Seattle startup veteran Stefan Kalb is back with a fresh brand and an ambitious vision for enterprise automation in the AI era.

Rebranded earlier this year from Super Labs, Kalb’s latest venture, Latch, is positioning itself as the context layer for enterprise AI, helping companies observe, learn and document how work actually gets done.

Kalb launched the startup alongside co-founder and CTO Jared Kofron, a University of Washington physics alum and former principal software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs last year.

Kalb is well known in startup circles. In 2009, the Bainbridge Island resident founded Molly’s, a fresh food supply company that serviced Seattle-area cafes and hospitals. That led him to start Shelf Engine, which used machine learning to drastically reduce food waste for retailers like Target, Kroger and Walmart. After raising $60 million in venture funding, it sold to New York retail data analytics company Crisp in 2025.

We recently caught with Kalb to hear more about Latch, his latest startup venture that has the ambitious goal of liberating humanity “from doing work that owns us.”

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
Latch captures how work actually gets done. An employee records themselves doing a task and narrates it like they’re training a new hire. Latch turns that into a knowledge graph of the company’s processes and serves it to your AI agents. Your agents finally know how the business really runs.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Liberating people from work they don’t like. Every job has hours in it that only exist because software never learned how the company runs. I want that work to disappear, and I don’t think anyone will miss it.

What surprised you after talking to customers?
That people are bad at explaining their own jobs, and they know it. Ask someone to document their process and you get a five-step list. Watch them do it and it’s forty steps with a dozen decisions they never mention, because to them it isn’t a decision. It’s just Tuesday.

How has AI changed the way you build?
The obvious stuff is real, but the interesting change is org shape. The ratio of product to engineering has flipped. So has the ratio of SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) to closers. Building used to be the bottleneck, so you staffed for it. Now the bottleneck is deciding what to build and who to sell it to, and you staff for that instead.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
They think we’re Loom. A Loom is a video in a folder waiting for a human to watch it. Latch watches the recording, figures out what you did and why you did it that way, and turns it into something your agents can act on. The video is the input. What we learn from it is the product.

Toughest decision in the past year?
Go to market. AI made reaching customers harder and more expensive, not easier. Every inbox is full of AI-written outbound now, so the cheap channels are gone. We decided to stop competing on volume and spend real money on fewer, deeper conversations. Showing up in person. It costs far more per account than we planned for, and it’s the only thing that works.

One piece of advice for other entrepreneurs?
Look away from the obvious. If someone is telling you about the front of their store, ask them about the loading bay. The best problems are the ones nobody is talking about, usually because they can’t put words to what’s happening. That’s also where you’ll have the least competition.

We’ll know we’ve made it when…
Someone gets furious that we’re down. Not because they lost a file, but because they can’t do their job without us. That’s the moment we stop being a tool and become key infrastructure.

Longtime Seattle food photographer Scott Pitts spent 25 years capturing commercial imagery for major brands, and now he’s using that quarter-century archive to train Pallat. The new AI-powered production system is designed to eliminate costly reshoots while keeping real studio craft at the center of generative creative tech.

The platform combines fine-tuned open-weight models with Pitts’ extensive archive, allowing art directors to modify existing campaign assets — like swapping a topping, adjusting lighting, or changing a backdrop — in minutes through software rather than starting from scratch back on set.

Pitts, a non-technical founder operating Pallat out of his Seattle photo studio, SP Studio, leads a nimble five-person team and believes domain experience is key to competing with generic AI platforms.

“We are close to the problem, and we’re looking at it from a photographic eye,” he said. “We’re making sure those outputs look photoreal, that they’re not going to get labeled as AI slop.”

To show how the tech works in practice, Pitts points to a recent shoot for a national steakhouse client. After completing a complex setup for a burger — carefully layering the bun, patty, sauce, and greens — the brand asked if they had shot a version with tomatoes. Rather than calling back the food stylist and rebuilding the set, Pitts dropped the final image into Pallat, prompting it to add two tomato slices with subtle condensation, natural translucency, and accurate drop shadows cast onto the cheese below.

In another instance, a commercial seafood brand prepared packaging imagery for a buyer presentation, only for the client to ask to see the fish presented on a white plate instead. Pallat to the rescue.

