Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce CEO Joe Nguyen delivered a direct message to regional leaders at the organization’s 144th annual meeting on Thursday: Seattle’s progressive social goals cannot exist without a thriving employer base.

Nguyen, a former Washington State Senator and Microsoft manager who served as Director of the Washington State Department of Commerce before taking over the Chamber, used his inaugural annual meeting address to bridge the gap between regional business priorities and broad civic goals.

While political and business leaders often appear at odds in Seattle, Nguyen argued that the two are deeply intertwined and fundamentally interdependent. Having a healthy business community is “not up for debate; it is a requirement,” Nguyen told the audience of more than 800 civic and business leaders.

He continued:

“So I want to be very clear: the progressive values in this region depends on the economic activities and jobs created by strong employers. Housing doesn’t fund itself. Human services do not fund themselves. Public safety and parks do not fund themselves. They are made possible by people creating companies, making payroll, and hiring workers, when businesses succeed, our values get funded. Economic growth is not separate from social progress.  In fact, economic growth makes social progress possible. You cannot fund compassion from an empty treasury.” 

Nguyen framed his vision for Seattle through a personal lens, detailing his family’s journey arriving in Seattle as refugees from Vietnam with little more than “hope.” A powerful image of his family departing Vietnam on a rickety boat accompanied his remarks.

He recalled his family taking footholds in local business, operating a billiards hall in White Center, working at the Port of Seattle and his mother sewing for JanSport. Nguyen later attended Seattle University on Capitol Hill while washing dishes, went on to work at Microsoft, entered the Washington State Senate representing the 34th District, and eventually joined Governor Bob Ferguson’s administration as Commerce Director.

“The larger lesson from my family story is not about any one company or career,” Nguyen said. “It is about what’s possible when a region creates opportunity. Microsoft opened doors for me that I never knew were even possible as a kid growing up in White Center. The employer community did more than employ my family; it changed the trajectory of our lives.”

Pointing to macro-level data, Nguyen highlighted that the tri-county regional economy (King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties) generates $600 billion in annual economic activity, representing 71% of Washington State’s total economic output and ranking as the 10th largest metro economy in the United States.

Additionally, local business activity funds roughly 70% of the City of Seattle’s budget revenue.

However, Nguyen cautioned against taking the regional economy for granted amid rising operational costs, public safety challenges, and regulatory friction.

“Prosperity is not permanent. It is not part of the scenery like Mount Rainier,” Nguyen said. “It is something a region must earn, protect, and renew… When an employer leaves, we lose jobs, we lose customers for nearby small businesses, we lose charitable giving, we lose future investments, and we lose the public revenue that sustains our shared priorities.”

Nguyen pointed to recent momentum in aligning state and local government with economic development priorities.

Over the past year, state lawmakers introduced a dedicated economic development committee in the legislature, the governor formed a state business council, and the Mayor of Seattle signed an executive order establishing a local Economic Development Council.

The Chamber’s core advocacy pushes remain centered on faster permitting, housing expansion, and addressing public safety as both a quality-of-life and economic imperative.

On the latter issue, Nguyen joined other business leaders earlier Thursday in signing an open letter with executives from Microsoft, Starbucks, and dozens of regional employers demanding a 100-day public safety action plan from City Hall.

The letter, spearheaded by the Chamber, Challenge Seattle and the Washington Roundtable, urged the city to accelerate 911 response times, activate surveillance cameras, and step up foot patrols to protect workers, visitors, and foot traffic across downtown.

“We will partner when partnership produces results. We will push when pushing is necessary,” Nguyen said in his remarks at the annual meeting. “We will be constructive, but we will not be passive. And we will never apologize for standing up for the employers and workers who make this region possible.”

Looking forward, Nguyen urged the region’s tech sector, innovators and policymakers to resist complacency and bet on the future of Seattle. Nguyen concluded his remarks by asking the audience to embrace the future, and he said he’s optimistic about what’s ahead because he sees “people betting on Seattle every single day.”

“I believe that Seattle is at an inflection point. We can give in to complacency… or we can decide that our next chapter will be even more ambitious than the last… Somewhere in this region, an entrepreneur is building our next great company, a scientist is making a discovery that will save lives, and a young person in White Center is imagining a future none of us can see yet. And it is our responsibility to give them that chance.”

We’ll be breaking down Nguyen’s address, the Chamber’s 100-day public safety push and the broader debate over Seattle’s economic future on this weekend’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Be sure to tune in here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influencers and online creators have become an increasingly powerful way for brands to sell products. But managing those relationships can get complicated — especially for companies selling across Amazon, Walmart, Shopify and other channels.

That’s the market Seattle startup Levanta is targeting, which today is announcing $22 million in new funding led by Volition Capital. The company provides software that helps brands find creators, send them products, set up affiliate commissions, track sales and handle payments.

The company says it now has more than 90,000 vetted creators on its platform. Brands can offer creators products to review or promote, pay commissions when their links generate sales, or arrange flat-fee partnerships. Levanta tracks the performance across Amazon, Walmart and Shopify and handles payments.

The startup originally focused on Amazon sellers but has expanded to Walmart and Shopify. Its revenue is up 80% year-over-year in 2026, according to the company.

“Every marketplace has thousands of sellers that want more customers, and there are millions of creators and affiliates capable of driving those customers,” said CEO and co-founder Ian Brodie in a press release. “The missing piece is infrastructure that connects the two, handles the economics, and accurately measures what happens.”

In 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated that the the influencer marketing category was expected to grow to $480 million by 2027.

