This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in decline but is in danger — finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers.

The report says Seattle should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech, the one industry the city can actually shape, since it owns the electric utility and controls permitting, building codes and land use.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times and Newsday sue Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train their AI models, putting Microsoft’s hometown paper against a company that helps fund some of its journalism.

And Apple’s first foldable arrives as the iPhone Duo, reviving the name of the dual-screen phone Microsoft gave up on in 2023, with Surface fans arguing Apple took more than the name.

Which leads us to a new GeekWire Trivia Challenge about the Microsoft products that Apple later turned into categories. Stick around to the final segment to see if you can figure it out.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.

Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.

“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”

He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.

Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.

A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”

A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.

He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.

As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.

Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.

“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”

He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”

He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.

Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.

Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.

Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”

He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.

Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.

He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.

“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.

“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”

Hector Rivas spent a decade building ThriftBooks into one of the country’s largest used-book sellers, before an unlikely second act: co-founding a sports agency representing NFL players.

That career change led him to the problem behind his newest startup, and to the Las Vegas Raiders running back who just invested in it.

Nukleus, based in Issaquah, Wash., is building what Rivas calls an operating system for the business of sports. The idea is a single workspace for everyone in an athlete’s orbit: agent, lawyer, CPA, financial advisor, marketing team, and others. It lets them all work from the same contracts, deadlines and records, rather than each keeping a separate pile of emails and spreadsheets.

The idea came out of Rivas’s years at Disruptive Sports, the agency he co-founded in 2020 and left earlier this year.

Ashton Jeanty, who signed a four-year, $35.9 million rookie contract with the Raiders in 2025, has taken equity in the company and signed on to serve as its public face.

Nukleus has also named four strategic investors: Mat McBride, Microsoft’s executive vice president and CFO for commercial products and infrastructure; WaFd Bank President and CEO Brent Beardall; investor Skyler Nelson, previously of Vulcan Capital and its successor firm Cercano; and Dr. Brett Kindle of the Andrews Institute in Gulf Breeze, Fla.

The company has a team of 12 based out of its Issaquah office, plus a supporting engineering team in India. Most of the team is engineering.

Other executives include CTO Eric Ahlstrom, previously at Microsoft, Unity, Oracle and ESPN; chief creative officer Ben Miller, a former creative director at the University of Washington and CAA Sports; and CFO Matt Porter, who worked with Rivas at ThriftBooks, EcoGoodz and Disruptive.

Nukleus closed a pre-seed round from friends and family in 2025 and is raising again now. Rivas declined to disclose the amount raised by the company so far.

From books to football: Rivas was ThriftBooks’ first CEO, running the used-book seller for about a decade after it launched in 2003. Based in the Seattle area, the company grew during his tenure from a storage unit in Kirkland, Wash., to 10 distribution facilities in 10 states, by his account.

He went on to found EcoGoodz, a used-goods and overstock brokerage, and in 2020 co-founded Disruptive Sports Agency with agent Henry Organ.

Rivas, an NFLPA-certified contract advisor, worked the business side of the agency. He left earlier this year to build Nukleus full time.

The years inside the agency are what produced the idea.

Everyone in a player’s orbit was working off “their own version of the truth,” Rivas explained via email: the agent, the lawyer, the CPA, the financial advisor, the marketing team. The athlete, he said, “was the one absorbing the cost of that disconnect,” in slower decisions and deals that fell through the cracks.

The pitch in Las Vegas: Jeanty and Rivas knew each other from Rivas’s years at the sports agency, and Rivas said the running back had been tracking what he was building.

“Because Ashton and I already knew each other, and he’d been aware of what I was building, the conversation came together naturally,” Rivas said.

He flew to Las Vegas to walk Jeanty through the model, the team, and where the company was headed. Rivas said Jeanty’s equity reflects both money invested and his role promoting the platform.

In a statement, Jeanty described the job of running his own career.

“Coming into the NFL, you become a CEO, directing a team of agents, advisors, and marketers, whether you’re ready or not,” he said. “Nukleus is what finally gets them all on the same page, so I can actually run that team the way it should be run. That’s why I invested in it.”

Where things stand: The product is in a free beta with about 30 users, including athletes, agents, agencies, lawyers and marketing staff. Nukleus plans to charge $99 per user per month for a starter plan and $249 for a full-featured one, with custom enterprise pricing. Athletes join free.

Alongside contract storage, deadline tracking and a shared workspace, the company is building AI tools meant to answer questions about contract terms and league rules.

Others are working similar territory. Agent Live 360 sells software built specifically for sports agents, and Opendorse, which says it works with more than 1,000 sports agents, offers tools to negotiate, approve and track deals. Nukleus says it differs from narrower tools by serving everyone in an athlete’s orbit.

The bigger bet: The company is looking well past a single app.

“Long-term, I don’t see this as a tool athletes use, I see it as the infrastructure the entire business of sports runs on,” Rivas said. “Every athlete becomes the center of their own connected team, and every professional working with them, across every sport, at every level, operates on one shared system instead of a hundred disconnected ones.”

Amazon is adding the Activity Feed and other features from its Quick desktop app to the AI assistant’s mobile apps for iOS and Android.

The Activity Feed is the signature feature of Amazon Quick. It combines email, Slack messages, calendar invites and CRM updates into one prioritized list, and lets people act on items (opening and responding to emails, for example) without switching apps.

Amazon said Wednesday that the Quick desktop app, released in preview in April, is now generally available on Windows and macOS. The company also said Quick’s agents now run in the cloud, so they keep working after a laptop is closed and deliver results to the feed.

The desktop and mobile apps now sync, as well, so a task started on a laptop can be picked up on a phone, for example.

Quick has a free tier, with paid individual plans starting at $20 per user per month billed annually, and business plans running $20 to $40 per user per month.

Quick is Amazon’s entry in a crowded market for AI assistants at work, competing with Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. Amazon’s announcements cited business customers for Quick including Southwest Airlines, LabCorp and the PGA Tour.

The desktop app came together fast, as part of a new effort inside Amazon to use small teams to move quickly: Swami Sivasubramanian, the AWS vice president of agentic AI, told GeekWire in June that a team of about six engineers started in late January and shipped April 28.

An independent study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city’s tax structure is unique among its peers in the way it “specifically penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers,” with that penalty falling overwhelmingly on large tech employers.

Overall, Seattle’s business taxes are actually in line with competing cities, write researchers from the economic consulting firm Formation in the new report. But Seattle’s taxes are “particularly distortionary when it comes to hiring high-wage employees,” they add.

Mayor Katie Wilson helped design the tax, known as JumpStart, before taking office. But even the strongest supporters of new local and state taxes would concede that Seattle is “reaching the limits of how much it can tax the industries and people that it is depending upon to drive its growth,” the researchers write.

Another risk for the city is the resulting concentration of the tax base. Three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers comes from 10 companies. Nine of them are in tech-related sectors.

A big company shifting 10,000 workers out of Seattle would cost the city about $50 million a year in payroll tax revenue, the researchers say in an accompanying slide deck, without naming Amazon explicitly. That’s more than a quarter of the $175 million deficit the city projects for next year.

In that way, much of the city’s financial future depends “on the marginal location and compensation decisions of a handful of employers,” the report says. Because much of the taxed compensation is vesting stock, it adds, the city’s revenue is exposed to “the single most volatile attribute of these firms — one the city has no ability to forecast or influence.”

Reducing that dependence through growth is the bigger point of the report.

The 127-page assessment, called “Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy,” goes well beyond the topic of taxes. The title refers to Seattle’s rebuilt waterfront seawall, engineered to hold back the water and also let marine life take hold. The researchers offer this as a model for protecting the city’s economic base while building a more diverse economy on top of it.

A decade of growth lifted wages at every level of the income spectrum, the report finds. Few other U.S. regions spread prosperity as broadly. But the same growth made Seattle far more expensive, especially for families.

Fast-forward to today, and the report sees an economy that’s dangerously concentrated, “significantly more AI-exposed than the national average,” short of the electricity it will need, and no longer producing mid-sized companies.

In danger, not in decline: The report is also careful to point out the city’s unique position and strengths. Seattle’s tech workforce is “almost peerless,” it says: 23% of the nation’s AI engineers are based in the region, and output per tech worker is more than double the national average.

The region also has the rare combination of a big tech industry and a strong manufacturing base.

Seattle “may not be in decline, but it is in danger,” the researchers write — “not because it is losing its place in the industry, but because the industry could undergo a radical change, and arguably already is.”

The concern that Seattle is becoming “the next Cleveland,” raised in a GeekWire column in February by Seattle tech veteran and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, is “likely hyperbolic,” the researchers write. (They acknowledge that it “caused quite the stir this past winter.”)

The report points instead to Portland and Los Angeles as the more relevant warnings, citing Portland’s pileup of new business taxes and Los Angeles’ failure to turn a deep talent pool into jobs.

