Defense tech giant Anduril, which is rapidly expanding its operations in the Seattle area, is looking to raise a new round of capital that could value the company at about $100 billion, reports Reuters.
That would give the privately-held startup a bigger valuation than Northrop Grumman, the 87-year-old defense company which is currently valued at $77 billion. Boeing’s market value stands at $165 billion, while Lockheed Martin is valued at $134 billion.
Founded in 2017, Anduril is led by the Hawaiian-shirt and cargo-shorts wearing Palmer Luckey, the 33-year-old creator of Oculus VR, whom the New York Times described as the “It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry.”
In May, the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company raised a $5 billion series H funding round — including investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz — that valued Anduril at $61 billion.
Anduril is rapidly expanding in the Seattle area, with offices in downtown Seattle and Bellevue where the company is working on a range of defense technologies, including its Lattice command and control software. That platform is described as an “AI-powered battle management platform built to accelerate complex kill chains.”
It also recently established operations at the historic Foss Maritime shipyard along the southern bank of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, where the company is developing autonomous naval vessels and other maritime technologies.
The company’s expansion in Washington state is not without controversy. Last weekend, protesters handed out flyers outside the company’s downtown Seattle offices that said: “Anduril Out! No AI for War and Plunder!”
Anduril said it recognizes the right to protest, while defending its work supporting the U.S. military and service members.
“We respect the right to free speech and we understand that protests are a hallmark of democratic expression,” Anduril said in a statement provided to GeekWire. “That said, it is perplexing when people choose to protest a company dedicated to supporting the very military that safeguards those rights.”
Earlier this week, Anduril announced a new program called Thunder, an autonomous attack rotorcraft that it said is “designed to multiply the combat power and increase the survivability of current and next-generation crewed attack and assault aircraft.”
The size of the potential funding round hasn’t been determined and the terms are still in flux, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. One structure under discussion would have investors commit upfront to a second financing within a year at a higher valuation, contingent on Anduril hitting certain financial targets.
In a statement, Anduril said the “reporting runs well ahead of the facts.”
“Any details about terms, structure, pricing, or timing of a future financing round are purely speculative,” the company said. “As a private company, we regularly evaluate opportunities to fund the growth of the business. Beyond that, we don’t comment on rumors.”
In a headquarters and lab space formerly occupied by SpaceX in Redmond, Wash., AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM) is focused on solving big problems on Earth. But the startup’s CEO envisions a day when autonomous bulldozers and excavators will dig, haul, and grade on the moon or Mars, and take AIM’s “terraforming mission” off planet.
For now, AIM’s 25,000-square-foot facility in a nondescript business park is a long way from Mars. Inside the sprawling space, there are glimpses of what the rapidly growing company is working on, including the apparatuses that attach to existing machines to make them self-driving.
Around the office, desk cubicles are decorated with tiny yellow excavator buckets, mirroring photos on the walls of heavy equipment operating on job sites worldwide.
The toy excavators are a nod to a massive global market that AIM founder and CEO Adam Sadilek wants to continue to disrupt with modern technology.
Autonomous passenger vehicles have captured the public’s attention for decades, but construction, mining and hauling equipment attracts little fanfare, even as legacy companies including Komatsu and Caterpillar embrace new technology.
AIM’s goal is not to build new machinery, but retrofit existing earthmoving fleets with a physical AI platform — using advanced sensors and edge compute to let heavy iron operate entirely on its own.
Founded in 2021, the startup grew out of Sadilek’s background at Google where he spent nine years working on projects involving AI and autonomous vehicle systems.
Whether building anti-flood structures or wildfire breaks, managing nuclear waste, mining critical materials or clearing land for agriculture or the military, Sadilek views AIM’s work as immediate terraforming on Earth that is necessary to drive down costs for housing and commodities. But the long-term vision remains interplanetary.
“When humanity goes to Mars, the real question is not so much around what the rocket looks like as a vehicle to get us there, but what is going to happen after the rocket lands,” Sadilek said. “You cannot have human operators run there. That’s why this is a very long mission that we are on.”
Building autonomy for heavy equipment presents a paradox self-driving cars never have to face: the ground itself is constantly changing. While a Tesla or Waymo relies on pre-mapped roads and predictable lanes, a bulldozer or excavator’s entire job is to reshape its environment. AIM’s physical AI platform has to continuously build real-time 3D maps using onboard 360-degree LiDAR and edge compute, making split-second decisions without relying on persistent GPS or cloud connectivity on remote job sites.
