Jacob Colker of AI House speaking at the Showbox Market in Seattle, where he later joined his bandmates on drums. (Photo via AI House)
AI House co-founder and managing director Jacob Colker may be Seattle’s number one cheerleader. In posts on LinkedIn, panel discussions and recent news stories, Colker is reminding Seattleites that this is a pretty special place.
That all bubbled up at a Seattle Tech Week startup showcase event on Tuesday when the venture capitalist gave a passionate speech about the positive attributes of Seattle — a city that despite a robust innovation economy, spectacular scenery and a great showing during the World Cup is a bit down on itself lately.
Colker, channeling the best motivational speaker vibes, let loose at the Showbox Market.
“I am here because Seattle is at the forefront and has an opportunity to have a massive impact on this next wave of technology,” he said. “But we are missing a major piece of making that happen.”
That missing piece, he explained, is community and connection.
He shared a story about his first experience at a Cirque du Soleil show, saying his mind was blown seeing people doing flips and flying horses floating above him. He was amazed, and awestruck. Many years later, he took his family to Redmond’s Marymoor Park to see a Cirque show, and they walked out kind of underwhelmed.
“We get numb to the magic,” said Colker. “And I’ll tell you what, that’s what’s happening right here in Seattle.”
He went on to say, “We have flying horses in every part of this city,” citing the impact of companies like Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft and countless startups. “We literally created the cloud,” he said.
Colker also noted the world-changing impact of the University of Washington, ranked one of the top public education institutions in the country.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t so much a speech as a rallying cry. Or, perhaps, a love letter to a city that Colker believes punches well above its weight and yet is globally (and locally) underappreciated in many ways.
Colker’s message resonated with some, including fellow venture capitalist Jen Haller from Ascend, who commented on Colker’s LinkedIn post: “Jacob for Mayor!”
Asked later by GeekWire why he felt compelled to share this message with the crowd, Colker said that Seattle “has absorbed years of lazy criticism and has started to internalize it.”
“The city does not have a talent problem, an ambition problem, or an innovation problem,” he tells us. “It has a confidence problem. Too many people have forgotten what has been built here, what is being built here, and how much potential is still sitting in this region waiting to be activated.”
Colker does not see himself as civic booster. He just wants people to stop accepting others definition of the community, recognize the extraordinary assets already in place and “start behaving with the urgency, pride, and conviction of a city that belongs at the center of what comes next.”
It was a common theme at Seattle Tech Week. Earlier in the day, at a Building in Seattle event, startup leader Zaylan Jacobsen, co-chair of the local Young Professionals Nexus chapter, described Seattle as “one of the most special places in the entire world.” While acknowledging short-term problems, he urged the crowd to recognize its timeless qualities, including the natural environment.
Colker, after his speech later that night, still had some bottled up energy left over to play drums on the Showbox stage with his band: Good Lettuce and the Hallpasses.
One of the songs Colker and his bandmates belted out: Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey. It seems an appropriate message for Seattle at this given point in time.
Click to enlarge. The top 5% of U.S. seed-round valuations reached $200.4 million in Q2 2026, up 177% from a year earlier, even as fewer companies were funded. (Chart: Peter Walker / Carta)
Guest Opinion: When I moved to Seattle in 2000 and started in venture capital, I read the book “The Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams,” which told the story of how venture capital drove the innovation ecosystem.
Entrepreneurs toiled day and night in their garages. Venture capitalists discovered these entrepreneurs, writing “small” checks for ownership and partnering side by side to build blue-chip companies. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins alone backed Intuit, Netscape, Amazon, and Google.
More than 25 years later, venture capital is going through a dramatic evolution, chasing once-in-a-lifetime IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. There is more venture capital available than ever before, and it is harder than ever for most founders to get funded, especially if you are not working on foundational AI.
Today’s founders need to think hard about alternative financing and growth strategies, rather than relying on venture capital. But before we get to those solutions and ideas, here are just a few examples of what’s happening in the market.
Anthropic envy: The Wall Street Journal covers the story of Spark Capital’s Yasmin Razavi, a former McKinsey consultant who invested $75 million in Anthropic when much of Silicon Valley passed at a $4 billion valuation in 2023. That stake is now worth about $7 billion — nearly 100x in three years! Silicon Valley is now chasing this pattern.
