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.

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. 

As AI workloads drive soaring cloud bills, more companies are weighing whether to move computing out of public clouds and into their own data centers. But building and operating AI infrastructure is far more complicated than simply buying servers — networking has become one of the biggest technical hurdles.

That’s the opportunity Seattle startup Hedgehog is chasing.

Founded in 2022 by CEO Marc Austin, a Cisco networking veteran, Hedgehog develops open-source software designed to make private AI data centers operate more like hyperscale clouds. It has raised $11 million in seed funding, with plans to raise a series A financing round.

We caught up with Austin for the return of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about the 20-person company, the AI networking boom and what surprised him most about building a startup in one of tech’s fastest-moving markets.

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

Hedgehog is open-source software that makes AI networking simple. AI clouds and enterprises use it to run GPU networks the way hyperscalers do — deployed in hours instead of months, operated by DevOps teams instead of armies of network engineers, on open hardware with no vendor lock-in.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Time to GPU value. A GPU cluster is the most expensive asset most companies will ever buy, and every day it sits idle waiting on the network is money burning. That wait is rarely the hardware — it’s the fabric: weeks or months of scarce network engineers hand-designing, cabling, tuning, and validating it across proprietary CLIs and locked-in vendor gear.

Meanwhile the people told to “own the network” usually aren’t network engineers at all — they’re platform and DevOps teams. We’re obsessed with collapsing that timeline: declare your network like intent in Kubernetes and go from racked GPUs to inference in hours instead of months — on open hardware, no lock-in, no room full of specialists. Cloud-grade networking without hyperscaler headcount.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

How rarely the buyer is a network engineer. It’s platform and DevOps teams, often at AI clouds who just took delivery of thousands of GPUs who are told “you own the network now.” They don’t want to learn BGP; they want a network that behaves like the rest of their cloud-native stack. The other surprise: they don’t just want to run the network, they want to sell it by carving up capacity for their own customers, like a cloud provider does.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Twice over.

Our product exists because AI broke traditional networking. Training and inference traffic melts networks designed for web apps.

And AI changed how we build: we use it heavily across engineering, testing, and go-to-market, which lets a small team continuously test every supported device and configuration in our lab and ship with hyperscaler-grade rigor. AI raised the bar for what a startup-sized team can deliver.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That “open source” means hobbyist. The opposite is true: openness is the enterprise feature. Our customers can audit every line of code that runs their fabric, extend it, and never get locked in. Nearly every competitor markets “open networking” while shipping a proprietary controller. Hedgehog is the only one that actually publishes the repo.

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

Betting entirely on Ethernet. We decided open, standards-based Ethernet would win AI networking and put everything behind it. Watching the industry’s largest AI operators now standardize on that same approach makes us feel good about the call — but saying no was hard.

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

Pick the wave, not just the surfboard.

Product decisions are recoverable; betting against a structural industry shift isn’t. Find the standard, the architecture, or the buyer behavior that’s inevitable, align everything to it early, and be patient while the market catches up to your bet.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

Networking is boring again. When a platform engineer stands up a multi-tenant GPU cloud and the network is just a few lines of declared intent that nobody thinks twice about. When “network like a hyperscaler” describes every AI cloud, not just the giants running on Hedgehog, then we will have made it!

Salesforce’s Tableau business has renewed its lease for roughly 114,000 square feet at the Data 1 office building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, extending its long-term home in the city.

The lease renewal takes effect after the current agreement expires in 2029, according to an announcement Monday first reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal. It marks the largest office lease renewal in Seattle this year.

The renewal continues Tableau’s long association with Fremont, where the company added offices over the years to accommodate its rapid growth before its $15.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in 2019. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once said the Seattle region would become the company’s “HQ2” with the Tableau deal.

However, the years following the acquisition brought significant change. Salesforce conducted multiple rounds of layoffs that affected Tableau employees and trimmed its Seattle office footprint as hybrid work reshaped demand for office space.

