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.

The UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design (IPD) today released a new open-source model for creating proteins with specific functions, called RFD4-Proteina. It is the first AI protein model the University of Washington has co-developed with semiconductor giant Nvidia.

The release comes on the heels of a major computing boost. Earlier this month, IPD announced it had received a large grant of computing power from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, through their foundation. In June, the institute began accessing Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, through cloud company CoreWeave. The grant is expected to support the institute for a year.

“RFD4-Proteina will open the door to new solutions in medicine, sustainability, materials and biotechnology,” David Baker, director of IPD and a 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry, said in a statement. He earlier told GeekWire that the foundation’s grant has been “transformational” for the institute’s work.

IPD has used deep learning to develop and release a series of tools, including RoseTTAFold for predicting protein structures and RFdiffusion (RFD) for designing new proteins. The new model’s name nods to RFD and references Nvidia’s Proteina-Complexa computational models.

The team is touting RFD4-Proteina as “a considerable improvement over previous methods” that is faster and requires significantly less computational power.

The models have allowed researchers to design proteins never imagined before, with potential as drugs for challenging diseases or as tools for managing environmental waste such as toxic chemicals and plastics, among other applications. The IPD lists 11 spinout companies, including vaccine developer Icosavax and protein-design startup Archon Biosciences.

Seth Woodbury used RFD4-Proteina in his enzyme work as a , a UW bioengineering predoctoral candidate. “In just a few days we designed a pesticide-degrading enzyme that performs many fold better than my previous best, which took months to design,” he said. Woodbury last year published a paper in Nature on enzyme research.

At IPD, the RFD4-Proteina work was led by UW doctoral students Nathaniel Corley, Maxwell Kazman and Rafi Brent, along with Kieran Didi, a visiting student from the University of Oxford.

RFD4-Proteina is available through Berkeley Software Distribution. 

Researchers at UW Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) have created new proteins that act like molecular scissors, chopping up targets associated with Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The University of Washington scientists are using sophisticated AI models developed at IPD to design proteins called proteases — a class of enzymes that cut specific proteins at specific locations in their structure. The proteases can make those cuts over and over again.

“You have this catalytic capability to destroy one target, and then immediately your molecule can hop over to the second, third and thousands of different targets,” said Anqi Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at the institute.

Many pharmaceuticals bind to a single target, inactivate it and stay there. That approach requires high doses of medicine to have an effect on disease. These enzymatic proteins, by contrast, have an amplified impact.

“There’s this potential to use your drug at very, very low concentrations,” Chen said.

The researchers have made proteases that attack proteins associated with neurodegenerative disease and are now working on targets for malaria, chronic diseases and cancer. They also could make proteins to defang viruses or bacterial toxins.

“There’s super exciting applications,” said David Baker, director of IPD and a 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry.

Baker is the senior author of two papers describing this work that were published today in the journal Nature. Chen and Kejia Wu are the first authors of one paper, and Hojae Choi, an IPD graduate student, is the first author of the other.

Baker said the research is significant because of how well the enzymes work and the range of potential applications, which beyond medicine include breaking down hazardous pollutants and plastic waste.

Chen and her colleagues designed proteases that use a metal ion, rather than an amino acid, as the cutting blade. More than one-third of the new proteases that they created precisely cut their target, a protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, and did so 100 million times faster than cuts made without the enzymes.

The work by Choi and his colleagues used an activated amino acid called cysteine as the blade. The proteins designed by the scientists had a 19% success rate in cutting their targets and were up to 30 million times faster than uncatalyzed reactions.

Much work remains before these newly designed proteins can become drugs for humans. One challenge is ensuring that the proteases don’t trigger a response in which a patient’s immune system attacks the therapeutic before it has a beneficial effect. Another potential hurdle is turning the enzymes off and on to modulate their impact as needed.

Choi is studying that immune system issue, called immunogenicity. He’s working to combine the catalytic, cutting component of the enzyme with a benign-appearing antibody that won’t alert the immune system — sort of a protease wolf in antibody clothing.

“It is a newly launched project, so we don’t have any official data to show to public,” Choi said. “But we’re really working on it.”

The Nature publications are titled: “Computational design of metalloproteases” and “De novo design of cysteine proteases”

Other institutions contributing to the research are: University of Oxford, NVIDIA, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Universitat Ramon Llull, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Zhejiang University, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, ETH Zurich, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design (IPD) has announced a giant grant of computing power from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, supercharging its research into new protein discovery.

