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.

Amazon confirmed Wednesday that it laid off an unspecified number of employees in its artificial general intelligence (AGI) organization, the division working on the company’s advanced AI models.

The move, first reported by Reuters, comes as the company invests heavily in programs to help businesses implement AI effectively, including a $1 billion initiative to embed AWS engineers with customers building agentic AI systems.

It’s part of a larger shift in the industry as tech giants and AI frontier labs look to make sure the enormous sums they’re spending on AI pay off in tools businesses actually use.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said building large AI models remains “one of the most important things we’re working on,” but said the company is also “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts.”

“That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization, even as we continue to invest in the areas most important to our customers’ future,” the spokesperson said.

It’s the latest in a series of changes in Amazon’s AGI group, which despite its name has always been focused more on frontier models than on what the industry considers AGI, the still-theoretical systems that would match or surpass human intelligence.

Rohit Prasad, the senior executive who oversaw Amazon’s AGI work, left the company late last year, and AGI Lab head David Luan departed in February. In December, Amazon folded the AGI group into a larger organization led by senior vice president Peter DeSantis that also includes chip development and quantum computing.

The cuts are the latest in a series of smaller reductions since January, when Amazon eliminated 16,000 jobs across the company. Amazon said U.S. employees whose jobs are cut will receive 90 days of pay and benefits, outplacement support and transitional health coverage, along with eligibility for severance.

The latest game from Seattle-based developer Harebrained Schemes, and its first since its return to independence in 2023, is a dark sci-fi/horror adventure where the player must constantly change and enhance their body in order to survive.

In GRAFT, players take the role of Tiger, a man with jumbled memories who’s trapped aboard the Arc, a massive, decaying space station. The Arc’s other inhabitants include failed experiments, crazed mutants, bands of human survivors that could be either allies or enemies, and a hostile AI.

To survive, Tiger must salvage new parts from his enemies and graft them into his own body, which gives him new weapons, abilities, and upgrades. However, each new body part comes with its own secondhand memories, which quickly impacts Tiger’s sense of identity.

That leads naturally to a cyberpunk-infused Ship of Theseus situation: how much of yourself can you replace before you’re no longer you?

Harebrained CEO Mike McCain describes GRAFT as a survival horror game, in the spirit of mainstream releases like Resident Evil and Dead Space. In order to succeed, players must ration their available resources, constantly scavenge for supplies, and carefully pick their battles. Sometimes it’s going to be better to simply run away.

GRAFT is being developed in Unreal Engine by a core team of five at Harebrained, plus “key collaborators.” McCain also serves as GRAFT’s project director.

Harebrained Schemes was founded in 2011 by Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman, who’d previously worked together on the Crimson Skies franchise. After releasing two mobile games, Harebrained pivoted to the PC market with a trilogy of crowdfunded strategy RPGs based on the Shadowrun tabletop game.

In 2018, Harebrained released a new BattleTech game for PC and Linux via the Swedish publisher Paradox Interactive (Crusader Kings). Paradox subsequently acquired Harebrained for $7.5 million. Shortly afterward, Weisman stepped down as CEO; he would eventually leave the company to found the no-code game development platform Endless Adventures.

5 years later, Paradox announced that it would “part ways” with Harebrained, shortly after the release of Harebrained’s original strategy RPG The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World. McCain, who’d previously been the director on BattleTech, rejoined the company in early 2024 as Harebrained’s new CEO, while Gitelman stepped back to an advisory role.

Following the separation, Paradox owns and operates most of Harebrained’s previous catalog, including Shadowrun, BattleTech, Lamplighters League, and Harebrained’s 2016 action-RPG Necropolis. With GRAFT, Harebrained is effectively starting from scratch.

GRAFT does not currently have a release date.

Nearly 20 years ago (!), in 2007, I published my first and only book: Microsoft 2.0. It focused on changes I expected at the company in the “Post-Gates” era. What would remain the same and what likely would be different once co-founder and CEO Bill Gates had left the building?

CEO Satya Nadella has not exited the company (yet). But there’s no question that Microsoft and its mission have morphed considerably in the past year or two. I’m not quite ready to christen this the Microsoft 3.0 era, even though Nadella handed the reins of Microsoft’s dominant commercial business to Judson Althoff nearly a year ago.

That decision resulted in Nadella moving into more of a “founder mode” role, allowing him to focus less on the day-to-day work of running the business. (Microsoft historians may recall that Gates made a somewhat similar move back in 2000 when he became Microsoft’s chief software architect.)

While it might not yet be time for Microsoft 3.0, we arguably could be in the “Microsoft 2.5” era. Windows and Office are still around and still play a big role. Microsoft still builds and sells developer tools and databases. But there’s no question that the cloud and all things AI are at the top of the pecking order now.

I’m embarking on a series here at GeekWire that will focus on what matters to Microsoft and, by extension, to its customers, partners, investors, and employees these days. Who are some of the people shaping and leading the company? What are their opportunities and challenges right now?

Over the next few weeks, I will be profiling various Microsoft execs working on plans for Microsoft’s ongoing evolution. Some are company veterans; some are newcomers. I’ll be talking with top execs from Microsoft’s Security, Copilot, Windows + Devices, Xbox, GitHub, and more.

I’m interested in their strategies for Microsoft’s key products and technologies and how they plan to try to turn Microsoft’s ambitious vision into reality. What are their teams building? What do they see as their biggest challenges and opportunities? And where do they see the technologies in their respective areas heading?

I feel like many of us who’ve been keeping track of the biggest tech companies (myself included) have fallen into the trap of blaming or attributing everything a company does to AI. Layoffs? AI is the culprit. Price increases? It’s all thanks to AI. Changing sales strategies? Chalk it up to AI …

But upon further reflection, I believe Microsoft’s strategy is more nuanced than “AI or bust.” There’s no question that Microsoft’s AI ambitions are shaping its goals and tactics. But Microsoft, as a heavily enterprise-focused entity, can’t simply stop supporting products that aren’t built from the ground up with AI (as much as it might like to do so). Nor can it just leave behind customers who aren’t 100% onboard with its AI moves.

Couple those enterprise hurdles with some not-so-popular consumer decisions, like axing 3,200 people in the gaming unit, and Microsoft’s approach to turning the ship looks a lot trickier.

Our Microsoft 2.5 series kicks off Thursday. Stay tuned.

Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.

The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.

Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.

President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.

The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.

Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.

“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.

Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.

Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.

Jean Paoli has spent his career making documents readable by machines — first as a co-creator of XML, then helping build the file formats behind Microsoft Office. Now his Kirkland, Wash.-based startup, Docugami, is open-sourcing the technology at the heart of its business, betting it can become a standard way to turn documents into data that people and AI agents can trust. 

The company is releasing its technology, called DGML (short for Document Graph Markup Language), under Apache 2.0, a widely used open-source license, so other developers and companies can adopt it.