Furthermore, taking human operators out of cab seats addresses one of the most perilous aspects of heavy industry. By creating “zero-entry” sites where machines operate autonomously, AIM’s platform effectively removes workers from harm’s way — transitioning traditional equipment operators into remote site supervisors who oversee entire fleets from a safe distance.
Beyond early deployments in mining and site preparation for data centers, AIM landed a $4.9 million U.S. Air Force contract earlier this year to deploy autonomous machines for airfield repair and base construction in remote or high-risk zones. The military work builds on the company’s growing momentum following a $50 million funding round backed by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Human Capital.
AIM has risen to No. 110 on the GeekWire 200 ranking on top Pacific Northwest startups.
To support its growth, AIM has rapidly expanded its headcount, doubling in size to about 80 employees in the last few months. Sadilek is attracted to the Seattle area’s intersection of hardware expertise from companies like Boeing and Amazon alongside top-tier software and AI talent.
But while AIM has managed to hire a couple former SpaceX engineers to build out its team, it isn’t the only startup mining that rocket-engineering pedigree. TerraFirma, an Austin-based company founded by two more SpaceX engineers, raised $115 million earlier this month in the burgeoning race to semi-automate physical construction.
For Sadilek, anchoring his team in Redmond rather than Silicon Valley was a deliberate decision to stay rooted in physical engineering. Having spent years in the Bay Area during his time at Google, Sadilek wanted to avoid the tech industry’s “echo chamber.”
“I wanted to be somewhat shielded from the Kool-Aid in Silicon Valley,” he said. “We wanted to build something that’s real and gets in the black really quickly… To do that, you need to do it in an environment that is more anchored in reality.”
That philosophy extends directly into their field testing. AIM’s regional proving grounds in the mountains near Monroe, Wash., expose the autonomous equipment to heavy snow and inclement weather early in development so the physical AI is built for harsh, real-world conditions from day one.
Amid the hard hats, safety vests and construction-related decor in AIM’s headquarters space, one piece of art offers a fun take on where AIM has been and where it’s headed.
The 1949 photograph, titled “Refueling the Sunkist Lady,” shows a Jeep driving beneath a low-flying plane and transferring supplies to aid the crew during an endurance flight.
Sadilek likes it as a reminder of getting started, and what it feels like to build a company from scratch, literally working on the airplane while it’s already rolling down the runway.
“The first years of AIM were exactly like that,” he said. “I think every tech startup is like that in the early days. The problem is that some of them never finish building it before the runway ends.”
— Agility Robotics named Michael Beer as its chief financial officer. Current CFO and chief operating officer Jennifer Hunter will transition to serving exclusively as COO.
“Michael brings outstanding public company finance and capital markets experience, while Jennifer, with her prior experience as a publicly traded COO, will focus exclusively on scaling our operational excellence and manufacturing capabilities,” said CEO Peggy Johnson, in a statement.
The Salem, Ore.-based startup, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, the company announced last month.
Beer joins Agility Robotics from the California energy storage company Energy Vault, where he was CFO for two years. Past roles include venture partner at Vest Coast Capital and CFO at FreeWire Technologies.
— Seattle-area tech veteran Matt Fisher has taken the role of CTO for London-based Efekta Education. The company is developing an agentic teaching and learning platform.
“I’ve spent my career building technologies that help people learn, connect and achieve more. What attracted me to Efekta is its clear vision for using AI to enhance learning, support teachers and
make high-quality education accessible to more people around the world,” Fisher said.
Last August, Fisher joined immersive media startup Adventr as a late-stage co-founder. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CTO at Daydream, a startup that raised a $50 million seed round last year to shake up the way people find and buy clothing online. Other past roles include leadership at Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom and Auth0.
— There is another name to add to the raft of departures from Microsoft‘s security leadership.
Rahul Prakash, head of product for Microsoft Security Copilot, shared that he’s leaving his role after nearly a decade with the company.
“As any Identity professional will tell you, the world of [Identity Access Management] is far more intricate than people realize, and it’s being rewritten for the world of AI agents. At Microsoft, I’ve had the privilege of going deep into this space…” Prakash said on LinkedIn.
On Monday, GeekWire reported that Rudra “Rudy” Mitra, who spent more than 27 years at Microsoft, was joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of security services. Other recent departures include Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy, who resigned at after nearly three decades.