“We have made more rapid progress on methods development than any time in my career,” said David Baker, director of the IPD and a 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry. “I mean, it’s just been totally mind-boggling.”

In June, the IPD began accessing Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, through the cloud computing company CoreWeave. The grant from the foundation, which was co-founded by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, totals nearly 7 million GPU hours. The allocation is expected to support the institute for a year.

The IPD’s work has long been rooted in computation. In 2003, Baker and fellow University of Washington researchers used their Rosetta software to design a protein with a structure unlike any known in nature. In recent years, the institute has embraced deep learning, releasing tools such as RoseTTAFold for predicting protein structures and RFdiffusion for designing new proteins.

With this technology, the institute designs previously unimagined proteins with potential for treating intractable diseases and tackling environmental challenges such as plastic waste and toxic pollutants. The tools are open source and available for public use.

Running them takes vast computing power, though, and until now the institute has lacked the resources to pay for outside cloud services. It has relied instead on its own computer cluster, which works but is limited. Baker said IPD scientists meet every Tuesday at 5 p.m. to decide what to test over the coming week, keeping capacity in mind.

To advance their protein research, the team experiments with different architectures for the AI models and tweaks the datasets used for training, sometimes expanding them or adding synthetic data. With compute restrictions, however, researchers historically have made multiple changes at once rather than testing each alteration individually, a more systematic approach that yields cleaner results.

Despite the hurdles, the IPD has produced a steady stream of breakthroughs with its models and protein designs, publishing regularly in leading scientific journals such as Nature and Science.

Google DeepMind is pursuing similar AI-driven protein research. Baker said he knew the tech giant’s team had much more computing power than the IPD, but he didn’t fully appreciate what that could unlock.

That capacity “spawns more ideas because you know you can test them,” Baker said. “So it just creates this incredibly fertile, creative environment.”

Jensen Huang, the foundation’s co-president, said in a statement that the extra computing power allows the UW researchers to train AI “on tens of millions of molecular structures, learning from virtual experiments, and finding novel protein designs that have eluded nature.”

Huang predicted that many of the most important future medicines “will come from proteins that have never existed.”

Baker said the IPD still holds its Tuesday meetings, but the new compute capabilities — which he called “transformational” — open up more options.

“The team is iterating fast,” Baker said. “We get feedback on all these different computational architecture explorations, and there’s just so many different things you can try.”

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

The startups did not disclose the terms of the deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seattle-based ModernVivo is using AI to help scientists design preclinical studies for drug discovery.  The goal: better experiments that are also faster, cheaper and less reliant on animals.

“You’d be shocked at the way scientists design their experiments,” co-founder Ian Levine told GeekWire. “It’s very manual.”

To design experiments, scientists typically enter keywords into PubMed or another database, receiving hundreds or thousands of results. They then go through each complex paper, typically 30 pages long, to find information relevant to the experiment they’re planning.

Levine spent thousands of hours manually combing through scientific papers as a research undergrad at Virginia Tech, and later as a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan. He wanted a better way – and in 2022 co-founded ModernVivo with Colin Small, a fellow graduate student he’d met online while Small was pursuing a master’s in biotechnology at Brown University. 

ModernVivo’s platform can analyze millions of peer-reviewed publications – cross-referenced with clinical trial and regulatory data – delivering highly detailed results in minutes. Researchers can filter papers by factors including animal model, experimental conditions, author affiliation and publication date, then drill down into more than 40 individual variables used in the experiments. 

“We want to make experiments faster,” Levine said, “and help get better drugs to the clinic.”

For Levine, it’s personal: while studying to develop non-opioid pain therapeutics at Virginia Tech, he watched his mother live with a chronic pain disorder. 

In the pharmaceutical industry, about 90% of drug candidates that reach human clinical trials go on to fail. Levine suspects part of the problem could lie in the many variables involved in how animal experiments are designed. 

ModernVivo occupies a narrow niche in biotech software. Its closest analog is Trials.ai, another AI-driven platform tackling clinical trial design, founded in San Diego and acquired in 2023 by consulting firm ZS. 

The Seattle company draws on the paper database of Semantic Scholar, a research tool developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, putting it in loose company with general-purpose research tools like Elicit and Consensus – though none of those are built specifically to extract in vivo protocol details the same way.

ModernVivo’s pitch is that it provides deeper insight than manual literature review or general-purpose AI tools. Ask a general AI chatbot about an experiment, Levine said, and it’ll return the high-level, commonly known approaches. Researchers want every relevant data point, including the obscure European study that might matter for their specific drug candidate but wouldn’t surface in a broad summary.