More money, fewer winners: In 2025, US venture firms deployed roughly $319 billion, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. In the first half of 2026 alone, they put in $412.7 billion, more than all of 2025. Capital has never been more abundant. But according to Silicon Valley Bank, 33% of all US venture dollars went to the top 1% of companies by valuation, up from 12% in 2022.
Seed valuations for the “right company” are at an all-time high.The bar for the next round is not a little higher. It is roughly double what it was a few years ago.
Peter Walker from Carta tracks seed valuations over time showing that the top 5% of seed deals are up 177% year over year, rising from about $72 million to $200 million. Carta found that 30.6% of companies that raised a seed round in early 2018 reached a Series A within two years. For the 2022 cohort, that number fell to 15.4%.
The practical takeaway for founders: The median revenue you now need to raise a Series A has roughly tripled, to about $3.5 million in ARR.
VC for the select few: A company that would have raised easily a few years ago now can’t get funded at all. Reid Christian from CRV argues the way to raise now is to be “Legible to Capital.” Two kinds of startups are getting funded, he says: “stupidly obvious credentialed teams with a semblance of an idea” priced at $50-200M, and later-stage rounds that “don’t require any amount of thinking.”
If the founders are the right demographic — “young, cracked, or repeat,” the right schools, “nepo, etc.” — capital finds them. Everyone else, he writes, is “just fighting pattern recognition in a lemming industry.”
So what should a founder do?
Go for it and raise VC: If you are building the next OpenAI, go raise VC. Recruit the best team possible and swing for the fences. Make sure you execute and your growth rates match the high expectations for a 2026 VC-backed company.
Heather Redman of Flying Fish Partners says companies “are getting pre-seed financed at ‘modest’ valuations and then going and executing like crazy to show dramatic growth … and raising great successive follow-on rounds.”
Seattle’s Tin Can is a great example of a contrarian bet (landlines for kids) that is showing tremendous growth and follow-on VC funding success.
Seek other sources of capital: Kirby Winfield of Ascend says, “If you don’t have reasonable confidence in hitting $3M-$5M ARR within 18-24 months of your first commercial contract you probably shouldn’t raise venture in 2026.”
If that’s not you, that’s fine — it just means priced venture equity may be the wrong instrument. Other sources of capital to consider:
Angel funding: Individual angel investors write smaller checks, move faster, and don’t carry the same growth expectations or blocking rights as institutional VCs. A round assembled from angels lets you raise less, give up less ownership, and avoid the signaling trap where a lead investor’s follow-on decision dictates your next round. The tradeoff is more relationships to manage and less firepower behind you for follow-on financing — but you keep control of your own timeline.
Venture debt: For companies with revenue and real margins, venture debt extends runway without dilution. It’s a loan taken alongside or shortly after an equity round, repaid over time with interest. The catch: it usually assumes an equity sponsor standing behind you, and it’s debt that must be paid back, so it works best as a bridge to a clear milestone.
Revenue-based financing: This approach, which advances capital against your recurring revenue, is one of the fastest-growing categories in startup finance. If you have predictable revenue and real margins, you have more options than a priced equity round. Providers advance a multiple of your monthly recurring revenue and get repaid as a percentage of it. It’s built for exactly the company this market has stranded: too small for a mega-round, too healthy to need one.
Get profitable fast: The cheapest capital you will ever raise is your own revenue. The best founders are not thinking about VC or chasing the next investment milestone. They’re heads-down building their businesses. AI has made this easier than at any point in history. A small team that controls its own burn controls its own destiny.
Aviel Ginzburg of Foundations and Founders’ Co-op offers this parting advice for founders: “Recognize that venture is just as confused as they are. We aren’t gatekeepers here, we’re getting disrupted.”
Nominal CEO Cameron McCord says Seattle’s concentration to tech talent and key partners attracted the company. (Photos via Nominal)
Seattle’s emergence as a hub for companies building the next generation of industrial technology is drawing another high-profile startup.
Los Angeles-based Nominal, whose software helps engineers build, test and validate complex hardware systems, is establishing a permanent Seattle office as it ramps up hiring and looks for a larger home in the region.