Commercial photographers have long tweaked images using tools like Photoshop, but Pitts sees AI as the natural next step for advertising workflows — distinct from news photography, where image manipulation remains out of bounds. Where Photoshop requires painstaking manual editing to adjust a scene, Pallat handles complex lighting, translucency, and material physics in minutes based on a simple prompt.

The startup recently signed its first enterprise customer and is currently working directly with brands as a hands-on production partner while building toward full software access.

Pitts sees the technology not as a threat to his craft, but as a natural progression. He started his career shooting four-by-five film, then transitioned to digital and video. AI is another progression.

“My hope is that me building Pallat is sort of this bridge between tech and creative,” Pitts said. “Craft is still important. Judgment and taste are still probably some of the most important things.”

Continue reading for Pitts’ answers to our Startup Spotlight questionnaire.

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

Pallat is a photographer-led AI production system built for food and beverage brands, born from a working photo studio. It combines licensed photography with generative workflows to help brands scale photo-centric content while maintaining the creative control expected from commercial photography.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

I’ve spent 25 years watching brands solve the same problem: invest in a shoot, then ultimately need more usable imagery than the initial shoot was designed to deliver. Generic generative tools can create images, but weren’t built around the quality, control and production standards food and beverage brands require.

I’m obsessed with using AI to close the gap. Pallat gives brands a way to extend photography they’ve already invested in and create new production-ready imagery grounded in a licensed dataset and the standards of a traditional photoshoot.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Because we’re so close to the problem we’re solving, their need for a solution and high bar for quality didn’t surprise me. 

What did was how much generated imagery disrupted their existing workflows. There is no obvious owner, no review path and no shared vocabulary for feedback and approvals. Brands are asking us to help establish new workflows, and that has turned out to be almost as important as building the tech itself.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

AI is a big part of why a five-person team can build something like this. Our tech stack is built on open-weight models that we fine-tune using proprietary training data, while foundation models support planning and a handful of day-to-day operations.

Not to oversimplify it, but in many ways my role at Pallat parallels production. I built a team of experts, defined the problem we’re solving and established the criteria for the output. A growing part of my work is getting those standards out of my head and structuring evals so they hold when I’m not in the room.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That Pallat is trying to replace photography. It’s far from it.

Practical photos are important inputs, and our studio continues to create net-new ones to expand the system. Visual trends are always evolving, so datasets powering creative tech cannot be static. The future of production is hybrid: practical photography and generative imaging working together, with each deployed where it creates the most value. 

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

Resisting the urge to broaden Pallat before we establish product-market fit. The goal isn’t to automate every step as quickly as possible. It’s to understand which problems in the workflow are best solved through software.

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

I truly believe some of the most interesting AI companies will come out of service businesses where the founder knows the industry exceptionally well — where the friction lives, which shortcuts a client will notice, and what excellence looks like in their vertical.

I spent a long time assuming my 25 years in photography was the past and AI was the future, and I had that backwards. The years on set that sharpened my taste and judgment, our dataset and the client relationships are the true compounding assets.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

When an art director at a food or beverage brand drafts a shot list dividing it into two columns: “Capture as Practical Photography” and “Generate in Pallat.”

When that becomes a normal way of planning, Pallat will have done what we set out to do.

When a pilot wants to find a flight instructor, a mechanic, an examiner for a flight test, or a fair price on an airplane, the solution is usually the same: ask around at the airport.

Nick Tsang, founder and CEO of Skyfarer, wants to help fix this problem. He sees general aviation as a multibillion-dollar market that’s fragmented at every stage, without the unified online tools other industries take for granted.

Skyfarer is a marketplace where pilots (and those who aspire to be one) can find instructors, flight schools, examiners, mechanics, gear and aircraft. Tsang calls it Airbnb for aviation.

Tsang grew up in Hong Kong, where his aviation roots trace to 2012, when he started flight training in New Zealand, and where he spent eight years in the Hong Kong Air Cadet Corps. He holds a master’s degree in educational management and turned down an MPhil at Cambridge in 2018 to help lead a $28 million initiative that brought computational thinking to more than 90,000 students.

