The past two years have transformed the world of software development, but there’s at least one area that remains largely untouched by artificial intelligence: the operating-system layer inside phones, vehicles, and other connected devices. 

A Seattle startup called logcat.ai has raised $2.55 million to change that.

Co-founded by CEO Varun Chitre and CTO Tarun Vashisth, two engineers with years of experience building device software, logcat.ai is developing a system of AI agents that autonomously hunt down bugs across the kernel, modem, and firmware of devices running Android or Linux.

The pre-seed round was led by Founders’ Co-op, with participation from Act One Ventures, TheFounderVC, Shorewind Capital, Clayoquot Capital, and Alumni Ventures. 

“It’s one of the toughest areas of software engineering, and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure. Operating-system engineering is virtually hidden today,” Chitre said in an interview.

It’s also a challenge for many companies given a shortage of engineers who specialize in the field, compared to the much larger population of developers who build apps and software that run on top of the operating system.

How it works: An engineer using logcat.ai uploads the log files a device generates when something goes wrong — such as bug reports and kernel logs — and logcat.ai’s software analyzes them together to find the root cause and point to where in the code to fix it. Each finding cites the exact log line it came from, so an engineer can check the work.

Currently, logcat.ai finds the root cause and recommends a fix. The larger plan is to have the AI write the fixes, test them, and eventually build new features on its own, with engineers approving the work before it’s deployed.

The long-term goal, Chitre said, is to become the standard tool for building and maintaining operating systems on new and existing hardware — from smartphones to cars to robots and other embedded systems — so a company can ship without a full-stack specialist on staff.

“We’re moving toward a world where software and intelligence extend far beyond our laptops and phones, yet the tooling to build high-quality products for that world is still missing,” said Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op, in a statement.

He called Chitre and Vashisth “one of the only teams in the world truly up for the challenge.”

Traction: The company says it has served hundreds of engineering teams in a public beta, analyzed more than 10 billion lines of trace data, and run thousands of automated investigations. It’s generating revenue but isn’t ready to disclose numbers or customers. 

Competitive landscape: Chitre said logcat.ai’s main competition isn’t another product but in-house scripts and the knowledge locked in a few senior engineers’ heads. App-level crash tools like Google’s Crashlytics and Sentry stop at the app layer and don’t do the deeper system debugging.

Specialist vendors and the contract manufacturers that build devices are potential partners more than rivals, Chitre said, since they face the same engineer shortage.

GeekWire first reported on logcat.ai in March, in a Startup Radar roundup.

The team: Chitre and Vashisth met at Esper, the Bellevue, Wash.-based device-management company, where they worked together for more than seven years. They started logcat.ai because they had spent years doing debugging by hand and knew what was missing.

Chitre has spent more than 13 years in the field, getting operating systems to boot and run on new hardware and porting new Android releases and Linux kernels onto older devices. He was also a maintainer of LineageOS, a widely used open-source version of Android. 

Vashisth has led engineering teams working across Android, Linux, and iOS, and brings a background in large-scale distributed systems. At Esper, he rose to senior software engineering manager. His prior experience includes platform-architecture engineering at Target.

For now, the company is just the two founders: Chitre in the Seattle area, Vashisth in Bengaluru, India. They plan to hire about 10 people over the next year, with a distributed team working remotely from wherever they can find the specialized talent.

They know those hires won’t be easy to find, given the scarcity of people in the field. “That’s the same shortage our product exists to address,” Chitre said, “and we’re not exempt from it.” 

Augmodo, the Seattle startup that straps AI-powered cameras onto retail workers to track store shelves, has raised $21 million as it pushes its technology beyond grocery aisles and into warehouses, factories, and other physical workplaces.

The new funding, led by existing investor TQ Ventures, values Augmodo at $350 million.

CEO Ross Finman, who told GeekWire he wasn’t even looking to raise fresh capital, said he was motivated by interest in the startup’s technology from customers beyond retail, including automotive settings and hospitals.

“Fundamentally, someone grabbing a wrench at an automotive factory isn’t that different from someone grabbing a Cheerios box,” Finman said. “Turns out the algorithms work pretty well across all of those.”

Founded in 2023, Augmodo builds AI-powered “Smartbadges” — lightweight wearable devices with dual cameras — that store employees wear passively as they move through aisles. The badges use computer vision, 3D mapping, and spatial computing to track shelf inventory in real time, building what the company calls a digital “Realogram” of each store.