The nearly 4-year-old company currently employs 11 people at a downtown Seattle co-working space, and expects to more than double that number by the end of the year.
Nominal’s Stephen Slattery will lead the Seattle office.
The company is also relocating Head of Product Stephen Slattery, the former director of technical operations at defense tech giant Anduril Industries, from Los Angeles to Seattle to oversee the new office. Employing about 200 employees globally, Nominal also operates offices in Austin, New York, Washington, D.C., and London.
Seattle’s concentration of tech and aerospace talent, along with proximity to key partners and customers, attracted the fast-growing company.
Nominal CEO Cameron McCord said Seattle is one of only a handful of U.S. markets with a deep concentration of engineers experienced in solving large-scale infrastructure and reliability problems. Seattle’s aerospace heritage also appealed to the company.
“Some of the magic of Nominal is putting them in one room,” McCord told GeekWire.
The company boasts 75 customers, about half of which are in the defense sector. It also sells its software to companies in the energy, robotics and automotive arenas.
The Seattle expansion comes just months after Nominal raised an $80 million venture capital round led by Founders Fund at a $1 billion valuation, part of a growing trend of companies serving industries where artificial intelligence is accelerating innovation in the physical world.
“Nominal exists to help these engineering teams rethink their data supply chain: the end-to-end flow from instrumentation through acquisition, storage, analysis, reporting, and into the decisions that shape the next design,” the company wrote in the funding announcement.
Seattle has increasingly become a landing spot for companies operating at the intersection of AI and the physical world, while some of the region’s fastest-growing homegrown startups — including Overland AI, Carbon Robotics, Brinc and Stoke Space — are helping define the category.
In recent months, defense tech company Anduril has expanded its operations in the Seattle area. AI infrastructure startup Armada — which like Nominal is backed by Founders Fund — and AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI also have opened new offices or expanded engineering centers in the region.
Nominal’s McCord, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer who previously worked at Anduril, said conversations with former colleagues, including Anduril co-founder and COO Matt Grimm, helped reinforce Seattle’s appeal.
“I’ve been able to get a lot of advice and thoughts from him on what it looks like to properly enter the Seattle market,” said McCord. “Everything from him is incredibly positive on the talent and density.”
While Nominal has gained traction among defense contractors — McCord said four of the five traditional U.S. defense companies use its software — he said the company increasingly sees opportunities across a number of industries. The energy sector — including nuclear, fusion and batteries— as well as AI data center infrastructure are growing areas of interest for the young company.
The Seattle office will be more than an engineering outpost. McCord said Seattle will become a full cross-functional location, with engineering, sales, customer success, design and other teams represented as it grows.
The company expects the Seattle office to reach roughly 20 to 25 employees by the end of this year and could double again to 40 or 50 employees by the end of 2027. It is currently looking for a permanent office space, likely targeting downtown Seattle.
McCord said the Seattle office will play a key role in Nominal’s growth as it looks to reimagine the unique challenges that industrial companies face in building hardware systems for this new era.
“There’s a huge market opportunity as the world reindustrializes,” he said.
See this interview with McCord by General Catalyst’s Paul Kwan for more on the company:
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Top row from left: Emily Rapp, Henry Arias, Cleo Escarez, and Jagan Nemani. Bottom row from left: Kim Vu, Andy Liu, Mary Jesse, and Kenny Daniel, at the Seattle Tech Week kickoff. (GeekWire Photos / Todd Bishop)
The fourth annual Seattle Tech Week got off to a big start Monday, with panels and parties bringing together thousands of people from across the region and out of state. Organizers said the week features more than 250 events and drew more than 29,000 event registrations.
We went to Madrona’s kickoff event at Picklewood Paddle Club with one question for the founders, investors, and operators we met: What are you building? Here’s what we heard and learned.
Jagan Nemani, chief product officer of the Seattle Orcas. (GeekWire Photos / Todd Bishop)
What he’s building: An AI system that runs a professional cricket franchise — flights, hotels, ground transportation, and daily schedules for players and staff, all handled over WhatsApp.
