Q3 2026 VC deal activity by U.S. metro area. Note: PitchBook’s map uses broader regional boundaries than the metro-area figures in this story (PitchBook-NVCA Graphic, click to enlarge.)
That’s more than triple the $1 billion raised in the region in the same quarter a year earlier, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. It’s also more than $1 billion above the previous quarterly high of about $2.4 billion, reached in late 2018 and again in late 2022.
Most of the money went to a handful of companies building physical things: rockets, satellites, spacecraft and fusion power plants. Three space companies in the region raised $1.6 billion combined: Stoke, Redmond-based Starcloud and Seattle’s Hubble Network.
Nationally, the trend went the other way. U.S. venture funding fell 40% from the prior quarter, to $98.4 billion, as the giant rounds for frontier AI labs that drove the first half of the year tapered off.
Seattle ranked seventh among U.S. metro areas for venture dollars in the quarter. The Bay Area led with $40.7 billion, followed by Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Boston and Denver. Denver’s $4.2 billion came largely from a single $3.9 billion round for AI data center developer Crusoe.
By number of deals, Seattle ranked eighth, with 94.
The total includes Helion’s $500 million round, which the company announced in June but PitchBook counts in the third quarter. Even without it, the quarter would still be the region’s biggest on record.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Temporal is expanding its security capabilities for AI agents following a $550 million funding round last month that valued the enterprise infrastructure company at $12.55 billion.
In an announcement Tuesday, Temporal revealed that team members from Oso, a New York-based startup specializing in application authorization, are joining the company to integrate access controls directly into Temporal’s platform. Meanwhile, holding company Tiny acquired Oso’s software product and customer base.
The move addresses a growing challenge for enterprise tech teams: while generative AI models handle reasoning, autonomous agents must interact with internal databases, execute multi-step workflows, and call external application programming interfaces without breaching security boundaries.
“AI safety doesn’t stop at the model,” Temporal VP of product Preeti Somal said in the release. “It extends into the applications where agents act, which is where access to systems and crucial data comes into play.”
Temporal’s primary technology, known as “durable execution,” maintains application state and execution history across system failures and network timeouts. By adding Oso’s security frameworks to this underlying engine, Temporal aims to ensure an agent’s permissions and human approvals remain intact, preventing agents from bypassing controls or repeating rejected actions.
Temporal said the addition of the Oso team will accelerate security features currently in development, with existing platform operations remaining unchanged.
“Our goal is practical: to help developers put agents to work with appropriate access and with guardrails their companies control,” said Somal. “In practice, that means asking, for each action an agent takes, who it is acting for and what that person is allowed to do, and getting the same answer every time the work is retried.”
“What makes agents valuable is the same thing that makes them dangerous – access to real systems and data. Temporal already powers agents in applications like Cursor and OpenAI Codex, and unlocking their full potential requires the right security controls. We’re joining Temporal to accelerate its work on agent authorization, giving developers more precise control over what agents can access and do.”
Co-founded in 2019 by Amazon and Microsoft veterans Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, Temporal provides open-source orchestration tools used by companies including OpenAI, NVIDIA, Netflix, Snap and JPMorgan Chase. The company recently surpassed $250 million in annualized revenue run rate, growing more than 200% year-over-year.
It employed about 570 people prior to the Oso deal, roughly double from a year ago, with 89 in the Seattle area. The company is fully remote. Its Bellevue office, previously occupied by OpenAI, is used mainly for meetings rather than daily work. The company recently rose to the #1 spot on the GeekWire 200, the list of the fast-growing privately-held tech startups in the Pacific Northwest.
Companies building software for the AI boom and advanced machinery for space, energy and defense are remaking the Pacific Northwest’s tech economy, and both trends are showing up in full force on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.
The Fall 2026 update, released Wednesday morning, features a new No. 1: Temporal, the Bellevue, Wash., company whose software keeps AI agents running reliably. It raised $550 million this month at a $12.55 billion valuation, more than double its value earlier this year. Its annualized revenue has passed $250 million, up more than 200% in a year, with customers including OpenAI, Nvidia and Netflix.
Temporal replaces fusion company Helion, now No. 2. Helion grew its Series G round to $500 million and opened a Seattle office as its headcount topped 800, but questions have emerged about its timeline for delivering fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
Six of the top 10 companies build advanced machinery: fusion reactors, rockets, drones, radar, military vehicles and weed-zapping robots. Several of them spent the quarter scaling up production.
Stoke Space (No. 3), which is developing a fully reusable rocket, jumped three spots after it raised about $1 billion. It’s expanding its rocket test site in Moses Lake.
Brinc (No. 6), which makes drones that police and fire departments send to 911 calls, is moving into a new headquarters and factory in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood with three times the production space of its current plant.