He founded the company in July 2024 in Camas, Wash., just outside of Portland, Ore., and recently joined the board of the National Flight Training Alliance.

The company started with live online instruction and later added in-person training, buying a competing marketplace, InstructAir, in 2025 to sign up more instructors.

Skyfarer is self-funded apart from some early angel funding. The company says it has close to 14,000 registered users and 8,500 listings in all 50 states, plus an iOS app. July was its biggest month, with 9,900 monthly active users, up 70% from June, and inquiries and transactions up 60%.

Continue reading for Tsang’s answers to our Startup Spotlight questionnaire.

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

Skyfarer is a marketplace for general aviation, SaaS-enabled, consumer-facing up front with enterprise infrastructure behind it. Pilots, training and service providers, examiners, and aircraft owners connect in one place. Think Airbnb for aviation: thousands of listings, all 50 states, still running on word of mouth.

What problems are you obsessed with solving?

Nearly half a million certificated pilots fly in the US today, and tens of thousands more start training every year. It’s a multi-billion dollar market fragmented at every stage, and the dropout rate in flight training is brutal. Much of it traces back to bad matching: wrong school, wrong instructor, wrong expectations, and even wrong aircraft.

People walk away from a life-changing dream because the market gives them no way to compare options before committing tens of thousands of dollars, and no community to lean on when training gets hard. Our own nationwide survey confirmed the setup: the internet is already the top channel for discovering, yet what people find there is fragments with no guidance.

And the problem doesn’t end at the first certificate. Countless milestones follow, from advanced ratings and checkrides to finding work as a pilot, buying an aircraft, and knowing who to trust for maintenance, and every step runs on the same word-of-mouth guesswork.

Meanwhile, the modern tools every other industry takes for granted have barely reached general aviation. I’m obsessed with fixing that across the entire pilot journey, because when a real ecosystem works, more people start flying, more keep flying, and the whole aviation community thrives.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

The first surprise was how much of the industry’s dysfunction traces back to one thing: customers don’t know what they don’t know.

A student pilot isn’t like a customer buying software. Nobody hands you a syllabus for the decision itself. Medical requirements, real costs, timelines, financing, how to evaluate a school, how to tell whether flying is even right for you. Most people start training without answers to any of it.

Then the gaps catch up with them: cost surprises nobody warned them about, plateaus with no mentor, an instructor who leaves for an airline seat mid-training. Most student pilots quit before their certificate. I spoke with people who’d spent years and six figures without reaching their goal. People don’t quit flying; they quit the process.

And the knowledge gap doesn’t stop at students. Aircraft buyers don’t know what a fair price looks like. Schools don’t know how to reach students beyond the airport fence. Instructors don’t know how to market themselves. The information exists but never reaches the person who needs it at the moment they need it.

But what surprised me most is how alive the ecosystem is. In most marketplaces, buyers and sellers are separate populations. In aviation, they’re the same people at different altitudes on the same journey.

Today’s student becomes next year’s instructor, then an airline pilot who comes back as a mentor, an aircraft owner, sometimes an examiner. The same flight instructor might also be an aircraft broker, a ferry pilot, or a director at a national aviation organization. Schools that compete refer students to each other. Half the industry volunteers at each other’s fly-ins.

Once I saw that, the product question changed: you don’t build a platform for one transaction. You build the place that holds people through every role they’ll ever play in aviation.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Fundamentally. A year ago I could only make non-code updates to our infrastructure. I’m not a software engineer, so ideas would come and then sit in a queue waiting on the tech team. Meanwhile I was absorbing everything I could from other marketplace models and from successful marketplace founders, but insight without shipping speed is just a reading list.

That’s inverted now. July was our highest-velocity building month since Skyfarer started. We’ve opened over 400 pull requests in company history, and nearly 200 of them came in July alone, most of which I shipped myself with AI-assisted development.

With frontier models available to everyone, moats are shifting toward speed, domain depth, and distribution. The clearest sign of the shift: we no longer keep a product roadmap, not even for the next year. Roadmaps exist because building used to be expensive, so we had to guess far in advance and commit. Now we notice something users need, assess it, and ship it the same week. The strategy stays fixed; everything else is discovered, not planned.

