— Two former Amazon executives who helped build Discovery’s direct-to-consumer operation in Bellevue, Wash., are stepping down from their leadership roles following the company’s acquisition by Paramount Skydance. They will remain in advisory roles during the transition.

Avi Saxena joined Discovery in 2019 as chief technology officer of its direct-to-consumer business and led its new Bellevue office. He became CTO of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) following Discovery’s 2022 merger with AT&T’s WarnerMedia business. Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of WBD on Oct. 6, with the combined company taking the name Skydance Corporation.

Before joining Discovery, Saxena was with Amazon for 19 years over two stints, most recently as vice president of technology for Amazon Marketplace. He also held leadership roles at Microsoft and internet infrastructure startups.

Tyler Whitworth is stepping down as executive vice president and chief product officer for WBD’s streaming business. He led teams working on digital products for HBO Max, discovery+, Eurosport, TNT Sports, Food Network and others. Before joining Discovery, he spent more than seven years at Amazon, leading teams developing products and services for customers and third-party sellers.

Dane Glasgow, Skydance’s chief product officer, announced the departures of Whitworth, Saxena and WBD Chief Information Officer Dave Duvall in a memo shared with GeekWire.

“Much of the strength of WBD’s product and technology organizations reflects their leadership and dedication. Please join me in thanking them and wishing them the very best,” Glasgow wrote.

The company has not responded to GeekWire’s inquiries about the future of the Bellevue office.

— Bahadir Onalan is returning to Microsoft as a vice president in its CoreAI organization, focused on responsible AI, after nearly 10 years at Amazon. Onalan first joined Microsoft in 2005 and worked on Azure teams focused on search, analytics, business intelligence and security. He left in 2017 as a principal software group engineering manager to join Amazon, where he worked on machine learning initiatives.

“This second tenure feels like a true homecoming,” Onalan wrote. “Our goal goes beyond shipping a platform or a product; we are here to define the global standards for AI safety.”

— Naria Santa Lucia is leaving Microsoft after seven years, most recently as a general manager with Microsoft Elevate. She previously served as executive director of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship.

“I’ll carry the lessons I learned from my time at Microsoft as I continue my personal and professional mission to serve people and communities by teaching, advising nonprofits and mission driven organizations, and spreading joy and human connection,” Santa Lucia wrote.

She did not announce a specific next role.

— VertueLab, a Pacific Northwest nonprofit supporting climate tech entrepreneurs, has named Leo Ochoa executive director, promoting him from managing director for Oregon. He succeeds Aina Abiodun, who is transitioning to chair of the organization’s board after more than three years as executive director.

“Leo brings a unique blend of vision, relationships, and entrepreneurship experience,” the organization said, noting his background as a wildland firefighter, startup founder and patent holder for wearable safety gear.

Abiodun’s accomplishments include co-creating the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, launching the Opalene Climate Challenge and helping lead the Just Future Climate Labs initiative.

— Seattle’s Pulse Space has appointed Leah Sardone as vice president of engineering. The startup is developing laser-based systems to deliver power and enable long-distance communications in low Earth orbit and beyond. In July, the company announced a $40 million U.S. Space Force contract to advance its laser-based space power technology.

Sardone brings more than 23 years of experience in hardware, sensors and embedded systems development. She joins Pulse Space from IonQ, where she most recently served as director of quantum networking and interconnects. Her previous employers include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell Aerospace, Blue Origin and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, now known as Amazon Leo.

— Caravel Bio a Portland, Ore., startup developing technology to rapidly test newly designed proteins, has announced Michał Jastrzębski as its CTO. The company says its platform can screen millions of protein designs in parallel at low cost, helping identify promising candidates for applications in human health, pollution reduction and industrial processes.

Caravel also announced a nearly $1.25 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop the platform.

Jastrzębski previously served as a principal machine learning engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks. His past employers also include GitHub and Intel.

— Darick Baker has been appointed the director the University of Washington’s Washington Nanofabrication Facility, which the UW describes as “the largest publicly accessible nanofabrication facility and cleanroom in the Pacific Northwest.” Baker joined the facility in 2012 as a research engineer and has served as acting director since 2025. He previously worked at the Colorado School of Mines

— Technology Alliance announced that Stoke Space director of communications Kyra Jorgensen has joined its board. Jorgeson recently joined the space startup from the fusion company Helion Energy.