The idea is to turn it into a shared standard that no single company owns, much as XML became a common foundation across the tech industry. 

The move reflects a shift in where the value is created in AI. Docugami until now has made its money selling software that turns unstructured documents into usable data. It’s betting now that there’s more value in proving that data is trustworthy instead. 

How it works: Docugami is teaming up with Inveniam, a Detroit company whose software helps big investors keep tabs on the mountains of paperwork behind real estate and other hard-to-value assets. Inveniam will record a kind of digital fingerprint of each piece of DGML data on NVNM Chain, its blockchain built with Mantra, a crypto firm that Inveniam is acquiring.

That means, for example, that a single fact buried in a 200-page lease — such as the rental rate, a renewal option, or a default clause — can be verified on its own, without exposing the whole document. An investor, auditor, or AI agent can trace it to the page it came from. 

To work with documents, AI systems usually convert them into a simpler format first. DGML enters a growing field of contenders in that regard, competing with the popular Markdown format and DocLang, a new open standard for AI-ready documents backed by IBM, Nvidia and Red Hat.

The business model: This is a big move for a company of Docugami’s size, taking the 30-person startup in a new direction. Paoli is handing the industry the technology his team spent years building, and pinning the company’s future on a larger idea.

The plan is to make money not from the format itself but from the value of the trusted data. Once a company converts its leases or loans into DGML and anchors the key numbers on the blockchain, investors, lenders and auditors can pay to draw on that verified data.

Docugami will share in the revenue through its partnership with Inveniam. The company also stands to collect a small fee each time a piece of data is recorded on the chain. 

The company is giving away the DGML format and a working version of the software, but not everything. Paoli said the company is keeping some of its own technology private, including AI models it has fine-tuned to read documents, and could sell those or other tools to enterprises. 

“The business model of everybody is changing. And if you know any company where it’s not true, you need to tell me, because I haven’t met them yet,” Paoli said in an interview. 

Docugami has raised about $13 million to date, including a $10 million seed round in 2020 that drew the first investment in Grammarly’s history.

The partnership: Paoli met Patrick O’Meara, Inveniam’s CEO, a few months ago, through a former Microsoft colleague who had become one of O’Meara’s advisers. They quickly realized they had been working toward the same idea from different directions.

Inveniam, founded in 2017, helps big investors keep track of assets that are hard to value, like office towers, private loans and infrastructure. It monitors the documents behind those assets and flags changes as they happen, and its clients include some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, according to O’Meara.

What it lacked was a consistent way to break those documents into verifiable pieces. That is what Docugami provides.

“We’re not putting the data itself on-chain, just a fingerprint of the document. Change one bit, one byte, one pixel, and the hash won’t match,” O’Meara said.

The blockchain comes from Mantra, a crypto company run by John Patrick Mullin. Inveniam invested $20 million in Mantra last year and has since agreed to acquire it outright. Mantra’s OM token collapsed in April 2025, erasing several billion dollars in value. 

Paoli said the project uses the underlying blockchain, not the token.

“Crypto as an industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last 18 to 24 months, and it’s growing up in a lot of ways. This is a real use case with fundamental value, not just pure speculation,” Mantra’s Mullin said in an interview. 

The result is a division of labor: Docugami turns documents into data, Inveniam verifies it and brings the customers, and Mantra provides the chain where the proof is recorded.

The DGML specification, sample documents and reference code are at dgml.io and on GitHub. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to correct the name of a competing document format, DocLang, and to note that Inveniam’s blockchain is called NVNM Chain.

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.

The science and the law

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.

An unexpected appeal

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.

Younger generations opt in

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.

Sources and references

Interviews:

• Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose
• Micah Truman, founder and CEO of Return Home
• Elyssa Tappero, customer of Recompose and tsunami program manager for the Washington Emergency Management Division

Additional sources:

• Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, chair of the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University
• Inside Recompose, where the human composting startup is ready to grow its formula beyond Seattle (GeekWire)
• 50+ & Unfiltered with Shawn Killinger, Episode 124 with Martha Stewart
• The environmental toll of cremating the dead (National Geographic)
• The Potential of Our Decay: Cemeteries That Save the American Landscape (Smithsonian)

The Mars Society is planning to build a Pacific Northwest research station suitable for simulating missions to the moon or Mars, in partnership with South Seattle College.

The nonprofit space advocacy group announced today that its executive director, James L. Burk, and the college’s president, Monica Brown, have signed a 10-year memorandum of agreement establishing the partnership.

The plan calls for the Mars Society to lease land on the college’s 87-acre West Seattle campus and build the research station, contingent on funding. Both parties will raise funds from aerospace companies and other donors to support construction, with the goal of opening the station at the start of the 2027-2028 academic year.

The agreement provides for the creation of a joint space studies curriculum and certificate program; a student capstone project and internship program tied to industry partners; and a regional workforce pipeline and community engagement effort.

The Seattle facility would be the third analog research station operated by the Mars Society, joining the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Canada’s Devon Island and the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.

Those two stations were built more than two decades ago to reflect the designs for Mars habitats. They provide opportunities for teams of researchers to test the tools and techniques that future astronauts might use for extraterrestrial exploration. During their missions, the researchers live and work under simulated Mars conditions. For example, they’re required to put on simulated spacesuits every time they venture outside their habitat.

Burk said the Seattle research station will reflect NASA’s growing emphasis on moon exploration as a precursor to crewed Mars missions, as well as South Seattle College’s traditional emphasis on workforce training. “For more than two decades, the Mars Society has operated analog research stations in the Utah desert and the Canadian Arctic that have shaped how humanity will live and work on other worlds. Bringing that capability to an urban community college campus is something new, and it is deliberate,” he said.

“The moon and Mars programs the federal government has now committed to are going to need a workforce we have not trained for in 50 years,” Burk said. “South Seattle College knows how to train people for the industries that actually build things. That approach is exactly what we need for preparing for planetary surface operations on the moon and Mars.”

The analog research projects would build upon the college’s existing training programs. For example, students learning about electric vehicle maintenance and repair could work on projects involving battery-powered rovers and drones. Students in the college’s culinary arts program could contribute to research into growing vegetables in space environments.

“South Seattle College has a long tradition of meeting our region’s workforce needs in aerospace, applied science, and skilled trades,” Brown said. “This partnership extends that tradition, and this initiative reflects our commitment to exploring bold, future-oriented opportunities that expand access, inspire imagination, and ensure our students are prepared to lead in emerging industries.”

The Mars Society is headquartered in Colorado but has plenty of Pacific Northwest connections. The Seattle chapter was created in 1998, shortly after the national organization was founded. Burk, a former Microsoft project manager, lives and works in North Bend, Wash.