Former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson also departed in 2024 after leading the business for two years. Before the acquisition, Tableau had grown to about 4,200 employees worldwide, about half of them in the Seattle region. 

Salesforce originally planned to sublease the Data 1 building at 744 N. 34th St., which Tableau opened in 2018. But it then quickly reversed course in 2023, instead choosing to put its nearby Fremont headquarters building on the sublease market.

The Tableau news also comes at a changing time for Fremont.

Last year, Google announced plans to leave its Fremont campus, bringing all of its employees in Seattle together at its South Lake Union campus. At the time, it cited a desire for better collaboration and community. The pending departure has meant a large chunk of prime office space remains available for lease along the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

However, other companies and organizations have discovered the so-called “Center of the Universe.” Chip maker Nvidia recently leased 28,000 square feet of space at The Fremont Lake Union Center building and the global biotech nonprofit PATH last year took over offices formerly occupied by Tableau in Fremont’s West Dock building.

We’ve reached out to Salesforce about the Tableau lease, and we will update this post as we learn more.

UPDATE with statements from Salesforce and Hess Callahan Grey Group:

“Data 1 has been a critical hub for our local employees and customers, and we are thrilled to continue our presence in Fremont,” said Rob McCorkindale, VP of Global Real Estate Portfolio & Transactions at Salesforce. “This renewal underscores our continued investment in the Seattle region and our focus on creating spaces that inspire our people to do their best work.”

“Salesforce has been an exceptional tenant and a valued presence in the Fremont community since Data 1 was completed,” said Mark Grey, partner at Hess Callahan Grey Group. “Their decision to extend their commitment to the building speaks to the enduring appeal of Fremont and the importance of creating great environments for leading employers. Salesforce is an integral part of the neighborhood’s technology ecosystem, and we are proud to continue supporting their long-term presence in Seattle.”

Bellevue, Wash.-based Pulse Space says it has received a $40 million award from the U.S. Space Force to develop technologies for laser-based power beaming and orbital tracking systems.

The startup, founded in 2022, is working on a system that would collect energy using solar arrays and send that energy via a laser beam to remote nodes in space. The technologies developed for the system could also be used to track objects in orbit and transmit data.

“This historic $40 million award is a defining moment for Pulse Space, and I am exceptionally proud of our team for making it happen,” Karl Stedman, Pulse Space’s founder and CEO, said today in a news release. “We are honored to partner with the United States Space Force to mature our laser-based technologies and are proud to share this massive step forward with our investors and shareholders. Pulse’s technical development platform is helping pave the way toward that future.”

Pulse Space was previously awarded a $1.9 million Air Force contract in support of its work on laser-based military communications systems. The company said its proposed satellite constellation would support “secure, high-bandwidth optical communication and energy delivery,” with the ability to transmit 29.7 kilowatts of power to a 3-meter (10-foot) target from 1,000 kilometers (621 miles).

The company is also on the Missile Defense Agency’s list of potential vendors for SHIELD contracts, with a ceiling of $151 billion. SHIELD — which stands for Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense — is a program that encompasses a broad range of work areas for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative.

Pulse Space was one of the startups selected in 2024 for the Techstars Space Accelerator program, and last year the company partnered with Virginia-based Scout Space to work toward an in-orbit demonstration of laser power transmission.

In February, Pulse Space completed a $5.72 million seed investment round, according to Pitchbook. Its investors include Divergent Capital, GrayArch Partners, Shake and Bake Productions and Techstars.

Gov. Bob Ferguson last week recruited top executives from Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Boeing and other major employers to help shape Washington state’s economic strategy, launching a new advisory council as concerns mount that the state is becoming less competitive for business.

The 26-member Governor’s Economic Development Council is the first such governor-led economic advisory body in roughly two decades, reviving an approach last used under former Gov. Christine Gregoire in 2006. The group includes leaders from technology, aerospace, organized labor, higher education, tribal governments, ports and economic development organizations who will advise the governor on policies aimed at strengthening Washington’s economy. (See full list below).