— Nancy Lipson has joined Zap Energy as chief legal officer. The Everett, Wash.-based company is in pursuit of fusion energy, and recently expanded its scope to include next generation nuclear fission.
Lipson was previously executive vice president and CLO for the gold mining giant Newmont Corporation, departing after 18 years in 2023.
“Nancy’s deep expertise in areas of corporate strategy, governance, compliance, and sustainability will be key assets as Zap pursues its integrated approach to advanced nuclear,” Zap posted on LinkedIn.
— Jyoti Shukla was named chief product and technology officer at KEXP, a nonprofit radio station serving Seattle and the Bay Area. The station includes community and performance spaces, and features wide-ranging music genres.
“There is a lot of meaningful work ahead, and I’m excited to keep learning, building, and partnering with an amazing team as we shape what’s next,” Shukla said on LinkedIn.
Prior to taking the role, Shukla served on KEXP’s board of directors and was senior vice president of product design at SiriusXM. She has also worked in tech leadership roles at Nordstrom and Starbucks, and started her career at Microsoft.
— ZEV Co-op, a Washington-based nonprofit EV carshare cooperative, announced Ry Armstrong as its new executive director. Armstrong was previously at Sustainable Seattle, where they served as co-director.
— Tirzah VanDamme has joined Gagen MacDonald as senior director of AI and digital transformation. She brings more than 20 years of experience and was most recently at Microsoft.
— The Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS) announced the election four new board members. They are:
WSAS also elected 30 new members, who will assist the organization in providing scientific and technical information to state policymakers.
They include 26 scientists and engineers elected by their WSAS peers and four members recently elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, or Medicine or awarded the Nobel Prize and who reside or work in Washington state.
The members include 11 UW professors and eight from WSU, five researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, three from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and three at private companies, with some participants holding roles at multiple institutions.
As AI changes how people discover products online, marketers are rethinking the traditional digital advertising playbook. With AI-generated answers reducing clicks on search results and display ads, brands are looking for new ways to reach customers.
Seattle startup MediaPact wants to capitalize on that shift.
Founded in 2026 by online marketing veteran Lacie Thompson, MediaPact makes finding and signing ad deals quicker, painless, and accountable for both publishers and companies. It has raised $200,000 in a small friends and family round, and recently added companies like BroBible, Gadget Review and Penske Media to the platform.
We caught up with Thompson for GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about her one-person startup, how AI helped her build the business despite having no coding experience and what surprised her most about launching in a market she thought she already knew.
In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
MediaPact is a marketplace and workflow for flat-fee direct media. Buyers discover publishers, newsletters, and creators, then negotiate terms, sign the IO (insertion order), and pay, all in one place. Seller inventory is standardized to list inventory in a searchable format. It is the direct media buy without the 40-email thread.
What problem are you obsessed with solving?
Flat-fee media is a massive market that still runs on emails, PDFs, calls, bespoke IOs and a Google Sheet named “final_FINAL_v3.”
Nine out of ten publishers I have interviewed described their flat-fee workflow as exactly that: manual email threads, hand-built IOs, invoices they chase for 60 days. Meanwhile, the buyer on the other side of that thread is sitting on budget and cannot find them.
Programmatic solved this for banner ads 15 years ago. Nobody has ever solved it for this type of media: sponsored articles, newsletters, or podcast reads. I am obsessed with making a direct media buy as easy as booking a flight.
What surprised you after talking to customers?
Two things:
Supply is not the problem. I have spent 15 years in this industry, so I can sign publishers all day. Demand is the hard part. Every marketplace founder reads The Cold Start Problem and still thinks they are the exception. I was not the exception.
The buyers are much more broad than I thought. I come from affiliate and performance. Those teams live and die on click-based measurement. While they often purchase flat-fee media, they sometimes avoid the risk of guaranteed placement because of over-scrutinized click-based attribution (especially on a last click).
One hyper-performance-based agency told me flatly that this was not for them. Brand marketers who understand top of funnel growth get it. They are typically at a mid-stage consumer brand that has plateaued on Meta and Google and needs somewhere else to go. Shopper marketers are also very focused on working with partners that can reach their audience, even if they are influencing in-store behavior in ways that are difficult to measure. Said another way, MediaPact is for the marketer who uses art, the marketer who uses science and the marketer who uses both.
How has AI changed the way you build your company?
Two ways, and the second is a strategic angle for the platform, not just an operational efficiency.