Levanta was founded in 2023 by Brodie, CTO Spencer McKenney and Chief Marketplace Officer Rob Schab, all University of Washington graduates. The three previously founded Grovia.io, an affiliate marketing company that was acquired by Acceleration Partners in 2022.

With more than 100 employees, Levanta is the rare startup that has already reached profitability with Brodie telling Business Insider that it has been profitable or roughly break-even since its launch. With the new funding, it also provided cash liquidity to some eligible employees.

“This is a milestone moment for Levanta and it reflects how far the company has come and the value our team has created together,” Brodie said in the release. “At the same time, it allows us to reward the people who have been instrumental in building the foundation of the business while ensuring they remain deeply aligned with where we’re going next as we continue building Levanta for the long term.”

The new funding will support expansion to additional retail marketplaces and international growth.

Previous Levanta backers include Long Run Capital, OpenSky Ventures and Arrived Homes CEO Ryan Frazier. The latest series B round brings Levanta’s total funding to more than $43 million.

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, the fast-growing open-source database that has become a favorite of developers looking to analyze large amounts of data without the cost and setup of a cloud data warehouse.

Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project’s technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects.

Amazon says it is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project itself. DuckDB will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, as will the related DuckLake and Quack projects, according to DuckLabs.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September.

Larger shifts in cloud data

The deal fits Amazon’s broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it. It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage.

The move comes as the data industry shifts toward keeping information in open formats in cloud storage, where it can be queried directly rather than loaded into a separate warehouse.

The shift puts pressure on companies like Snowflake and Databricks, which sell the compute and governance layer on top of stored data. Both are major AWS partners as well as competitors, with large numbers of customers running on Amazon’s cloud.

AI has raised the stakes, driving up both the volume of data companies keep in the cloud and the cost of analyzing it. Amazon says DuckDB is a natural fit for AI agents, which query data much the way people do, poking and experimenting with small sets before deciding what they want.

“DuckDB ends up being naturally optimized for AI agents to use,” wrote Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the AWS VP who leads its cloud data services, in a post about the acquisition.

DuckLabs said it has worked closely with AWS in recent years, including on DuckDB support for Amazon’s S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse.

“DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today,” said Andy Warfield, an AWS vice president and distinguished engineer, in a press release announcing the deal.

‘That’s Amazon’s playbook’

One of the companies watching closely is in Seattle. MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, was founded in partnership with the DuckLabs team and has worked with it closely for four years. Three of its engineers are among the top 10 outside contributors to the DuckDB project.

In a blog post Wednesday, MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani said Amazon is following a familiar pattern. “That’s Amazon’s playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service,” wrote Tigani, who helped start Google’s BigQuery and spent a decade there before co-founding MotherDuck in 2022.

He expects Amazon to do exactly that with DuckDB: “After all, they’re not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source,” he wrote. “We welcome the competition.”

He said the deal is likely to be good for DuckDB, because Amazon has a financial reason to keep the project open and healthy. “If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money,” he wrote.

Tigani said DuckLabs is being kept as a wholly owned subsidiary with its organization intact, and that the DuckDB Foundation has “iron clad control over the DuckDB IP.”

MotherDuck also said it is now offering enterprise support for DuckDB — which it had previously steered clear of to avoid competing with DuckLabs. Tigani said the company has Mühleisen and Raasveldt’s “explicit blessing” to take it on now that they are joining Amazon.

Five years, no venture capital

DuckLabs was founded a little more than five years ago as a long-term home for the DuckDB development team. The company turned down venture capital, stayed owned by its founders and employees, and grew to more than 30 people in Amsterdam, funding itself through support and feature-development contracts.

In a blog post, Mühleisen and Raasveldt wrote that they had come to worry DuckDB’s growth would outpace their ability to support it, and that their small company “could become a bottleneck for the project.” Building a larger sales and operations organization, they wrote, would have pulled the team away from the technical work that made DuckDB successful.

Nine days before the acquisition was announced, Mühleisen and Raasveldt published a preview of DuckDB 2.0, due this fall, declaring that the release “kicks off the year of DuckDB as a server.” It adds Quack, which lets one DuckDB instance serve data to others over a network, along with work aimed at speeding up queries against data held in object storage such as S3.

DuckLabs said the DuckDB Foundation will add a technical advisory board, giving leading community members input on the project’s technical direction. The company also plans to let DuckDB run extensions signed by outside developers and organizations.

Digs, a Vancouver, Wash.-based startup building AI software for residential construction, raised $25.3 million in Series A funding led by building products giant Builders FirstSource, the companies announced Tuesday.

Under the five-year agreement, Builders FirstSource will integrate Digs’ AI platform into its digital ecosystem, expanding tools for its 140,000 builder clients. The technology streamlines everything from pre-construction estimates and blueprint collaboration to post-move-in home maintenance and warranty care for homeowners.

The deal represents a major milestone for Digs, which was founded in 2022 by Ryan Fink and Ty Frackiewicz. Fink said the partnership moves Digs closer to its vision of creating “the first scalable true digital twin of the home” that lives on well past the construction phase.

The Series A pushes Digs’ total funding to more than $47 million, building on a $5 million pre-Series A round in late 2025. The startup previously drew backing from regional venture firms including Fuse, Flying Fish, Oregon Venture Fund, and Cascade Seed Fund.

Digs has grown to 37 employees and Fink said they’ll look to double that count to more than 60 by the end of the year, mostly in engineering, design, and product and some in sales and marketing.