One missing ingredient: No members from Washington’s venture capital or startup ecosystem are on the council, even though they are often considered the bench strength of a growing economy.

The announcement comes as executives, startup founders and business organizations have increasingly warned that higher taxes, rising costs, permitting delays and an uncertain regulatory environment are making Washington a more difficult place to build and grow companies. Ferguson recently signed the so-called “millionaires tax” — a proposed 9.9% tax applied to taxable, personal annual income that exceeds $1 million.

Some of the region’s wealthiest and most prominent entrepreneurs — including Zillow and Expedia co-founder Rich Barton; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz — have publicly announced moves out of Washington state in recent years.

Starbucks also recently announced a major expansion in Nashville, and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte of earlier this month announced that Sedro Wooley, Wash.-based Janicki Industries chose Great Falls for the site of an $800 million manufacturing center expected to create 1,000 jobs.

“Washington is our home, and that is not changing,” said John Janicki, president of Janicki Industries, in a press release. “Our footprint in Washington has continued to grow but is slowing due to ever-increasing regulations and lack of business understanding at an executive and legislative level.” 

Meanwhile, a recent survey from the Association of Washington Business found that 24% of businesses are considering a relocation out of the state, up from 17 percent in the prior quarter.

Washington’s economic climate was also one of the reasons why GeekWire recently traveled to Cleveland, where we explored how the Midwestern city was positioning itself for a changing economy, and the lessons that Washington could learn from it.

“We cannot take our strength for granted,” Ferguson said in announcing the council. “I’m launching a historic convening of top leaders from around Washington state to help guide the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state.”

The council will help develop Washington’s long-term economic strategy, identify opportunities to create family-wage jobs, evaluate the state’s competitiveness against other states and global markets, recommend ways to attract new employers and review regulatory barriers that may be slowing economic growth. The group will meet quarterly and submit recommendations to the governor.

The council’s creation comes after months of growing unease within Washington’s technology and business community.

GeekWire has reported extensively on criticism surrounding this year’s tax package, which raised business taxes on many employers and expanded the sales tax to additional services, including advertising. Business groups warned the measures could discourage investment and expansion in Washington, while lawmakers argued the revenue was necessary to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap and preserve essential public services.

The broader economic backdrop remains mixed. Washington continues to rank among the nation’s strongest state economies and remains home to global leaders in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, aerospace and life sciences. At the same time, employers are navigating higher borrowing costs, federal policy uncertainty, trade tensions and intensifying competition from states aggressively courting new investment.

As one example, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently encouraged people and businesses from places like Washington to consider Ohio.

“Come work in Ohio,” DeWine noted after a question from GeekWire about advice he’d provide to Washington. “You will not find a better place, better people, quality of life. Cost of living is low compared to the two coasts.”

In the press release announcing Janicki Industries’ Montana expansion, Gianforte was a bit more blunt.

“The Treasure State is proud to attract job creators like Janicki that choose to expand from high-tax, high-regulation blue states to take advantage of our unmatched quality of life, lower taxes, and strong workforce,” he said. “I look forward to seeing the impact of this significant investment.”

Ferguson has sought to make economic development a central priority during his first year in office. His administration has highlighted efforts to speed permitting across state agencies, increase housing production and invest in sectors including quantum computing, advanced manufacturing and clean energy.

However, some have argued that the governor’s efforts come a bit too late, and are only be instituted in response to criticism. Gov. Ferguson shot back at that contention in the press conference last week, saying he doesn’t worry about critics and he’s interested in “solving problems.”

“I didn’t wake up last week and think about forming this council,” he said. “To be clear, as I mentioned in my talking points, this was an effort we really started last year and was an outgrowth of having conversations with many of the folks behind me and many other people across the state.”

Whether the new council ultimately leads to meaningful policy changes remains to be seen. But its creation sends a signal that Ferguson intends to place economic competitiveness — and closer engagement with Washington’s business community — near the center of his administration.

Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky, a member of the newly created council, called the formation of the group an “important step.”

