faster testing and iterations.

“There’s a few much more deep investigations we want to do,” Singh said. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

Zap’s dual core bet

A four-minute drive from Helion sits rival Zap Energy. The startup is building its technology on a physics phenomenon known as the Z-pinch, which uses a powerful electrical current to generate its own magnetic field to confine plasma.

Zap’s system operates through a distinct process:

• Plasma Generation: Hydrogen gas is injected into the device and blasted with energy, creating a 2-foot-long strand of plasma resembling a tame lightning bolt.
• Heat Absorption: When the Z-pinch triggers fusion, released neutrons are captured by a surrounding liquid metal blanket (bismuth in testing, lithium for commercial use).
• Power Generation: The neutrons carry intense heat, which is then converted into usable energy.

Zap is running three fusion devices that measure about 12 feet long, each focused on fine-tuning a specific challenge in its system.

Despite hitting key milestones, concerns about the timeline for reaching commercially-ready fusion triggered Zap’s move to add fission to its plans, making it the first fusion company to do so.

Zap is now working to deploy a 10-megawatt fission microreactor based on legacy Toshiba designs, giving it a more certain path to an operational power plant than fusion currently offers.

The company says the two strategies share technologies that could accelerate the development of both. A key technical overlap is the use of liquid metals; the fission device is cooled by liquid sodium, which behaves similarly to the liquid bismuth and lithium used in its fusion design.

“Fission gives us a path to deploy. Fusion gives us a path to transform,” Zap CEO Zabrina Johal, said in April. “Bringing them together is how we do both.”

A global clean energy race

More than 50 companies globally are pursuing fusion power, including two additional Pacific Northwest ventures: Seattle-based Avalanche Energy and British Columbia’s General Fusion.

Among the heavily funded contenders is Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Armed with nearly $3 billion, the company plans to build a plant in Virginia, home to the nation’s largest data center hub. China remains another major wildcard, investing billions of undisclosed dollars into its own domestic fusion ventures.

As work continues, enthusiasm grows alongside persistent skepticism. Some experts doubt cost-competitive fusion can ever be achieved, while others believe commercial viability is still decades away — too late to solve the immediate energy needs of the AI boom.

Laura Berzak Hopkins, deputy chief research officer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, remains cautiously optimistic about the sector’s trajectory.

“We’ve made incredible progress, and we are reaching ever closer, but there still remain these major scientific and technological hurdles,” Berzak Hopkins said. However, she added, “new capabilities and new knowledge really bring us to this exciting cusp.”

Whether Helion and its peers will prove the skeptics wrong remains to be seen, but the data center energy crisis ensures the world will be watching.

Sources and references

Podcast interviews:

• David Kirtley, Helion Energy, CEO and co-founder
• Manav Singh, Helion Energy, director of electrical engineering 
• Matthew Thompson, Zap Energy, senior vice president of fission technology and former vice president of systems engineering and pulsed power
• Laura Berzak Hopkins, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, associate laboratory director for Strategy and Partnerships, and deputy chief research officer

GeekWire’s related coverage:

• Helion gives behind-the-scenes tour of secretive 60-foot fusion prototype as it races to deployment
• Helion makes big bet on ‘Tiny Merge’ fusion testbed to meet aggressive Microsoft timeline
• Inside Zap: Fusion pioneer tries to build ‘a star in a jar’ to unlock abundant clean energy
• Zap Energy’s nuclear double play: Fusion startup adds traditional fission to its lineup, in industry first

— Hrishikesh Aradhye has joined Amazon Music as vice president of product and tech for the streaming service. He spent nearly 19 years at Google, most recently as senior director of engineering leading YouTube Music and Podcasts.

“The music industry is going through a tectonic shift that will unlock entirely new kinds of customer experiences through AI,” Aradhye said.

Earlier in his tenure there, he worked at Google Research, where he helped pioneer computer vision and machine learning systems for YouTube and Android.

— Vasu Jakkal is stepping down after six years as Microsoft‘s corporate vice president of Security, Compliance, Identity, Management & Privacy. She thanked colleagues and customers in a LinkedIn post.

“It’s been an epic journey — six years ago, we formed our Security customer solution area and the growth and impact of Microsoft Security over these past years has been incredible as we built the #1 security business in the world while keeping our mission of building a safer world for all at the heart of it,” Jakkal wrote.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She did not indicate her next move.