Echodyne (No. 9), which makes compact radar used to detect and track drones, jumped 33 spots into the top 10 after it opened a $40 million factory in Woodinville to meet growing demand for drone detection.
The GeekWire 200 combines objective data, editorial insight and AI analysis of our coverage to provide a broad view of the region’s startup landscape. Dating to 2013, it has long served as a resource for investors, job seekers, service providers and others tracking the regional tech scene.
See the updated GeekWire 200, and continue reading for highlights. Here’s the new top 10.
Durable-execution infrastructure for the agentic-AI stack, valued at $12.55B after a $550M Series E led by Lightspeed, with OpenAI, Nvidia and Snap among its customers.
Kent, Washington • Defense and Space Manufacturing
Building the fully reusable Nova rocket, with roughly $1B raised and its Moses Lake test site expanding to 550 acres ahead of a first flight in early 2027.
Health-data platform built with a consortium of health systems; its co-founders are serving as interim co-CEOs as Terry Myerson retires at the end of September.
Kirkland, Washington • Appliances, Electrical, and Electronics Manufacturing
Radar maker that opened a $40M, 86,000-square-foot factory in Woodinville built for about 30,000 radars a year, and is adding 100 to 200 people on top of 260.
Overland AI (No. 7, up 2): The military autonomy startup landed a Marine Corps contract worth nearly $20 million, which it says makes it the first ground-autonomy company to serve as prime contractor on a military production deal. It also opened a Bay Area office to recruit AI and robotics talent.
Carbon Robotics (No. 8): The laser-weeding company added Plant Profiles, letting farmers tailor its AI model to their own crops and fields.
Dropzone (No. 10, up 3): The maker of autonomous AI agents for security operations enters the top 10 after more than doubling its headcount over the past year, the fastest growth of any company in the top 20.
Starcloud (No. 52, up 23): The Redmond company building data centers in orbit raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, with Nvidia joining as an investor.
Levanta (No. 72, up 5): The creator-marketing platform raised $22 million and says revenue is up 80% this year.
AIM Intelligent Machines (No. 100, up 10): The autonomous construction startup laid out its vision for self-driving bulldozers on Earth and, eventually, Mars.
Digs (No. 120, up 13): The Vancouver, Wash., homebuilding AI startup raised $25.3 million led by Builders FirstSource, which will offer its platform to 140,000 builder clients.
Augmodo (No. 122, up 23): The maker of AI camera badges for retail workers raised $21 million at a $350 million valuation and is expanding into warehouses, factories and other workplaces.
Nuance Labs (No. 163, up 20): The AI lab founded by former Apple researchers raised a $50 million Series A led by Lightspeed.
NewDays (No. 172, up 14): The dementia-care startup expanded its seed round to $16 million and expanded to Nevada.
New to the list
Entire (debut, No. 101): Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke’s startup launched a distributed Git network built for the load of AI coding agents. It’s the highest debut this quarter.
BrainChild Bio (debut, No. 117): The Seattle Children’s spinout raised $116 million to advance a CAR T therapy for a deadly childhood brain cancer.
BuyWander (debut, No. 124): The retail-returns marketplace moved its headquarters from Spokane to Kent and raised $21 million led by Madrona and Inspired Capital.
Endurance (debut, No. 128): Former SpaceX engineer Andrew Redd’s startup is tapping undersea volcanoes for geothermal power.
General Robotics (debut, No. 130): The Redmond startup led by Microsoft veterans says its AI has cut robot setup from a month to hours.
Thira (debut, No. 140): Apptio co-founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer reunited to launch the enterprise AI startup with $21 million led by Madrona.
Golden Analytics (debut, No. 152): The Bellevue startup led by Francois Ajenstat, Tableau’s longtime chief product officer, is using AI to take on traditional business intelligence tools. It launched with $7 million from NEA and Madrona in April, then added a $14 million extension led by Insight Partners in June, bringing its seed funding to $21 million.
Resect AI (debut, No. 158): The Washougal, Wash., startup launched out of stealth with $25 million to catch AI hallucinations before they happen.
Harell Data (debut, No. 176): Adaptive Biotechnologies co-founder Harlan Robins raised $15 million to connect AI developers with proprietary scientific data.
Noösphere Labs (debut, No. 180): Former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg raised $10.25 million from Trilogy and Madrona for the stealth physical AI startup.
Leaving the list
Agility Robotics (previously No. 5): The Salem, Ore., humanoid robot maker left the list as it prepares to go public in a $2.5 billion SPAC merger expected to close in the fourth quarter. It unveiled Digit 5, which lifts 50 pounds and is designed to work alongside people without safety barriers.
Common Room (previously No. 80): The sales-intelligence startup left the list after agreeing to be acquired by Zoom.