Fitzgerald responded Wednesday evening on his blog, Platformonomics, writing that the city “has finally acknowledged there is such a thing as an economy.” His main objection was who wasn’t in the room: “No businesses were involved, but that seems to be the norm hereabouts on economic matters.”

The report’s acknowledgments list dozens of interviewees, including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, the Washington Roundtable and the Tech Alliance. No large tech employer is among them.

Ryan Donahue, a co-founder and managing partner at Formation, said in an email that the researchers interviewed many business representatives but no large companies directly, saying he expected a predictable message from their government affairs teams.

The person who led the report’s tax and cost analysis previously ran Amazon HQ2 recruitment at the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the agency that landed the project for Arlington, Va., Donahue said, providing insights into how firms like Amazon weigh those decisions.

A path forward: The report recommends that the city focus on five industries: artificial intelligence, cleantech, maritime, life sciences and space. Cleantech is the priority, the report says, because Seattle owns or regulates much of what the sector needs, from Seattle City Light to building codes, permitting and land use.

The Seattle Office of Economic Development commissioned the report from Formation in 2025, under then-Mayor Bruce Harrell, to examine the drivers of the city’s business climate.

Harrell’s successor, Mayor Wilson, released the report Wednesday afternoon alongside an executive order convening a task force of business, labor, community and civic leaders, directing the city to improve permitting pathways, and calling for a proposal to create a Seattle Strategic Initiatives Fund.

In releasing the report, Wilson’s office said the findings “are independent and are not City policy.” But speaking on KUOW-FM’s Soundside as the report was released, the mayor called it “fantastic,” describing it as “super nuanced,” and urging listeners to take the time to read it.

The cost of a hire: JumpStart, the payroll expense tax, applies to large employers based on the compensation they pay to high-earning workers in Seattle. Approved by the City Council in 2020 and in effect since 2021, it was created to fund affordable housing, small-business support and climate programs, but the city has increasingly used it for general government operations.

Wilson helped create the tax before running for mayor, saying on her campaign website that she “played an instrumental role in designing and passing” the payroll tax.

Under JumpStart, hiring a software engineer at $650,000 in total compensation costs about $17,000 a year more in Seattle than in Bellevue, the report says. For an employee earning more than $1 million, the difference exceeds $33,000. San Francisco imposes no per-employee tax at all, and New York City’s equivalent is less than $6,000, according to the researchers.

That $17,000 reflects the tax’s top rate, which this year applies only to employers with about $1.3 billion or more in Seattle payroll. Two or three companies at most are in that tier, the report says. At the city’s lowest rate for that pay level, the same engineer would cost about $11,800, according to Seattle’s published rates.

The rate rises with an employee’s pay, and a company that crosses one of the city’s payroll thresholds pays the higher rate on every qualifying worker, not just the next hire.

“No other comparison city has a tax with both of these features,” the report says.

An issue of perception: Business leaders interviewed for the study described JumpStart as a problem “not primarily for its cost but because the process of enacting it communicated that the city’s governing orientation is fundamentally extractive.”

The researchers add: “Whether or not that characterization is fair, it is the operating perception, and perception shapes location decisions.”

But the researchers stop short of recommending a change. Taxes have “modest effects on firm location and expansion decisions,” they write, and Seattle is unlikely to lose its biggest employers to other regions, because the alternatives are either more expensive or have weaker talent.

“The Eastside is the only real threat in that regard,” the report says.

The study is blunt about what is at stake in keeping those employers. “If they leave,” it says, “Seattle won’t become more equal, it will just become poorer.”

What to do about taxes? The report does not recommend raising or lowering that top rate. Research on how firms respond to local taxes draws on thousands of firms across dozens of jurisdictions, it says, and “cannot tell us how any one firm will respond to any one tax change.”

With two or three firms in the top tier and “one firm by far the most dominant,” the question “is fundamentally a question about how that single firm will react.” It adds, “That is not a question this report, or the literature it draws on, is equipped to answer.”

GeekWire has contacted Amazon for comment on the report.

Other tax options that have been floated — vacancy taxes, wealth taxes, head taxes beyond JumpStart, expanded gross receipts schemes — are “either disallowed under state law or would, if enacted, likely push out the firms and workers Seattle most needs to retain,” the report says.

And once the state’s new 9.9% tax on income above $1 million takes effect in 2028, Seattle earners above that level will face a combined state and local marginal rate of about 10.5%. Pushing meaningfully above that, the report says, “would be a high-stakes tax experiment.”

Where Wilson stands: The mayor has already conceded the Bellevue point. “I don’t think it’s good that it is less expensive to do business in Bellevue than in Seattle,” she said in May. “We’re going to be taking that into consideration.”

She defended the tax in June, crediting it with helping Seattle recover from the pandemic and cautioning against blaming downtown’s problems on any single cause.

Her relationship with the tech community has been rockier. At a Seattle University event in April, asked about that state tax, Wilson said concerns about wealthy residents leaving were “super overblown” — then waved and said, “the ones that leave, like, bye.” The moment drew national coverage and criticism from Seattle investors.

A bet on cleantech: Taking a step back, the report says Seattle’s best opportunity is in cleantech, a category it defines broadly to include clean energy generation, energy efficiency and sustainable production methods and materials.

The shift is already showing up in local venture funding. Cleantech and energy companies took 3% of the venture capital raised by Seattle-area private companies from 2016 to 2020, and 20% from 2021 to 2025, according to Crunchbase data cited in the report. Three companies — TerraPower, Helion and Group14 — account for 70% of that.

The city “should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech,” the report says.

AI will ultimately be more important to Seattle’s future, the researchers explain, but the city has almost no ability to shape it. Cleantech is different: Seattle owns the electric utility, writes the building codes and controls permitting and much of the land.

The city can also use its own purchasing power to create a market for what these companies build, the report says, pointing to a New York program that used public housing demand to bring a new cold-climate heat pump into production.

To reach the top tier of cleantech ecosystems, the report says, Seattle would need a dedicated entity putting at least $5 million a year into growing the sector, funded through ratepayer charges, philanthropy, corporate sponsorship and competitive federal grants.

What’s next: According to the city, Wilson’s executive order calls for the task force to convene industry roundtables in the coming months. The report’s own first-year list runs to ten items, including a business-led commission on the city’s fiscal exposure, with an emphasis on AI, and structured visits with 50 companies across the five industries it identifies.

Others include naming a senior staffer in the mayor’s office to run the city’s AI agenda, and a childcare cost-sharing pilot split three ways between employee, employer and city, with the city’s share paid out of JumpStart.

On taxes, the report’s primary recommendation looks beyond City Hall. It urges Wilson to build a cross-partisan coalition of mayors and county executives to press Olympia for new municipal revenue tools, including changes to the state’s 1% cap on property tax growth.

A caller on KUOW asked Wilson whether there’s a limit to how much Seattle should grow. She said she shares the concern, then pointed back to the report, which she said makes clear there is “no graceful path” for Seattle to cool down its growth.

“We can’t go back to the ’90s,” she said.

Amazon named cybersecurity veteran Kevin Mandia to its board of directors, adding new security expertise a few months after former NSA director Keith Alexander stepped down.

Mandia founded Mandiant, the breach-investigation firm Google acquired for $5.4 billion in 2022, and remained at the search giant as a strategic advisor through July 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile. He now leads Armadin, an AI security startup he started last year.

Amazon said in its announcement that “cybersecurity is one of the most consequential risks and responsibilities organizations face today, and the threat landscape continues to evolve rapidly alongside advances in AI.”

Amazon added a cybersecurity specialist to its board in 2020, when it elected Alexander, who also led U.S. Cyber Command. Mandia comes from the other side of the field, with two decades spent investigating corporate breaches rather than defending government networks.

His appointment also puts an AI security entrepreneur on the board of a company whose cloud infrastructure underpins much of the internet. Armadin, founded in September 2025, uses AI to run attacks against corporate networks, probing defenses the way an intruder would.

The board’s Security Committee, which oversees Amazon’s cybersecurity policies and its response to significant cyber incidents, is now chaired by Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Mandia joins as a member, along with former Bridgewater co-CEO Jon Rubinstein.

Amazon also named Mandia to the board’s Audit Committee, according to a securities filing.

Mandia received 4,086 restricted stock units in connection with his election to the board, vesting in three equal annual installments beginning Nov. 15, 2027, the filing shows. The shares were worth about $1.03 million at Amazon’s closing price Wednesday.

The filing disclosed that his sister-in-law, Kristin Mandia, is an Amazon employee with an annual salary of $185,000. The company said her compensation is consistent with that of other employees at her level with similar responsibilities.

NLM Photonics, a Seattle-based chip materials startup and University of Washington spinout, announced two new investors: Pangaea Ventures and Diamond Edge Ventures, the investment arm of Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.