— Mika Yamamoto was named chief marketing and customer AI officer for Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company. It’s the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made four other executive hires or promotions this year.

Yamamoto previously worked for Seattle-area companies including F5, Microsoft and SAP, and joined Veeam from Los Angeles-based Blackline.

“She has experienced this industry from every angle — analyst, operator, executive leader — and has consistently put the customer and partner at the center of how companies operate,” CEO Anand Eswaran said in a statement.

— In case you missed it, Microsoft has undergone a leadership shakeup within Copilot as the company works to turn its platform into a “super app.” Changes include:

• Jacob Andreou has moved from corporate vice president at Microsoft AI to executive vice president of Copilot. He joined the company in 2025 from Greylock Partners and before that was at Snapchat-maker Snap.
• Peter Sellis has been named Copilot’s lead of design, growth and engineering, reporting to Andreou. He joins Microsoft from Discord and overlapped with Andreou at Snap, where Sellis was VP of product.
• The reshuffle also comes with a departure. Trevor O’Brien, former VP of product for M365 Copilot experiences, has resigned from his role. “The past two and a half years have been inspiring, chaotic, intense, and deeply rewarding,” O’Brien said on LinkedIn. He did not indicate his next move.

— Seattle-based tech executive Niranjan Vijayaragavan has taken the role of CTO at Five9, a cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service company. He joins Five9 from Nintex, where he served as chief product and technology officer. Other past employers include Avalara and Expedia Group.

“Five9 is at the center of one of the most important shifts in customer experience as AI reshapes how companies engage with their customers,” Vijayaragavan said in a statement. The company is based in San Ramon, Calif., but Vijayaragavan will remain in Washington.

— Maura Mast was appointed president of Seattle University, succeeding Eduardo M. Peñalver, who resigned to lead Georgetown University. Mast is the first woman and first mathematician to hold the top role at the Jesuit Catholic university.

“Our world urgently needs spaces of dialogue and discernment that actively work to heal deep divisions and build a more equitable society,” Mast said in a statement, adding that SU can lead in these areas.

Mast will begin the job on Sept. 1 and joins SU from Fordham University, where she served as a dean and mathematics professor.

— The Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator named Jake Gentry as its executive director. Gentry helped create CSAA, which aims to make the Pacific Northwest a center for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). He remains a senior director at Seattle’s Earth Finance and is leading the accelerator as part of that organization.

Hawaiian Airlines CEO Diana Birkett-Rakow praised Gentry’s appointment, saying in a statement that he has “the right combination of strategic depth, execution orientation, coalition-building instincts, and commitment to the work.”

Gentry previously held sustainability leadership roles with companies including Point B and Boeing.

— Seattle’s F5 has added Gavin Munroe to its board of directors, where he will serve on the audit and risk committees. Munroe has decades of experience in financial services and most recently was chief information officer and transformation head at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

— Harini Gokul, a former leader at Microsoft and AWS and past chief customer officer at Entrust, has joined the board of Afiniti. The company builds AI software for call centers that aims to match customers with the appropriate agent. Gokul also serves on the Medina City Council.

— Safe Software, a data and AI enterprise integration platform based in Surrey, British Columbia, has named Nabil Lodey vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Lodey will help lead the company’s expansion in the UK and Ireland.

— Allison Gruber is now VP and leader of Portland-based Cambia Health Foundation. She previously oversaw Cambia Health Solutions’ Strategy and Innovation team, where she led data-driven strategy initiatives.

— And some more folks are retiring from Microsoft, in addition to those featured Tuesday in a GeekWire story on the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program:

• Nir Michaely, Azure software engineering manager, closes out 26 years with the company.
• John Ballard, principal security researcher, departs after nearly 30 years.
• Kristen Mattoni, senior product marketing manager, is leaving after 15 years.

Amazon’s carbon footprint jumped 16% last year after several years of little or no increase. The company emitted nearly 80.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025. By comparison, that’s slightly higher than the nation of New Zealand’s emissions.

Amazon disclosed its climate-related data in its most comprehensive sustainability report to date, which includes a breakdown of its carbon sources, water use and other environmental impacts.

Not surprisingly, energy use showed the biggest rate of increase in the 2025 carbon tally as Amazon and other tech companies are working to rapidly expand their data center capacity to meet AI computing demand.