Auger (previously No. 31): The supply chain startup led by former Amazon operations chief Dave Clark moved its headquarters to Dallas. Auger still has a major engineering hub in Bellevue, which we’ve added to our list of engineering centers established in the region by companies headquartered elsewhere.
XBOW (previously No. 35): The AI hacking startup left the list because it doesn’t meet our standard that a company’s headquarters and leadership be based in the region. Its CEO is based in Malta, and its Seattle headquarters is a mailbox at a coworking space.
Notes on the GeekWire 200
Our list is not scientific, by any means, and the specific rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. But it has proven to be a valuable tool for many years. We hear regularly from readers who use the GeekWire 200 to look for jobs, prospect for customers, scout potential investments and get a high-level view of the region’s tech community.
Companies on the list must be privately held, founded within roughly the past 15 years and headquartered in the Pacific Northwest with their leadership based in the region. Companies generally leave the list when they agree to be acquired by another company or to go public.
To make sure your Pacific Northwest technology startup is eligible for the GeekWire 200, first confirm it’s included in the broader GeekWire Startup List. If so, there’s no need to submit it separately. If your startup isn’t among the companies on that larger list, you can submit it for inclusion here, and we’ll crunch the numbers to see if it makes the next GeekWire 200 update.
One of the hottest infrastructure companies in AI today is a startup established nearly seven years ago, tracing its roots to work its founders were doing before the cloud was a thing.
Temporal, based in Bellevue, Wash., announced this week that it raised $550 million at a $12.55 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed, more than doubling its $5 billion valuation in February. Its software is used by OpenAI, Nvidia, Netflix, Snap and JPMorgan Chase, among more than 4,300 paying customers, and its annualized revenue run rate recently passed $250 million.
It might seem like an overnight success, but it’s not, said Samar Abbas, Temporal’s co-founder and CEO, speaking along with co-founder and CTO Maxim Fateev in an interview with GeekWire this week. They first met at Amazon in 2010, where they worked on Simple Workflow Service, an AWS product for coordinating long-running tasks across distributed systems.
“We’ve been hacking away at this problem for 20-plus years now,” Abbas said.
The problem: software that runs in many steps across many machines breaks in the middle, and picking up where it left off is far harder than it sounds. Their answer, for which they coined the phrase “durable execution,” records each step as it completes, so a program survives a crash or a failed outside service, and finishes rather than starting over or leaving the work half-done.
“It’s core infrastructure. You really cannot go and build it very fast,” Fateev explained. “It took us years and years to get to the point where we knew what we were doing.”
It’s also especially well-suited for AI agents, which is why a company built for the cloud era is suddenly at the center of the AI boom. Agents can sometimes run for hours or days, calling models and outside tools that fail routinely. Keeping everything together regardless is Temporal’s role.
“Every Snap story is a Temporal workflow,” Abbas said. “Every time you place an order at a Taco Bell, all of the steps get orchestrated on top of our platform. Some of the most popular coding agents out there are using us as an outer harness. It’s a pretty exciting time for us, from that perspective.”
Pacific Northwest roots: Founded in October 2019, Temporal employs 570 people, roughly double from a year ago, with 89 in the Seattle area. The company is fully remote. Its Bellevue office, previously occupied by OpenAI, is used mainly for meetings rather than daily work.
But the founders describe the region as instrumental to the company’s success. Both have been in the Seattle area for more than 26 years, and they’ve built their entire professional careers here.
Abbas spent 11 years at Microsoft before joining the Simple Workflow Service team at AWS in 2010, then returned to Microsoft and wrote the open-source library that became Azure Durable Functions, leaving for Uber’s Seattle office in 2015.
Fateev built the messaging infrastructure behind Amazon’s Simple Queue Service starting in 2004, and later led the architecture of Simple Workflow Service, before going to Google and later reuniting with Abbas at Uber.
When GeekWire first wrote about Temporal in 2020, a year after Abbas and Fateev left Uber, it had 15 employees, $25.5 million in funding and no paying customers. Sequoia Capital led the $20 million Series A, with participation from Seattle’s Madrona and others. Bob Muglia, the former Snowflake CEO and longtime Microsoft executive, was an angel investor. Snap and Box were early users.
Fast-forward to today, and the company has raised $1.2 billion in total funding. Temporal ranks No. 2 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top Pacific Northwest startups, behind only Everett fusion energy company Helion, valued at $15.5 billion.
“The kind of talent that we have here in the Pacific Northwest is insane,” Abbas said, citing factors including the deep bench of cloud engineers from Microsoft and Amazon. With another platform shift now underway, he expects the same advantage to apply to AI infrastructure.
The larger question of AI safety: Temporal’s milestone comes amid a growing industry debate over the pace of AI development, and incidents in which AI agents have gone rogue, escaping the systems meant to contain them, including the latest examples from OpenAI this week.