They joined as part of a funding round that totals $13 million, according to a Form D filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NLM has reported at least $26 million in funding since 2018, according to SEC filings.

The company offers a way to move more data without burning more power. Inside a data center, information travels between chips and servers as pulses of light. The part that puts the data onto the light beam, called a modulator, is normally made of silicon. It limits how much data a link can carry, and how much power that takes.

NLM’s technology, sold under the name Selerion, is an organic electro-optic material that goes on as a liquid and hardens in place on the chip, taking over the modulator’s job from the silicon underneath. The company says it does the work 10 to 15 times more efficiently.

Applications for the technology include fiber-optic networking equipment and the links between servers in AI data centers. NLM says it could also be used in quantum computing.

Five existing investors participated in the round, which the company described as a Series A2: Emerald Technology Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund, Idemitsu, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and StoryHouse Ventures. Private investors and company employees also took part.

Pangaea Ventures, which has offices in Canada, the United States and Japan, backs startups built on advances in materials, chemistry and biology. It says it has invested in more than 40 companies over more than 20 years. David Weekes of Pangaea is joining NLM’s board, which already includes Frank Balas of Emerald.

Diamond Edge Ventures, led by president Curtis Schickner, has $200 million to invest through 2030. It backs companies in Mitsubishi Chemical’s core markets, including advanced materials, polymers and electronics, and its portfolio includes Boston Materials, DigiLens and Eridan.

Hamamatsu Photonics, which invested previously, is not part of this round but is still a shareholder, according to the company.

The company was incorporated in 2018 as Nonlinear Materials Corp. It licensed its patents from the University of Washington, building on 25 years of research there in the labs of chemists Larry Dalton and Bruce Robinson. Robinson is one of the company’s co-founders, as is Lewis Johnson, a longtime UW researcher who is chief technology officer.

Pack Ventures, the UW-affiliated venture fund, is an investor in NLM and is also listed among the advisors to its board.

GeekWire covered NLM’s launch in 2019, when the company was raising a $1.25 million seed round and running a small production lab on campus.

Brad Booth, who spent nine years at Microsoft and joined NLM’s board in 2023, took over as CEO in 2024 from co-founder Gerard Zytnicki, who is now a corporate advisor to the company. The company raised $1 million from Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and Hamamatsu in 2023.

Last year NLM said outside testing confirmed that a 1.6-terabit chip combining silicon with its materials ran at 224 gigabits per second on each of eight channels. It started sending samples of 1.6- and 3.2-terabit chips to customers in March.

NLM is not alone in trying to build a better modulator. Lightwave Logic, a publicly traded Colorado company also working with organic materials, named NLM among its smaller competitors in its annual report for 2024.

Some of the company’s rivals have raised a significant amount of funding. HyperLight, a Harvard spinout that uses a crystal called lithium niobate instead of an organic material, has raised $117 million, including $80 million in June led by MediaTek.

NLM has worked to get its materials onto other companies’ production lines. In March the company said the chips going out to customers were made at GlobalFoundries, and that it had built modulators using Tower Semiconductor’s high-volume silicon photonics process.

A Redmond, Wash., robotics software startup founded by former Microsoft researchers says its platform can now handle much of the work of getting a robot up and running in a factory, warehouse or other industrial setting, a job that used to take a team of engineers.

General Robotics said Wednesday that advances in GRID, its robot intelligence platform, have cut the process of onboarding a new robot from about a month to as little as two hours. The company calls the approach “Auto Engineering,” with each onboarded robot and diagnosed failure feeding back into the system and speeding up the next deployment.

“Before this moment, it would take us a team of experts to go and execute on behalf of our customers,” said General Robotics CEO and co-founder Ashish Kapoor in an interview. “Clearly non-scalable, clearly very expensive, and clearly will take a long time.”

With Auto Engineering, he said, “we can magnify and accelerate each engineer’s capability.”

Founded in 2023, the company has grown to about 50 employees, primarily engineers. It has raised nearly $34 million, most recently in an April round led by Construct Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Accenture Ventures, Nvidia and Valo Ventures. PitchBook put the size of the round at $25 million; the companies didn’t disclose terms at the time.

Kapoor said General Robotics has roughly a dozen customers — large enterprises across manufacturing, logistics, energy and defense — and revenue in the millions of dollars.

Customers include HTX, the science and technology agency of Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, which Kapoor said has been working with General Robotics for about a year and a half.

The company’s platform works with robot types including industrial arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, wheeled robots and drones, according to the company.

General Robotics is operating in a competitive and well-funded sector. Physical Intelligence, which builds foundation models for robots, has raised more than $2 billion. Nvidia — an investor in General Robotics, and the maker of the Isaac Sim simulation software built into GRID — is developing its own robot models and deployment tools.

Robot makers build good hardware, Kapoor said, but often lack the expertise to put it to work in a specific setting like a shipping terminal. “That last layer is missing.”

Before co-founding the company, Kapoor spent 17 years at Microsoft, ultimately as general manager of its autonomous systems and robotics research group in Redmond, where he created the open-source drone simulator AirSim. General Robotics co-founders Sai Vemprala (CTO) and Shuhang Chen came from the same Microsoft team.

GeekWire covered the launch in 2023, when it was Scaled Foundations and billed itself as “ChatGPT for robots.” It had five employees at the time, focused on aerial robotics and drones, with backing from Khosla and E14 Fund. It later renamed itself General Robotics.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The NBA suspends former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a year and hits the Clippers with $30 million in fines and five lost draft picks over allegedly sham endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard, drawing comparisons to the Microsoft antitrust era.

A new Redfin report says San Francisco’s housing market is booming on AI wealth while Seattle slumps, with the Bay Area-to-Seattle migration pipeline nearly dried up.

And the Seahawks sale to the Khosla family officially closes, ending the Paul Allen era, with two familiar Seattle tech names surfacing in the new ownership group.

Plus, the return of the GeekWire Trivia Challenge.

Related Stories and Links

Ballmer / Clippers

• NBA suspends Steve Ballmer for 1 year, fines L.A. Clippers $30M over salary-cap scheme
• NBA announces penalties and findings arising from investigation of LA Clippers and Kawhi Leonard — NBA
• Read the NBA’s Report on Clippers, Kawhi Leonard, and Aspiration — Front Office Sports
• NBA announces punishments for Clippers after Kawhi inquiry — ESPN
• The Briefcase, Ballmer’s Social Network and Aspiration’s House of Cards: Kawhi-Gate Part VII — Pablo Torre Finds Out

Redfin / SF vs. Seattle housing

• AI wealth fuels San Francisco’s housing boom while tech layoffs weigh down Seattle
• Uber laying off 93 Washington state workers, hitting engineer and management roles at Seattle office
• Qualtrics cut 117 jobs tied to Seattle headquarters, new filing shows

Seahawks sale

• Two familiar Seattle tech figures turn up on Seahawks co-owner list as sale is finalized
• ‘I’m the 12th man … I want to represent that’: New Seahawks co-owner with deep Seattle tech roots
• What to know about Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley legend whose family is buying the Seahawks
• Apptio co-founders reunite to launch enterprise AI startup Thira with $21M in funding led by Madrona

Editor’s note: Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 16 for a live recording of the GeekWire podcast. Co-hosts John Cook and Todd Bishop will discuss the week’s news and interview Zillow’ Senior Vice President of engineering, Toby Roberts, about how AI is changing the real estate business. Details and tickets here.

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Microsoft was sued Friday by the parent company of its hometown daily newspaper, The Seattle Times Co., which joined with Newsday to accuse the Redmond tech giant and OpenAI of using their journalism to train artificial intelligence models.

The lawsuit alleges that the companies scraped hundreds of thousands of Seattle Times and Newsday articles — bypassing paywalls and ignoring terms of service — to train their AI models. It seeks financial damages and the destruction of any training datasets and models built with their content.

“Like a snake eating its own tail, GenAI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content,” the suit says. “If Defendants are allowed to succeed, independent journalism of the kind Plaintiffs produce will struggle to survive.”

The case is notable in part because the Seattle Times is suing two of its own funders. Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some Seattle Times journalism projects. In 2024, Microsoft and OpenAI jointly funded a $10 million Lenfest Institute AI fellowship that included both the Seattle Times and Newsday among its inaugural participating newsrooms. The Times says it maintains editorial independence.

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement Friday evening, “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”

It’s not clear if there were negotiations or licensing talks in advance of the suit. GeekWire has contacted The Seattle Times Co. for comment.

In its own coverage of the lawsuit Friday evening, the newspaper quoted a memo from Seattle Times Co. President and CEO Alan Fisco, saying: “This was not an easy decision. However, we feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation.”

The Seattle Times Union, which represents more than 160 newspaper employees, said Friday it supports the lawsuit but that in ongoing contract negotiations the company has refused to guarantee it won’t replace non-reporter newsroom jobs with AI.