During a 2023 podcast interview, Mars Society President Robert Zubrin — who earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Washington — said the Pacific Northwest was “perhaps at the top of the list” of potential sites for a Mars Technology Institute. Today’s announcement appears to be consistent with Zubrin’s assessment of the region.

In its news release, the Mars Society noted that the Pacific Northwest “hosts one of the largest concentrations of commercial space activity in the United States.” The society specifically cited Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite factory and L3Harris Technologies’ Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Redmond.

To raise public awareness of the Seattle project, the Mars Society said it plans to install an inflatable mockup of a research habitat in South Seattle College’s Aviation Maintenance Technology facilities this summer. The society also hinted at more to come, saying that there’s “a public event in the works.”

Seattle-based Interlune says it has managed to produce 99% pure helium-3 from a standard supply of industrial-grade helium, marking a milestone for a technology that the company aims to use on the moon.

The process, known as Cold Capture, could be profitably used on Earth even before Interlune begins lunar mining operations.

Only 0.000137% of the world’s helium exists in the form of helium-3, as opposed to the much more common helium-4 isotope. But helium-3 is uniquely suited for use as a refrigerant for quantum computers. It can also be used in radiation detectors, medical scanners and eventually fusion reactors.

Because of its rarity and utility, the price of helium-3 can range as high as $20 million per kilogram ($9 million per pound). Interlune is betting on the proposition that helium-3 is more abundant and easier to access on the moon, due to the lunar surface’s exposure to the solar wind. If Interlune’s business model works out, the company will be able to turn a profit by delivering lunar helium-3 to Earth for industrial applications.

Interlune’s first objective was to show that Cold Capture could work as advertised. The process uses cryogenic distillation to separate helium-3 from ordinary helium at temperatures approaching absolute zero.

“Capturing helium-3 from existing helium sounds deceptively simple,” Gary Lai, Interlune’s chief technology officer, said in a news release. “But helium-3 and ordinary helium are almost chemically identical, making them extraordinarily difficult to separate. Cold Capture exploits subtle physical differences between the two isotopes at cryogenic temperatures to recover helium-3 in a process designed to scale.”

Interlune demonstrated Cold Capture at a small scale in early 2025, and received a $1.25 million small-business grant from the Department of the Air Force last November to scale up the technology for commercial production.

Based on the experiments conducted since then, Interlune projects that its technology could triple the current domestic production rate of helium-3.

“Every liter of helium produced in the world contains trace amounts of helium-3,” said Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune. “Cold Capture plugs into existing helium liquefaction plant infrastructure to recover that helium-3 and turn it into a valuable product.”

Interlune has already struck deals with the U.S. Department of Energy and Maybell Quantum to deliver shipments of helium-3. The first shipments are likely to come from terrestrial sources of helium, courtesy of Cold Capture.

Meanwhile, the company is following a step-by-step plan for lunar prospecting and production. A camera designed to estimate lunar levels of helium-3 is due for delivery to the moon late this year aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander.

That mission, known as Crescent Moon, is expected to open the way for a NASA-supported experiment called Prospect Moon in 2028. The experiment will test methods to extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks.

Follow-up missions could focus on harvesting hydrogen for rocket fuel and other lunar power applications, while also collecting helium-3 for delivery to Earth.

Interlune was founded in 2020 and reported raising $18 million in seed capital in 2024. This January, the company announced an additional $5 million investment offering aimed at advancing key technical milestones.

A judge in Seattle issued a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, finding that Washington state is likely to prove that the fast-growing prediction market is running illegal online gambling.

The ruling by King County Superior Court Judge John McHale, issued Monday, does not immediately halt Kalshi’s operations in the state. McHale granted the injunction in the case brought by Washington AG Nick Brown, but deferred the specifics until early next month.

McHale rejected Kalshi’s argument that oversight by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission preempts state gambling laws. That has been the basis of Kalshi’s defense against regulators across the country. Washington is the latest state where a court has shot it down.

Kalshi quickly pushed back on the ruling.

“States don’t have jurisdiction to regulate prediction markets. Many courts — including the Third Circuit — have made this clear,” spokesperson Jacki McGavick said in a statement. “We’re disappointed to see Washington State continue wasting taxpayer dollars.”

In his ruling, McHale said Kalshi “willfully ignored” a December 2025 notice from the Washington State Gambling Commission that event-based contracts were not authorized in the state, and cited a Kalshi ad showing a text exchange where one user tells another: “I found a way to bet on the NFL even though we live in Washington.”

Kalshi’s platform lets users bet “yes” or “no” on thousands of events across sports, elections, entertainment, and so-called “mention markets” — wagers on whether public figures will say specific words. The New York-based company, which markets itself as a federally regulated “prediction market,” takes a transaction fee on each bet.

Washington has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country: the legislature banned internet gambling in 2006, and while the state allows a lottery, horse racing, and tribal-casino gambling, online betting is broadly prohibited and sports wagers are legal only in person on tribal lands.

The order requires Kalshi to preserve all records tied to Washington users, including logs, communications, geolocation data and marketing materials.

The specific operational terms of the injunction are still being determined: McHale gave both sides until Aug. 3 to submit proposed language, with a full order to follow by Aug. 5.

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.”

Backstage at a Seattle tech event in the early 2000s, Chris Diorio was waiting his turn to speak. Next to him was Jeff Bezos, whose company was already becoming a household name.

Diorio, the leader of Impinj, then a tiny local startup, turned to the Amazon founder: “Jeff, you’ve got a much bigger near-term opportunity than we do,” Diorio recalls saying, “but we’ve got a much bigger long-term opportunity than you do.”

Before Bezos could respond, he was called onstage.

“The technology turned out to be way harder than I thought,” Diorio acknowledged after telling that story in a recent interview. “But that’s what I told him — and I still believe in those words. Our opportunity is to deliver physical intelligence for every item in the world.”

A quarter-century after that chance encounter, Diorio rang the Nasdaq opening bell Tuesday morning in New York City to mark the 10th anniversary of Impinj’s IPO. The company’s tiny, battery-free RFID chips — each smaller than a grain of sand — have been embedded in more than 160 billion items, including clothing, pharmaceuticals, airline luggage, and groceries.

Impinj commands nearly two-thirds of its market, won a patent war against a rival 15 times its size, and has grown from a $250 million IPO valuation to a market cap of more than $4.2 billion. Along the way, the company survived a billion-dollar industry hype cycle that killed nearly every competitor.

And yet, Impinj has posted exactly one profitable year since going public — thanks to a $45 million legal settlement at the time. Its accumulated deficit stands at $400 million, its financial reports show. Less than 1% of the items it envisions connecting are connected today. 

To Diorio, that speaks to the potential. The company is barely scratching the surface. He cited the 1% stat in his comments before ringing the Nasdaq bell on Tuesday morning, saying the “opportunity is so gigantic that we’ll still have a huge runway ahead of us 10 years from now.”