The software also surfaces contradictions in the literature: if 20 published studies point one way and five point another, ModernVivo flags this rather than picking a winner, since, as Levine puts it, scientists don’t want to be told what to do.

“They’re the people who suffer through the Ph.D. to be an expert in their field,” he said.

So far, the results are speed, confidence and lower animal use, Levine said. Tracking whether a study leads to a successful drug takes years, so he’s cautious about claiming translational impact. But customers have told him work that used to take about a month now takes as little as an hour.

Researchers who use ModernVivo report more trust in their initial study design, he said, and run fewer duplicate or follow-up animal experiments, which cuts down on animal use and the cost of housing and caring for animals.

ModernVivo has more than 20 customers ranging from small biotech firms to large pharmaceutical companies. It also offers ModernVivo Scholar, a version for academic researchers launched last October, with plans ranging from free to $50 a month.

The company has been through multiple accelerator programs: a WTIA founder cohort in 2023, Creative Destruction Lab’s Seattle program, which it graduated from in June 2025, and the Merck Digital Sciences Studio’s third cohort. The company has raised $1 million in a pre-seed round, and Levine said fundraising is going well as the company looks to expand. 

ModernVivo’s attention is now shifting from the design phase of an experiment to execution. The company launched the ModernVivo Marketplace on Sept. 15, matching a finished study design against a network of pre-vetted contract research organizations, analytical labs and specialist dosing facilities. Suppliers of compounds and animal models are listed as coming soon.

Once a study is designed, researchers often don’t know which vendors have the right supplies or which contract research facilities are equipped to execute it, and tracking that down has meant manual search and outreach. ModernVivo wants to remove that ambiguity and connect scientists directly to the right vendor.

“The way we position ourselves in the future,” Levine said, “is helping scientists go from study design to study execution faster than ever before.”

Terry Myerson, the former Microsoft executive who co-founded Truveta during the pandemic, growing it to 500 employees and a valuation of more than $1 billion, is retiring as CEO of the Bellevue, Wash.-based health data company at the end of September.

Truveta co-founders Jay Nanduri, CTO, and Ryan Ahern, the chief medical officer, will take over as interim co-CEOs while the board conducts a search for a permanent CEO. Myerson said in an interview that the board has a responsibility to look for “the absolute best CEO,” but he expressed hope that the search will confirm Nanduri and Ahern as the right leaders for Truveta’s next chapter.

Myerson, 54, will become an advisor to the company and step down from its board. He said he’s leaving because the business is doing well and his co-founders are ready. He also cited changes in his personal life. He and his wife, Katie, are empty nesters, and they want to travel.

“If things were not going well, I would not do this,” he said. “I’d be grinding it out. But things are going really well.”

Truveta pools de-identified patient records from 30 large U.S. health systems into a database that’s updated daily. It sells access to that data, along with analysis and AI tools, to drug makers, medical device companies, researchers and government agencies studying how treatments work in the real world.

In a LinkedIn post announcing his retirement, Myerson noted that Truveta started “with an idea and no employees, no technology, no customers, and no data.” He wrote that what he’ll remember most are “the hundreds of Truvetans who took a chance on an ambitious idea and turned it into something real.”

Origins in the pandemic: Truveta grew out of a proposal from Providence, the Seattle-area nonprofit health system, for health systems to pool their data for research. Early in the pandemic, then-Providence CEO Rod Hochman called Myerson, who had left Microsoft in 2018 after leading its Windows and Devices Group, and asked him to build it.

GeekWire first reported on the startup in October 2020, and it launched publicly in February 2021 with 14 health systems.

Ahern was treating patients at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York at the time. “We were giving out hydroxychloroquine, not knowing that it was actually harming patients,” he said. “It was the first time in my career that we were learning a new disease from scratch.”

Ahern was connected to Myerson through Madrona co-founder Jerry Grinstein, a former Delta Air Lines CEO and Ahern’s uncle by marriage. Myerson had joined the Seattle venture firm as a venture partner after leaving Microsoft.

Truveta says its data now covers more than 140 million patients. It published the first peer-reviewed real-world comparison of Ozempic and Mounjaro for weight loss, research that landed the company on the Today Show.

In 2025, Truveta raised $320 million in a round that included Regeneron and Illumina, bringing its total funding to $515 million. The round helped fund the Truveta Genome Project, which is sequencing leftover blood samples from consenting patients and linking the genetic data to de-identified medical records.