“If the Seattle Times Co. truly cares about the threat AI poses to journalism’s business model, it should protect the workers who produce the copyrighted material at the heart of this case,” the union said in a statement.

Fisco, a longtime Seattle Times executive, took over as CEO on Jan. 1, succeeding Frank Blethen, who led the paper for 40 years and remains chair of the board. Ryan Blethen, Frank Blethen’s son and a fifth-generation member of the family that has owned the paper since 1896, became publisher in the same transition.

The complaint Friday includes examples of ChatGPT reproducing Seattle Times and Newsday journalism nearly word for word, including an 88-word verbatim stretch from The Seattle Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, generated when a user prompted the chatbot with just the article’s headline and web address.

The suit echoes The New York Times’ 2023 copyright case against the same defendants, which just this week drew a U.S. Justice Department brief siding with Microsoft and OpenAI, arguing that a ruling for the publishers would stifle American AI development.

The newspapers join a growing list of publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training. In addition to the New York Times, that includes the New York Daily News, Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting, all consolidated before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan.

On Friday, the publishers in that case moved for summary judgment, as did OpenAI and Microsoft.

OpenAI has struck licensing deals with more than a dozen other outlets, including The Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer. Publicly disclosed terms of three of those deals top $300 million, according to the Seattle Times complaint.

Updated with statement from The Seattle Times Union.

Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research initiative that will generate data and train AI models to design proteins and genes that don’t exist in nature — sharing the results freely to help others develop new medicines and materials.

The initiative, called AI BioDesign, brings together the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, with funding from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), created by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

AI BioDesign is led by David Baker, the UW biochemist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computers to design new proteins, and Jay Shendure, a leading genome scientist at the UW and the Allen Institute.

The plan is to “hijack a lot of the machinery that evolution provided us” — the cellular assembly line that turns DNA into proteins — to design and measure millions of novel biological molecules, Shendure said in an interview in advance of the announcement.

That will help AI models learn the rules of biological design from a huge set of examples, instead of inferring them from the relatively limited number that nature has produced.

The field, Shendure said, is “putting too much emphasis on taking the cranks that we have and just running with them, as opposed to building the right cranks.”

The goal is to make designing biology more like ordering a part: a molecule that latches onto a cancer cell, for example, or a genetic switch that fires only inside brain cells and nowhere else.

Potential outcomes could include everything from new therapies for disease, to proteins that dissolve plastic in the environment, to cells that travel through the body in a programmed way, said Sanjay Srivatsan, a Fred Hutch assistant professor who leads the cancer center’s work on the initiative, in a video released with the announcement.

“For the first time, the speed of AI is beginning to match the experimental power of synthetic biology,” Baker said in a statement. “That changes the question from ‘what has nature already made?’ to ‘what else is possible, and how can we test it?'”

Where the money goes

The Fund for Science and Technology is providing $94.6 million for AI BioDesign over five years. The foundation launched publicly last year with a mandate to direct a large share of Allen’s fortune into bioscience, environmental and AI research.

The funding from FFST is allocated as $46.1 million to the Allen Institute, $43.8 million to the UW and $4.7 million to Fred Hutch, according to an Allen Institute spokesperson.

The initiative had 62 people as of mid-August, including some new hires and others redirected from existing projects at the three institutions. The UW accounts for 41 of them, the Allen Institute 13, and Fred Hutch eight. AI BioDesign is expected to continue growing over time.

“AI BioDesign is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science FFST was created to support,” said Marc Malandro, the foundation’s chief programs officer and co-lead, in a statement. He joined FFST in May after nearly a decade at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, most recently as chief operating officer of CZI and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network.

Malandro and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Liz Carey have been leading FFST on an interim basis since founding CEO Lynda Stuart stepped down in May.

Inside the lab

On a recent tour of the AI BioDesign lab, research associate Jack Boylan pulled up results from a run he’d done on their new DNA sequencer that morning — on free kits donated by a neighboring biotech company, a year past their expiration date.

“We decided, let’s give it a roll,” he said. It worked fine.

The sequencer is what makes the whole approach possible. It reads all of the millions of DNA sequences in a single tube at once and reports which ones performed. One recent experiment ran 6 million distinct sequences through it at once.

“The scale comes not from robotics, but from parallelizing inside the test tube,” said Jesse Gray, executive director of strategy and platform for AI BioDesign and the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, and a former Harvard Medical School geneticist.

The lab, at Dexter Yard in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a short walk from the Allen Institute’s headquarters, is organized into teams of five or six people, each working on a different design problem.

A separate four-person team of machine-learning specialists takes the incoming results and works with the bench teams to decide which experiments come next — the ones that will teach the models the most. Each round is judged on how much the models improved.

The Allen Institute calls projects like this “accelerators,” a term Rui Costa, the institute’s president and CEO, traced back to Paul Allen himself. The word came up in early planning sessions, Costa said. Allen wanted to “exponentially accelerate the field.”

Other accelerators at Dexter Yard include the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the Allen Institute’s collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the UW, which Shendure also leads; and Cell Science, which works on engineering cells to assemble themselves into tissues.

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the separate Seattle research organization also founded by Paul Allen, is involved informally rather than as a funded partner, Costa said.

Its robotics team has been talking with AI BioDesign about scaling up the protein work, and the two expect to collaborate on models and on tools that generate research hypotheses.

Why give it away

The decision to focus on open science also came from Allen, Costa said in an interview this week. “He was so visionary in the early 2000s: radically open science to exponentially impact and change fields, not to compete.”

That raises a question the initiative will face as soon as it produces anything valuable: what happens if a company builds a lucrative drug on data given away free? In traditional science, Costa said, being beaten to a discovery counts as a loss. Here it’s the goal.

“We would be so lucky if many companies would be taking this data and changing the world for good,” he said.

At the same time, Costa left open the possibility of the three principal institutions spinning out their own startups, nonprofits, or other initiatives from the work done by AI BioDesign.

Betting against the field

AI BioDesign’s approach runs against much of the current thinking in the field. Costa said most efforts to apply AI to biology are chasing a single general model that could answer questions about how any cell works. AI BioDesign is betting on the opposite: narrow models built for specific design problems, trained on data generated for that purpose.

“This project is a clear bet on a different way of doing things,” Costa said.

The people running the initiative are careful not to oversell. Gray said it remains an open question as to whether their approach beats the alternatives. “The jury’s still out,” he said.

Shendure put it plainly: “It’s never as easy as you think it’s going to be,” he said.

Costa said AI BioDesign needs to show real progress within 18 to 24 months — ideally even sooner — and expand to researchers around the world within five years.

Qualtrics is cutting 117 jobs connected to its Seattle headquarters, according to a state filing that provides new details of the layoffs that the experience management technology company made two weeks ago.

Engineering and product teams were hit hard. The filing lists software roles from entry-level through principal engineers, plus testing, machine learning, network and information security positions; engineering managers and directors; and product and product marketing managers.

The employees work at or report into Qualtrics Tower at 1201 Second Ave., the filing says.

The company, which has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, made cuts globally on Aug. 19, so the Seattle number reflects only a portion of the overall positions impacted. The company has not disclosed the total. We followed up again Wednesday to ask for an overall number.

Qualtrics employed about 900 people in Seattle as of 2023 and has not disclosed a figure since.

It’s part of a steady stream of tech layoffs in the Seattle region. Amazon disclosed 121 job cuts in Washington state on Aug. 31, T-Mobile 77 on Aug. 26, and TikTok 75 in Bellevue on Aug. 19. Zillow cut more than 500 Seattle jobs in early August.

Earlier this year, Meta cut nearly 1,400 jobs in the state, about 20% of its local workforce; Microsoft cut 605; and Oracle 491.

Qualtrics makes software that companies use to collect and analyze feedback from customers, employees, partners and others — a category that Qualtrics calls experience management. It was founded in Provo in 2002 and later added a Seattle headquarters.

The layoffs followed the company’s $6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, an Indiana-based healthcare data company, which closed in May.

In a memo to employees on Aug. 19, CEO Jason Maynard said the deal brought together “two organizations, two sets of teams, two structures built independently,” and that the company had gone “function by function, team by team, to understand where we have overlap.”

Maynard became CEO in February, joining from Oracle. In April he removed five senior executives and reorganized teams across marketing, customer operations, IT and corporate development.

Qualtrics has been owned by Silver Lake and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board since they took it private for $12.5 billion in 2023. The company cut about 780 jobs, roughly 14% of its workforce, in October 2023, and about 270 earlier the same year.

Daniel Bernstein spent much of the past decade as an M&A advisor, selling other people’s software companies. This time the company was his own, and he found a buyer in McGraw Hill.