That the company has gotten to this point is as much a Seattle story as it is a technology story. Impinj has benefitted from a network of patient local investors, academic connections and supporters who gave the company the time that Silicon Valley never would have. 

But no one imagined it would take this long when they got started.

From Caltech to Seattle 

The origins of Impinj were at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1990s. Diorio was a graduate student working under Carver Mead, the physicist and engineer who helped coin the term Moore’s Law and helped lay the intellectual foundation for the modern semiconductor industry. 

Together, they discovered a way to change a transistor’s electrical properties after it had been manufactured — a quantum-mechanical phenomenon called “impact-ionized hot electron injection.” That made it possible to build chips so efficient and inexpensive that they could be embedded in disposable packaging. (“Impinj” is derived from that scientific name.)

In an oral history later recorded by the Science History Institute, Mead described Diorio as “a super-bright, super-high-energy guy” who “burned up the track” at Caltech.

After finishing his PhD, Diorio was recommended by Mead to the University of Washington’s computer science department. There was resistance among the UW faculty — his research in analog circuits wasn’t an obvious fit — but professor Larry Ruzzo carried the day. 

Ruzzo essentially said, “This guy is brilliant, and even if he is nothing other than our gift to the rest of the university, we should hire him,” recalled Ed Lazowska, the department chair at the time. 

Diorio joined the UW faculty in 1997. Over the next few years, his research earned a string of honors, including Packard and Sloan fellowships. A couple years later, Diorio met up with Mead on a trip to California, over dinner at Fresh Cream, a long-since-closed French restaurant in Monterey. Diorio asked Mead if it was time to start a company. 

“Are you up for it?” Mead asked. Diorio said yes. They started the paperwork the next day.

Impinj was incorporated in April 2000, headquartered in Seattle. It quickly got the attention of two local investment firms, with behind-the-scenes help from the everpresent Lazowska. 

On April 21, 2000, the UW computer science chair emailed Bob Nelsen at Arch Venture Partners and Tom Alberg at Madrona. He explained that he was urging Diorio and Mead “to get some local $ for the connections,” and that he had pointed them to Arch and Madrona. 

Patrick Ennis, then at Arch, reached out to Diorio that same day. As Ennis recalled in a recent interview, there were plenty of Silicon Valley firms that wanted in, thanks to Mead’s reputation, but Diorio and Mead decided to take Lazowska’s advice and go with Seattle investors. 

Diorio, who likes to take walking meetings, negotiated the terms with Ennis as they made their way on foot through the University of Washington Arboretum one day. The investment closed that summer: $15 million, split evenly between Arch and Madrona. 

Impinj at the time had patents, prototypes, and no real business plan. 

“That’s how venture capital should be done,” said Ennis, who has since become a Madrona venture partner. “You make big bets on great technology and great people.”

Betting the company on RFID

Bill Colleran joined Impinj as CEO in January 2001. He and Diorio had designed satellite chips together at defense contractor TRW in the 1980s. Colleran had just sold his Bluetooth startup, gotten married, and gone on his honeymoon. He came home to a message from Diorio: he’d started a company in Seattle and wanted Colleran to join. 

Colleran was soon in Seattle — one of six or eight people working out of what he warmly recalls as “a crappy little building” in the University District, several of them former TRW colleagues. 

“We were kind of getting the band back together,” he said. 

RFID wasn’t the original plan. Impinj’s first target was improving power efficiency for 3G wireless base stations, but the dot-com bust killed that market, and regardless, the company was too small to compete with the major chipmakers in the wireless industry.

The team spent two years exploring what to do with their technology. Cable modems required too much dependence on Intel, as Colleran recalled. Cell phone radios were dominated by players too big to compete against. GPS turned out to be a poor technical fit — Impinj’s chips excelled at low power, but GPS demanded low electrical noise, a different problem entirely. 

So they eventually settled on RFID, the technology that uses tiny wireless chips to identify and track physical objects. The industry was young, the standards were still being written, and Impinj’s low-power technology seemed tailor-made for it.

As Madrona’s Ennis and Tim Porter write in a piece pegged to the IPO anniversary, “When you have a truly powerful, groundbreaking deep technology, it behooves you to wander the product-market fit wilderness for a while, even when that is unsettling and downright frightening, and even when it runs contrary to what you learn in a VC class in business school.”

Then, a stroke of luck: In June 2003, Walmart announced it would require its top suppliers to tag every pallet and case with RFID chips. The Impinj team celebrated their good fortune. 

“We all high-fived,” Diorio recalled. “We did it. Eighteen months, we’re gonna IPO.”

In reality, it would be another 13 years.

Surviving the RFID hype cycle

Walmart’s announcement triggered a gold rush of venture capital investment into RFID technology startups. But there was no global spectrum allocated, no standard that worked, and no products ready to deliver on the promise. Walmart’s own January 2005 deadline came and went. Only half of its top suppliers could comply.

By 2008, the hype cycle had collapsed. Nearly every RFID startup died or got acquired. 

“More than $1 billion of VC money got poured into RFID,” Diorio recalled. “Way up, crashing down, and only one company that made it out the other side. … We were lucky enough that it was us.”

The real inflection didn’t come until around 2010, when retailers began tagging individual items, not just pallets. Knowing exactly which products were where, in real time, could lift same-store sales by as much as 10%, by solving a basic problem: getting items out of back rooms and onto shelves, making them available for purchase before customers gave up looking for them. 

Impinj filed to go public in April 2011, seeking to raise $100 million. But choppy markets — capped by the botched Facebook IPO in May 2012 — closed the window, and the company withdrew the filing that summer, raising $21 million privately instead.

After 14 years as CEO, Colleran stepped aside in 2014. 

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a lifelong RFID guy,” he said. 

An exit wasn’t in sight — the IPO window was shut, and a sale didn’t make sense because Impinj made both chips and readers, and “any of the companies that would be interested in boxes weren’t chip companies, and the chip companies weren’t interested in boxes.”

Diorio took over as CEO that November. The venture investors were 14 years in and needed a path to liquidity. He spent the next two years sorting things out and getting the company ready.

The long road to IPO

Porter, now a Madrona managing director, who had worked closely with Alberg on the Impinj investment since 2007, recalled the final stretch. One of the first target dates for trading landed on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union, sending markets into a tailspin. 

“It was a little bit like, are you kidding — what next?” Porter said. 

But on July 21, 2016 — some 16 years after its founding — Impinj went public on the Nasdaq at $14 a share, raising $67 million at a market cap of just over $250 million. 

Alberg, the late, legendary investor, who was one of the first people to back Bezos’ fledgling online bookstore, personally invested $500,000 in the offering — a rare move among venture investors, who typically use IPOs to finally cash out, not double down. 