Digs charges builders on a SaaS model and currently has thousands of homes on its platform across all 50 states. Fink often describes the tool as a “CarFax for the home,” replacing static PDF blueprints and lost paperwork with an AI-powered hub that tracks a property’s history, materials, and warranty details.

Fink and Frackiewicz previously collaborated on augmented reality startup ONtheGo Platforms, which was acquired in 2015. Fink later founded home-service AR startup Streem (acquired by Frontdoor in 2019), while Frackiewicz brought a background in construction engineering and luxury homebuilding.

Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Builders FirstSource is the nation’s largest supplier of building materials and prefabricated components for residential construction. The Fortune 500 company operates approximately 565 locations across 43 states, supplying structural building products, trusses, and millwork to professional homebuilders in 91 of the top 100 U.S. metropolitan markets.

“Our customers are looking for seamless technology that helps them operate more efficiently and deliver a better homeowner experience,” Builders FirstSource President and CEO Peter Jackson said in a statement. “By combining Builders FirstSource’s scale, deep customer relationships, product data, and extensive digital ecosystem with Digs’ AI platform, we are advancing tools that can simplify workflows, improve productivity, and create a more connected experience across the homebuilding lifecycle.”

TikTok is laying off 75 workers in the Seattle region, focused largely on the company’s e-commerce business, according to a notice filed Tuesday with Washington state.

Job titles listed in the notice are almost entirely TikTok Shop and Global E-Commerce roles in Bellevue, Wash., including anti-fraud and governance program managers, seller and creator operations staff, campaign managers, data scientists, and backend and frontend engineers.

It’s part of a steady stream of tech layoffs this year. Zillow cut more than 500 jobs this month, including 91 in Washington state. Microsoft eliminated 605 positions in the state in July as part of a broader reduction of 4,800. Google cut 52 jobs and Salesforce cut 59 locally this month.

The notice Tuesday was filed by TT Commerce & Global Services LLC on TikTok letterhead, and lists two ByteDance employees as contacts. It gives the affected facility as Lincoln Square North at 700 Bellevue Way NE, with a separation date of Oct. 19.

TikTok Shop is the company’s in-app shopping business, which lets brands and creators sell products directly in TikTok videos and livestreams. The company has used the Seattle region as a base for the e-commerce push, expanding its Bellevue offices as it built out the business.

GeekWire has contacted TikTok representatives for comment, and asked for details on the size of the company’s remaining workforce in Bellevue and the Seattle region.

The cuts follow TikTok’s announcement on Aug. 6 that it will close its Nashville office and lay off all 250 workers there, most of them on content moderation teams.

The company last year cut 65 Seattle-area jobs, including 38 at TikTok and 27 at ByteDance.

Amazon’s drones are finally going national.

The company’s autonomous aerial vehicles are set to deliver packages to nearly 500 cities and towns across the country by the end of this year, zipping items through the air to drop them in backyards and driveways as quickly as 30 minutes after ordering.

Amazon announced the plan Wednesday, describing it as a sixfold increase in its Prime Air footprint, reaching communities collectively representing tens of millions of customers.

It’s a milestone nearly 13 years in the making. Jeff Bezos unveiled Prime Air on 60 Minutes in December 2013, showing off a prototype to an astonished Charlie Rose and a skeptical public.

“I know this looks like science fiction — it’s not,” the Amazon founder said at the time.

Bezos acknowledged that it would take at least four or five years, optimistically, and that convincing the FAA the drones were safe would be one of the biggest hurdles. Amazon’s FAQ that night said it hoped the agency would have rules in place “as early as sometime in 2015.”

Both the technology and the regulations took far longer than the company expected.

Amazon said Wednesday morning that Prime Air will launch soon in the Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise metro areas, with more communities to come later this year. The drones fly primarily over suburban areas, which allows them to avoid the tall buildings and crowded airspace that complicate flights over dense urban areas.

There’s no word yet on when or whether drone delivery will come to the Seattle area.

Amazon said the drones launch from two types of facilities: smaller same-day delivery sites and its larger robotic fulfillment centers. The mix is what lets Prime Air offer anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of items depending on the location, according to the company.

Nearly any item weighing 5 pounds or less and small enough to fit in a large shoebox is eligible for drone delivery. That translates into millions of products, as noted by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in his annual letter to shareholders earlier this year. He wrote that Prime Air would carry “a much larger selection of items inside a half hour” than Amazon’s other fast-delivery options.

Drone delivery will be free for Prime members on orders of $50 or more. Prime orders below that carry a $2.99 fee, and customers without a membership pay $4.99.

Amazon’s reference to expanding to 500 cities and towns does not reflect the number of planned Amazon drone launch locations, but rather the number of municipalities that fall within delivery range of the planned hubs, each of which covers roughly 175 square miles.

The 30-minute delivery scenario is a best case. Most orders arrive around 60 minutes after checkout, Amazon said in its announcement.

Amazon isn’t the only company betting on drones. Amazon retail rival Walmart and Google parent Alphabet’s Wing have been building what they call the largest drone delivery network in the U.S., adding seven new markets in June including Phoenix, Philadelphia and the Bay Area. They plan to reach 270 stores and more than 40 million people by next year.

Local approvals remain a hurdle for delivery drones. Noise has been a recurring concern for residents near drone operations. Amazon says its drones are quieter than an idling delivery truck during drop-off and comparable to a window fan while in flight. A proposed federal rule that would more broadly allow flights beyond the pilot’s line of sight has not been finalized.