The obvious one: I built and shipped (and am continuing to do so) the entire platform with Claude Code. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe Connect, the whole thing. I have zero experience writing code, managing dev teams, or product management. And now I can ship features to production within less than a day. I don’t say this to boast, but rather to show that this is a structural change in who gets to start what kinds of companies.
AI is eating the click. When ChatGPT answers the question, nobody clicks. And the content is so trusted that conversion happens at 4.4 times the rate. So brands stop competing for rankings and start competing to be inside the source material that the models cite, which is high-authority editorial. That is not just SEO anymore. It is Answer Engine Optimization, and the only way in is to be in the content. MediaPact allows buyers to do this.
What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?
That it is for affiliate marketers. My résumé makes people assume rev-share, cookies, and last-click attribution.
It is the opposite. Flat fee, guaranteed placement, signed IO, and automated payment. Sellers get paid for their audience and their authority, not for whatever the attribution model felt like giving them that month. Publishers have been shortchanged by last-click for decades and everyone in our industry knows it.
What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?
Launching the company and determining the real TAM.
My network is affiliate. Those are warm calls, fast meetings, and lots of enthusiastic nodding. It would have been very comfortable to build for them. But the customer discovery data pointed toward brand marketers, shopper marketers, and media planning and buying teams—audiences who don’t know me.
Even though I know this challenge, I’m tackling it by figuring things out as I go, in the same way I did before: by building partnerships and relationships that grant me access to the right opportunities.
What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?
Ask for help. The key, though, is that you have to give help, you must be someone people want to help and that isn’t just granted—it’s earned over years. I naturally think of asking my network for help: my friends, my family, and my advisors. But now you can also ask Claude (or your preferred AI) for help. While it’s definitely not the same, knowing when to ask whom or what for help is probably the most powerful needle-mover.
We’ll know our company has made it when…
I’m the most proud when I know the platform has benefited someone. Usually when that’s the case, they want to tell their friends about it. That part of the growth cycle is always the most fun for me because I have the luxury of getting out of hustle mode and into innovation mode, pushing beyond the beta, dreaming big and taking things beyond my current scope.
When sellers tell brands “just send it through MediaPact” without me anywhere in the conversation, that will be a milestone. The day the marketplace works without the founder in the middle is the day it is actually a marketplace.
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Last year, lifestyle icon Martha Stewart created an internet sensation when she told a podcast host that she would pick composting over burial or cremation after she dies. She has Seattle entrepreneur Katrina Spade to thank for making that option an available, legal choice.
While a graduate student studying architecture, Spade set out to create an alternative for putting people to rest — one that offered a climate-friendly, sustainable solution while remaining practical in urban settings and palatable to loved ones.
“Cremation and burial, both are polluting in their own way,” Spade said. “And I don’t want my last gesture to pollute the earth.”
So in 2020, Spade launched her company, Recompose, becoming the first in the U.S. to develop the technology needed for the commercial composting of human bodies. Now 14 states have legalized the practice and more than a dozen others are considering it. Additional companies have joined Recompose in providing the alternative “death care” service and all are looking to scale. One, Earth Funeral, earlier this year opened the first human composting facility on the East Coast.
In comparing funeral options, a cremation produces about 530 pounds of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a fuel-efficient car from Seattle to San Diego. Burials consume land and can rely on toxic embalming chemicals, chemically treated caskets, and concrete vaults. Composting requires almost no energy input and produces clean soil.
The process is relatively simple: A deceased person is put in a vessel with natural materials that create the conditions needed for composting. But Spade had to navigate technical and legal hurdles to turn the concept into a business, sparking a new sector within the funeral field.
Stewart and Spade both came to champion human composting by way of horses. When Stewart’s equine pets die, she wraps them in linen and buries them on her land to naturally decay into soil in a process akin to composting.
During her research, Spade discovered a video on horse composting from Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Carpenter-Boggs is an expert in the practice, which is routinely applied to livestock like cows and horses. Spade wanted to refine the approach for humans, and the two began collaborating.
They developed a strategy using stainless steel vessels and a blend of straw, alfalfa and wood chips.
“We determined… the best kind of recipe of plant materials that would have the right ratios of carbon and nitrogen, and also the right structural properties to allow air to permeate, because oxygen is critical to this process,” Spade said.
The vessels include thermometers to ensure the body reaches and holds a temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit for three consecutive days to destroy pathogens. The heat is generated entirely by naturally occurring microbes.
Before Spade could deploy the technology, she had another problem to solve. She was contacted by Tanya Marsh, a professor and expert in human remains law, who informed Spade that her plan was “completely illegal” in all 50 states, but offered to help her change that.