The education publishing giant on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Teachally, a small startup led by Bernstein in Bothell, Wash., that uses AI to help teachers build and customize lessons, assignments and assessments aligned to state standards.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The deal has closed, and all five employees have joined McGraw Hill, with Bernstein taking the title of senior advisor for Teachally integration and growth. He declined to say what the company sold for or how much it had raised, but said the outcome was good for him and his investors.

“We didn’t take in a pile of money,” Bernstein said, explaining that the company brought in a small group of angels and was able to stay focused and effective.

The five-person team is spread across three continents: Bernstein and a colleague in the Seattle area, co-founder and CTO Rushil Makkar in Melbourne, Australia, a customer success lead in Arizona and a developer in Ethiopia.

Bernstein is best known in Seattle tech circles for Sandlot Games, the game studio he started in a spare bedroom in Bothell in 2002 and sold to Digital Chocolate in 2011, after developing casual gaming hits including “Cake Mania” and “Tradewinds.” He later founded the mobile game startup UpTap.

Bernstein spent the following decade on the other side of deals, as a software M&A advisor at Corum Group and then at his own firm, Hemisphere Partners, which ran Teachally’s sale.

Teachally raised a small round from local angels about nine months ago, and later opted to try an M&A process. An edtech M&A specialist representing the company approached a small group of potential buyers, and Bernstein said he hit it off immediately with McGraw Hill over a shared view of what curriculum and instruction should look like in the age of AI.

Teachally focuses on teachers rather than students, developing technology for what the industry calls high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM, which is the standards-aligned curriculum that many states and districts have pushed schools to adopt.

The startup was working with about eight school districts at the time of the sale — fully commercialized, Bernstein said, but “still very much an early stage company.” It was named a top edtech product for curriculum and instruction by District Administration magazine in January.

Bernstein said he had to learn an entirely new industry after two decades in games. The M&A work helped: he’d taken other edtech companies to market before building one.

Teachally itself started as something else. The company was founded as EZ Reward, maker of EZ Stickerbook, a digital sticker chart teachers used to reward students and message parents. Bernstein pivoted the company about three years ago to focus on AI for teachers.

McGraw Hill, which went public last year and reported $2.1 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, said the deal will let it develop and localize K-12 curriculum faster and put AI tools in front of teachers already using its content.

“This acquisition provides a great opportunity to accelerate our AI strategy in ways that directly support educators and strengthen how we develop and deliver our K–12 products globally,” said Jana Thompson, interim president of the company’s School group, in the announcement.

Teachally is now live as a McGraw Hill product, with its own page on the company’s site.

Bernstein said it’s a second exit both for him and for some of the angels who have backed him along the way. “It’s a good Seattle story once again,” he said.

In 2012, T-Mobile was losing hundreds of thousands of customers a quarter. AT&T’s attempted acquisition of the Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless company had just collapsed. T-Mobile was the fourth-place carrier in a four-carrier market, with a network that was a punchline and no obvious plan for fixing any of it.

Mike Katz was one of the leaders responsible for figuring it out.

The result of their work was the “Un-carrier,” a series of moves starting in 2013 that upended one industry tradition after another, launched under CEO John Legere and continued by his successor, Mike Sievert.

T-Mobile today is worth nearly $195 billion and claims the country’s best network. The company is now led by Srini Gopalan, who became CEO in November 2025.

Katz, whose wireless career began selling VoiceStream phones at a Circuit City in Fort Collins, Colo., is leaving after 28 years. The company announced July 7 that Katz, then chief business and product officer, would pursue “new professional interests,” staying on as an advisor through December.

During his tenure at T-Mobile, Katz worked in sales and corporate strategy, ran the company’s prepaid business, led consumer marketing through the first Un-carrier moves, built the company’s business division, and served as chief marketing officer, before becoming chief business and product officer in December 2025.

In an interview with GeekWire, Katz reflected on his experience inside one of the most improbable and irreverent comebacks in American business.

Continue reading for the lessons we took from his story.

Use speed to your advantage against bigger competitors.

When the AT&T deal died, Katz was put on a small team assigned to assess the company’s position and come up with a plan. Their advantage, he said, was that T-Mobile was too small to compete on everyone else’s terms.

“We were so subscale relative to AT&T and Verizon at the start, and what we developed because of being subscale was agility,” Katz said. “We would do things, and AT&T and Verizon would take forever to respond, and by the time they responded, all their customers were gone.”

It started with Un-carrier 1.0. Under the standard model then, a customer could get a phone for well below cost if they signed up for a two-year plan. But the carrier recovered it through the monthly service rate, which never came down once the phone was paid off. Customers paid a penalty for leaving early.

T-Mobile separated the device from the service plan in March 2013, pricing service on its own and putting the phone on monthly installments that ended when the device was paid for.

Verizon didn’t stop signing new customers to two-year contracts until August 2015. AT&T held out until January 2016.

Getting copied was the point. Katz said one measure of success for every Un-carrier move was whether AT&T and Verizon would eventually imitate it, because by the time they did, T-Mobile had already gotten all the credit and attention.

Legere reveled in calling AT&T and Verizon “Dumb and Dumber” (it was never clear which was which in his eyes). He crashed AT&T’s party at CES in 2014 and was escorted out by security, generating multiple rounds of positive publicity for T-Mobile. He asked the public to vote on how to taunt his rivals next, with skywriting over their headquarters among the options.

They were clearly having fun. Asked whether T-Mobile ever worried it had gone too far in baiting its rivals, Katz said, “Not really.” The mission then, he said, was to change wireless for everyone and not just for T-Mobile’s own customers.

The mockery extended to the events themselves. Katz recalled preparing for an early Un-carrier launch in New York when Legere, around 10 p.m. the night before, decided he wanted to open by parodying AT&T’s “It’s Not Complicated” campaign, in which a man interviewed small children at a tiny table. That meant finding dolls. Katz said the team spent the night working out how to get into the American Girl store in Manhattan.

“It was wild,” Katz said. “There were so many things in those early events.”

The next morning the lights came up on Legere at a small table, talking to the dolls.

“Maybe we were the only ones that got it,” Katz said. “But it was funny to us.”

Look for the unexpected and find out why it’s happening.

Back in 2010, then-CEO Robert Dotson put Katz in charge of the company’s prepaid business. It was not a marquee assignment.

Prepaid customers of that era “didn’t really pick prepaid. Prepaid picked them,” Katz said. “They had no other choices. They had tough credit, or they socioeconomically were in a really tough place.”

T-Mobile was also losing ground. A price war broke out in January 2009, when Sprint’s Boost Mobile introduced a $50 unlimited plan and MetroPCS answered at $40. The recession was pushing customers toward prepaid, and the flat-rate carriers were taking market share.

Katz ran prepaid as a business of its own, operations and marketing together, and looked for a way to compete without matching the price. Those cheaper plans limited customers to 3G, so T-Mobile charged a bit more, gave them 4G, and called it Monthly 4G. (A deliberately clear and functional name, as he pointed out.)

It worked. Through 2010, 2011 and 2012, while the postpaid business was shedding customers, prepaid was the only part of T-Mobile that was growing.

The surprise: a lot of the new growth was coming from previously postpaid customers, people who had other options and were choosing prepaid anyway. Katz’s team asked them why.

“There’s no contract. I sign up for a $50 plan, and it actually costs $50 a month. It’s just simple and predictable,” Katz said, quoting customers. It might seem obvious now, he said, “but at the time it’s like, wow, that’s a pretty interesting insight.”

Expand what’s working to other parts of the company.

They found inspiration in that when they turned to what T-Mobile should do next. The idea was to give postpaid customers the same simplicity that was drawing them to prepaid.

They called it pain-free wireless. They mapped out six moves in advance, including the end of upgrade restrictions and international roaming fees. These were the origins of the Un-carrier.

They pitched it to Legere, and to Sievert, the chief marketing officer at the time. Both signed on. The launch was originally set for the end of 2013. Legere moved it to the beginning of the year.

“There is something about desperation that really helps create crisp decision-making,” Katz said. “You can keep trying to make a gameplan that’s been failing for years work, or take some swings and take on some risk. … Because what’s the downside? It can’t get much worse than it was.”

Make sure people know the ad was yours.

Storytelling is the thing companies and brands get wrong most often, Katz said, and he called it the biggest thing he learned from Sievert, whom he worked with for more than a decade. It’s especially important in the wireless industry, where customers are effectively buying a promise.

“At the end of the day, we sell invisible air. You don’t really see the product we sell,” Katz said. “There’s phones, but we don’t make the phones. Apple makes the phones. There’s towers that you can see, but the tower companies, those are their towers. We sell the invisible air in between.”

Katz divides the profession into two camps: the “award show CMOs,” motivated by collecting trophies at Cannes, and the ones who measure themselves by business impact. He puts himself in the second group.

One example: T-Mobile’s February 2025 Super Bowl spot, which launched the public beta of its Starlink partnership, offering satellite-to-cell texting in the parts of the country terrestrial networks don’t reach.