The Associated Press first reported on the expansion Tuesday afternoon in what appears to have been an inadvertent break of a news embargo, to which GeekWire had not agreed. Post updated Wednesday morning with details from the official announcement.

Genevieve Priebe took a business meeting this summer while bottle-feeding baby goats. A couple of years ago, she was advising executives at some of Seattle’s largest tech companies.

“Best decision I’ve ever made,” she said of her career change.

Priebe is the solo entrepreneur behind Reroot, a bootstrapped Seattle startup trying to make local food as easy to find and buy as anything else online.

The company operates a marketplace where independent farmers, ranchers, bakers and makers sell direct to customers, currently live with founding partners in the Pacific Northwest. In July it launched a free companion app, Reroot: Find Local Food, that maps more than 50,000 producers across the U.S. and parts of Canada.

She has also built a patent-pending tool called Walk & Talk, which lets a farmer update an online store by voice while walking the field, with or without a cell signal. When they’re back in range, it reconciles what they said against any sales that came in while they were offline.

A fourth-generation farm kid from Whitefish, Mont., Priebe grew up driving her dad’s tractor before she could reach the pedals and counting change at farmers markets for her mom, a flower farmer. She left for college and spent two decades in Seattle consulting, starting at Accenture and working for clients including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Starbucks and Boeing.

After her parents passed away, she and her brother took over the family farm. Priebe ran the numbers on what it takes to make a living growing food, and found it “close to impossible.” That’s a big part of what she’s now looking to solve as a startup founder.

“I didn’t want to be a founder,” she said, “but I couldn’t walk away from the problem.”

Continue reading for Priebe’s answers to our Startup Spotlight questionnaire.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

Local food is all around you, but finding it is hard. Buying it directly from the source is even harder. Reroot exists to fix that. We’re a discovery app and marketplace that connects independent producers to the people who love what they grow, raise and make.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Something that perhaps most people wouldn’t see as a problem. That is: why is it easier to buy a mango from Peru than a tomato from a farm 10 miles away?

What surprised you after talking to customers?

My biggest surprise was that most small farms pay to be farmers. They don’t make money, they lose money. Less than 50% of the 1.9M farms in the US are profitable. Average median farm income is over a thousand dollars in the red. It’s no surprise that 15,000 farms go out of business every year and unfortunately the story isn’t much better for other independent food producers. Growing our food is one of the most important jobs, yet it’s close to impossible to make a living doing it.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Dramatically. Two years ago, I’d have needed a 5-person development team, 18 months, and $1.5M to do what I’ve done solo in about four months. Traditional development cannot compare to the speed with which AI has enabled me to operate.

I do have a strong tech background, but haven’t written a single line of code and yet I’m live with a fully functioning marketplace that processes financial transactions, integrates with Square and Stripe, has sent over 100,000 marketing emails for our customers, manages inventory, fulfillment, and analytics. And, bonus — we just launched a free discovery app called Reroot: Find Local Food that maps 50,000+ local food producers in the US and parts of Canada.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

In a world of AI-powered, niche, technology businesses, people seem surprised at how simple the idea is. They assume it already exists. It doesn’t. There is no single place to discover, follow, and buy from local producers. That gap is exactly why I built Reroot.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Every advisor and investor I’ve talked to has told me to find a technical co-founder, and even better if he’s younger and male. The decision to ignore that advice and bootstrap solo as a woman in my forties was simultaneously the hardest decision I’ve made and the easiest. I’m choosing a different path than raise-and-burn: heads-down building for real customers who need what I’m making. It’s working.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Don’t overthink it. I spent decades in environments where every decision needed a PowerPoint deck and three rounds of approvals. The best thing I’ve done as a founder is just move: build it, ship it, learn, repeat.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

When the hardest part of farming is no longer the marketing. When farmers like my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents can actually afford to do the work that they love. And when I can conveniently replace most of my grocery store spend with local food purchased directly from my favorite producers.

Washington state has assembled the country’s deepest bench of quantum technology assets — including two major cloud platforms, a national lab and the first U.S. quantum computer factory — but has captured almost none of the federal money now driving the industry.

That disconnect is the focus of a report released Tuesday morning by the Washington Technology Industry Association, the Northwest Quantum Nexus and the state Department of Commerce.

Since a January 2023 assessment, Washington state’s quantum ecosystem “has grown denser, more visible, and physically larger,” reads the report, authored by Nirav S. Desai, CEO of innovation consultancy Moonbeam Exchange. “Yet the state has fallen behind peers on the coordinated public investment that converts assets into a resilient cluster.”

The report makes five recommendations:

• Use the governor’s office to convene a standing group — universities, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, companies, investors and the Commerce Department — that decides which federal grants to pursue and assembles joint bids for funding.
• Pick one to three specialties to compete in, such as post-quantum cryptography or industry applications, rather than chasing all of quantum.
• Build the workforce at all three levels: developers first, then the missing undergraduate and technician programs.
• Position the Seattle region and Washington state as a landing pad for Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese quantum companies.
• Create a single point of contact for founders, and promote the quantum machine access the state already has but hasn’t advertised.

“This isn’t a resource problem; it’s a coordination problem, and that’s the good news,” said Nick Ellingson, WTIA’s vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship, in a news release.

Quantum computers, which have yet to be proven commercially viable, can hold multiple states at once and could eventually solve problems beyond the reach of conventional machines.

The report points to efforts by states including Illinois, Maryland and Colorado, which have committed $500 million, roughly $200 million and $127 million respectively to quantum campuses and research hubs.