Nemani is chief product officer of the Seattle Orcas, the Major League Cricket team now in its fourth season. For the first three, he ran team operations the old-fashioned way: “I ran the entire operations using spreadsheets and people and processes,” he said. That meant tracking a constant stream of inbound flights, hotel blocks and car bookings across a season.
This year, he used Claude Code to build the backend for an AI agent that took over roughly 80% of the operation: booking flights, hotels and cars, dealing directly with hotels and transportation vendors, and telling players and staff when their flight lands, which hotel they’re in, and who’s picking them up. It also handles daily schedules, down to massage appointments.
To accommodate players and staff who were reluctant to adopt new tech tools, he built it to run on WhatsApp, the messaging app they already used every day.
What she’s building: A B2B tool that lets thrift, vintage, and consignment resellers photograph an item and get back the identification, pricing, and listing details they now assemble by hand.
Vu is founder and CEO of StyleOrigin. Getting a single secondhand garment listed for sale is still manual work that takes 30 to 45 minutes an item, she said. With StyleOrigin, a reseller takes one image and an AI analysis returns what they need to list and price it. The company also gives sellers data to guide inventory decisions.
She found the problem herself. Vu ran environmental, social and governance work at Remitly until she stepped down in 2023, then took a year off and started selling vintage clothing. She assumed she was slow because she was new to it. “But turns out everybody does it the same, and so there wasn’t really any good solution out there.”
She taught herself to code and built the first version of the product. StyleOrigin has a working MVP but no revenue yet. More than 70 stores around the country are on a waitlist, and Vu is about to bring her first engineer aboard.
What he’s building: Tools for collecting, storing, and analyzing the data AI systems produce — the record of what agents actually did, not just the code they shipped.
Daniel is founder of Hyperparam, an early-stage Seattle startup, and previously co-founded Algorithmia, the Seattle machine learning company acquired by DataRobot in 2021.
Companies are spending heavily on AI without much sense of what they’re getting, he said. “AI is producing this wall of tokens. Companies are paying huge amounts of money to generate all these tokens, but they have really no visibility into what are these agents doing.”
Every token leaves a trail, and Daniel said most companies ignore it. Mining it would show them where AI is working and where it’s wasting money.
“Where are models being stupid? Where are they going down rabbit holes?” Older analytics tools can’t help, he said, because they were built for numbers and clicks: “People haven’t really been thinking about what do you do when the majority of the data being produced in the world is text.”
What she’s building: An urban mine — recovering precious metals from jewelry and returning them to the supply chain for clean technology.
Escarez is founder of Redyoos, which GeekWire featured in Startup Radar last year. The jewelry industry accounts for 40% to 50% of the global supply of precious metals, she said — the same materials found in “anything that has an on and off button,” from cell phones to wiring.
Demand for those metals is climbing with AI and clean energy, and Escarez said projections point to a supply shortfall of 700% over the next couple of decades. “We mathematically cannot solve this deficit,” she said, which is why she sees jewelry as a viable source.
Redyoos collects jewelry, refines what contains precious metals, and sells the recovered material to clean-tech manufacturers.
Escarez, a former chief operating officer at Boma Silver Jewelry and brand manager at Starbucks, has bootstrapped the company, which has been live a little over a year and is generating revenue. She is now raising a pre-seed round.
What he’s building: An engineering team inside a venture capital firm, automating the work of investing.
Liu is a partner at Unlock Venture Partners, which he helped launch in 2018 to back early-stage startups in Seattle and Los Angeles, and which raised a $60 million second fund in 2022. A longtime Seattle entrepreneur and angel investor with stakes in close to 100 companies, he was previously CEO of BuddyTV, acquired by Vizio, and of NetConversions, acquired by aQuantive.
“We actually have an engineering team that’s trying to automate a lot of what we do in VC,” Liu said, “and trying to make sure we can scale our business just like our own portfolio companies.”
The work covers deal memos and diligence on prospective investments, along with the mechanics of dealing with the firm’s own investors and collecting updates from portfolio companies.
The point, he said, is better decisions: “How do we get smarter as VCs?”
What she’s building: Private AI — letting people own their own data and context, use any large language model, and not be tracked or trained on.