Blue Origin is taking over an industrial building in Des Moines, Wash., where the Jeff Bezos-founded space company plans a mix of lab, development and light production work, the company confirmed to GeekWire.

The 265,922-square-foot facility, known as Prologis Park SeaTac 3, was previously a Bartell Drugs distribution center just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Blue Origin said that at full capacity over the long term, the site is expected to support hundreds of employees.

KING 5 first reported the news Tuesday, citing a state environmental application filed in September that lists Blue Origin Manufacturing LLC at the building’s address, 21202 24th Ave. S. A pre-application under review by the city indicates the property could be used for research and development of commercial satellites, the station reported.

Commercial real estate firm Newmark announced a lease for the entire building last week without naming the tenant.

“The manufacturing project that will be using this property is cutting-edge and we are excited about the job growth and possibilities that it represents for our region,” Newmark Executive Vice Chairman Thad Mallory said in a news release.

With roughly 33,000 residents, the small city of Des Moines is becoming something of an aerospace hub.

Blue Origin’s new location is around the corner from where Shield AI is building X-Forge 3, a 420,000-square-foot facility that will make the company’s X-BAT autonomous fighter jet. Shield AI said last month it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s, and that it’s looking for another 1 million square feet.

“It’s all about labor and access to power,” Mallory told KING 5, referring to the advanced manufacturing projects coming to the area.

Blue Origin is headquartered in nearby Kent, Wash., about 5 miles from the Des Moines site.

The company is working to get its New Glenn rocket flying again after one exploded during a ground engine test in May, which damaged its Florida launch pad. New Glenn is slated to carry Blue’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, a test in Earth orbit planned for mid-2027 ahead of a crewed moon landing targeted for 2028.

Astronomers sorting through data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile have found an icy world that has a good chance of joining Pluto in the solar system’s retinue of dwarf planets.

University of Washington astronomer Mario Jurić joined the astronomer who made the discovery, Matthew Holman of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to announce the findings today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Spokane, Wash.

Jurić, the Rubin team’s solar system lead scientist, said the observatory’s capabilities made it possible to detect and characterize the new dwarf planet candidate, known as 2026 ED138.

“Rubin is giving us an unprecedented capacity to explore the sky through a combination of speed, depth, and precision,” Jurić said in a news release. “And the discovery is just the beginning: Once we identify a new object, we can search back months, and sometimes even decades, finding it in images where nobody knew to look. This ability to both discover and ‘precover’ objects is transforming how quickly and accurately we can determine their orbits and understand the distant solar system.”

2026 ED138 traces a tilted orbital path that takes it well beyond Pluto, the solar system’s best-known dwarf planet. It’s currently at a distance of 46 astronomical units, where 1 AU equals the average distance between Earth and the sun. Pluto, by comparison, is currently about 40 AU from the sun.

Astronomers suspect ED138 formed billions of years ago closer to the sun before being flung into a wider orbit by gravitational interactions with Neptune.

Based on an analysis of its distance, brightness and assumed composition, ED138 is thought to be somewhere between 600 and 1,500 kilometers (373 to 932 miles) in diameter. At that size, an icy object should possess enough gravity to pull itself into a round shape — satisfying the primary physical criterion for a dwarf planet.

ED138 may be Rubin’s first dwarf planet candidate, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. Thanks to the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope — named after the family of Seattle software billionaire Charles Simonyi — the Rubin team detected more than 11,000 new asteroids even before June’s official start of a 10-year survey of the southern sky.

Rubin’s researchers analyze the data from those scans to find objects of interest — ranging from asteroids to gamma-ray bursts — and track them over time. On Oct. 13, Holman was running data through a search code that he developed with Kevin Napier, a colleague at the Center for Astrophysics. ED138 stood out due to its exceptional size and brightness.

“My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” Holman said. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”

To confirm the discovery, Holman, Jurić and their colleagues found 30 archived observations of ED138 dating back to March 4. The Asteroid Institute’s ADAM Precovery service found still more images of the object, going back to 2016, in the archives of a different astronomical survey.

The precovery data confirmed that ED138 was a special case.