It was tempting to fill it with celebrities and gimmicks, he said. Instead the spot was built around a voiceover and a direct call to action: try it out for free during the beta, open to AT&T and Verizon customers too.

“If we wanted to build a Super Bowl commercial to win the best Super Bowl spot in Ad Age, we would have done something very different,” Katz said. “We would have done the celebrity-palooza.”

“Within 30 minutes of that Super Bowl spot running, we achieved all the goals that we had for the rest of the month in signups,” Katz said.

He contrasted that with Verizon’s 2024 Super Bowl ad starring Beyonce, which he said people recalled without necessarily remembering the advertiser.

Bad results don’t mean bad people.

One of the lessons Katz learned from Legere, in addition to taking risks and failing fast, came from how the incoming T-Mobile CEO treated the people who were already there when he arrived. Legere took over a company that was losing badly and kept the team in place.

“It would have been really easy for him to come in and assume, hey, company’s not doing well, we must have a bunch of bad people here, and change everybody out, and he didn’t do that,” Katz said. “Don’t assume simply because the results of the company are bad that the people are bad.”

Katz said that was in his head during the Sprint merger, where the same thing applied: a business in rough shape, staffed by people who weren’t the reason. T-Mobile’s leadership today is a mix of the two companies.

Perception can sometimes lag reality.

Katz said T-Mobile passed Verizon on network quality years before customers believed it. Verizon “had so much built up brand equity around being the best network,” he said, that four or five years later, people still named Verizon when asked who had the best network.

T-Mobile declared victory at an event in Bellevue in June 2025, citing an Ookla study built on half a billion crowdsourced data points. Verizon disputed the methodology, saying crowdsourcing can’t control for variables, and pointed instead to RootMetrics drive tests that it said still showed Verizon the most reliable.

T-Mobile then began running ads with Billy Bob Thornton declaring it the best network in the country. Earlier claims had carried qualifiers, like fastest 5G or most available 5G. This one didn’t. Katz said the gap in how customers rate the two networks is now down to a couple of points.

Staying on top is harder than the turnaround.

For all the attention the comeback gets, Katz said the more remarkable part has been what came after it.

“If you look at companies that have done big turnarounds, you don’t really see a lot that have had the kind of sustained success and continued growth for a decade and a half like T-Mobile has,” he said.

He gives much of the credit to the network. The Sprint merger gave T-Mobile a spectrum position it didn’t have before, and the company bet that 5G would play out in mid-band spectrum, which was seen as risky at the time. Protecting that advantage through later spectrum deals was one of the things he worked on.

Building the network was not.

“There’s a couple jobs that they never let me do, probably for very good reason,” Katz joked. “You actually need to know what you’re doing.”

A mature company also needs different things from its leadership than a struggling one does. Gopalan spent years on T-Mobile’s board before joining as COO and then taking over as CEO. Katz describes him as an operator who brings discipline to the details of a business that by now has years of success behind it.

Asked for his biggest mistake, Katz said he moved too slowly at times.

“There are big decisions, risky decisions, that I could have made a lot faster,” he said. “I wish I’d pushed harder to make some of those decisions.” Some of what became the early Un-carrier moves were ideas that had been floated years earlier, in corporate strategy.

Katz says he still believes the company’s best days are ahead.

As for what’s next for him? Stay tuned, he says.

Highspot’s branding is still everywhere inside its longtime headquarters at World Trade Center East, overlooking the Seattle waterfront. But outside the corner office that once belonged to the sales software company’s co-founder and CEO, “Seismic” is scribbled on the whiteboard.

That’s how fresh the merger is. Two weeks after San Diego-based Seismic took over its Seattle-based rival, Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff is in town this week for the first board meeting since the combination was completed, and the inaugural gathering of the combined company’s senior leadership team.

Highspot and Seismic sell sales enablement software: systems that manage the pitch decks, case studies and training materials salespeople use, and track which ones help close deals.

Founded in 2011 by Robert Wahbe and two former Microsoft colleagues, Highspot raised $650 million and held the top spot on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s privately held tech companies, prior to the merger. Wahbe, its CEO until the deal closed, is now on Seismic’s board.

Tarkoff, a lawyer by training who spent much of his career in corporate development and M&A, became Seismic’s CEO in October 2025, succeeding co-founder Doug Winter. He had previously spent seven years running Oracle’s customer experience business.

The Highspot deal was announced in February, four months into his tenure.

Tarkoff addressed a wide range of questions from GeekWire in an interview Monday afternoon in Wahbe’s former office, which now serves as an ad hoc meeting room.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

A $600 million company: Tarkoff disclosed the combined company’s annual recurring revenue for the first time, putting it at about $600 million, with about $200 million of that coming from Highspot.

That makes the combined business three times the size Highspot was on its own and 50% bigger than Seismic. Tarkoff said the larger size will be an adjustment for people across both companies as they come together. “We’re getting closer to being a billion dollar company,” he said.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, and Tarkoff declined to say whether the transaction put Highspot above or below the $3.5 billion valuation it reached in 2022.

Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona, which led Highspot’s Series A in 2014, called it a “multi-billion-dollar merger” in a post after the deal closed. Porter, who serves as a board observer at Seismic following the combination, wrote that Madrona hopes to help build the combined company into “a truly iconic AI software company, through a potential IPO and beyond.”

Permira, the private equity firm that has backed Seismic since 2020, remains the controlling shareholder of the combined company.

Impact on jobs: Seismic said when the deal closed that Highspot had more than 700 employees and that the combined company would have about 1,700 total. Tarkoff said in a statement at the time that the companies were “carefully evaluating our organizations to identify areas of overlap,” and that “any decisions will be communicated directly and proactively to employees.”

Since then, word of initial job cuts has started to emerge on LinkedIn and other online forums, but the company has not provided specifics or disclosed any numbers.

Asked for an update on job reductions this week, Tarkoff said, “We did our best to try to find roles for everybody that we could, but there’s always some level of overlap where you don’t need two people doing a task that requires one.”

Tarkoff did not provide numbers or address the question of whether more job cuts are coming. He said the company feels “really good about where we are from a go-forward staff perspective,” while adding: “We will continue to push performance and push growth and acceleration.”

Seismic’s future in Seattle: Tarkoff said Seismic will keep Highspot’s Seattle offices at World Trade Center East, where the company has a long-term lease. He called Seattle “one of the top centers of excellence for tech talent,” citing the ability to recruit from Amazon, Microsoft and others.

There will be no designated Seattle site leader, he said, describing the office as one of the company’s major centers rather than a headquarters.

However, several senior leaders of the combined company are based in Seattle, including Kurt Berglund, who led engineering at Highspot and is now Seismic’s senior vice president of AI.

Others include chief human resources officer Kimberly Schultz, who joined Seismic in June after 11 years at Amazon, where she led the team responsible for integrating acquisitions and divestitures, and Lucas Welch, VP of brand and communications, who spent nearly eight years at Highspot.

Tarkoff said a number of the company’s top engineers are based in Seattle as well.

Seismic’s other major locations include San Diego, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, B.C., London and Hyderabad, India, where Tarkoff said the company has more than doubled its presence. Gurpreet Singh Pall, who was Highspot India’s chief operating officer, now leads Seismic’s India operations.

Product plans: The current Highspot and Seismic platforms both will continue to be sold and supported for the time being, Tarkoff said. He declined to set a timetable for eventually consolidating them, saying customers will move to a new platform when one is ready.

Now that the companies are able to work directly together, he said they’ve come to see that the two products are closer than he understood before the deal closed. Seismic has focused on complex enterprise workflows and regulated industries, financial services in particular, while Highspot built for a broader market of upper mid-market and lower enterprise customers.

With two teams no longer building the same things, he said, engineering can move to new work — more AI agents, additional content governance features, and deeper industry-specific workflows such as archiving and records retention.

Rivals are making the opposite case. Ali Akhtar, CEO of Letter AI, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that mergers in the category turn companies inward for quarters or years, predicting “stalled innovation, layoffs, and distractions from delivering customer value,” and a period of reduced support for customers on legacy platforms. Akhtar is offering to buy out their contracts.

Pricing: Tarkoff said seat-based subscriptions aren’t going away, because enterprises want predictable costs. He said he’s skeptical of the usage-based pricing some AI vendors have adopted, pointing to high-profile examples of companies blowing past their budgets.

“Token-maxing is not really a good model long term, because it’s just going to force enterprises to use less,” he said.

He said Seismic is working toward pricing tied to outcomes rather than usage.

The Salesforce question: A week after the Seismic-Highspot merger closed, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, making Claude the default model across Slack and parts of Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.

Salesforce is both a channel and a rival for Seismic. Seismic’s software sells through the Salesforce AppExchange, and its Aura AI runs inside Agentforce, Salesforce’s agent platform. At the same time, Salesforce’s Sales Cloud includes its own sales enablement tools. And Agentforce agents increasingly do work that enablement platforms have owned.