In Washington state, Microsoft and Amazon are among the major tech companies leveraging their research to build quantum platforms and technology. Maryland-based IonQ’s Bothell, Wash., plant, the country’s first dedicated quantum computer factory, employs about 100 people, part of an expansion the report says could generate 1,200 to 2,000 jobs within five years.

Gov. Bob Ferguson vetoed $100,000 for a state quantum strategy in May 2025, citing fiscal pressure, while directing the Commerce Department to build industry partnerships and produce policy recommendations. Tuesday’s report was funded by a grant administered by Commerce.

In April, Ferguson steered $500,000 from the state’s Strategic Reserve Fund to IonQ’s Bothell expansion, Washington’s first direct investment in quantum.

Illinois, by comparison, has committed more than $500 million to the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, a campus near Chicago anchored by PsiQuantum and IBM.

Read the full report here.

— Hannah McClellan Richards has left Amazon after more than 15 years to become chief operating officer of micromobility company Lime.

“Ensuring hundreds of thousands of light electric vehicles are available, fully charged, when and where riders need them, at global scale is exactly the kind of operational challenge I love,” she said on LinkedIn, praising Lime’s carbon-free, affordable transportation model.

McClellan Richards previously served as VP of operations, product and tech for Amazon’s pharmacy division. Other past roles include technical advisor and chief of staff to the CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, and VP of freight, inbound transportation and returns. She will serve in the new role remotely.

— Ankur Sinha, former chief product and technology officer at Remitly, shared that he’s taken a role at Anthropic as head of enterprise and verticals. Sinha was at Seattle’s Remitly for more than four years, and was previously an engineering director at Google and spent more than a decade at Microsoft, working primarily on Xbox.

“Moving from transforming lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders (Remitly’s mission) to ensuring the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI (Anthropic’s mission), a few things stay constant,” Sinha said on LinkedIn. “The impact on human lives is what makes the work worth doing, and trust and safety are critical to doing it well. I’m super stoked to be part of this and to help carry it forward.”

— Christine Chambers has been named chief financial officer of Redmond, Wash.-based lidar maker MicroVision. She joins from Fusemachines and previously served as CFO of PetMeds and RealNetworks. Chambers was also a financial vice president at Seattle-area company Rosetta Stone.

MicroVision, which develops lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous driving and security use cases, cut 49 jobs in March, targeting engineering and technical roles.

Chambers’ appointment was disclosed in a federal filing and takes effect Aug. 27.

— Slalom has appointed Dan Garrison chief AI officer of the Seattle-based global business and technology consulting firm.

Garrison, who is based in Detroit, spent nearly 30 years at Accenture, most recently serving as chief technology officer for Accenture Song. His experience there included work in quantum computing and generative AI, integration of acquired businesses, and technology strategy leadership.

“Dan has an incredible amount of hands-on technical depth, enterprise transformation experience, and entrepreneurial energy,” said Brian Turner, Slalom’s chief capability officer, in a statement.

— AI infrastructure and data center company Crusoe has hired Celeste Grebe as senior vice president of financial planning and analysis. She will be based in Crusoe’s Bellevue office, which opened in December.

Grebe joins from CoreWeave and was previously with Microsoft for more than a decade across two stints. She left the tech giant as chief financial officer of cloud and AI data centers. She was also with PicMonkey as a vice president.

“It’s rare to find a company positioned to shape infrastructure at this scale, with such a deep understanding of, and partnership with, its customers—and that’s exactly what drew me here,” Grebe said on LinkedIn.

— Gravyty, a Seattle-based ed-tech company, named two new executives:

• Margaret Onisick Lawless will serve as chief product and technology officer, joining from TeachTown, where she held a comparable role for nearly five years. Onisick Lawless is based in North Carolina and will work remotely.
• Brandon Stec has joined as senior vice president of marketing, coming from Frontline Education. Stec resides in Illinois and will also work remotely.

— Richard Tso has taken a role as senior director analyst of AI marketing strategy for Gartner. He joins from Microsoft, where he worked for nearly a decade over two stints. Tso was most recently director of product marketing management for Azure and has held marketing roles for Microsoft Viva, Edge, PowerPoint and other products.

Tso was a founding member of Round, an organization providing mentorship and support for tech executives. Other past roles include leadership positions at Persefoni and LivePerson.

— TerraPower’s former chief operations officer, Eric Williams, is joining rival Hadron Energy as executive vice president of engineering. Williams was with Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower for 12 years, leading design and operations of its modular nuclear reactor and helping secure Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction permits.

“I have spent my career proving that advanced nuclear technology can be engineered, licensed, and deployed in the United States,” Williams said in a statement. “The mission at Hadron to commercialize a first-of-a-kind microreactor (MMR) is exactly where the nuclear industry needs to go.”

Williams’ move to New York-based Hadron is effective Aug. 31.

— Seattle’s Ian Wathen was promoted to chief financial officer of Conga, a Houston-based company that helps businesses coordinate their pricing, quoting, contracting, rebates and communications.

— Brittany Jarnot was promoted to senior manager of state and local government affairs in the West for Salesforce.

— Kristy Carrington was promoted to the role of chief executive for the North Division for Providence, overseeing operations in Western Washington and Alaska for the healthcare system.

— Colin Dale is now director of sales for Factal, a Seattle company providing risk intelligence, working out of its London office.