“Finding an object this big, roughly 1,000 kilometers across, is something that happens maybe once in a generation,” Jurić said. “It’s the largest trans-Neptunian object found in about 20 years, and Rubin turned it up while we were still commissioning the telescope.”

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined dwarf planets as planetary objects that are big enough to crush themselves into a roundish shape — technically speaking, into a state of hydrostatic equilibrium — but not big enough to clear their orbital neighborhood.

So far, the IAU has classified five solar system objects as dwarf planets — including Ceres in the main asteroid belt, plus Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake in the region beyond Neptune. 2026 ED138 joins a host of other celestial objects that are thought to be dwarf planets but haven’t yet been added to the IAU’s official list.

“The official list hasn’t moved since 2008,” Jurić told GeekWire in an email. “I’m not sure if there’s an active process that reviews candidates, and what are the timelines.”

Jurić and his colleagues hope additional observations will boost ED138’s chances of attaining true dwarf planethood.

“The next step in building the case would be to prove it’s round (in hydrostatic equilibrium),” he wrote. “The means to do that would be directly through occultations (and there’s a good chance of that, given it’s in a dense stellar field), and then thermal measurements plus modeling and light curves (or the absence of variability).”

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space has secured a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital to build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral for a larger version of its fully reusable rocket.

The loan isn’t final until Stoke meets a list of financial, legal, technical and due-diligence requirements. The announcement Monday comes less than two months after Stoke raised roughly $1 billion in a Series E round, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion.

The new pad would serve Stoke’s Nova Block 2 rocket, which is designed to carry up to 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit. That’s five times the capacity of Nova Pathfinder, which Stoke plans to launch for the first time from its existing pad in early 2027. Block 2 is slated to debut in 2029.

The loan would be paired with private capital to pay for the pad, according to the Department of War. Jordan Sebold, senior managing director for investments at the Office of Strategic Capital, said in a statement that adding launch infrastructure would “enhance the overall capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base.”

The Office of Strategic Capital was set up in 2022 to draw private investment into technologies seen as critical to national security. The following year, Congress gave it the power to make loans and loan guarantees to companies in those fields. Space launch is one of the technology categories it targets.

“By expanding domestic launch facility capacity, this investment enables launch service providers to ensure our commercial and defense partners have reliable, high-cadence access to space,” David Lorch, the office’s director, said in the news release.

Stoke is already lined up for military launch work. In 2025, the Space Force added the company to a pool of providers that can compete for national security missions under Lane 1 of the program’s third phase. Lane 1 is the tier meant for newer launch companies and less demanding payloads. Stoke can’t bid on those missions until it completes a successful orbital flight.

The company has other federal ties as well. The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Stoke a $4.5 million contract in 2024 to study rapid delivery of cargo to orbit, and possibly back to Earth. In June, Stoke was one of 37 companies NASA chose for unfunded partnerships. Stoke’s project focuses on returning Nova’s upper stage safely through the atmosphere.

Nova is designed so both of its stages can return and fly again. The booster flies itself back for recovery. The upper stage uses a metal heat shield cooled by liquid hydrogen that circulates through channels inside it, to survive the heat of reentry. Only SpaceX, with its much larger Starship, is pursuing the same goal, and it hasn’t fully achieved it yet. Stoke has yet to launch a rocket to orbit.

Stoke was founded in 2019 by two Blue Origin veterans: Andy Lapsa, the CEO, and Tom Feldman, the chief technology officer. The company has about 400 employees. Most work at its 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters in Kent, and about 50 are at its test site in Moses Lake, which is expanding from 75 to 550 acres. About 50 more work at Cape Canaveral.

GeekWire reached out to Stoke Space for comment and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

Portal Space Systems has reached Earth orbit for the second time this year, successfully launching the startup’s first free-flying spacecraft, Starburst-1, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Portal’s Starburst-1 lifted off Tuesday at 7:04 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The spacecraft separated from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission about 57 minutes later.

Within hours of deployment, the Bothell, Wash.-based company reported that the desk-sized craft had established ground communications, stabilized itself, and successfully deployed its solar array to become power positive.

It marks the second significant milestone for Portal this year, following the March debut of Mini-Nova — a tissue-box-sized technology demonstration payload that flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission to test critical control and power systems in orbit.

Portal self-funded Starburst-1 to accelerate its flight timeline and prove out hardware for prospective customers, achieving orbit in less than a year since introducing the Starburst vehicle concept in November 2025.