Abbas said he sees those failures as accountability problems more than model problems.
“As you dig into each and every one of the incidents that have happened in the last three months, it always comes down to no one really knowing what these AI agents did, step by step,” he said.
Part of Temporal’s pitch is that it can make those failures traceable. Temporal records every step as a program runs, leaving a log of exactly what an agent did, in what order, and where it stopped. Abbas said that also creates a place to intervene, inspecting or blocking an action before it executes.
“We can put the agent in a much, much tighter jail,” Fateev said.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you we solve AI safety,” Abbas added, calling that the job of the labs that create the models. But a company’s ability to know what its agents did, and to keep them from doing more than they should, is a specific challenge that Temporal can address.
“That’s truly an engineering problem,” Abbas said, “and it’s very solvable today.”
Customers and competition: Bloomberg reported in August that OpenAI is Temporal’s largest customer. Asked whether it’s too dependent on the ChatGPT maker, Abbas said no. The labs are moving fast and driving usage, he said, but the similar growth trends are starting to show up across the rest of the customer base. Abbas said 18 of the top 30 AI-native companies use Temporal.
The AI labs and cloud providers sell their own agent frameworks, and some are getting into the reliability work that Temporal does, which means its biggest customers could become competitors.
Fateev’s answer is that enterprises don’t want to be locked into one provider, one model or one vendor’s idea of how agents should work. Temporal is open source and takes no position on what a customer runs on top of it, which matters given seemingly constant changes in the tech stack.
The founders also see an opening in how AI systems connect to one another.
Agents increasingly have to call other systems, and each other, to get anything done. Fateev said the standard ways of wiring those connections (such as Model Context Protocol) assume the work finishes in seconds, and fall apart when a job runs for hours or days, or has to be unwound after something fails. Temporal is built for that kind of work, and can serve as an underlying foundation.
What’s next: Temporal plans to put a big chunk of the new funding into research and development, extending the “durable execution” technology at the core of the platform.
Today, the company tracks an application’s state from the outside, coordinating work that runs elsewhere. In the future, Abbas said, Temporal wants to provide the computing power, too, hosting the agents on its own platform rather than simply directing them on others.
Big business customers have been pushing for stronger security and auditing, another target for the spending. Temporal is also expanding a project called Nexus, which lets teams call each other’s workflows without giving up the guarantees that make the platform useful in the first place.
The company plans to expand internationally, where it does a small share of its business today, and to keep hiring after doubling its headcount over the past year. Abbas said the company’s growth defies the popular wisdom that AI companies don’t need significant human talent.
In the meantime, the founders remain very much engaged with the problem they’ve been trying to solve in one form or another for the past two decades. Temporal’s open-source Slack channel has about 25,000 members, and Abbas said Fateev is still in there mixing it up himself.
“You ask a question,” Abbas said, “I’m pretty sure Max will jump in within the first five minutes.”
Temporal has raised $550 million in a Series E funding round that values the Bellevue, Wash.-based infrastructure startup at $12.55 billion, more than double its valuation from earlier this year as demand explodes for reliable agentic AI systems in production.
It caps a significant growth stretch for the open-source platform, whose annualized revenue run rate recently surpassed $250 million — growing over 200% year-over-year, according to a news release on Monday — as major tech players like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase rely on its “durable execution” engine to keep complex AI workflows from breaking.
Co-founded in 2019 by CEO Samar Abbas and CTO Maxim Fateev — veterans of Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber — Temporal originally made its mark helping developers manage complex distributed systems.
But as Abbas told GeekWire earlier this year, the AI explosion put that exact problem “on steroids.” While generative AI models handle reasoning, Temporal’s “durable execution” engine acts as the underlying plumbing — preserving application state, retrying failed steps, and preventing multi-step AI agents from crashing when external services drop out.
To support that surge, Temporal has doubled its workforce over the past year to 570 employees worldwide. While operating as a remote-first organization, the company maintains deep roots in the Pacific Northwest — where both founders have been based for decades — and continues to expand its engineering footprint in the Seattle area to keep pace with global demand.
“As agents take on more critical work across more systems, every additional step creates another place to fail. In production, that work has to survive those failures and finish reliably,” Abbas said in a statement. “Temporal was built for this problem. Durable Execution is becoming the standard for reliable applications at scale, and this investment reflects the conviction that much of the next generation of software will be built on Temporal.”
The cash infusion brings Temporal’s total capital raised to date to $1.2 billion, building on a $300 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz in February that valued the company at $5 billion.
In addition to Lightspeed, the Series E round drew new backing from Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and T. Rowe Price, alongside returning venture backers Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Madrona.
Temporal plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate platform R&D, expand its developer and enterprise go-to-market teams, and support global cloud operations.
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