Augmodo raised $37.5 million a year ago in a round that came after Australian pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse — the startup’s first big customer — moved from a pilot to a full contract and validated the technology at scale. Now others want in on the action.

“Our whole mission statement is AI systems for the physical workforce,” Finman said. “Everyone’s focused on the 20% of the workforce that’s knowledge work, and we’re focused on the 80% of the workforce that’s physical work.”

That demand has pulled Augmodo into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery operations, and even employee training — verticals the company didn’t originally set out to serve. Existing retail customers, Finman said, kept expanding their contracts to cover new parts of their operations, from auditing warehouse pallets to logging maintenance work like HVAC repairs.

The Smartbadge itself has evolved, too. Finman said it’s now lighter than an iPhone Air and has grown into what he calls an “everything device,” adding walkie-talkie capabilities, an opt-in panic button, and a digital ID display, on top of its original inventory-tracking function.

“That’s actually become a really big selling point,” Finman said. “You don’t need to buy five or six different devices, you buy one at cost, and then here’s all the different features that you can get out of it.”

The company says it has grown 10x in revenue over the past year and now maps more than 186 million square feet of retail space monthly — a figure it expects to cross 1 billion square feet per month by year’s end. Augmodo is adding 50 to 100 new store locations a month.

The company’s headcount has grown 5x over the past year to more than 50 employees, including new CTO Bradford Snow, who joined in January after previous stints at Axon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

Augmodo is ranked No. 145 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups and was a finalist in the Hardware, Robotics, and Physical AI of the Year category at the 2026 GeekWire Awards.

Beyond TQ Ventures, backers include Lerer Hippeau, Jefferson River Capital, Arena Holdings, Chemist Warehouse, New Fare, Interlace, and Webb Investment Network.

Andrew Marks, co-founding partner at TQ, called Finman an “exceptional” leader and said every board meeting reinforced that demand for Augmodo’s tech was outpacing the team’s ability to serve it.

“When you pair a truly special founder with customers lining up around the door and pulling you into new markets, it was obvious we should propose putting more fuel on the fire,” Marks said.

Augmodo said it plans to use the new capital to expand its global enterprise footprint, invest further in its core AI models, and grow its engineering team — with a particular focus on hiring for computer vision and machine learning roles as the company scales its data processing beyond retail.

While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a funding round for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposedly going to replace.

Auger, the supply chain technology startup founded in Bellevue, Wash., by the former Amazon executive, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse, with existing investor Oak HC/FT also participating in the new round.

The round brings total funding to $150 million for the company, which has grown to about 130 employees and counts Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division, sports merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark among its customers.

Clark’s view is that general-purpose AI can generate insights but can’t handle deeply specialized domains like running a supply chain. Making financial and operational decisions and executing them at the scale of big companies requires systems built on strong supply chain expertise — what Auger calls its ontology, essentially a detailed map of how supply chains actually work.

“Many a pure technology company died on the hill of supply chain over the last decade,” said Clark, the company’s CEO, in an interview this week. “You really need to understand the complexity and the contextual requirements.”

Auger sits on top of a company’s existing systems — ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning tools — and unifies the data into a single operating layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents and traditional optimization models to make decisions and execute them automatically, as much as possible.

For example, in a recent demo at the company’s Bellevue office, Clark showed how the system would handle a supplier missing a delivery commitment when there isn’t enough product to go around. Auger identifies the shortfall, determines which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back to the company’s existing systems.

Most supply chain software, Clark said, generates alerts and waits for a person to act. Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and flag the exceptions for human review.

“We’re not really a tool,” he said. “We’re really the new employee.”

At Fanatics, the sports merchandise company, Clark said about 85% of decisions in the process Auger manages are happening autonomously, with a goal of reaching the mid-90s soon. In addition to the customers it has named so far, Clark said another eight to 10 companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead the company’s worldwide operations and later its worldwide consumer business. He left in 2022 and became CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarding startup, but that tenure lasted less than a year amid a turbulent period for the company.

He launched Auger in 2024 with a team that includes Leigh Anne Clark, his wife, who serves as co-founder and president of the company’s fashion and beauty division, focused on an industry Clark describes as one of the most wasteful supply chains outside of groceries.