Jesse is co-founder and CEO of ACME Brains, whose first product, nexie, is in beta. GeekWire wrote about the origins of the company last year: after her husband passed away, she turned to ChatGPT and found real comfort in it, then ran into its limits — it couldn’t carry the context of their conversations, and she had concerns about the privacy of what she was telling it.
nexie keeps a user’s notes, journals, and conversations in what the company calls a personal context engine, and carries that context across AI services instead of leaving it scattered in separate chat histories.
Trading privacy for free services goes back to the early internet, she said, but AI tilts the exchange further. A chatbot draws information out of a person in conversation, then combines it with everything already known about them. “AIs can talk you into your data,” she said.
An electrical engineer with more than two dozen patents who spent decades in wireless at McCaw Cellular and AT&T Wireless, Jesse said most people don’t grasp how AI actually behaves, which leaves them exposed — seniors especially. “You need people that understand it to help protect people that don’t.” Her co-founders are Alan Caplan, Amazon’s original general counsel, and patent attorney and engineer Bob Bergstrom.
What she’s building: Voice AI that lets bar and restaurant staff count inventory out loud instead of writing it down by hand.
Rapp is founder and CEO of Köniva. A typical hotel resort bar spends 12 hours and four people on an inventory count, she said; with Köniva it’s two people and 3-and-a-half hours, and more accurate. Staff download an app and wear a lapel mic — you want both hands free on a ladder — and count out loud the way they always have.
She came to the problem after a career in big tech and ad tech. Not wanting to build for an industry she’d never worked in, she took a part-time job at Canlis after training as a sommelier.
When she was injured, the wine director let her help with inventory reconciliation and handed her a clipboard of handwritten numbers plus a login to the restaurant’s inventory software. She asked why they were still using paper and pencil when a whole engineering team had built software for the job. The wine director’s answer: it was faster.
Köniva has 10 customers. At several high-end hotels and restaurants, Rapp said, staff put the app on their personal credit cards to start using it, then helped her pitch their own procurement departments — an unusual path in an industry she said has been badly burned by technology.
“It is insane how bad tech has been to them,” she said.
Henry Arias, founder and managing partner of Altelan Capital.
What he’s building: A growth equity firm investing at the intersection of food brands and food tech.
Arias is founder and managing partner of Altelan Capital, a Seattle firm he started last year. It underwrites companies around the Series A stage, generally, providing growth capital and strategic support.
He came up in the industry itself, leading finance at restaurants and breweries and most recently running corporate development and financial planning for Seattle Hospitality Group. That operator lens, he said, is what he brings to investments and to coaching founders on growth. He has been an investor since 2015.
Arias calls Altelan an AI-native investment fund, using AI tools to get up to speed on an industry and test assumptions about a business’s ability to scale and where the risks are. He’s equally interested in where the technology doesn’t belong and simplicity is the better option: “AI is great, but it may not be the right tool for the job.”
The bigger shift he’s watching is food and digitization. The industry has traditionally worked off “the proverbial clipboard and a notepad,” he said, and the pandemic accelerated the move to technology across the supply chain. “There are many applications of tech in food,” he said, “and that’s what keeps us up and gets us excited every day.”
A UPS truck makes its way through downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Handling fewer packages for Amazon is boosting the financial outlook for UPS, as CEO Carol Tomé said Tuesday that the delivery giant has successfully completed its planned volume pullback and is pivoting toward higher-margin shipments.
“I want to thank all UPSers for their extraordinary work over the past 18 months as we successfully completed our Amazon glide-down and related network reconfiguration initiatives as designed,” Tomé said in the company’s second quarter earnings release.
The “glide-down” caps an 18-month UPS strategy initiated in early 2025 to scale back low-margin e-commerce shipments for Amazon. During the pandemic peak, Amazon generated over 13% of UPS’s total revenue, but executives repeatedly pointed to that low-yielding volume as “extraordinarily dilutive” to profit margins.
Last year, Tomé addressed UPS’s 30-year relationship with Amazon, saying, “They are our largest customer, but they’re not our most profitable customer.”
Speaking on CNBC on Tuesday, Tomé confirmed that Amazon now accounts for roughly 9% of UPS’s business, marking the completion of the planned pullback.