“When the public and private sectors align around shared goals, communities benefit,” he said.

Governor’s Economic Development Council members:

• Michael Cade — Incoming Board Chair, Washington Economic Development Association; Executive Director, Thurston County Economic Development Council
• Dr. Betsy Cantwell — President, Washington State University
• Leonard Forsman — Chairman, Suquamish Tribe
• Denny Heck — Washington State Lieutenant Governor
• Kris Johnson — President, Association of Washington Business
• Trevor Johnson — CEO, Blackwood Homes
• Dr. Robert Jones — President, University of Washington
• Mike Katz — Chief Business & Product Officer, T-Mobile
• Mary Kipp — President & CEO, Puget Sound Energy
• Heather Kurtenbach — Executive Secretary, Washington State Building & Construction Trades Council
• Dr. Thomas J. Lynch Jr. — President & Director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
• Julianna Marler — CEO, Port of Vancouver
• West Mathison — President & CEO, Stemilt Growers
• Stephen Metruck — Executive Director, Port of Seattle
• Denise Moriguchi — President & CEO, Uwajimaya
• Stephanie Pope — President & CEO, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
• Heather Rosentrater — President & CEO, Avista
• Michael Senske — Chairman & CEO, Pearson Packaging Systems
• April Sims — President, Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO
• Brad Smith — Vice Chair and President, Microsoft
• Rachel Smith — President, Washington Roundtable
• Bill Sterud — Chairman, Puyallup Tribe
• Shane Tackett — President and Chief Financial Officer, Alaska Airlines
• Monique Valenzuela — Executive Director, Ventures
• Dr. Rebekah Woods — President, Columbia Basin College
• David Zapolsky — Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer, Amazon

U.S. shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during Amazon’s four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase were those who arrived from AI chatbots.

It’s the latest twist in a high-stakes bet by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending retailers their best-converting customers are the same ones Amazon has worked to keep away from its own store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its own on-site AI assistant instead.

Adobe reported over that weekend that visitors who clicked through to shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those showing up through search, email or social media.

AI still accounts for a small fraction of total shopping traffic, but a trend is starting to emerge. In the past, shoppers sent by AI were the least likely to buy, according to Adobe’s data. The change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are becoming more effective at giving shoppers the information they need to buy with confidence.

Those figures span all of U.S. retail — “Prime Day” has become much more than a day, and much bigger than Amazon alone. The distinction matters, because Amazon has taken a different path than many of its rivals. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to outside AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.

Agentic AI drives less than 1% of traffic across every major online store, but Amazon’s share is the lowest of the group, at about 0.4%, according to J.P. Morgan data.

That’s by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that shopped on customers’ behalf, and won a preliminary injunction barring the tool from the logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents degrade a trusted experience. Perplexity is appealing.

Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPT’s crawlers from reading its listings — even as it has begun buying ads inside ChatGPT to bring shoppers back, a move first spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.

On Amazon’s most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with the AI companies to come up with a better experience between Amazon and third-party agents to “find something that works for customers and all the companies.”

In the meantime, Amazon is focusing on its own AI assistant.

The tool — launched as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping — has drawn more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% over the past year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are more than 60% more likely to buy, and Amazon Web Services has said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.

Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents weren’t good enough yet — that they lacked a shopper’s history and often couldn’t get prices right — and that people would gravitate to whichever assistant knew them best. That’s the opening Amazon is going after with its own AI chatbot and related tools on Amazon.com.

“We are aiming to have it be the best shopping assistant anywhere,” Jassy said.

The strategy reflects one of the ways Amazon is increasingly making money. Advertising is now among its most profitable businesses. J.P. Morgan expects it to bring in about $83 billion in revenue this year and, because the margins are high, to account for roughly a third of the company’s operating income.

That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its own site rather than handing the decision to an outside chatbot it doesn’t control.

The big question long-term is whether Amazon can maintain its own role as a primary destination for shoppers and avoid becoming just another selection on a chatbot’s shelf.