For the first time since 2019, the company also reported an uptick in its “carbon intensity” — a measure of how much carbon was emitted relative to each dollar of revenue. Amazon has promoted this metric as a sign that it can decouple its growth from its climate impacts.

Despite emissions moving in the wrong direction and ongoing data center-driven challenges, the Seattle-area company remains committed to its pledge of net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

When it comes to that goal, “I remain confident and optimistic in the overarching vision and the long-term progress we continue to make toward it,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, in the foreword to the company’s annual report.

The report highlights areas of success that include:

• Data center efficiency: Amazon’s data centers are 9% more efficient than the public cloud average and 30% more efficient than on-premises data centers at directing energy toward computing rather than cooling, lighting or overhead.
• Data center water use: Amazon is seven times more efficient in its water use than the industry average thanks to its use of air cooling at most sites, most of the year.
• 100% clean energy overall: For the third year running, Amazon matched its company-wide electricity use with an equivalent volume of purchased clean energy, although it technically still draws on fossil fuels for some of its energy.
• Electric vehicle fleet: It has the largest corporate EV fleet in North America, with more than 52,700 delivery vans worldwide. It’s halfway to meeting its 2030 goal of 100,000 EVs.

The company also reported improvements in reducing packaging and plastic use in delivered items; increasing use of low-carbon building materials in data center construction; and progress toward becoming water positive at its data centers, meaning it aims to replenish more water to communities than it uses.

The Amazon-backed Climate Pledge — an effort to get other organizations to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — has grown to 656 signatories after adding 107 companies this year. It marks a notable increase at a time when companies are growing quieter about climate commitments, with some stepping back from earlier goals.

But the surge in data center investment shows little sign of slowing, which will keep complicating Amazon’s path to lower emissions. CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon expects to spend a record $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, including “AI, chips, robotics, and low-Earth orbit satellites.”

Not all reactions to that buildout have been positive — even within the company. Members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice this month testified before the Seattle City Council in favor of data center requirements for renewable energy and labor protections, though Amazon doesn’t operate any data centers within city limits.

In response to the sustainability report, the employee group was critical of the increased emissions and accused the company of pressuring carbon accounting standards bodies — including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science-Based Targets Initiative — to adopt weaker rules.

More than 1,000 employees have signed an open letter drafted last year criticizing Amazon’s “warp-speed approach” to its AI development, the group added.

In the report, Amazon CSO Hurst acknowledged that AI-fueled advances could catalyze sustainability solutions or slow progress toward climate goals.

“But what alternative do we have,” she said, “but to continue to invest, learn, and move forward to try to solve one of the world’s most challenging issues?”

Editor’s note: Story updated at 11:56 a.m. with comment from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

It was on something of a lark that Heather Koponen went to a screening of “Dark Waters” — the Mark Ruffalo film about dangerous “forever” chemicals fouling creeks and drinking water.

She really liked the movie and took home a free test kit offered by the nonprofit that organized the event to check her own drinking water for the pollutants, known as PFAS.

Koponen, a retired physician’s assistant, lives on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska, in a home that once belonged to her parents. She knew about PFAS contamination in the area from firefighting foams used at military bases and airports, and had local friends who believed their health had been harmed by the chemicals. Koponen thought she was in the clear given her location relative to potential sources.

“Surprise, surprise, the well that my parents had put in in 1966, had the best-tasting water in the world and was west of the known contamination, turned out to have high levels of PFAS,” Koponen said. “We didn’t believe it, so we tested again, multiple times.”

PFAS — a family of industrial chemicals used in non-stick pans, food packaging, and as a grease and water repellent in clothes and carpets — contaminate water and soil across the U.S. and the world. Most people have detectable levels in their blood.

The chemicals are linked to reduced immune response, developmental delays in children, increased incidence of some cancers and hormonal impacts such as decreased fertility.

As PFAS have spread through the environment, strategies for controlling and destroying the persistent pollutants have been in short supply and extremely costly.

Now, decades into the problem, that’s finally changing. On this debut episode of Positive Charge, GeekWire’s podcast about hope in the sustainability and climate fight, we go inside the effort to build and deploy technologies that can effectively destroy PFAS. Two companies at the forefront are based in Western Washington: Aquagga and Sedron Technologies.