AI amplifies what Matt McIlwain at Madrona recently described as the traits of successful founders: curiosity to keep asking questions, humility to actually listen, and the willingness to act even when you might be wrong. What’s changed is where those traits can take you.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That our users are all twenty-two-year-olds chasing pilot careers. The truth: the person learning to fly right now could be your niece in university, your uncle who just retired, or your colleague who finally decided to stop postponing the dream. Flying is one of the few pursuits people take up at twenty and at sixty with equal seriousness, and we see that full range on Skyfarer every day.

The other half of the misunderstanding is thinking the journey ends at a certificate. It doesn’t end at all. An active pilot always has a next step: a flight review, an advanced rating, a checkride, an aircraft to buy or share or sell. Our job isn’t to graduate people out of the platform. It’s to help pilots stay active for decades, because a pilot who keeps flying is a customer for life and, more importantly, one more person keeping this community alive.

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

Killing our original thesis. Skyfarer started as live online instruction: connect students with seasoned flight instructors remotely, build stronger foundations before anyone burns money in an aircraft.

The logic was sound. The signups weren’t. People came to the platform, but the demand for online instruction never showed up at the rate the thesis needed, and the customer conversations explained why. The moments that make someone a pilot happen in person: sitting in the cockpit, meeting your instructor on the ramp, the airport itself as a place you belong. Online instruction supports the journey; it isn’t the journey.

So we expanded into in-person flight training, and we did it carefully. We talked with existing users, advisors, and people across the industry, planned the transition, then committed fully, to the point of acquiring a competitor to accelerate the in-person supply side. That decision changed everything about where we are today, but letting go of the original idea was hard.

First ideas feel like identity. Uri Levine says to fall in love with the problem, not the solution, and I had to learn it the way most founders do: the hard way. Customers are the ones who validate an idea. Our job was to listen when they did, and to listen harder when they didn’t.

One piece of advice for other entrepreneurs?
Most startups fail. Founders exist to defy those odds, and you don’t defy them with a single brilliant move. You do it by staying curious, learning relentlessly, and applying what you learn to the company the same week you learn it. That loop is also, honestly, the fun part. The rollercoaster may not get less steep, but the ride gets rewarding when you can feel yourself getting better at it. And keep moving forward, because motion changes what uncertainty feels like. Stand still and the unknown is a threat.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

… when Skyfarer is the default for the entire pilot journey: learning to fly, finding training, booking a medical exam or a checkride, getting insured, buying gear, buying an aircraft, and every question in between. The way you check Zillow before you even know if you’re really moving, people will check Skyfarer before they even know if they’re really going to fly.

Today, aviation’s defining problem is how many student pilots give up. We’ll know we’ve made it when nobody talks about dropout rates anymore because the industry’s problem has become the opposite one: we need more aircraft, more instructors, more runways to hold everyone who’s flying.

When the bottleneck moves from people quitting to the sky getting crowded, we did our job.

Genevieve Priebe took a business meeting this summer while bottle-feeding baby goats. A couple of years ago, she was advising executives at some of Seattle’s largest tech companies.

“Best decision I’ve ever made,” she said of her career change.

Priebe is the solo entrepreneur behind Reroot, a bootstrapped Seattle startup trying to make local food as easy to find and buy as anything else online.

The company operates a marketplace where independent farmers, ranchers, bakers and makers sell direct to customers, currently live with founding partners in the Pacific Northwest. In July it launched a free companion app, Reroot: Find Local Food, that maps more than 50,000 producers across the U.S. and parts of Canada.

She has also built a patent-pending tool called Walk & Talk, which lets a farmer update an online store by voice while walking the field, with or without a cell signal. When they’re back in range, it reconciles what they said against any sales that came in while they were offline.

A fourth-generation farm kid from Whitefish, Mont., Priebe grew up driving her dad’s tractor before she could reach the pedals and counting change at farmers markets for her mom, a flower farmer. She left for college and spent two decades in Seattle consulting, starting at Accenture and working for clients including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Starbucks and Boeing.

After her parents passed away, she and her brother took over the family farm. Priebe ran the numbers on what it takes to make a living growing food, and found it “close to impossible.” That’s a big part of what she’s now looking to solve as a startup founder.

