The massive funding round comes just days after reports emerged that Upwind had attracted acquisition interest from several companies, including Datadog
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The company will use the Series B funds to expand its platform for securing AI agents’ access to sensitive systems.
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Seattle-based Kivo Health today announced $10 million in funding to help increase access to its services, which target older adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The Series A round brings the startup’s total funding to more than $16 million.
Kivo ships equipment to patients’ homes and provides a nine-week program of therapist-led, live video sessions focused on exercise, breathing techniques and disease management. The company provides ongoing support following the program and says it uses AI to handle administrative tasks and communicate with patients, supporting its clinicians.
“We’re using the funding to build our AI health coach to blend AI-led care with human-led care,” Dr. Victor Sadauskas, Kivo’s co-founder and CEO, said via email. That pairing, he added, will help patients manage their chronic disease over the long term.
The company has approximately 50 employees, including clinicians.
COPD is an incurable lung disease in which damaged airways and air sacs make breathing difficult and can worsen over time. Common symptoms include shortness of breath, a persistent cough and fatigue. COPD is the third leading cause of death globally and the fifth in the U.S.
However, there are effective treatments to improve the condition, though many patients are not able to easily access care. A study of Medicare beneficiaries with COPD found that only 3.7% received pulmonary rehabilitation in 2012.
Kivo reports that a peer-reviewed study of its program found improvements in participants’ symptoms, physical function and mental health. The company also funded an analysis that estimated its model could reduce annual health care spending by $8,245 per member through fewer hospitalizations, ER visits and time in nursing homes.
Kivo says its program is covered by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers including UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross, Aetna and Priority Health.
“By thoughtfully combining high quality clinical care with AI, we can now scale proactive, accessible care to every senior, improving symptoms and reducing avoidable costs,” Sadauskas said in a statement.
Sadauskas launched Kivo in 2023 with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Vaughn Koch. Sadauskas previously was an emergency medicine physician for Kaiser Permanente and a senior investment fellow with Life Science Angels. Koch is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Movity to Trulia in 2010.
While its current focus is COPD, Kivo aims to expand into other costly chronic conditions affecting older adults.
Allumia Ventures led the round, with participation from Corewell Health Ventures, Y Combinator, Heuristic Capital and MassMutual Ventures.
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.
Founded in 2025 by Unit 8200 alumni, Tel Aviv-based Mave uses AI agents to investigate alerts across existing security stacks.
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Seattle-based ag-tech startup Strella has landed $4.25 million to expand the reach of its technology that monitors produce to prevent spoilage and food waste.
The investment extends the company’s Series A round and brings its total funding to $26.25 million.
CEO and co-founder Katherine Sizov launched the startup in Philadelphia in 2019 and relocated its headquarters to Seattle four years ago to be closer to Washington’s fruit orchards.
Strella uses IoT devices to measure gases including ethylene, a plant hormone released by ripening fruit, and machine vision to monitor the produce. Its software interprets the fruit’s real-time conditions alongside data such as country of origin, packing date and varietal type.
The 19-person team serves customers in 26 countries and provides information to growers of apples, pears, avocados and citrus. It recently added kiwifruit to the lineup.
“Our vision is to become the system of record for quality in the food supply chain, or the ‘guardian angels’ of produce as it passes from hand to hand,” Sizov said.
The company works with all of the players in the supply chain, including farmers, produce packers, shippers, distributors and retailers.
“The next step for us is to begin stitching all the pieces together to become a one-stop shop for quality and tackle the food waste problem at scale,” Sizov said.
The United Nations estimates that roughly 33% of food intended for humans worldwide is lost or wasted, totaling $940 billion in annual economic losses. Waste in the U.S. is even worse, at about 40% of edible food and $218 billion each year.
The funding was led by SilverBlue, with participation by LeVert Ventures, Beta Milouot and PeakBridge.
The Amsterdam-based company plans to use the funding for research and development and commercial expansion in Europe and the Middle East.
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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:
Asymptote Labs raises $5.5M seed led by Tower Research Ventures to commercialize its Beacon AI agent runtime security platform.
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Aviation startup Reliable Robotics is opening a new engineering hub in the Seattle area, establishing a radar research and development center in Bothell.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced Tuesday that it has raised $115 million, pushing its valuation above $1 billion. The funding will help expand its aircraft fleet, production facilities and engineering team as it works toward federal certification of its autonomous flight technology.
Reliable’s new office in the Bothell Highlands north of Seattle will open with about 25 employees and serve as its Radar Center of Excellence, a facility for developing and testing systems designed to help aircraft detect and avoid other aircraft. The company plans to grow the team and is heavily recruiting in the region, including roles across radar, embedded software, flight controls, guidance and navigation, simulation and systems engineering.
The expansion adds another player to the Seattle area’s growing mix of aerospace, robotics and autonomous systems companies.