Spade then turned to her Seattle neighbor, state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was coincidentally pursuing another climate-friendly end-of-life alternative called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation. Pedersen sponsored legislation to legalize composting, and it passed in 2019 with bipartisan support, paving the way for Recompose.
Recompose has created an environment that Spade hopes is comforting for grieving friends and families. The facility features a room for sitting with the deceased, who is wrapped in a natural linen shroud, and a memorial space with vaulted ceilings and green and golden stained-glass windows.
Beyond that is the “greenhouse,” a soil- and straw-scented space containing 33 vessels for composting. Active composting takes about one month; the resulting soil is then removed to “cure” for an additional month to cool and dry out. Bones are broken down mechanically and added back to the soil, while non-organic materials like artificial joints are recycled.
The process creates 20 to 30 bags of a mulch-like material. Friends and families take as much as they like, and Recompose can donate a portion to its partners in land restoration and conservation.
Other companies offering human composting include Return Home and Earth Funeral, which are both based in the Seattle area.
Interest in the death-care alternative has been surprisingly broad.
“I really thought that this was going to be for the Subaru-driving urban Seattle dwellers, and they certainly exist,” said Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home. “But we get as many people from ruby-red Eastern Washington as we do from Seattle or Bellevue.”
While liberals are drawn to the climate benefits, conservative farmers and hunters often feel deeply connected to returning to the land, Truman said. A third segment of customers simply finds traditional burial and cremation unnerving.
In an unexpected turn, younger adults are opting in, too. Elyssa Tappero, a 30-something tsunami program manager for Washington state, is pre-funding her $7,000 Recompose service via $100 monthly installments.
“When I learned how much of an environmental impact there is from cremation, and how expensive some of those things are — and just the entire approach by the funeral industry — I knew that wasn’t something I wanted,” Tappero said.
Spade recognizes that addressing climate change requires much bigger actions than human composting, but is eager to do her part.
“If we can truly and meaningfully change the funeral industry, the way we care for our bodies, and … connect humans even more to the fact that we’re part of that ecosystem, we’re part of the natural world, that would be hugely satisfying,” she said.
Interviews:
Additional sources:
Seattle’s Copper has landed a high-profile new backer as it looks to accelerate growth of its consumer rewards platform, announcing Tuesday that Grammy-winning artist, DJ and entrepreneur Diplo has invested in the company.
Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.
“I’m always looking for things that actually make sense for people,” Diplo said in a statement. “Copper’s one of those — you’re already on your phone, you’re already spending money, and this gives something back. That’s real.”
Copper says more than 4 million members use its platform to earn money through mobile games, cash-back offers and purchases.
Copper CEO Eddie Behringer, who previously co-founded Snap! Raise, said the company is building an alternative to consumer apps that monetize users’ attention.
“Most consumer apps are designed to take more from the user — more time, more money, more attention,” Behringer said in a LinkedIn post. “At Copper, we’re building the opposite.”
Founded in 2019, Copper originally launched as a banking app for teenagers. GeekWire covered the startup in 2022 after it raised $29 million in funding to expand into investing products, at a time when the company had nearly 1 million users.
The startup has since evolved into a broader consumer rewards platform. Copper has raised $42 million to date and recently ranked No. 2 among the Pacific Northwest’s fastest-growing companies in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 rankings, based on three-year revenue growth.
Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, has built a business portfolio that extends beyond music, investing in technology and consumer startups while launching ventures such as Diplo’s Run Club, a series of 5K races paired with music festivals.
He’s a three-time Grammy winner, and has collaborated with artists like Labrinth and Sia as part of the musical group LSD and worked with musician Mark Ronson on Silk City. He’s also the founder of record label Mad Decent.
In 2024, Copper discontinued its banking services following the collapse of fintech infrastructure provider Synapse, forcing the startup to pivot away from its original business. “Despite our prior planning, this event has forced us to close banking accounts much sooner than anticipated,” Behringer wrote at the time.
The company has since rebuilt around its rewards platform, which it says now serves millions of users.
Behringer said that the company’s mission was always about helping families improve their financial lives.
“As household costs rose, we saw an even bigger opportunity to help the person making everyday spending decisions earn more from the things they were already doing—from buying groceries to shopping in-store and spending time on their phone,” Behringer tells GeekWire via email. “Diplo’s investment is meaningful validation of how far that evolution has come.”
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