Asked about Amazon’s growing footprint as a direct logistics rival through Amazon Shipping, Tomé dismissed concerns that the e-commerce giant was poaching core customers, drawing a sharp distinction between network strengths.
While Amazon thrives in lightweight, short-distance urban deliveries, Tomé emphasized that UPS maintains an edge across “every other place” — from complex B2B routes to time-sensitive cold chain logistics. By shedding roughly 2 million lower-margin Amazon packages per day, UPS says it freed up critical capacity across its ground and air networks.
UPS posted second-quarter revenue of $22.8 billion — a 7.6% increase year-over-year that topped Wall Street estimates. The courier raised its full-year 2026 revenue forecast to approximately $91.2 billion (up from $89.7 billion).
Despite the earnings beat and raised guidance, UPS shares dropped nearly 5% in early trading as investors weighed transformation costs and broader consumer spending concerns.
Amazon reports its second-quarter earnings on Thursday.
Replify, a Seattle startup that uses agentic AI to help fitness operators automate member and prospect communications, is being acquired by Dallas-based ABC Fitness, the companies announced Monday.
Replify’s software handles phone calls, emails, chats, and texts for health and wellness businesses, including inbound customer messages as well as proactive outbound marketing.
Replify co-founders Anna Rodriguez, left, and Tony Small. (LinkedIn Photos)
The idea is to help gyms, recreational facilities, tanning salons, and other businesses improve customer service and free up staff to focus on other tasks.
ABC Fitness is a technology provider for fitness businesses with a global customer base of more than 30,000 businesses and 40 million members. It already shares customers with Replify, including Gold’s Gym, UFC Gym, and Club 24.
Replify’s platform supports approximately 35 languages across voice, and more than 100 across text and chat. ABC Fitness’ software is used in more than 100 countries.
Replify was founded in 2023 as heyLibby by CEO Tony Small and CTO Anna Rodriguez. Zillow co-founder and former CEO Spencer Rascoff, who worked with Small and Rodriguez at the Seattle real estate company, joined as co-founder, investor and advisor. He incubated the startup out of his Los Angeles-based firm 75 & Sunny Labs.
Replify raised $4.5 million in an April 2025 seed round led by French firm Aglae Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Vertical Venture Partners. The company raised $6.7 million total in three years.
“Replify was built to help fitness operators be present at every moment a prospect or member is ready to engage,” Small said in a statement. “By joining ABC Fitness, we can bring our AI agents to a larger global ecosystem and help more operators capture demand, support their teams and grow with less manual work.”
Small and Rodriguez and the 12-member Replify team are joining ABC Fitness, which employs nearly 2,000 people, according to its website. Small will be senior VP of AI strategy and Rodriguez will be VP of engineering, with both reporting to ABC Fitness President Khal Rai.
The goal for the Replify team is to lead the advancement of the agentic layer of ABC’s Intelligent Operating System and continue innovation in agentic AI capabilities, Rodriguez told GeekWire.
Starbucks was using technology from Redmond-based NomadGo to automate how workers counted inventory items. (Starbucks Photo)
When Starbucks scrapped an AI-powered inventory counting tool back in May, just nine months after revealing the new system, it landed as a surprise to those tracking the coffee giant’s high-tech ambitions. A new report from Fast Company tells the inside story of how the national rollout disintegrated — and why the Redmond, Wash.-based startup behind it was left “blindsided.”
Known as “Automated Counting,” the tool was built in partnership with NomadGo to scan backroom storage shelves using iPad Pros equipped with computer vision, spatial computing, and augmented reality. It was designed to automatically tally coffee bags, milk, syrups, and other key supplies.
The idea was to turn an hour-long manual chore into a 10-to-12-minute job so baristas could focus on making drinks and connecting with customers.
The technology was deployed rapidly across all 11,300 company-operated Starbucks locations in North America. But almost immediately, real-world store environments triggered rampant glitches, according to Fast Company.
Baristas reported camera errors — such as shiny refrigerator reflections doubling milk counts or the app misidentifying syrups and trash cans — while stores with spotty Wi-Fi frequently had their counting progress wiped out entirely mid-scan.