Clark moved back to the Seattle area from Texas to tap the region’s talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. The company quickly assembled a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon’s senior ranks, along with leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce, spanning supply chain operations, AI, data science, and product development.

In March, Auger was named a premier supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric, the tech giant’s data platform. Auger’s product is built on Azure, and Microsoft sales reps can earn commission on Auger deals. Clark said the partnership has generated engagement but is still early.

Clark said Auger went out for the Series B early, before the company needed it, to avoid the distraction of fundraising during what he expects to be a busy fall of customer onboarding.

With the investment, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joined the Auger board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT’s Matt Streisfeld.

Auger hasn’t disclosed revenue or other financial metrics, but Clark said the valuation was roughly double the level set by Auger’s initial round. “We didn’t shoot for the crazy astronomical valuation,” he said. “We sat at a place that we felt really comfortable with.”

That pragmatic approach extends to how Auger operates. In Bellevue, the company works out of an office it subleased after Microsoft vacated the space. Auger kept the desks, monitors, and chairs the tech giant left behind, furnishing its new offices for next to nothing.

But Clark’s ambitions for the company are anything but modest. He said Auger’s goal is to have half of U.S. GDP flowing through its platform by 2030, with revenue exceeding $1 billion.

“That requires a pretty steep curve to get there,” he said. “We’re not playing small.”

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AI chip maker SambaNova has raised at an $11 billion valuation months after Intel was rumored to be trying to buy it for about $1.6 billion.

KredosAI, a Seattle-area startup that uses AI and behavioral science to help companies chase down late consumer payments, raised $7 million in a new funding round led by BMW i Ventures, the independent venture capital arm of automaker BMW Group.

The company, founded in 2021 by former T-Mobile executives Balaji Sridharan and Dave Thoms, is based in Issaquah, Wash. It focuses on the period after a bill is overdue but before the account gets sent to collections or written off. Its technology is able to tailor the wording, timing and channel of each overdue message based on a customer’s account history.

The premise, Sridharan said, is that most people aren’t being nefarious in their tardiness but are dealing with something more mundane, such as a forgotten due date, a short-term cash crunch, or possibly some kind of frustration with the service. 

“The majority of consumers who go late on payment actually want to pay,” he said. “There’s a very small subset of people that are fraudsters, but most of them want to pay.”

New investors Motley Fool Ventures and Walter Ventures joined existing backers Okapi Venture Capital, StartFast Ventures, SaaS Ventures and Stout Street Capital in the Series A round. Total funding to date for the company is a little over $10 million.

The BMW connection came through an introduction from an existing investor, Sridharan said. Having an automaker’s venture arm behind it matters, he added, as KredosAI moves deeper into auto lending.

Subprime auto-loan delinquencies have climbed to their highest levels since the 1990s. Lenders, Sridharan said, weigh the problem much the way telecoms do — balancing the cost of recovering a payment against the value of keeping the customer. That overlap, along with BMW’s footprint in the car business, made its venture arm a logical fit. 

KredosAI works with large enterprises, including some in the Fortune 50, though it doesn’t name most of them publicly. It got its start in telecom, which speaks to its roots: Sridharan and Thoms met at Bellevue-based T-Mobile. Sridharan spent eight years there, first running corporate strategy and later the carrier’s IoT unit, following an earlier stint at McKinsey. Thoms has spent much of his career in credit and collections at telecom and financial-services firms. 

Watching T-Mobile wrestle with millions of past-due accounts each month, they came to think there was a better way to handle the conversation with a customer who’d fallen behind. 

To decide what to send, the software weighs a customer’s account characteristics (how often they’ve been late before, their average balance, how long they’ve been a customer) while steering clear of off-limits signals like age. It reaches people through text, email and most recently RCS, along with AI voice agents the company began adding over the past year. 

The company says the approach delivers notable improvement: across its customers, it reports cutting write-offs by 11.5% and lifting customer lifetime value by 13.6% compared with conventional collections. It says its platform has handled more than 200 million customer interactions over the past two years, with revenue growing more than sixfold in that span. 

KredosAI is also a partner of FICO — the analytics firm best known for the FICO credit score — and integrates its technology into the FICO Platform, the software banks and other large companies use for credit decisions and collections.