Last month, GeekWire reported that San Diego-based Shield AI selected Des Moines, Wash., as the production and engineering hub for its X-BAT, an AI-piloted aircraft designed to take off and land vertically. The heavily-funded company is planning a 420,000-square-foot manufacturing and engineering facility and says it expects to employ about 4,000 people in the region by the early 2030s.
Reliable is developing systems that can automate aircraft operations, including engine startup, taxiing, takeoff and landing. Its longer-term ambitions include enabling aircraft to fly without a pilot aboard, with remote operators overseeing flights from the ground. The company is working toward certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Founded by former SpaceX engineers in 2017, Reliable has spent nearly a decade developing technology designed to work with existing aircraft rather than requiring entirely new planes. Its initial system is intended to keep a pilot in the cockpit while automating key flight operations, with more advanced levels of autonomy planned over time.
The 250-person company’s latest financing, including $90 million led by Nimble Partners and a $25 million term loan from Silicon Valley Bank, brings total funding to $380 million.
The company’s new Bothell lab will bring together engineers to design, build and test radar systems, including its active electronically scanned array air-to-air radar.
The technology is intended to support detect-and-avoid capabilities that would help autonomous aircraft safely operate in the national airspace alongside conventional planes.
“Seattle represents the past, present and future of aviation. For decades, engineers here have developed aircraft and systems that change how the world connects,” Chris Schulenberg, Reliable’s vice president of programs, said in the company’s announcement. “By expanding into the Pacific Northwest, Reliable is uniting the tech talent in Silicon Valley with the aviation expertise of Seattle.”
The Bothell office — located at 21222 30th Drive SE — will be led by Schulenberg and Marc Pos, a senior technical fellow focused on radar who previously spent more than two decades at Honeywell.
“Radar development is a hands-on process,” Pos said in a statement. “By bringing a team together in a centralized lab and engineering environment, with all of the resources we need at our fingertips, we can move from design through development and testing with the rigor, speed and precision unique to Reliable.”
Reliable also plans to expand its engineering operations in San Diego, where it will focus on aviation autonomy for military applications.
The two offices bring the company’s footprint to five locations, joining its headquarters and aircraft hangars in California and the operating hub of its subsidiary airline, Reliable Airlines, in Albuquerque, N.M.
Seattle-based TriMagnetix has landed new funding and commitments totaling $1 million to continue developing a semiconductor chip that, according to initial lab testing, consumes 800 times less energy than a traditional chip to process the same amount of data.
The startup uses nanomagnetic technology that requires only electrical pulses rather than the constant power stream traditional chips need, dramatically reducing electricity consumption and heat generation. The design also makes the chip resistant to radiation, and it’s built to integrate with existing computing infrastructure.
The startup has made additional progress beyond the new funding:
Earthbound data centers struggling to curb energy use and heat output are seeking more sustainable chips, but the startup is particularly interested in satellite applications.
The Pacific Northwest, home to companies including Starcloud and SpaceX, is the “satellite capital of the world,” said Lucas Hahn, co-founder, president and chief strategic officer of TriMagnetix.
Satellite companies have told him they want semiconductors that are energy efficient and resistant to the radiation experienced in space, Hahn said. That makes TriMagnetix’s devices “a no-brainer.”
In addition to Hahn, the startup’s other employee is Madison Hanberry, who launched the TriMagnetix in 2023. Hanberry, who has served as chief of research and development, is transitioning to CEO. His sister, Aspen White, is also a co-founder.
The chips made so far by TriMagnetix are not the high-performance graphics processing units, or GPUs, used for applications such as AI and 3D animation. Nor are they simpler central processing units, or CPUs.
“It’s replacing specific compute in certain devices at a very low level,” Hahn said. “So not quite CPU yet, but it is at the core level doing similar things.”
TriMagnetix has contracted with the Washington Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Washington to use the site’s fabrication equipment. It aims to have a product available for commercial sales within the next year.
The round was led by Acequia Capital with participation from Athenaeum Ventures. Actuate Ventures has also committed to the round. The combined total from the three firms is $1 million. Last year, the startup received a $200,000 investment from climate venture fund SNØCAP.
The cybersecurity startup plans to expand engineering and go-to-market teams in the US and UK.
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Kapta Space, a Seattle startup building lower-cost, steerable radar sensors for satellites, has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round to scale production and meet growing demand for defense intelligence contracts.
The investment brings total funding to $30 million, following an initial $5 million seed round led by MetaVC— a metamaterials-focused fund backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It also previously received a $1.8 million grant from the Department of Defense.
The deal highlights the ongoing momentum in the Pacific Northwest’s commercial space ecosystem, where a growing cluster of venture-backed startups is building hardware alongside major satellite operations like SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond and Amazon’s Leo constellation program.
Founded in 2023 by CEO Milton Perque and Adam Bily, Kapta uses metamaterials for its proprietary Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) architecture. The tech provides high-resolution, geospatial imagery and ground-target tracking without the extreme cost, power demands, and manufacturing complexity of traditional systems.