— And in case you missed it, Zillow announced a series of executive changes: CFO Jeremy Hofmann‘s role is expanding to include chief operating officer, while Jun Choo, who became chief operating officer in 2024, is stepping down to focus on his health and will serve as an advisor through the end of the year.

Editor’s note: Updated on Aug. 10 at 1:20 p.m. with news of Ankur Sinha’s new role.

Members of Washington’s AI task force point to the state’s new AI regulations as evidence that regulation and innovation can coexist, but a panel discussion this week marking the end of their two-year effort showed just how unsettled the core issues remain. 

The task force is caught between consumer and labor groups calling for more extensive guardrails, and tech industry representatives concerned about compliance costs, exposing the tension between the demands of the fast-moving AI industry and the risks the technology poses to individuals.

That came to the fore at a panel on Wednesday, held at the Seattle startup incubator AI House, where task force members faced an unusual mix of people: an audience of AI startup founders, plus a roster of pro-regulation experts representing the legal, labor, and consumer protection fields. 

Panelists were there to discuss the task force’s final report, which recommended AI regulations to the state legislature. Four of the eleven recommendations were adopted, in part or in full, and passed into law this spring. 

“We are here today to see how much of this sentiment — that Washington does not have to choose between embracing innovation and protecting people — comes out in the content of the report,” said Ryan Burns, co-founder of Responsible AI Washington, who moderated the panel. 

That line has become a refrain for AI regulators in Washington. Gov. Bob Ferguson, then the state’s attorney general, requested the legislation creating the task force in 2024. He appointed representatives from government, labor, academia, and the tech industry, directing them to explore how AI could be “regulated without stymieing innovation.” 

In the final report, published in July 2026, Attorney General Nick Brown wrote that the task force had “made clear” that the two priorities could coexist, despite the federal government’s pro-innovation agenda. But Wednesday’s event showed that might not be so simple. 

Narrow regulations passed

Washington passed its first AI regulations this spring, including a requirement that companion chatbots remind users that the bots are not human and another that prohibits medical insurers from denying a patient coverage solely on the basis of an assessment made by AI. For Burns, the laws that did not pass were more telling.

“It did strike me as meaningful that the recommendations that have been adopted pertained to narrower application areas,” Burns said. “The recommendations that have not yet passed were a lot bigger.”

One of those recommendations was to regulate the use of AI for high-risk decision making, meaning applications of AI to hiring processes, algorithmic pricing, criminal justice, and healthcare. A similar law has passed in states such as New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, and Colorado, but the Washington bill died before reaching a floor vote in either chamber.

The task force’s recommendation to require AI developers to disclose the datasets they are using to train their models, as California does, also died, as did a third recommendation to develop guidelines for the use of AI in the workplace. 

In an interview with GeekWire, state Rep. Mia Gregerson, who sponsored some of the comprehensive bills, said she appreciated the work of the task force but maintained that there is much more work to be done. 

“We are a tech heavy state, so we have an even bigger responsibility to do good work to catch up to what other states are doing,” Gregerson said. “We are so behind.”

On Wednesday, panelists said broader AI regulations failed in part because they drew less interest from the public.

“What passed in the legislature was more sector specific things where the consumer harm was more clear, and I think that’s a product of political dynamics,” said Yuki Ishizuka, technology policy manager for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “It’s harder to connect broader governance or transparency bills to harm to people.”

Broad AI regulations also faced heightened opposition from the tech industry, where a patchwork of state regulations means higher legal fees. At task force meetings, which were open to the public, representatives from the tech industry opposed regulations around AI development that would add “procedural hoops.” 

Cost of compliance

Concern about overregulation was echoed by attendees of the event, the majority of whom were founders of small AI startups.

When it came time for the Q&A, multiple audience members asked the task force to consider the financial burden for small startups of complying with complicated state regulations.

The distinction between big tech and startups has become a refrain for AI House, where entrepreneurs met with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray last month to discuss the nuances of AI regulation for so-called “small tech.”

“As these recommendations turn into policy, it’s important that startup founders are part of the conversation,” AI House Managing Director Jacob Colker told GeekWire. “A five-person startup doesn’t have the same legal, compliance, or policy capacity as a trillion-dollar company.”

But Jai Jaisimha, co-founder of a pro-regulation organization called the Transparency Coalition and a former startup founder himself, cautioned against creating legal carve outs for certain AI developers. 

“Arguing that you’re exempt because it’s too much data to disclose, or it’s a trade secret, those arguments send a sign that normal software development and governance does not apply to AI,” Jaisimha said. “Disclosure and consumer protection, these are standard practices in other industries.”

While the bills that would have been most costly for developers to comply with did not pass into law, those that did will still create significant legal consequences for AI developers who don’t abide by them. 

Panelist and technology law expert Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who was not a member of the task force, said the state’s new companion chatbot law will be “blood in the water for the plaintiffs’ bar” for two separate reasons. 

• First, any failure to comply could now be treated by the courts as “negligence per se,” meaning that the plaintiff will not have to show broader negligence but will simply have to show that the defendant violated the law. 
• Second, any failure to follow these regulations is deemed an unfair or deceptive act under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act, giving consumers a private right of action and exposing developers to higher financial penalties. 

The question for the tech industry will be about where the state’s attorney general will prioritize enforcement. 

“The AG has a lot of power, but not enough to bring every violation of the law. So you have to think of the Eye of Sauron, and whether it will focus on you. If you’re a little startup, probably not, but if you’re Meta, probably yes,” Calo said.

Future AI regulation

As Washington state prepares to implement its new regulations this January, regulators are bracing for backlash from the federal government.