“I didn’t want to be a founder,” she said, “but I couldn’t walk away from the problem.”

Continue reading for Priebe’s answers to our Startup Spotlight questionnaire.

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

Local food is all around you, but finding it is hard. Buying it directly from the source is even harder. Reroot exists to fix that. We’re a discovery app and marketplace that connects independent producers to the people who love what they grow, raise and make.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Something that perhaps most people wouldn’t see as a problem. That is: why is it easier to buy a mango from Peru than a tomato from a farm 10 miles away?

What surprised you after talking to customers?

My biggest surprise was that most small farms pay to be farmers. They don’t make money, they lose money. Less than 50% of the 1.9M farms in the US are profitable. Average median farm income is over a thousand dollars in the red. It’s no surprise that 15,000 farms go out of business every year and unfortunately the story isn’t much better for other independent food producers. Growing our food is one of the most important jobs, yet it’s close to impossible to make a living doing it.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Dramatically. Two years ago, I’d have needed a 5-person development team, 18 months, and $1.5M to do what I’ve done solo in about four months. Traditional development cannot compare to the speed with which AI has enabled me to operate.

I do have a strong tech background, but haven’t written a single line of code and yet I’m live with a fully functioning marketplace that processes financial transactions, integrates with Square and Stripe, has sent over 100,000 marketing emails for our customers, manages inventory, fulfillment, and analytics. And, bonus — we just launched a free discovery app called Reroot: Find Local Food that maps 50,000+ local food producers in the US and parts of Canada.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

In a world of AI-powered, niche, technology businesses, people seem surprised at how simple the idea is. They assume it already exists. It doesn’t. There is no single place to discover, follow, and buy from local producers. That gap is exactly why I built Reroot.

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

Every advisor and investor I’ve talked to has told me to find a technical co-founder, and even better if he’s younger and male. The decision to ignore that advice and bootstrap solo as a woman in my forties was simultaneously the hardest decision I’ve made and the easiest. I’m choosing a different path than raise-and-burn: heads-down building for real customers who need what I’m making. It’s working.

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

Don’t overthink it. I spent decades in environments where every decision needed a PowerPoint deck and three rounds of approvals. The best thing I’ve done as a founder is just move: build it, ship it, learn, repeat.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

When the hardest part of farming is no longer the marketing. When farmers like my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents can actually afford to do the work that they love. And when I can conveniently replace most of my grocery store spend with local food purchased directly from my favorite producers.

Medical researchers need cutting-edge tools to create new treatments, and Vancouver, BC startup ScopeSys wants to provide them.

Founded in 2017 and tracing its roots to research from University of British Columbia biophysicist Sabrina Leslie, ScopeSys uses physics to make testing new medicines quicker and cheaper.

The 7-person company, which recently closed a $1.1 million seed funding round, is developing tools that let drugmakers observe individual RNA and DNA molecules, giving researchers a more precise way to design new forms of medicines.

We caught up with ScopeSys CEO Padma Kodukula — a longtime biotech leader who most recently served as chief business officer at A-Alpha Bio — for this installment of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

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

ScopeSys is developing next-generation analytical instruments that reveal the size, payload, structure, and dynamic behavior of individual nanoparticles and biomolecules. Our proprietary Convex Lens-induced Confinement (CLiC) technology helps pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies design better genomic medicines, accelerate formulation development, improve scale-up, and strengthen manufacturing control.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

I am obsessed with improving how genomic medicines are characterized. These therapies are complex and highly heterogeneous, yet many existing analytical methods report only population averages. We want to give scientists particle-by-particle and molecule-by-molecule insight so they can better understand what they are making, why it works, and how to manufacture it consistently.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

I was surprised by how actively customers seek technologies that can give them a meaningful competitive advantage. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology teams are highly sophisticated, but they still face major analytical gaps. They are willing to explore cutting-edge tools when technology can answer important questions that existing methods cannot and provide actionable data.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

AI has multiplied our efficiency across nearly every part of the company. We use it to accelerate scientific research, analyze market and competitive information, refine product positioning, develop customer materials, support sales outreach, and improve internal decision-making. It allows a small team to operate with the speed and breadth of a much larger organization.