Asked whether the partnership makes Salesforce a tougher competitor, Tarkoff said no.

As sellers start working inside Claude rather than inside individual applications, he said, the assistant will call each company separately — Salesforce for customer records, Seismic for approved content and sales materials. That makes Seismic a peer of Salesforce inside Claude, rather than an add-on inside Salesforce’s own product.

“It actually puts us more on an even playing field with Salesforce,” he said.

But Salesforce is considerably further along. Claudeforce launched with a Salesforce plugin carrying 37 prebuilt sales skills, in pilot now and due in open beta this month.

Much of the early analysis of the Salesforce-Anthropic partnership saw it as evidence that enterprise AI is consolidating around a few deep platform alliances rather than opening up.

Seismic’s next fiscal year begins Feb. 1. Tarkoff said he expects to spend much of the intervening months on the road with customers and employees. Seismic plans to give the first detailed look at its new product roadmap at its Shift conference, Oct. 12-15 in Carlsbad, Calif.

Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona released its sixth annual Intelligent Applications 40 list this week, naming 45 private AI companies (the five extras come from ties) that have collectively raised $410 billion from investors across the industry.

Three of them — Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks — account for 92% of that total.

The uneven distribution of funding reflects a larger split in the tech industry, as the largest AI companies make huge bets on the computing capacity needed to meet demand for their models, while almost everyone else builds businesses on top of them.

The frontier labs are “increasingly funded by strategic capital from the likes of Amazon, Google, Nvidia and SoftBank rather than traditional venture,” Madrona’s Matt McIlwain and Rolanda Fu wrote in a post accompanying the list. That scale, they added, “makes every other category on this list look capital light by comparison.”

On top of that, he said, hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into OpenAI and Anthropic.

“And what I say to both the big tech companies and to the people funding the model companies: thank you very much,” McIlwain said on Bloomberg TV, noting that the five largest tech companies will spend an estimated $750 billion in capital expenditures this year.

But even setting those big three aside, McIlwain said, the rest of the winners have raised an average of more than $800 million each. That’s a total of $34 billion combined. Companies across the list are raising far more than they used to, enough that Madrona had to redraw its own categories.

The list sorts companies by total capital raised, and this year the ceiling for “early stage” rose to $50 million, up from the $30 million threshold that held for the previous five lists. The cutoff for “emerging enablers,” its category for smaller infrastructure companies, doubled to $100 million.

“Companies across the board are raising more money, and the definition for what ‘early’ means continues to shift higher,” McIlwain and Fu wrote.

Madrona has published the IA40 since 2021 as a roster of the private companies it considers most important in building and enabling AI applications. According to the firm, this year’s list drew on input from 72 investors representing 54 venture and corporate firms, who nominated and voted on more than 450 companies, with PitchBook data factored into the scoring.

Two Seattle-area companies made this year’s list:

• Clarify, which builds an AI-native CRM, appears in the early-stage category for the second straight year, with $23 million raised. It acquired San Francisco’s Seam AI in July.
• Gradial, which builds AI agents for enterprise marketing, is a first-time winner in the mid-stage category; it raised $65 million in June at a $675 million valuation, bringing its total to $120 million.

Last year’s list included two other Seattle-area companies in addition to Clarify.

• OpenAI acquired one of them, Bellevue-based Statsig, for $1.1 billion in September 2025, making Statsig founder Vijaye Raji its CTO of applications.
• Security startup Dropzone AI, which was on the list last year, did not repeat this year.

Madrona, one of the Seattle region’s largest and oldest venture capital firms, is an investor in all four — Clarify, Gradial, Statsig and Dropzone AI — although it also invests outside the region, and many of the companies on the IA40 are not in its portfolio.

Several of the companies on this year’s list have engineering centers in the Seattle region, including Anthropic, which leased 113,000 square feet in South Lake Union this year; OpenAI, which expanded to nearly 300,000 square feet in downtown Bellevue after the Statsig acquisition; and Anduril, which employs about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle.

Databricks, the San Francisco-based data and AI company (which leased 142,000 square feet in Bellevue this year), is the only company to appear on all six IA40 lists. That said, 23 of last year’s 40 winners returned this year, a 58% repeat rate, up from 33% the year before.

McIlwain and Fu wrote that the biggest and most established companies on the list are holding their spots, noting that “the age of experimentation is giving way to an age of enterprise readiness,” with buyers and investors “paying premiums for companies that can demonstrate real ROI.”

Madrona will recognize the winners at its IA40 Summit in Seattle on Sept. 29 and 30.

Updated with Matt McIlwain’s comments to Bloomberg TV.

A Kirkland, Wash.-based biotech company led by former Athira Pharma CEO Leen Kawas has raised $35 million in a Series A round led by Propel Bio Partners, the Los Angeles investment firm where Kawas is a co-founder and managing general partner.

EIT Pharma said Monday that the oversubscribed round also drew participation from Good Ventures, Arrowtown and others. The company said the money will support FDA review of lonafarnib, an oral treatment candidate for chronic hepatitis D, along with manufacturing and commercial preparations, subject to regulatory approval.

The Food and Drug Administration accepted the company’s New Drug Application for review on Aug. 11.

Lonafarnib came to EIT Pharma through the 2024 bankruptcy of Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, in a court-supervised sale that closed that September. The same sale included peginterferon lambda, which EIT Pharma is developing for severe respiratory infections.

Kawas, EIT Pharma’s CEO, said in a news release Monday that the oversubscribed round validates the company’s founding belief that “advancing important medicines is about recognizing unrealized potential.”

Chronic hepatitis D is a serious liver disease that affects people who are already infected with hepatitis B. The FDA approved the first U.S. treatment for chronic hepatitis D in May: Gilead’s injectable Hepcludex, or bulevirtide-gmod. EIT Pharma is positioning lonafarnib as a potential oral alternative, if approved.

Kawas resigned as CEO of Athira Pharma in 2021 after a board investigation found she had altered images in research she co-authored as a graduate student. She said at the time that the changes were enhancements that did not alter the underlying data.

Athira has since changed its name to LeonaBio and shifted its focus from Alzheimer’s disease to breast cancer.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Bill Gates published a new essay warning that the AI industry is crossing the safety lines it set for itself, and that nobody is preparing for what’s coming. At age 70, he also uses AI more than most people half his age, and he finds it enthralling, as you’ll hear on this week’s show, with highlights from our interview with him.

Along the way, we dig into his three proposals: new institutions for managing the transition, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on the use and purchase of AI and robots.

The change in his own tech usage: “I joke with people that I used to have Claude-like people that I would send email to, but they were so slow, and there were some topics they didn’t actually know. … It’s three a.m. I want to understand sodium batteries, and now there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go. Yeah, it’s crazy.”

How he uses AI specifically: “If you’re a curious person, this is a mind-blowing time. When I’m working on malaria, nutrition, my poor humans that I work with always get these long conversations from me, where I paste in — me, Claude, me, ChatGPT. Sometimes I do it if there’s three of us: Claude, ChatGPT and me, debating these things.”

On where personal agents are headed: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t. … You won’t go to those applications. You’ll just go to your personal agent. … From a productivity point of view, we are in heaven.”

What has surprised him: “I was shocked by ChatGPT, and I was shocked by Claude Code. Those are both things where I went, oh my God. … I did not expect that a statistical machine would essentially learn to read, and the idea that the code is better than human code. Those are two stunning thresholds.”

On writing this essay: “It’s very unnatural for me to think that innovation may be a net negative if it’s not managed properly. The more I wrote the memo, the more I was like, Jesus, we really need to get our act together here. Even though this may come across as negative, that’s the truth. If we don’t step up, the negatives will substantially outweigh the positives.”

What AI leaders say privately: “You’re in this perverse period right now where people in the AI industry who are willing to say that AI might have some negative effects are told, ‘Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.’ … I know they’re all worried. Or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”

On losing control of AI: “The wake-up for the memo is that the bad stuff thresholds are all being crossed. Even lack of control that I thought would be many years from now, we’re seeing lack of control. … These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things. What kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”

On how fast robots are coming: “What’s weird about AI is it’s better at doing jobs across the entire economy, including physical jobs when the robots come — which you can guess when that is, but my view is it’s only a couple of years.”