Porter called Alberg’s move “a really big signal” to the market that demonstrated his long-term belief in Impinj. It was also a smart investment, as it turned out. As noted during the Nasdaq bell-ringing Tuesday morning, Impinj’s share price has grown by nearly 900% since the IPO.

But there was one last hitch. On the night before trading began, the offering was so oversubscribed that the final allocation became a drawn-out negotiation between the board and the bankers over how many shares to issue. It dragged on so long that Diorio and CFO Evan Fein, stuck in Chicago for the roadshow, missed their flight to New York.

Fein had been one of the first people hired at Impinj, joining Colleran in the University District office in 2001 and staying through the whole ride. He was not about to miss the bell-ringing.

The CFO wanted to make a run for it, but Diorio told him there was no way — the flight departed in 30 minutes from O’Hare. Fein tried anyway. He didn’t make it. They stayed in Chicago overnight and caught a flight the next morning.

The company’s CTO at the time rang the bell in Diorio’s place. 

Trial by fire

The celebration was short-lived. After the IPO, demand for RFID surged — but Impinj, thinly capitalized after years of private fundraising, didn’t have the operational capacity to fill the orders. The stock quadrupled from its $14 IPO price to more than $60. Then it all came apart.

NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch chipmaker roughly 15 times Impinj’s size, moved aggressively on pricing and took business away. Customers who had been stockpiling RFID tags pulled back on orders. Revenue declined. On Feb. 2, 2018, the stock plunged 47% in a single day.

What followed was the darkest stretch in the company’s history. The company laid off 9% of its workforce. Then a former employee complaint triggered an audit committee investigation, forcing the company to miss an SEC filing deadline and drawing a deficiency notice from Nasdaq.

For months, the outcome was uncertain. Executives couldn’t trade their stock or issue grants to employees. The investigation cost $1.4 million. NXP, sensing an opportunity, continued to press its advantage.

Diorio described the investigation as mentally draining. The company was spending millions of dollars, the outside attorneys weren’t sharing their findings along the way, following the standard practice, and there was no way to know for certain how it would end. 

“You firmly believe you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, “but who knows if somebody actually did something wrong that you don’t know about.” 

The investigation ultimately cleared the company, finding “no credible evidence” of wrongdoing, and Impinj received what Diorio called a rare letter from the SEC formally closing the matter. The stock surged 35% on the news.

Diorio called 2018 a turning point. “It was the year where everything got really difficult, the team and the company rallied, and it was the strength and the persistence of the team and their dedication that pulled us out the other side,” he said. “I’ll never forget that.”

The following year, Impinj went on offense. In June 2019, the company sued NXP, alleging it had copied 26 of Impinj’s patents. NXP countersued. The litigation stretched across five years and four lawsuits. In 2023, a federal jury found NXP had willfully infringed Impinj’s patents and awarded $18.5 million in damages. NXP settled in 2024, paying $45 million upfront and agreeing to ongoing royalties of roughly $17 million a year.

Where Impinj stands today

Diorio helped coin an industry term for the technology Impinj had built: RAIN RFID, short for “RAdio-frequency IdentificatioN.” It distinguished what Impinj does (using battery-free chips to identify and track individual items at scale) from other flavors of RFID used for key cards, animal tags, and contactless payments.

Today the company employs more than 450 people, most of them based in its headquarters at 400 Fairview Ave. N. in Seattle, with a test and development lab on Beacon Hill. The workforce is a fraction of NXP’s, which has more than 32,000 employees — a reminder that Impinj has built a market-leading position with a comparatively small team. 

Impinj holds an estimated 64% of the global market for RAIN RFID endpoint chips, up from 51% the year before, according to ABI Research. The company first overtook rival NXP for the market lead in 2024. The industry shipped nearly 53 billion chips in 2024, roughly one for every six or seven people on Earth. Impinj has connected more than 160 billion items cumulatively.

Each chip is battery-free, costs a few pennies, can be read wirelessly from 30 feet away, and identifies individual items at a rate of up to 1,000 per second. Vision systems can’t identify individual items. QR codes require line of sight. NFC has a range of four inches. Bluetooth requires a battery.

“Name any other technology that even gets close,” Diorio said. “You won’t come up with one.”

Privacy concerns nearly killed the RFID industry in its early years, when consumer groups campaigned against the technology in the mid-2000s. Although there’s privacy innovation still to come, Diorio said those fears have largely faded. The chips carry only a number, respond only when powered by an external reader, and don’t track people. 

One retailer already turns its tags invisible after the point of sale, though Diorio noted that’s “not the best solution because then that inhibits recycling.” 

His longer-term goal is cryptographic security, chips that can’t be cloned, putting “a dent in global counterfeiting” while keeping consumer data protected. 

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is shifting. Diorio views NXP as the only real competitor — “everybody else in the market is a partner,” he said — but the competitor list in Impinj’s SEC filings has grown from two names at the time of the IPO to more than six, including four Chinese chipmakers. When a product costs pennies, low-cost competitors have a natural opening.

Retail apparel remains the core market. About 60% of all RAIN RFID tags go on clothing. But that reliance has made the business volatile. Three times in 10 years as a public company, demand from retailers has dropped sharply, dragging revenue and the stock with it. 

Earlier this year, Impinj’s stock plunged after the company issued guidance well below expectations. Part of the challenge: the company’s top three customers account for 61% of revenue.

The financial picture reflects a company that is still proving itself. Revenue has grown from $123 million in 2018 to $361 million last year, but Impinj has posted just one profitable year since going public — a $41 million gain in 2024, boosted by the NXP settlement.

To Diorio, all of this is prelude. Apparel, he said, is “tiny” compared to the total market of every item manufactured, transported, and sold. General merchandise, supply chain logistics, pharmaceuticals, food — each is an order of magnitude larger, or more.

“We have a gigantic blue ocean,” he said. “It’s the size of the Pacific.”

Machine learning and AI

The company is also using machine learning to move beyond handheld inventory scanning. Fixed readers mounted in ceiling tiles and other locations can track items autonomously at store choke points, from receiving docks to fitting rooms to exits, replacing employees who currently walk the aisles waving handheld scanners. 

More broadly, Diorio sees tagged items as a data source for AI, generating hard information at every point in a product’s journey from factory to shelf to recycling bin. 

“Most of the modeling that goes on today is based on guessing,” he said. “If the models are based on hard data, it’s immensely more valuable.” 

The biggest bet ahead is food. Three of the top five U.S. grocers (Kroger, Walmart, and Albertsons/Safeway) are piloting RFID for food freshness, according to Diorio, using tags to identify items approaching their expiration dates so they can be marked down before they end up in the trash. 

A European grocer is pushing toward fully automated checkout, where a basket of tagged items moves down a conveyor and is read instantly, no scanning required.

These are pilots, not deployments. The grocery market dwarfs apparel in volume, and Impinj has yet to prove it can crack it at scale. But here again, Diorio sees this as untapped potential. 