According to Fast Company, the technical breakdowns stemmed from both software limitations and outdated infrastructure. While NomadGo’s computer vision achieved 99% accuracy in controlled tests, CEO David Greschler noted that computer vision inherently struggles when inventory changes — requiring up to six weeks of retraining for seasonal holiday cups or limited-time packaging that NomadGo developers sometimes only learned about once items hit store shelves.
Compounding the problem, people involved in building the tool pointed to Starbucks’ backend network, which relies on a legacy IBM AS/400 system dating back to the 1990s, making it difficult for cutting-edge AI to process real-time store data reliably.
When Starbucks notified NomadGo on April 3 that it was pulling the plug, the startup was reportedly blindsided. Greschler called the decision “a complete surprise,” telling Fast Company that “there’s nothing you can do when leadership and strategy change.”
Within days of losing its centerpiece enterprise client, NomadGo was forced to lay off a large chunk of its 30-person workforce, according to the report, including the technical team that managed the Starbucks integration. Six weeks later, on May 18, Starbucks formally notified baristas that Automated Counting was retired, instructing them to rip the QR tracking codes off backroom shelves and return to manual tallies.
A Starbucks spokesperson provided GeekWire with this statement on Monday:
“Human connection is at the core of our business, which is why we have invested $500 million to put more partners (employees) in our coffeehouses. We use technology to support human connection, not to replace it. This tool was designed to simplify a routine task and give partners more time with their customers. When it fell short, we listened to feedback and changed course. That is what innovation looks like at Starbucks: listening, learning, and adapting.”
GeekWire also contacted NomadGo, and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
Despite retiring Automated Counting, Starbucks has pushed forward with other AI initiatives across its business. The coffee giant is building an AI-powered ordering companion inside its mobile app to translate cravings into custom recipes, while testing a ChatGPT integration that suggests drinks based on a customer’s mood or outfit.
For store staff, the company continues to rely on Green Dot Assist, a generative AI virtual assistant built to help baristas quickly look up recipes, standards, and store operating procedures.
— Jeff Lyon is now chief information security officer at Seattle’s Remitly. Lyon joins from Coinbase, where he was head of infrastructure security for two years. Past roles include security leadership at Robinhood and Amazon Web Services. Lyon also served as a petty officer with the U.S. Navy for more than nine years.
“Remitly’s mission to transform lives through trusted financial services that transcend borders resonates deeply and is a natural progression of my work building security organizations, secure applications, and safe-by-default platforms across fintech,” Lyon said in a LinkedIn post.
Remitly has seen a reshuffling of leadership since co-founder and CEO Matt Oppenheimer departed in February. Ankur Sinha resigned as chief product and technology officer in June, and Rina Hahn left as chief marketing officer earlier this month. Veteran tech and finance executive Sebastian Gunningham now leads the company.
Joseph Williams. (Dept. of Commerce Photo)
— Joseph Williams, a longtime Seattle-area leader at the intersection of tech and public service, was named director of Cybersecurity Programs at Western Washington University.
Williams most recently served as the governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) practice director at consulting firm Artemis Connection. His varied career includes working as information and communications technology sector lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce; Seattle office director for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; and divisional CTO at Microsoft.
Williams’ experience “sets the stage for propelling our cybersecurity programs to new heights as we seek to equip and empower our graduates to be successful in exciting careers in a fast-changing technology landscape,” said Filip Jagodzinski, computer sciences’ department chair.
Kartik Murthy. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Kartik Murthy was named vice president of product for Yoodli, a roleplay platform using AI to help people improve their professional skills.
Murthy joins the Seattle-based startup from the cybersecurity company Coalition, where he served as head of product for four years. He has held product management roles at companies including Meta, Google and Uber.
“In a world where many AI products try to automate workflows, Yoodli is taking a bet on humans and it’s already paying off,” Murthy said on LinkedIn.
Phoebe Weiser. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Phoebe Weiser is now an investor at the longtime Seattle venture firm Madrona. She joins from Databricks, where she worked as a product manager, and previously held internship and full-time roles at Microsoft.