State of the business: Myerson declined to share revenue figures. He acknowledged that Truveta isn’t yet profitable but said it doesn’t need to raise more money. An IPO isn’t on the near-term horizon, he said, because Truveta’s revenue isn’t yet large enough for the public markets.

That leaves Nanduri, Ahern and the board with strategic decisions about which path to take over the long term. Myerson said the company has turned down offers, without elaborating.

“One of the problems with a business that’s doing well is you’ve got all those options,” he said.

“We’re blessed with a lot of options,” Ahern added.

Dividing the job: Nanduri, a former Microsoft technical fellow, will continue to lead engineering, product and the data systems behind them. Ahern, a physician who remains on the University of Washington faculty part time, will run sales, marketing, customer delivery and the evidence services team that handles regulatory work for customers.

Nanduri described it as supply and demand. “Ryan takes care of demand,” he said. “I make sure that the supply and the ecosystem and everything thrives.”

The company is expanding beyond data into AI tools for research, including Truveta Intelligence, which launched in April and lets researchers ask questions of its clinical data in plain English. Ahern said a key challenge is showing that AI-generated answers can be trusted for high-stakes decisions such as drug safety and label expansion.

Nanduri said each of the companies behind the leading AI models is doing some health-related work, and “they have approached us too.” The board has discussed how Truveta can coexist with them, he said. The company also opened a development center in Hyderabad, India, in July, expanding its engineering organization.

Truveta’s next chapter: The leadership change follows a shift at the board level. In March, Henry Ford Health executive Robin Damschroder succeeded Hochman as Truveta’s board chair after he retired from Providence and affiliated entities.

The company also added a new senior executive this year, hiring Johnathan Lancaster, an oncologist and former Regeneron executive, as president and chief scientific officer in January.

Asked whether the board changes played a role in his decision, Myerson praised both Hochman and Damschroder, describing her as a disciplined board chair, and said the transitions are all part of the company moving into its second chapter. When it comes to CEO succession, he said, the question is who will commit for the next five to seven years.

“It’s easier for me to say, gosh, Jay and Ryan have earned this,” he said. “Bet on them for the next five to seven years versus betting on me.”

Myerson’s competitive streak, well known from his Microsoft days, hasn’t faded.

Truveta is currently No. 3 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top Pacific Northwest startups. Myerson once responded to a congratulatory note from GeekWire about the company’s status on the list with a link to a YouTube clip of the famous line from Talladega Nights: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”

Even as he discussed his departure, Myerson made his case for the top spot, calling Truveta “an amazing Pacific Northwest success story” and noting that more than 200 of its 500 employees are in the Seattle area.

“It’s a Pacific Northwest story that’s having global influence,” he said, “and so I think it should be number one on the list.”

At this stage of his life, he didn’t rule out the possibility of a next professional chapter for himself. But asked about his immediate plans, he said he’s hoping for “a great ski year.”

Providence will receive $1.1 billion — one of the largest gifts ever pledged to a U.S. healthcare institution — from Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny. The donation will allow the nonprofit health network to build Oregon’s first hospital focused on women’s health, increase support for cardiovascular services and improve patient care.

“Penny and I have always believed that real breakthroughs come from people willing to take on the toughest challenges,” Phil Knight said in a statement. “Providence has shown that kind of ambition in cardiovascular care, and we see the same opportunity to do something truly distinctive for women’s health.”

The funds are being directed to Portland’s Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and to Providence Heart Institute.

The new women’s hospital will be located on the campus of the medical center and provide care in specialties including gynecology, pregnancy, labor and delivery, menopause and cardiovascular care. Providence leaders note that many pregnant patients are also managing hypertension, diabetes, behavioral health and substance abuse, requiring more specialized services.

The Knights have previously donated $200 million over the course of 10 years to Providence Heart Institute, which sees nearly 63,000 patients each year across the Pacific Northwest, up from 40,000 a decade ago. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and hospitalization in the U.S.

The added support for the institute will help pay for diagnostic cardiac imaging, additional clinical trials, and the recruitment of leading doctors.

Knight, 88, co-founded Nike with Bill Bowerman in Eugene, Ore., in 1964. The business was originally called Blue Ribbon Sports before rebranding seven years later. Knight is currently worth an estimated $25.4 billion, according to Forbes.

“The Knights’ extraordinary gift is a generational investment, leading to bold and innovative ideas that will shape healthcare in Oregon for decades to come,” said Jennifer Burrows, chief executive of Providence Oregon.