“My enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been,” he said. “We are just getting going.”

And this time, he made it to New York to ring the opening bell. 

During his Nasdaq remarks on Tuesday morning, Diorio told the story of getting stuck in Chicago for the IPO a decade ago, using the anecdote to make a larger point.

“The team stepped in,” he said. “The team that was here covered everything, rang the bell, did all the process, and did it beautifully. In fact, probably better than we could have. And that is the story of Impinj. It’s the team.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated July 23, 2026, to reflect ABI Research’s 2025 market share estimate of 64% for Impinj, up from 51% in 2024 as originally reported. The spelling of former CFO Evan Fein’s name was also corrected.

Two months after emerging from stealth mode, TerraByte AI is using artificial intelligence and a new partnership to upgrade its “Earth Search Engine.”

The startup, which maintains operations in Seattle as well as San Francisco, has just rolled out a TerraByte News service that pinpoints wildfires, earthquakes and severe weather events on an interactive map. Users can follow links to access news reports, social media posts and satellite views related to selected events.

The satellite views include open-source images from NASA’s Earth observation system as well as Europe’s Sentinel satellites. And now the database also features high-resolution pictures provided through a newly announced partnership with Texas-based SkyFi. The partnership gives TerraByte’s users access to SkyFi’s self-service Earth intelligence platform, which offers satellite and aerial imagery from more than 300 sources at prices as low as $15 per image.

“In May, when we came out of stealth, we made the planet searchable,” TerraByte CEO Rishi Madhok told GeekWire. “Now, the moment you find something, you can hold the imagery in your hands within a day. The next step is making Earth intelligence as routine as a web search — you ask, you see, and then you act.”

Madhok and Fuxun Yu, TerraByte’s chief technology officer, founded the company last year as a follow-up to their work on geospatial data analysis at Microsoft. They developed search tools that can recognize features of interest in satellite images and deliver data-driven insights in response to natural-language queries.

Over the past couple of months, TerraByte’s team has grown from three to five employees, Madhok said. “Our goal is to grow the team even further this year, because we are seeing a lot of traction from users since we came out of stealth,” he said.

“A lot of traction is coming from insurance [companies], from the government, from mining, from other areas where there is the possibility to see things,” he said. “And finance, right? A lot of quant firms and hedge funds want to see all of this activity coming in.”

One key application involves emergency response. “Our big focus is on catastrophes, particularly wildfires,” Madhok said. “Our vision is that anybody should be able to track this — not limited to just journalists, but including everyone who is living in those areas and wants to see what’s going on.”

Madhok expects the revenue-sharing partnership with SkyFi to open up new opportunities. “I’m happy to say that we have customers who are paying us,” he said. “From that perspective, we’re already doing well.”

Advances in AI are creating still more opportunities. “Now you can do searches not just using text, but using images, which we call visual search,” he said. “Let’s say you’re searching for a certain kind of vessel, and it’s very hard for you to describe it in natural language. You can just take a screenshot of it, upload it, and within seconds it will literally search for what you were looking for.”

Looking ahead, Madhok and his teammates plan to add people power to the power of AI.

“This is the first version of a platform that we’re going to release, and we obviously want to learn more from our users,” he said. “We want this platform to become crowdsourced, so that people who are local to a region can add more information from that perspective, because then it starts becoming more powerful. We don’t want just TerraByte to be the owner of this.”

Madhok shared a video on LinkedIn that shows how TerraByte’s platform can quickly find high-resolution imagery of a shipwreck in Washington state’s Possession Sound:

Clarify, the Seattle-based AI startup that has raised more than $22 million to take on Salesforce and other CRM incumbents, has made its first acquisition: San Francisco-based Seam AI.

Seam’s technology monitors buying signals across the web — such as funding rounds, hiring, website activity, and executive job moves — and surfaces them to sales teams. Clarify plans to fold the technology into a new product called Clarify Signals, slated to launch later this year. 

Clarify is led by co-founders Patrick Thompson (CEO) and Ondrej Hrebicek (CTO), who previously co-founded Iteratively, a Seattle data-analytics startup that was acquired in 2021 by Amplitude, the publicly traded digital-analytics company.

Rationale: Clarify says the deal is part of a shift beyond what it calls a “system of record” that tracks what already happened to a “system of awareness” that flags what’s about to happen. 

Thompson said the Seam deal fills a gap in what Clarify’s own AI can pull from the open web, giving the CRM access to proprietary datasets that can’t be reached with a simple search. 

“The value that Seam is providing is typically the information that’s not necessarily easy to get from the web,” Thompson explained in an interview. “It’s the harder stuff to find.” 

Hrebicek said Clarify’s customers have been looking for a bigger and richer dataset — the ability to “look around the corners on who would be a good lead.” 

Deal points: Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Clarify, which had raised a total of $22.5 million in its seed and Series A rounds from investors including U.S. Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Madrona, said it brought in additional funding as part of the deal but did not disclose the amount. 

As part of the acquisition, five Seam employees are joining Clarify, including Seam co-founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone. With the deal, Clarify is adding a San Francisco office alongside its Seattle headquarters. The company now has 30 people total. 

Backstory: Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he saw teams accumulate many different sales and marketing systems, with customer data scattered across all of them. 

Seam raised $7 million including angel funding and a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2024. It counts Zapier, GoFundMe, Drata, and Betterment among its customers. Existing customers are on hold while the technology is integrated into Clarify, but many have already indicated they plan to move over to the new platform.

Scavone said he had been weighing whether to raise a new round or find a home for the company when he and Thompson, who have known each other for years, began talking about a combination. 

“We’re all going after the same big incumbents here,” he said, explaining that he ultimately decided Seam had a better chance of taking on the market’s dominant players by joining forces with Clarify than as a standalone company. 

In a post announcing the deal, the Seam and Clarify founders said they “realized we weren’t building competing products—we were building different halves of the same future.”

Landscape: Clarify is entering a crowded field. Sales-intelligence platforms like Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo already sell third-party data to revenue teams, and 6sense and Demandbase lead the account-based marketing category Seam had been targeting.

Thompson said one edge for Clarify is that signals arrive inside the CRM sellers already use, not a separate dashboard. 

The company was co-founded in early 2024 by Thompson, Hrebicek, and Austin Hay, a marketing-technology operator who served as co-CEO alongside Thompson. Hay departed in September 2025 and is now with Khosla Ventures, per his LinkedIn.

What’s next: Clarify plans to launch Signals later this year, Thompson said, noting that the company is considering raising additional funds in a Series B round early next year. 

Sila, a startup producing next-generation battery materials, on Tuesday announced $300 million in new funding.

The company previously raised $1.3 billion and was valued at close to $2 billion two years ago, according to PitchBook. It has 400 employees.