Co-founder and CEO Jeff Thornburg emphasized that urgency is baked into the startup’s operational philosophy, noting that customers require spacecraft that can shift rapidly in orbit.

“Speed can’t just be part of the product. It has to be part of the company building it,” Thornburg said in a statement. “Our customers need spacecraft that move quickly in orbit and a company that moves with the same urgency to get them there. We put our own capital behind Starburst-1 because proving hardware in flight is how we earn their confidence.”

Thornburg shared video of the launch and deployment of Starburst-1 on LinkedIn.

Starburst is an ESPA-class spacecraft designed to execute rapid maneuvers within a specific orbital regime, giving commercial and defense operators greater operational flexibility. The vehicle shares the majority of its core systems and manufacturing processes with Supernova, Portal’s larger upcoming spacecraft built for rapid travel across different orbital regimes, with flight data from Starburst-1 directly informing both platforms.

Starburst-1 is carrying experimental technologies from three partner companies to test in orbit:

• Zenno Astronautics’ Supertorquer: A superconducting magnetic attitude-control system designed to orient the spacecraft using Earth’s magnetic field — conserving onboard propellant — while testing whether its magnetic field can shield sensitive electronics from radiation.
• TRL11’s Fovea M1: A specialized camera system providing live video of Starburst-1 and its surroundings, including visual confirmation of the solar array deployment.
• Atomic-6’s Space Armor: Protective tiles engineered to shield the spacecraft from high-speed orbital debris without creating additional secondary debris.

Since emerging from stealth in 2024, Portal has raised $75 million in funding — including a $50 million round in April — from investors including Geodesic Capital, Mach33, Booz Allen Ventures, AlleyCorp, and FUSE, alongside receiving critical SBIR and STRATFI support from the U.S. military.

GeekWire got an inside look at Portal’s 8,000-square-foot Bothell development and testing lab earlier this year. To prepare for future demand — including a dedicated 2028 Falcon 9 mission known as Motus Via Sol that will carry multiple Starburst spacecraft and the first Supernova — Portal has been expanding its footprint.

The company — No. 107 on the GeekWire 200 index of top-ranked Pacific Northwest startups — is in the process of transitioning its satellite manufacturing operations into a new 65,000-square-foot facility in Bothell, which is slated to be fully operational by next year and capable of producing up to 16 Starburst and 12 Supernova spacecraft annually.

Aviation startup Reliable Robotics is opening a new engineering hub in the Seattle area, establishing a radar research and development center in Bothell.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced Tuesday that it has raised $115 million, pushing its valuation above $1 billion. The funding will help expand its aircraft fleet, production facilities and engineering team as it works toward federal certification of its autonomous flight technology.

Reliable’s new office in the Bothell Highlands north of Seattle will open with about 25 employees and serve as its Radar Center of Excellence, a facility for developing and testing systems designed to help aircraft detect and avoid other aircraft. The company plans to grow the team and is heavily recruiting in the region, including roles across radar, embedded software, flight controls, guidance and navigation, simulation and systems engineering.

The expansion adds another player to the Seattle area’s growing mix of aerospace, robotics and autonomous systems companies.

Last month, GeekWire reported that San Diego-based Shield AI selected Des Moines, Wash., as the production and engineering hub for its X-BAT, an AI-piloted aircraft designed to take off and land vertically. The heavily-funded company is planning a 420,000-square-foot manufacturing and engineering facility and says it expects to employ about 4,000 people in the region by the early 2030s.

Reliable is developing systems that can automate aircraft operations, including engine startup, taxiing, takeoff and landing. Its longer-term ambitions include enabling aircraft to fly without a pilot aboard, with remote operators overseeing flights from the ground. The company is working toward certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Founded by former SpaceX engineers in 2017, Reliable has spent nearly a decade developing technology designed to work with existing aircraft rather than requiring entirely new planes. Its initial system is intended to keep a pilot in the cockpit while automating key flight operations, with more advanced levels of autonomy planned over time.

The 250-person company’s latest financing, including $90 million led by Nimble Partners and a $25 million term loan from Silicon Valley Bank, brings total funding to $380 million.

The company’s new Bothell lab will bring together engineers to design, build and test radar systems, including its active electronically scanned array air-to-air radar.