What is one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

Some people assume we are still an academic research project because our technology originated at the University of British Columbia. In reality, ScopeSys is a commercial, revenue-generating company. We are translating years of scientific innovation into robust instruments, consumables, AI datasets, and analytical services designed for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and research laboratories.

What is the toughest decision you have made in the past year?

The toughest decision has been balancing near-term service revenue with the long-term investment required to commercialize our instrument platform. Services generate important customer validation and cash flow, but building a scalable product company requires disciplined choices about hiring, capital allocation, product development, and which opportunities to prioritize.

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

There will be many hurdles throughout the entrepreneurial journey, and some will feel overwhelming in the moment. Keep moving forward. Most challenges eventually pass, especially when you remain focused, adaptable, and persistent. Perseverance does not mean ignoring problems; it means continuing to solve them one at a time.

We will know our company has made it when…

Our technology and instruments are routinely used across pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic laboratories as a standard tool for developing genomic medicines—helping scientists build better formulations, accelerate process scale-up, understand product heterogeneity, and support manufacturing and quality control.

Planning a trip to a college campus, concert or Northwest landmark? Portland startup HitchPiggy is betting the ride you need may already be headed out on the road.

The company’s new marketplace allows drivers to post trips they’re already planning and connect with passengers heading the same way. Unlike on-demand services such as Uber or Lyft, HitchPiggy is focusing on regional travel, allowing drivers to choose who rides with them and what passengers contribute toward the trip.

Founder Skylar Windham says the idea has been percolating in his head for years, sparked from experiences traveling through Europe. Only recently, AI-powered coding tools allowed him to build the platform he always imagined.

The bootstrapped startup is small, with a little more than 100 registered users signing up for Pacific Northwest trips since its launch on June 1. No rides have been completed through the platform just yet, but Windham is looking to grow college ridership this fall through a partnership with the Portland State Business Accelerator.

Arsh Haque, director of the Portland State Business Accelerator, said he loves startup ideas like HitchPiggy that are hatched from international experiences.

“I got to firsthand experience a solution like HitchPiggy abroad, have always wanted it in the U.S., and think Skylar has the raw talent to bring it here,” said Haque.

Windham — a therapist and sailboat instructor by training — believes the service is on the right course as it tackles the complex challenge of matching drivers and riders. In fact, Windham’s background as a certified counselor and sailor is proving to be a useful in getting HitchPiggy on the road.

Counseling has honed listening skills, while sailing has taught adaptability.

“When you’re trying to reach a destination and the conditions change, you have to stay calm and adjust your course without losing sight of where you’re going,” Windham tells GeekWire. “That applies to building a startup too.” Let’s meet our latest Startup Spotlight company: HitchPiggy.

In 50 words or less, give us your elevator pitch.

HitchPiggy is like Airbnb for the empty seats in your car. It helps drivers already traveling between cities connect with passengers heading the same way, making travel more affordable and putting existing empty seats to better use.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

There are already thousands of empty seats traveling between cities every day. I want to help drivers and passengers fill them instead of letting them go to waste.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how encouraging and helpful people have been. Even when there’s been a hiccup, users have been patient and supportive. I think HitchPiggy naturally attracts community-minded people who genuinely want to help each other.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

I first tried building this idea in 2016 by hiring engineers overseas, but getting the product right was difficult. Eventually, I put the project on the back burner. Today’s AI tools gave me the ability to finally build the platform I had envisioned, despite having no coding background.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

Many people assume HitchPiggy is like Uber or Lyft. It isn’t. It’s a community-based rideshare platform for intercity travel, not local, on-demand rides.

Another common misconception is that the idea itself is unusually risky. In reality, people have been sharing rides for years through Craigslist, Facebook groups, and word of mouth. HitchPiggy makes that process more transparent and easier to use. It won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay. But for people who already like the idea of sharing rides, I think it’s a much better option than what has existed before.

What about safety?

Like any platform that connects people online, there is some inherent risk, and HitchPiggy can’t eliminate that entirely. What the platform can do is help people feel more informed and comfortable before deciding to ride together. Users can see details about who they may be traveling with, the vehicle, pickup location, route, timing, cost, and other important trip information. They can also message each other beforehand and ask any questions they need.