“After building in security at Microsoft and data engineering at Databricks, I’m looking forward to partnering with the next generation of founders. I’m especially grateful to the managers, mentors, and teammates over the past few years for everything they taught me about building products at scale,” she said on LinkedIn.
— Salman Taherian is now head of AI for Grant Thornton, a Chicago firm offering audit, assurance, tax and advisory services. Taherian, who is based at the company’s office in Bellevue, Wash., joins from Amazon Web Services where he was global head of agentic AI and strategic partner accounts. Past employers include Wipro Limited and Relx.
— Two Fred Hutch Cancer Center researchers have received endowed chairs:
Kate Markey, an assistant professor at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine, has received the Innovators Network Endowed Chair. Markey is a bone marrow transplant physician and studies how gut bacteria affect recovery for cancer patients.
Sita Kugel, a pancreatic cancer researcher and Fred Hutch professor, is the inaugural recipient of the Leung Roy Family Endowed Chair.
— Jeff Weintraub was appointed chief operating officer and chief financial officer for Nabu, a Seattle startup that publicly launched this year that’s building tools for software product teams. Its co-founders are Jon Grant and Eric Thompson.
Weintraub was most recently at Apple for more than 12 years, leaving the role of director of consumer and enterprise support engineering. Earlier in his career he was with Intel and also owned a bathroom fixture manufacturing company.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the Smart Systems Stage will be where energy, infrastructure, and technology collide, covering everything from fusion breakthroughs to the grid strain AI is putting on the entire economy.
Illustration of a patient receiving an ultrasound using Dopl’s remote technology as a medical assistant looks on. (Dopl Illustration)
Dopl Technologies announced $6.3 million in new funding to support the development and commercialization of a remotely operated robotic ultrasound system. The Bothell, Wash.-based startup has now raised more than $8 million.
Dopl is pursuing FDA clearance for its platform, which pairs with off-the-shelf ultrasound probes and commercially available robots. The system facilitates communication between a remotely based ultrasound technician (or sonographer) and the robot, allowing the sonographer to conduct the exam with haptic feedback.
The platform also includes a video connection to allow conversations between the sonographer, patient and onsite healthcare personnel.
The goal, said CEO Ryan James, is to target underserved and rural communities “to improve access to care and the time it takes for patients to get that care.”
Ryan James, CEO and co-founder of Dopl Technologies. (Dopl Photo)
While Dopl could eventually create remote interfaces for a variety of health services, ultrasound alone has widespread applications.
“People say that ultrasound is the new stethoscope,” James said. Perhaps best known for its use in obstetric exams during pregnancy, the diagnostic tool is also employed for cardiac and vascular exams and can be used to detect stroke, cancer, heart disease and other conditions.
The startup was co-founded by James, Chief Operating Officer Steve Seslar, and Chief Medical Officer Wayne Monsky, who began researching novel care delivery methods together at the University of Washington in 2017.
The system pulls together a suite of technologies including fine-motor robotic control, haptics, computer vision, AI, and advanced networking.
The new investment allows the company to hire staff to help it navigate the FDA approval process. Dopl is conducting clinical evaluations of its platform and aims to submit an application for FDA clearance next year.
Dopl currently provides in-person ultrasounds using its technology through traveling sonographer services. FDA clearance would allow it to perform remote robotic exams and scale its platform.
The startup has a letter of intent with a rural health care collaborative that includes 31 critical access hospitals in Washington and has partnerships across the nation, including on the East Coast.
The company also expects to take advantage of opportunities through the Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion federal effort that will distribute funds in every state from fiscal years 2026 to 2030. The program is targeting innovations that expand access to care.
The seed round was led by SpringTide Ventures, which was joined by WRF Capital, Tacoma Venture Fund (pre-seed round lead), HeartX, Transform Health Ventures, Precursor Ventures, and additional early-stage institutional investors.
There is competition in this market, including traditional ultrasound companies and startups. A notable rival is AdEchoTech, which launched in France in 2008 and has since received FDA clearance to sell in the U.S.
James said Dopl’s haptic technology sets it apart, allowing remote technicians”to actually feel the patient as they’re scanning.”
The remote robotic care delivery industry is rapidly growing, James said, and “represents the next wave of care delivery and shift in mindset in terms of how clinicians operate.”
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