A December executive order from the Trump administration called on Congress to pass a “minimally-burdensome” AI policy preempting state laws, created an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state laws that don’t “sustain and enhance the United States’ global AI dominance,” and threatened to cut broadband funding to those states. It named Colorado, which enacted the first comprehensive state AI law in 2024.

Federal preemption would require Congress to pass AI regulation of its own, which it has yet to do, but Trump’s order still seems to be having an effect. 

• This spring, Colorado repealed its AI regulation and replaced it with a more conciliatory law. 
• In Virginia, where no AI regulations have gained traction, legislators pointed to the federal government’s threats. 
• And in Utah, lawmakers withdrew a bill to regulate frontier models after the Trump administration sent them a memo criticizing it for “opposing the federal government’s agenda,” according to Politico.

“We believe that, if the federal government is going to act, they should act with meaningful AI regulation, and should not preempt the state’s ability to protect its citizens,” said Ishizuka of the Washington state AG’s office. 

The federal pressure has not stopped some leaders from calling for far-reaching regulation. Some members of Wednesday’s second panel, which was made up of representatives from labor, academia, and consumers from outside the task force, proposed redistribution: Future AI regulation should reallocate the profits made by developers to pay for AI’s impending costs, such as cybersecurity improvements, worker retraining, and updates to school curricula.

“My worry is that there is going to be a lot of money being made, and I really think that bill should go to the people that are making a lot of money off of it,” Calo said. “I’m not sure that all of the [task force’s] recommendations directly address that redistribution element.”

Some state lawmakers are ready to address it. Gregerson, whose district includes SeaTac Airport and whose constituency includes many Uber drivers, told GeekWire she hopes to allocate state funds for retraining rideshare drivers who are replaced by autonomous vehicles.

State Rep. Clyde Shavers, who was not present at Wednesday’s panel but was a member of the task force, has said he wants to spend the next session establishing liability frameworks for AI-related harm.

Now that the report has been published, the task force will be disbanded, but the work will continue at the Attorney General’s Office, where a new Tech Policy Team will be led by Ishizuka. 

“With the completion of the task force’s work, there is strong interest in the AG’s office to continue to focus on AI policy,” Ishizuka said. “We’ll look at emerging technologies and bring in outside expertise so that there is informed regulation.”

Salesforce is cutting 59 jobs in Washington state, impacting a wide variety of tech roles at offices in Seattle and Bellevue, according to a new state filing.

The layoffs at the San Francisco-based enterprise software giant, as well as data visualization company Tableau, are effective Oct. 5 according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification from the state’s Employment Security Department.

Affected positions include software engineers, product management directors, incident commanders, technical support engineers, and leadership roles across marketing and sustainability.

GeekWire reached out to Salesforce for comment on the reason behind the layoffs and for updated workforce numbers in the Seattle area. We’ll update this story when we hear back.

Last September, 93 employees in Washington state were laid off by Salesforce. At the same time, CEO Marc Benioff was touting efficiency gains at the company achieved through the use of AI tools.

The latest reductions come amid a broader restructuring at Salesforce, marking its third round of job cuts this year. The San Francisco Business Times reported that 74 employees are being laid off at the company’s headquarters, accompanied by a reshuffle in the C-suite that promoted Miguel Milano to COO.

Amid the restructuring, the company continues to pull in top regional leadership. Longtime Microsoft cybersecurity executive Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy announced last week that he’s joining Salesforce as executive vice president of engineering.

Salesforce acquired Seattle-based Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion. Despite the recurring job reductions, the company recently renewed its lease for roughly 114,000 square feet at the Data 1 office building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, signaling an ongoing commitment to its long-term home in the city.

In other tech industry layoffs this week, Google announced it was eliminating 52 jobs in Washington and Zillow is cutting 91 jobs.

— Teri Hatfield was named chief revenue officer for Iterable, a customer engagement platform. The Seattle-area tech executive most recently served as executive vice president of sales and solutions at Salesforce and CRO of Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019. She joined Tableau in 2012 and spent more than a decade in sales leadership roles at Verizon earlier in her career.

“I’ve come to believe that great customer relationships don’t start with technology. They start with understanding your customers,” Hatfield said on LinkedIn. “Iterable stood out because it’s built around that belief.”

Hatfield will work remotely for Iterable, which is based in San Francisco.

— Seattle-area attorney Ken Miller has joined Arnold & Porter as a partner in the life sciences and technology transactions teams within the law firm’s corporate and finance group.

Miller began his legal career at Perkins Coie, where he spent 16 years focused on tech companies and nonprofit organizations.

In 2015, he moved to the Gates Foundation as associate general counsel, briefly serving as lead counsel for the Gates Medical Research Institute before returning to the foundation as director of legal. In that role, he led work tied to the Global Health Division, the research institute, and business development and licensing, privacy and AI.

— Ben Reed is now chief marketing officer for AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM), a Seattle-area startup developing software that lets bulldozers and excavators operate on their own.

Reed previously ran a firm offering AI marketing and go-to-market advisory services. Other past roles include CMO for Sanctuary AI and a decade at Microsoft, where he departed as head of strategic storytelling for the company’s digital transformation platform.

“I’ve spent much of my career helping frontier technologies become understandable, credible, and consequential, from Microsoft Surface and HoloLens to physical AI, humanoids, and robotics. At AIM, the unusual opportunity is that the technology, customers, deployments, and proof already exist,” Reed said on LinkedIn.