Blasting PFAS in Tacoma

Located in downtown Tacoma, Aquagga does its R&D work inside the Petrich Marine building — a former marble works facility on the industrialized Thea Foss waterway. Inside the cavernous wooden structure, the startup builds devices that treat PFAS pollution from concentrated sources, housed in easy-to-move shipping containers painted bright white.

“We can step inside,” said Brian Pinkard, Aquagga’s co-founder and chief technology officer, letting visitors inside one of the containers. “It’s a little dirty. Watch your step. Just don’t touch anything. That’s the one rule.”

The system uses hydrothermal alkaline treatment, or HALT, blasting PFAS with high temperatures and extremely alkaline conditions — imagine a very strong bleach. Contaminated wastewater flows through the machine, and the process breaks the chemicals into smaller, nonhazardous components, including carbon and fluoride compounds.

What comes out isn’t drinking-water safe, but the technology destroys more than 99.99% of PFAS.

In recent years, Aquagga has treated contaminated water from various sources, including a lined underground pit that once held 20,000 gallons of waste at Fairbanks International Airport. A project with the Department of Defense treated 3,000 gallons of waste in North Carolina. DOD alone has an estimated 2 million gallons of PFAS-containing firefighting foam stockpiled for disposal.

Turning waste into a weapon against PFAS

Sedron wasn’t launched to battle PFAS. It set out to purify sewage waste into drinkable water — which it once served to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Janicki Industries, an aerospace engineering and manufacturing company, received funding in 2011 from what is now the Gates Foundation. The philanthropy wanted a wastewater purification system for use in developing countries. That project led to the creation of Sedron.

The company developed systems to treat dairy waste and municipal biosolids — the residual product from wastewater treatment plants. Sedron dries the biosolids in an energy-efficient thermal dryer, turning them into a biofuel fed into a biomass boiler. The boiler generates electricity that cycles back to power the dryer and produces excess clean energy sold to the grid.

The system also destroys PFAS that contaminate sewage waste, having escaped from consumer goods or passed through humans.

“When you’ve got biosolids in these thermal systems that are heated above 900 degrees Celsius, they’re in there for over two seconds, and there’s enough turbulence within that system, the literature suggests, that PFAS is destroyed,” said Meghan Carlo, Sedron’s senior permit manager.

Without this treatment, biosolids would typically be returned to the environment as fertilizer spread on farms, golf courses or similar sites — keeping PFAS in circulation.

The long road to clean water

Solutions for cleaning up PFAS exist, but the scale of the problem is staggering. One academic study estimated the cost of removing a subclass of PFAS from the environment at the same rate they are released: somewhere between $20 trillion and $7,000 trillion per year.

In 2024, the Biden administration established the country’s first drinking water limits on six forms of PFAS, setting a ceiling of 4 parts per trillion — roughly a tiny drop of water in five Olympic-sized swimming pools. The Trump administration is moving to cancel limits on four of the six and delay compliance for the other two.

States are forging ahead with their own restrictions on PFAS in drinking water, including monitoring requirements and limits on how and where the chemicals can be used. The resulting liability concerns for municipalities and other stakeholders are stoking demand for cleanup technologies.

Aquagga has devices available for lease, purchase or demonstration projects. Sedron broke ground this year on a regional waste treatment facility in South Florida that will serve municipalities home to 2 million people, with operations expected to begin in 2028.

Fairbanks resident Heather Koponen needs a solution now. Her options include an hour-long round trip to a natural spring to fill five-gallon jugs, deliveries from a local company whose water appears to have low-level PFAS contamination, or PFAS filters similar to a Brita.

But she’s also focused on the bigger picture.

“The most important thing is to stop more contamination,” she said. “We’ve got to think of future generations and the future planet.”

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Brian Pinkard, Aquagga, co-founder and chief technology officer
• Heather Koponen, Fairbanks, Alaska, resident impacted by PFAS
• Stephanie Dotterer, Sedron Technologies, director of strategy
• Meghan Carlo, Sedron Technologies, senior permit manager

Additional sources:

• ‘Forever chemicals’ are eternal no more thanks to a pollution destroying device from Tacoma startup (GeekWire)
• Flush with cash: Washington startup lands up to $500M to deploy facilities treating sewage, dairy waste (GeekWire)
• Bill Gates drinking water from sewage waste (Gates Notes)
• Alaska Community Action on Toxics
• Toxic-Free Future