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

The toughest decision I’ve made was deciding not to pursue investors, at least not yet. There’s a lot of pressure in the startup world to raise money and grow as quickly as possible, but I wanted to build HitchPiggy differently. I’d rather grow steadily and learn from real users before trying to scale. It hasn’t been the fastest path, but it has felt like the right one.

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

Have thick skin. Most feedback will be positive, but there will always be people who are quick to tell you why your idea won’t work. Anything worth building comes with challenges. Focus on what’s possible instead of everything that could go wrong. If entrepreneurs listened too closely to every critic, very little would ever get built.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

It’s a household name and people naturally check HitchPiggy before looking for a bus or train ticket whenever they’re traveling between cities.

Jeremy Bernier has spent years fixing clogged pipes. Now he’s trying to fix another everyday frustration: shopping local.

The U.S. Navy veteran and owner of Nerd Plumbing and Drain has founded MODRA, a Seattle-area startup that is designed to let shoppers browse inventory from nearby retailers and have purchases delivered the same day.

The 46-year-old says the idea struck him earlier this year after he needed a collared shirt in Portland and discovered there was no easy way to find one nearby and get it delivered.

MODRA’s AI-powered shopping assistant, “Savvy” — named after his firstborn daughter — is designed to learn customers’ sizes, style preferences and budgets to recommend products that fit their tastes. It is working on securing retail partners, with plans to launch in the Seattle area in September. MODRA plans to contract with local independent drivers, similar to marketplaces like Uber Eats or DoorDash.

He’s carving out a niche in a larger market that includes some big players, such as Amazon with its 30-minute Amazon Now delivery service for grocery and convenience items. And Bernier acknowledges he’s an unlikely tech founder. “I’m a blue-collar guy by trade,” he said.

While his Navy background taught him discipline, accountability and how to perform under pressure, his plumbing background also is helping him run MODRA. The experience “taught me that customers do not care how complicated the operation is behind the scenes,” he said. “They care whether you solve their problem and keep your word.”

We connected with Bernier for this latest installment of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

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

MODRA is an on-demand retail marketplace that lets customers shop nearby stores, boutiques, malls, and national retailers through one app, then have purchases delivered quickly. Savvy AI learns each customer’s style, size, budget, and preferences to create a faster, more personal shopping experience.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

I’m obsessed with making local retail as convenient as ordering food. People should not have to search five websites, call stores, drive across town, and hope an item is available. MODRA is meant to bring all of that into one experience.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

What surprised me is that speed is only part of the problem. People also want confidence.

They want to know what is actually available nearby, whether it will fit, whether it matches their style, and whether they are making the right choice. Convenience gets people interested, but personalization and trust are what make the experience valuable.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

AI has allowed me to move much faster than I could have with a traditional startup team.

I’m a blue-collar guy by trade. I know how to build businesses, solve problems, market, and create the vision, but I’m not a backend engineer. My founding engineer is actively building the technical side of MODRA from that vision, while AI helps me with research, strategy, operations, communication, and testing ideas.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

People may hear “fast retail delivery” and think MODRA is simply DoorDash for clothing. Delivery is only one part of it.

MODRA is a retail marketplace, discovery platform, logistics network, and personalized shopping experience. The larger vision is to help retailers compete in the same-day economy while giving customers one place to discover and buy what is available around them.

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

The toughest decision has been committing fully to building a technology company while continuing to run Nerd Plumbing and Drain.

A plumbing company generates revenue today. A startup requires you to invest time, money, and energy into something that is still being built. I had to decide whether this idea was worth taking seriously enough to act on it. Two weeks after getting the idea, I started building. On May 16, MODRA became a Delaware C corporation.

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

Do not wait until you feel qualified.

I came from the Navy and the plumbing industry, not Silicon Valley. I’m an idea guy and a problem solver. When I do not know how to do something, I find the right person, learn what I can, and keep moving.

You do not need to know everything. You need a clear vision, the willingness to work, and enough humility to bring in people who are stronger where you are not.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

Opening the app to find and receive something from a nearby store feels as normal as ordering dinner. I also want retailers to see MODRA as an essential sales and delivery channel, and I want Savvy to become a shopping assistant people genuinely trust.