The California-based startup has developed a silicon-carbon material that replaces graphite traditionally used in the anodes of lithium-ion batteries, delivering better performance and significantly higher energy capacity.

Last fall, Sila opened its manufacturing facility in Moses Lake, Wash. — the first automotive-scale silicon-anode plant for both the company and the nation. It’s shipping sample anode material from the facility to a variety of customers.

The cash infusion will help fund a planned expansion of its Central Washington operations.

The current plant has a production capacity of about 2 gigawatt-hours of anode material, which, depending on its application, could supply 20,000 to 50,000 EVs. The expanded facility could increase that volume to tens of gigawatt-hours.

EV sales cooled in the U.S. after President Trump returned to office and federal support for battery-powered cars waned. But new models are still entering the market and demand is growing for other battery applications.

“Anything that AI is touching right now is driving tremendous need for better batteries,” said Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO.

That includes drones, hardware deployed in outer space, robotics, autonomous vehicles, wearable consumer devices, and batteries used at AI data centers. All of those uses require higher performing batteries, he added.

It’s also essential that the U.S. bolster its domestic manufacturing of battery components given national and economic security concerns, Berdichevsky said. Because while the U.S. is racing to strengthen its AI sector, if the nation has to import all of the equipment and hardware systems that it needs, “you really don’t have an AI industry,” he added.

Sila’s round was led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures. It was joined by 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, and other existing and new investors.

Moses Lake is also home to Group14, which is producing its own version of a silicon anode material. The Washington-based competitor to Sila has put its U.S. manufacturing on pause as it focuses on its South Korean plant, which is delivering commercial-scale volumes of material for customer performance testing.

Editor’s note: Story updated at 9:25 a.m. July 21 to add comments from Gene Berdichevsky and to clarify that the next phase of manufacturing expansion will increase production into tens of gigawatt-hours of material.

Jimothy isn’t just a viral internet sensation — he’s a cause for good.

A painting of the beloved raccoon by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward attracted a winning bid of $6,543.21 in an informal Instagram auction this weekend, with all proceeds directed to the Ballard Food Bank.

The winning bidder for the 24-by-24-inch painting was identified by Ward as Angela Galdabini, who posted a picture of the painting hanging on her wall.

Now the auction gift is going viral in its own way, attracting a matching donation from Amazon, which encouraged other Seattle-area companies to follow suit. According to the tech giant on Monday, T-Mobile, Alaska Air and Brooks have all gotten on board.

“When we saw a local artist giving back to the Ballard Food Bank, inspired by a little raccoon that’s brought so much joy, we wanted to help,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement. “Amazon is proud to match the winning bid, and we’re calling on other Seattle-based companies to join us.”

Update: On Tuesday, Microsoft let us know that they, too, had committed funds to the food bank.

Jimothy seemed destined to be captured by Ward, a prolific muralist whose colorful, whimsical work is seen across the Seattle region on buildings, fences, garage doors and elsewhere. His art frequently features a variety of animals and other characters, including Sasquatch.

Ward called Jimothy “the hero we needed” in his Instagram post on Saturday, and said he was giving to Ballard Food Bank because the organization helped him through some of his hardest times.

The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when the raccoon was spotted in Ballard and a video attracted millions of views on Instagram. The craze spread around the world and other videos have emerged online, sparking immense curiosity and adoration, and a flood of memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry, songs and more. 

Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa faced a barrage of pointed questions from the audience Friday during a session at the annual Pacific Northwest Climate Week in Seattle.

Protesters challenged Nakagawa through most of the 30-minute session held in a conference room at Seattle’s City Hall, calling out the company’s use of fossil fuel energy sources to power its AI data centers and challenging Microsoft’s commitment to climate goals set years ago.

As a reporter covering sustainability issues for GeekWire, I moderated the session. Many of the issues raised by the crowd were on my list of questions for Nakagawa. The disruptions also included chants from protesters seated among attendees, at times going beyond climate issues to condemn Microsoft’s technology deals with Israel.

Security guards ultimately ushered some protesters out of the space, while others remained. Interruptions from the audience continued for all but the final 10 minutes of the session.

The event capped off Pacific Northwest Climate Week, which included conversations around the city and region about climate change solutions, policies and innovations.

Microsoft has for many years been viewed as an environmental corporate leader, setting an ambitious goal in 2020 to become carbon negative within a decade. It created an internal carbon tax — one of the corporate world’s largest — that charges individual Microsoft divisions for emissions from sources like air travel to fund climate-friendly initiatives. The company is credited with helping create and sustain the carbon dioxide removal sector, among other roles.

But the rapid expansion of AI data centers and their huge energy demands are undercutting Microsoft’s standing. The company recently released its annual sustainability report, disclosing that its carbon footprint grew 25% last year, moving it further from its 2030 target.

One protester’s question was about a deal announced earlier this year in which Microsoft is partnering with Chevron to build a 2.7 gigawatt natural gas facility to power a data center campus in Texas. I asked Nakagawa how the company defends the agreement, and she pointed to the 4.7 gigawatts of renewable energy that Microsoft has supported in the state. I followed up by asking about the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s commitment to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects given recent reports about a pause on new deals.

Nakagawa was unable to answer before the crowd drowned her out with a call-and-response chant: “Microsoft, you can’t hide. We can see your dirty side.”

Another protester criticized the escalating pursuit of AI. “You’re selling us a product that we don’t even need, and we never should ask for,” he said. “No one wants AI. You’re destroying the climate with AI.”

I brought up legislation proposed earlier this year in Washington to mandate clean energy use and bring transparency to data center impacts in the state. Microsoft opposed and helped defeat the bill, though the company says it wants to work with lawmakers to pass rules next year. I asked what needed to change in the legislation for Microsoft to support it.

Nakagawa didn’t provide specifics, but noted that this year, for the first time, the company shared facility-level information in its annual report on electricity and water use for data centers worldwide.

“People want to know more about the data, and we believe you can have an honest and candid conversation with transparency and access to that information and data,” she said.

Given the obvious public concerns, I asked Nakagawa, “Do you really honestly believe that by 2030, the company can hit that carbon-negative goal?”

Nakagawa pointed to wide-ranging initiatives that are starting to help curb specific emissions, including investments to make Xbox devices lower carbon and financial support for the recent opening of a production plant in Moses Lake, Wash., for sustainable aviation fuel company Twelve.

“There are a couple areas where we’re seeing a lot of promising progress,” she said. “Look, this is going to be a hard target. We’ve not been at all shying away from the fact that this is a difficult goal.”

Rudra “Rudy” Mitra, who spent more than 27 years at Microsoft and most recently led its Purview data-security business, is joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of security services.

Mitra will oversee an AWS portfolio that includes tools such as GuardDuty and Security Hub, which companies use to track security risks across their cloud accounts. AWS recently added AI-specific threat detection to GuardDuty and, perhaps notably given today’s news, extended Security Hub to monitor AI workloads and security inside Microsoft Azure. 