Both founders bring deep local expertise to the hardware: Perque and Bily were previously engineering leaders at radar maker Echodyne. Perque’s background also includes stops at Metacept and Intellectual Ventures, while Bily served as an antenna engineer at Apple and satellite startup Astranis.
The fresh capital will help Kapta expand manufacturing, qualify its hardware for spaceflight, and prepare for initial orbital demonstration missions.
Kapta’s software-defined architecture aims to make persistent satellite tracking feasible at constellation scale, letting spacecraft rapidly steer beams to continuously detect and hold custody of moving targets across air, sea and land.
“The mission calls for persistent awareness, and that requires us to rethink how radar has to work at constellation scale,” said Milton Perque, Founder and CEO of Kapta Space, in a release. “Traditional architectures are cost-prohibitive and were never designed for the scale these missions now demand.”
Washington Harbour Partners, which specializes in defense tech investing, led the round, with Bison Ventures co-leading. Previous backer MetaVC Partners joined alongside MYDA Capital, Entrada Ventures, Aurelia Foundry, and Fitz Gate Ventures.
“Kapta’s MESA architecture changes that equation with a modular, highly manufacturable approach to electronically steerable radar,” said Mina Faltas, Founder and CEO of Washington Harbour Partners. “We believe its combination of performance, cost, and scalability will make Kapta a foundational supplier to the next generation of U.S. and allied space architectures, and we’re thrilled to lead the Series A.”
The cybersecurity startup will invest in product innovation, agentic research, and employee base expansion.
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Hadrian offers an agentic offensive security platform that allows defenders to operate at the same speed as attackers.
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Seattle startup Chiplytics today announced $4.5 million in funding to support the deployment of its microelectronics verification technology and the opening of an inspection facility in Bellport, N.Y.
The company provides authentication and quality screening of semiconductor chips and other critical electronic components. It focuses on detecting counterfeits, substitutions, inconsistencies and suspect parts before they’re assembled into machinery.
Chiplytics launched in 2022 during the COVID-driven chip shortage when manufacturers struggled to find parts and also ran into quality issues. The AI boom has created new bottlenecks in electronics.
“We’re seeing a lot of lead times now over 52 weeks for basic components,” said Stephen DiBartolomeo, president and co-founder of Chiplytics.
That leaves manufacturers with two options: wait for components from an authorized distributor or turn to independent brokers and distributors that may have the parts but are not authorized by the original manufacturer to sell them.
Chiplytics has developed technology that incorporates AI, automation and robotics to screen every electronics item for quality — rather than randomly selecting a few for testing.
“We just did an order for 50,000 parts. If you were to try and do that by hand or by sampling, it would take way too long,” DiBartolomeo said.
The company got its start through a U.S. Department of Energy program that connects entrepreneurs with technology developed in national labs to facilitate commercialization. The team worked alongside experts from Sandia National Laboratories to develop its verification platform and validated the solution with the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force before deploying it commercially.
The startup’s newly opened inspection lab sits within a 600,000-square-foot center operated by Quality King, a major U.S. distribution company. Chiplytics supports the company’s QK Special Services, which focuses on electronics.
DiBartolomeo and Chiplytics CEO and co-founder Steven Dourmashkin knew each other from high school on Long Island, N.Y. DiBartolomeo attended the U.S. Naval Academy and worked as a cryptologic warfare officer with the National Security Agency. Dourmashkin earned degrees in mechanical engineering and launched and sold a music tech company.
The two reconnected to start a business in hardware and national security. They brought on Chief Technology Officer Connor Dempsey, an expert in semiconductor physics whom Dourmashkin knew from Cornell University.
The startup has six full-time employees plus contractors. Its R&D operations are in Seattle.
The $4.5 million in funding includes $2.5 million in seed financing and a $2 million Air Force Tactical Funding Increase award. The round was led by Scout Ventures and Waypoint Ventures. Additional investors include QKSS, Industrious Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, Seattle Alliance of Angels, and Cornell University’s Red Bear Angels.
USB-C Power Delivery (PD) has been a boon to anyone working with low-voltage DC power, because at a stroke it replaces a vast array of wall warts, power supplies, and connector standards with one simple and straightforward commoditized system. But with varying capabilities between sources and sinks, it can be difficult to know what’s going on.
[Marco Tabini] has created Dr. PD, a USB -C PD protocol analyzer. It can sit between USB-C PD source and sink, or emulate a sink in order to characterize a source. It supports an impressive range of USB power protocols, and can work up to the full 48 volt/240 watt limits of the technology. The project is open source and is to be the subject of a crowdfunding campaign should you want one without the extra work.
It’s likely that many of you will have had bad experiences with cheap USB-C PD gear failing to follow standards, being unable to handle the specified current, or just plain supplying the wrong voltage. We have, and while USB-C PD is genuinely a great technology, this regrettable hardware represents its grubby underbelly. This is just the project we need on the bench in our hackerspace.
In the past we’ve written about USB-C PD as a great example of new technology done right.
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