— Aerospace startup Gravitics named Philip Wong chief financial officer. The Marysville, Wash.-based company designs and manufactures modular space infrastructure such as commercial space station modules, cargo-carrying spacecraft and orbital carriers. Its customers include U.S. Space Force and Axiom Space. On Tuesday, Gravitics announced a partnership with Lockheed Martin on a Department of War contract.

Wong joins Gravitics from Viasat, a communications company providing satellite internet services, where he led financial strategy and investment planning. He previously held leadership roles at Pure Storage and Seagate Technology and is based in California.

“Philip has spent 30 years deploying capital across satellite, network, and space infrastructure … He knows how to translate real engineering programs into the financial strategy that supports them,” said Colin Doughan, co-founder and CEO of Gravitics, in a statement.

— Ian Fliflet, former chief growth officer at Seattle online sales platform OfferUp, is sharing his insights on Intro, a service that provides video chats with experts from wide-ranging backgrounds.

— Katy Brown, president of Microsoft’s Americas Markets & Industries organization, was named to Avanade’s board of directors. Brown has been with the tech giant for nearly 30 years and is past president and board chair of the Professional Businesswomen of California. She also serves as executive sponsor of the Bay Area Women at Microsoft group.

— Ben Minicucci, CEO and president of Alaska Air Group, has joined Lyft’s board of directors. Minicucci has spent more than two decades with the airline, which is the parent company of Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air.

— Seattle tech leader Ash Wahi was appointed to MoPOP’s board of directors. Wahi is the founder and CEO of Revenaut, a startup building an AI marketing tool. His career includes leadership roles in product and advertising at Microsoft, Snap and Meta.

— TiE Seattle, a nonprofit supporting entrepreneurship, named five new members to its board of directors:

• Joseph Sirosh, CEO of CreatorsAG and former executive at Amazon and Microsoft. He also serves on the board for the biotech company AbSci.
• Monika Panpaliya, partner director of product management at Microsoft and former leader at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Boeing and T-Mobile.
• Vamshi Reddy, CEO of Quadrant Technologies, founder of Seattle Venture Capital, and past leader at Lenora Systems and Microsoft.
• Prasad Anguluri, co-founder of the social media platform Haply, which connects neighbors. Anguluri also serves as a Bothell City Council member, president of ANG Technologies, and co-founder of Innovative Investing Group.
• Sanjay Puri, who was previously a vice president with Icertis and a former leader at Avalara, 9Mile Labs, Edifecs and others.

— JT McCrone, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center genomic epidemiologist, was named leader of Nextstrain, an open-source project that tracks the evolution and spread of viral and bacterial pathogens in real time.

The effort is primarily based in Seattle at Fred Hutch and two institutions in Basel, Switzerland. It has received $1.5 million from the Gates Foundation to support its next phase, which aims to make analyses of viral evolution more accessible and scalable.

— Graham Littlehale is now an investing partner with venture firm Felicis. He previously served as vice president of Point72 Ventures.

The number of product research and development roles at Microsoft declined for the second straight year, according to the company’s annual regulatory filing, offering a new indication of how the tech giant is reshaping its workforce in the AI era.

Microsoft’s total headcount declined by 5,000 people to 223,000 as of June 30, according to its Form 10-K, filed with the SEC this week. It’s the first annual employment decline for Microsoft since 2016, when the company was writing off and winding down its Nokia smartphone business.

The trend is notable in part because, over the same time period, Microsoft’s revenue rose 18%, or $50.1 billion, to $331.8 billion — the largest one-year increase in the company’s history.

Here’s how the employment trends break down:

• Product R&D roles represented the majority of the net decline, falling by 3,000, to 77,000 — down from a peak of 81,000 in 2024.
• Operations roles, now Microsoft’s largest employment category, held steady at 89,000 after growing by 3,000 the year before. It includes datacenter operations, product support, consulting, and manufacturing and distribution.
• Sales and marketing roles declined by 1,000, to 43,000, and general and administration by 1,000, to 14,000.
• The reductions fell disproportionately on Microsoft’s U.S. workforce, which declined by 4,000, to 121,000. International employment declined by 1,000, to 102,000.

The numbers reflect the roughly 9,000 jobs Microsoft cut on July 2, 2025, two days into its fiscal year. They do not reflect the 4,800 cuts announced July 6 of this year — spanning sales, consulting and Xbox — or the thousands of U.S. employees who left in early July under the company’s first voluntary retirement program.

On the earnings call Wednesday, CFO Amy Hood confirmed that “total company headcount declined 2% year over year.” She linked a 10% increase in operating expenses to “continued investment in R&D compute capacity, talent, and data to support product development across the portfolio.”

AI coding tools — including Microsoft’s own GitHub Copilot — have become a standard part of how software is built at Microsoft and across the industry, reducing the number of people and the amount of time it takes to ship products, while often expanding the total scope of the work.

Microsoft has repeatedly declined to link its job cuts to AI. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said in a memo earlier this month that the roles being eliminated were not being directly replaced by AI, while acknowledging that “AI is changing how work gets done.”

Tech companies have been keeping a tighter rein on operating expenses, primarily through job cuts, in part to offset soaring capital expenses to support their AI infrastructure buildouts. Microsoft’s capex reached $41 billion in the June quarter alone.

Microsoft is also moving engineers out of product development and into customer-facing roles. The Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion initiative announced July 2, brings together more than 6,000 people to embed engineers inside customers building AI systems — a group drawn “primarily from Microsoft’s existing engineering and forward-deployed teams,” according to the company.