He will report to Chet Kapoor, the former DataStax CEO whom AWS hired last year as vice president of search, security and observability, a role that reports to AWS CEO Matt Garman.

“Rudy brings decades of security experience, a passion for building, and a deep understanding of what customers need as the security landscape continues to evolve,” Kapoor wrote on LinkedIn. 

Mitra joined Microsoft in 1999 straight out of college, working on early efforts to deliver Office as an online service before launching Purview, the company’s data-security and governance product, in 2014. He announced his exit from Microsoft last week, addressing what was next at the time by saying only that there was “more on that soon.”

His departure comes amid a broader reshuffling of Microsoft’s security leadership this year under Hayete Gallot, who returned from Google in February to run the group and has been reshaping its executive ranks in recent weeks and months.

Gallot replaced Charlie Bell, who had joined from AWS in 2021 and continues at Microsoft as an individual contributor focused on engineering quality. She’s been overhauling the group’s product lineup, according to The Information, which reported last week that at least nine corporate vice presidents who reported to Bell have left the company this year.

Rohan Kumar left for Salesforce in June, Vasu Jakkal stepped down after six years. Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy departed this month after 28 years. Joy Chik, president of identity and network access, announced her retirement in April.

On the inbound side at Microsoft, Naseem Tuffaha returned in June to fill the corporate VP role Kumar had left, after nearly two decades at the company and a stint away.

When Gallot arrived, Microsoft named Ales Holecek, a longtime engineering leader, as the security group’s chief architect, reporting to her. David Weston, another veteran Microsoft executive, also reportedly shifted into the security unit earlier this year.

Fresh off a $2 billion fundraising and $900 million line of credit, London-based data center startup Nscale is planning a big expansion at a new engineering office in Bellevue, Wash.

Nscale, one of the fastest-growing companies building AI computing infrastructure, recently inked a deal for nearly 24,000 square feet of space at The Eight office tower in downtown Bellevue.

The office is slated to open in January 2027. It will serve as Nscale’s primary engineering hub in the United States, a company spokesperson said. The company currently employs about 50 people in the Seattle area, and the new office will be able to accommodate up to 250 people.

The company earlier this year hired Nidhi Chappell, the former Microsoft corporate vice president who led Azure AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, including the supercomputers that power ChatGPT. As Nscale’s new president of AI infrastructure, based in the Seattle area, Chappell will oversee the company’s global engineering and data center operations.

“I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in AI over the past several years, but one thing has always stood out: the world remembers the breakthroughs, but it’s the people building the infrastructure behind the scenes who make them possible,” Chappell wrote in a LinkedIn post last week announcing the company’s first “onboarding” event in Seattle.

Nscale, which is also preparing to open an office in New York, said it selected Bellevue because of the Seattle region’s concentration of AI infrastructure talent and its proximity to major customers.

Microsoft is one example. Earlier this year, the companies announced an expanded collaboration to deploy Microsoft’s next-generation AI infrastructure across Europe, including large-scale installations of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in Norway, Portugal and other locations. Nscale said it would be among the first providers outside of Microsoft to deploy the Vera Rubin platform, supporting Microsoft’s growing AI cloud infrastructure.

The new office is the latest sign of Bellevue’s growing role in the AI economy. The Eastside has become a magnet for companies building AI applications and infrastructure, with xAI, OpenAI, Databricks, CoreWeave, Armada, Anduril and others establishing and expanding offices.

AI companies have been giving a boost to the regional office market overall. Claude maker Anthropic, for example, recently announced an expansion of its offices in Dexter Yard in Seattle.

Nscale was founded in 2024. Its $2 billion funding round earlier this year valued the company at $14.6 billion, believed to be the largest Series C financing ever raised by a European technology company. The capital is being used to expand Nscale’s AI cloud platform, GPU infrastructure and data center footprint across North America and Europe.

Its backers include Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, NVIDIA and Point72.

News of the Nscale office in Bellevue was first reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Jimothy, the short-spined Seattle raccoon, has become a global sensation whose likeness has been immortalized in artwork, clothing, songs and tattoos — and now a video game created in the creature’s hometown.

Tech enthusiast and entrepreneur Chris Pirillo launched an 8-bit NES-style video game called “Jimothy” this weekend in which players can control the movements of the critter as he raids trash cans, crosses streets to the park, sneaks past the paparazzi, and climbs to the safety of a big tree.

Pirillo says the missions are pulled straight from Jimothy’s real life. No doubt the animal is busy these days trying to dodge curious onlookers who are hoping to capture the next photo or video that feeds the masses on social media.

The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when Kiana Hall spotted the raccoon in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and posted a video on Instagram — viewed by millions since — asking the question heard around the world: “What am I looking at?”

An earlier video of Jimothy, captured by a home security camera and posted on Reddit, ignited further curiosity and adoration, and now Reddit is flooded with sightings, memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry and more. The Mariners put a Jimothy mascot in the Salmon Run. There’s even a Lego Jimothy.

Pirillo told GeekWire the game idea came to him on Saturday afternoon after seeing so many creatives flood his feeds with their own Jimothy fan art. He started to build a not-so-live tracker and realized it was a not-so-great idea. He hopes internet creativity is enough of a fix for the Jimothy-curious.

“This game is as close as any of us should ever get to him,” the game site states. “If you find yourself in his neighborhood: don’t go looking for him, don’t feed him, don’t try to touch him, and don’t crowd him for a photo.”

The game is easy enough to play, with challenges that are reminiscent of classic 1980s games “Frogger” and “Donkey Kong.”

Pirillo’s “Vibe Arcade” is loaded with other games he’s created. Earlier this year he vibe-coded a Resume Analyzer app and a pre-rejection letter generator called Dear Applicant to channel his frustrations with searching for a job.

Pirillo credits AI with changing the speed and ease with which a moment can go viral and be captured in new and creative ways.

“I remember when every big moment had a video game. But by the time a studio could create a video game around a meme pre-AI, the meme’s energy would have dissipated,” he said. “We are now at a day and age (certainly with AI as a tool) where almost literally anybody of any age or tech experience level can bring full-fledged experiences to life in just a few hours. We can simply talk our solutions into existence. It’s astounding.”

Pirillo built the game as a single HTML page, pitting OpenAI GPT 5.6 against Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. One of the bigger challenges was getting the look of Jimothy right, as multiple AI models kept returning regular-looking raccoons.

Pirillo said he looks forward to sharing more about it all during a free vibe-coding community workshop in Seattle this Saturday.

His final takeaway for anyone looking to get in on the Jimothy hype — or whatever creature emerges next — is to not wait for the moment to pass.

“While it’s never been easier to make something, it’s also never been more challenging to get attention,” he said.