Is he still an optimist? “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful. I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything. So it’s kind of bizarre if a guy who’s 70 comes and writes a memo that’s actually helpful. … But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”

Related headlines and links

• The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. — Bill Gates, Gates Notes
• ‘I am very concerned’: Bill Gates says the world needs a plan to deal with AI, and he has three ideas to start
• Bill Gates says there’s ‘no upper limit’ on AI, citing opportunity and risk
• Etzioni on AI: Bill Gates has the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription
• Dwarkesh Podcast: Ryan Greenblatt — What happens once AI can automate AI research?
• NPR: Trump’s new AI safety order seeks voluntary review of new models
• New York Times: Bill Gates is warning that A.I. is more dangerous than Big Tech will admit
• Wall Street Journal: Three takeaways from Bill Gates’s 5,784-word warning on AI: ‘There is no plan’
• MIT Technology Review: Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?
• Axios: Gates confronts the Epstein questions hanging over his AI push
• Transcript: Here’s what Bill Gates told lawmakers in his recent Epstein testimony
• OpenAI: A Collective Approach to Cyber Defense

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Edited and produced by Curt Milton. Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

— Marc Whitten, a former Microsoft and Amazon executive, was named president and CEO of San Francisco-based Dolby Laboratories. He succeeds Kevin Yeaman, who is retiring after leading the entertainment technology company for nearly 20 years.

Whitten spent 17 years at Microsoft, rising to corporate vice president and chief product officer for Xbox. He went on to serve as chief product officer at Sonos before joining Amazon as vice president of entertainment devices and services, overseeing products including Alexa, Kindle and Fire TV.

He later served as president of Unity Create and CEO of Cruise. Most recently, he was vice president of robotics at Meta.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center announced leadership changes in two divisions.

Dr. Lawrence Fong was named senior vice president and director of the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division, effective Dec. 1. He succeeds Dr. Geoff Hill, who is departing the organization in December.

Fong joined Fred Hutch in 2024 as scientific director of the Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center and Bezos Family Distinguished Scholar in Immunotherapy. He previously founded the Cancer Immunotherapy Program at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Andrew Hsieh, the associate director of the Fred Hutch Human Biology Division, was named the inaugural Larry and Virginia Gordon Endowed Chair in Prostate and Bladder Cancer Research. Hsieh is a physician-scientist at Fred Hutch specializing in genitourinary cancers.

— Two recent notable Microsoft AI-related exits:

Andréa Mallard is leaving her role as chief marketing officer of Microsoft AI after joining from Pinterest in January, according to Business Insider. She will stay on as an advisor until early next year. Mallard, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, previously served as global chief marketing officer at Pinterest for eight years.

Ece Kamar departed Microsoft Research after 16 years with the company. She was corporate vice president and managing director of the AI Frontiers Lab, where she worked on small language models and the company’s agentic AI stack. She has not announced her next role.

— Poppy MacDonald was named president of NationSwell, a social impact membership organization. MacDonald previously served as president of USAFacts, the nonpartisan civic data initiative founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, for seven years. A past recipient of an Uncommon Thinkers award from GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners, she is also the former president and COO of POLITICO.

— Jeff Buhrman joined Seattle startup Tin Can as head of finance. The company is building a screen-free, WiFi-enabled phone designed to let kids connect with friends and family. Buhrman previously served as CFO of Seattle-based Sleep Doctor for more than four years.

— Susan Loosmore was confirmed to the Major League Baseball Stadium Public Facilities District board, which oversees T-Mobile Park. The King County Council approved the appointment Aug. 25. Loosmore spent more than 17 years in executive leadership at T-Mobile and previously served as chair of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

— Seattle-based SecureW2, a passwordless security company, named Martin Musierowicz as president and Mark Packham as chief marketing officer.

• Musierowicz, who is based in Atlanta, previously served as chief revenue officer at SmartBear and Keyfactor. Earlier, he led global channels and alliances at Atlassian through its IPO.
• Packham, who is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, joins from Dragos, where he was CMO. He previously served as executive vice president of marketing at DigiCert.

— Vancouver, B.C.-based Integrated Quantum Technologies, an enterprise AI infrastructure company, appointed Husam Fezzani as CEO. He succeeds Alan Guibord, who moved to chairman. Fezzani spent nearly 30 years at HSBC, where he held senior technology and engineering leadership roles including global engineering head for the bank’s Commercial Technology Division.

The co-founders of Pro.com, the Seattle-based home-improvement marketplace acquired by Opendoor in 2021, are back with a new company targeting what seems on the surface a very different kind of market: AI-powered software for the wealth management industry.

But Rajalakshmi “Raji” Subramanian and Matt Williams say the new challenge matches the same pattern: a huge industry held back not by a lack of customers, but by a shortage of professionals and tools.

Their Seattle startup, OnTrade, co-founded with former Bank of America chief investment officer Zachary Harl, has been operating under the radar since 2024, raising an undisclosed amount of funding from General Catalyst, Madrona and angel investors.

OnTrade’s chief technology officer is Jean Bredeche, who co-founded Quantopian, the algorithmic trading platform, and later served as a director of engineering at Robinhood.

How it works: OnTrade connects software that financial advisors already use — including CRM, portfolio accounting, trading, and compliance programs — into a single interface.

It then deploys AI agents to handle the type of work that advisors have traditionally done manually, such as scanning portfolios for tax-loss harvesting opportunities, flagging accounts that have drifted from their targets, or drafting proposals and reports for clients.

The humans approve everything before it reaches a client. The idea is to help them serve more clients without sacrificing the quality of their work, expanding access to wealth-management services that tend to be concentrated among more affluent households.

“Wealth management, if you look at the industry, does not have a demand problem; it has an access problem,” said Subramanian, the company’s CEO, in an interview. “Many people who’d like access to wealth management don’t have access to wealth management, and that’s what we’re here to solve.”

Harl, OnTrade’s chief investment officer, called raw foundation models the “brilliant PhDs” of the AI world — impressive on paper, but not as valuable to a specific industry such as wealth management until they understand its portfolios, policies, compliance rules, and client relationships. Vertical AI solutions like OnTrade, he said, are better positioned to connect that general-purpose intelligence to a specific firm’s data and workflows so the technology can do trusted work.

Industry shakeup: OnTrade is emerging at a pivotal moment, two days after investment giant Vanguard agreed to acquire wealth-management platform Altruist reportedly valued at $4 billion. OnTrade’s founders cite the deal as validation of the vertical AI opportunity they’re pursuing.

In a LinkedIn post Thursday, Subramanian wrote that the Vanguard-Altruist deal signals something bigger than a battle over where advisors park their clients’ assets: that capturing the opportunity “requires a new operating model rather than AI-enhanced versions of today’s applications.”

The wealth management industry’s unit of scale, she wrote, is shifting “from the number of people a firm employs to the intelligence and agency it can deploy.”

The founders: Subramanian joined Amazon in the late 1990s as an early engineer who helped build Amazon Marketplace and AWS, and later led the digitization of books for Kindle.

Amazon was where she met Williams, who had founded a startup called LiveBid that Amazon acquired in 1999. He spent 11 years there, including a stint as a technical advisor to Jeff Bezos, then left to run Digg as CEO and served as an entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz.

Subramanian went on to run engineering at Yahoo Finance, where she helped open up market data that had previously been the province of institutional investors, giving her an early look at the problem that OnTrade is now aiming to solve.

In 2013, the two co-founded Pro.com, a tech-driven home improvement marketplace that raised early funding from investors including Madrona, Maveron, Bezos and Andreessen Horowitz.

Real estate tech company Opendoor acquired Pro.com in 2021, and brought both founders on as executives — Subramanian as chief technology officer, Williams as head of the Pro.com unit and senior vice president of retail.

Harl spent many years at Bank of America, rising to chief investment officer, where he managed the bank’s asset portfolios and large balance sheet risks across multiple market cycles. He is a chartered financial analyst (CFA), with a math and computer science degree from Indiana University, and a statistics degree from the London School of Economics.

He served on the U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee under Secretaries Steven Mnuchin and Janet Yellen, advising on debt management, before joining Opendoor in 2023 as chief risk officer. That’s where he met Subramanian and Williams, before making the startup leap with them.

Traction and competition: The company’s technology is already in use at firms ranging in size from boutique advisories to large national practices, said Williams, the company’s president.

He said one client used the platform to win a billion-dollar family office account, and that another recouped the full annual cost of the platform in less than 30 days. He called that “a small window into what’s going to happen on a larger scale.”

The wealth management software market has many established players — such as Orion Advisor Solutions, Envestnet, and Addepar — but the OnTrade founders say they see them as partners, not rivals. OnTrade integrates with those systems rather than replacing them.

That distinguishes the company from Altruist, the Vanguard acquisition target, which built its own full stack, including its own custodian, the financial institution where client assets are held. That approach requires firms to move client assets onto its platform.

OnTrade doesn’t ask firms to replace their existing tools or move their clients’ money. Instead, it plugs into what’s already there.

The broader timing may work in their favor. As baby boomers age, an estimated $50 trillion or more in assets is expected to pass to younger generations in the coming decades — creating a wave of new clients who will need financial advisors, and new pressure on firms to serve them.

That’s where home improvement and wealth management have something in common.

“There aren’t many bigger places, other than health, wealth and real estate, where you can impact a population, especially an underserved population,” Williams said. “That was at the heart of the motivation.”