The company competes with a range of collections-software players, including larger, more established Symend, a Calgary-based company that also uses behavioral science to interact with late-paying customers. The field also includes online debt collectors and companies selling older collections software. 

The company has about 25 employees, roughly eight of them in the Seattle area. 

Sridharan said the funding will go toward sales and marketing, further product development around agentic AI and voice agents, and eventually international expansion. He expects to roughly double headcount over the next year, to 50 people or more. 

The additional funding, he said, “gives us a bit of fuel to go to market a little more aggressively than we have in the past.”

Venice.ai, a privacy-focused AI startup with strong Seattle ties, has raised $65 million in its first outside funding, valuing the 2-year-old company at $1 billion. 

The company positions itself as a private and unrestricted alternative to mainstream AI services, offering access to a range of open-source and commercial AI models. Venice says it doesn’t log or store users’ prompts and responses on its servers, keeping conversations on people’s own devices. It also strips out many of the content filters built into competing tools. 

The Series A round, announced Wednesday morning, was led by Dragonfly, a crypto-focused investment firm, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Morgan Creek, Liquid2 Ventures and Seattle-based Founders’ Co-op. 

The company was founded in 2024 by crypto entrepreneur Erik Voorhees, its CEO. Voorhees founded the crypto exchange ShapeShift and has long argued against heavy government regulation of cryptocurrency.

Seattle tech veteran and serial entrepreneur Jesse Proudman is Venice’s president, CTO and co-founder. The two met as classmates at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.

“We want Venice to be thought of in the consumer landscape on the same terms as a ChatGPT or an Anthropic,” Proudman said in an interview. “We want people to open their phones and have our app sitting alongside those apps.”

The case for privacy comes from how people are starting to use AI. As chatbots become go-to tools for sensitive matters — medical questions, legal issues, job negotiations, relationship advice — users hand over intimate details that accumulate in the databases of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

That data, Proudman said, is only as safe as the company holding it.

“It only takes one breach, one disgruntled employee who is going through that data, a government subpoena, a change in government policy — and then all of that data no longer is private to you,” he said. “It can be health records, it can be legal questions, it can be job negotiations, it can be relationship advice.”

Venice’s answer is to create no central trove to breach or subpoena in the first place.

Marketing AI with fewer restrictions can make Venice more useful in some cases, but it also raises the misuse questions that lead mainstream services to build in guardrails in the first place. Proudman said Venice includes some safeguards to prevent abuse and illegal activity. 

The company nonetheless bills itself as an “AI safety company,” casting the surveillance of users’ thoughts — rather than the content of their prompts — as the greater danger. 

Proudman is based in Seattle, where he has spent more than two decades starting and selling technology companies. He founded cloud-computing company Blue Box, which IBM acquired in 2015, and crypto trading startup Strix Leviathan, acquired by hedge fund Parataxis in early 2025. Strix spun out Makara, a crypto investing startup, in 2021, and Betterment acquired Makara the following year. 

Proudman spent about three years as a VP at Betterment, where he started moonlighting on Venice in 2024 — building it nights and weekends before leaving to go full-time.

Venice says it reached 3 million users in April and turned profitable in the first quarter. 

“That hockey stick that we always hear about, and that I’ve spent 25 years trying to build companies to find, finally manifested,” Proudman said. 

Venice makes money through consumer subscriptions and paid access to its developer API. It also has its own cryptocurrency, the VVV token, which developers can buy and lock up to reserve a share of the company’s computing capacity instead of paying per use.

Proudman said Venice will use the funding to build its own data center infrastructure — owning the GPUs that power its service rather than renting computing capacity — and to invest in growth as it tries to establish itself as a mainstream consumer brand. 

The company has grown to about 45 employees, up from roughly 15 people a year ago, with six in Seattle. It operates as a remote team and doesn’t currently have an office. 

Whether Venice expands its Seattle footprint long-term may hinge on state politics. Proudman has publicly opposed Washington’s new 9.9% “millionaires tax” — a state income tax on household income above $1 million that was signed into law in March and takes effect in 2028 — and said he won’t stay in the state if it does. 

He’s pinning his hopes on a repeal campaign that backers are trying to get on the November ballot. 

“I love it here … Seattle is a unique and phenomenal place to build a company, and I’ve been building companies here my entire life,” Proudman said. “I want to see us continue to be competitive against the Bay Area.”