The technology is intended to support detect-and-avoid capabilities that would help autonomous aircraft safely operate in the national airspace alongside conventional planes.

“Seattle represents the past, present and future of aviation. For decades, engineers here have developed aircraft and systems that change how the world connects,” Chris Schulenberg, Reliable’s vice president of programs, said in the company’s announcement. “By expanding into the Pacific Northwest, Reliable is uniting the tech talent in Silicon Valley with the aviation expertise of Seattle.”

The Bothell office — located at 21222 30th Drive SE — will be led by Schulenberg and Marc Pos, a senior technical fellow focused on radar who previously spent more than two decades at Honeywell.

“Radar development is a hands-on process,” Pos said in a statement. “By bringing a team together in a centralized lab and engineering environment, with all of the resources we need at our fingertips, we can move from design through development and testing with the rigor, speed and precision unique to Reliable.”

Reliable also plans to expand its engineering operations in San Diego, where it will focus on aviation autonomy for military applications.

The two offices bring the company’s footprint to five locations, joining its headquarters and aircraft hangars in California and the operating hub of its subsidiary airline, Reliable Airlines, in Albuquerque, N.M.

Space propulsion company Agile Space Industries is expanding its footprint to the Pacific Northwest, signing a sublease for a new engineering office in Bellevue, Wash.

Situated in the Sunset North office complex along Interstate 90, the nearly 5,740-square-foot space will initially house a half-dozen existing employees while scaling up to accommodate an engineering team of 20 to 30 people.

The effort is being led by Chief Technology Officer Jake Mills, a former propulsion engineer and crew member at Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based Blue Origin space venture. Mills joined Durango, Colo.-based Agile in June and the Bellevue hub will try to tap into more of the Seattle region’s deep aerospace talent pool for systems, design, and propulsion engineering.

Started in 2009 as Advanced Mobile Propulsion Technologies, Agile specializes in in-space chemical propulsion systems for satellites, lunar landers, and national security missions. Unlike booster rockets that launch payloads off the planet, the company’s hardware — including thrusters, propellant tanks, and integrated propulsion systems — takes over once spacecraft reach orbit, navigating everything from commercial constellations to lunar exploration.

“The talent pool there, manufacturing capabilities there, customer base there, supply chain based in Seattle, all make it very attractive to go there, and that is the reason we’re opening up the engineering office,” Mills told GeekWire.

Agile joins a bustling Pacific Northwest aerospace cluster anchored by heavyweights like Blue Origin, SpaceX’s Starlink engineering operations in Redmond, and a growing wave of startups and orbital logistics companies like Starfish Space.

Overall, Agile employs 178 people across the business. The majority of its workforce is based at its Durango headquarters, alongside an additive manufacturing center in Pennsylvania and a 25,000-square-foot test center breaking ground in Tulsa, Okla.

The Bellevue office is located at 3120-3180 139th Ave SE.

Backed by a $17 million Series A funding round earlier this year, Agile has scaled rapidly, and revenue over the last three years has more than tripled. Investors include Caruso Ventures, Howdy Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Veteran Ventures, Denver Ventures, and Cortado Ventures, among others.

Even as Agile plants a flag in the region, the expansion comes amid growing caution over Washington state’s business climate. Mills noted that the company shares the same concerns recently voiced by Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa — who warned during Seattle Space Week in September that if starting over today, “I’m not sure we’d make the same decision” to build in Washington, given local tax and political pressures.

While Agile is eager to tap into the local engineering talent for its Bellevue office, Mills cautioned that future investments, such as a prospective manufacturing and system integration facility, could face headwinds if Washington doesn’t match the aggressive incentives and welcoming posture shown by competing states like Oklahoma.

“I’m just biased towards the opportunity that when you get all the right people in the right place and you have that competition, you have all the capabilities that you need in one place, great things happen,” Mills said. “As people disperse from that, you start to lose that opportunity.”

Kapta Space, a Seattle startup building lower-cost, steerable radar sensors for satellites, has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round to scale production and meet growing demand for defense intelligence contracts.

The investment brings total funding to $30 million, following an initial $5 million seed round led by MetaVC— a metamaterials-focused fund backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It also previously received a $1.8 million grant from the Department of Defense.

The deal highlights the ongoing momentum in the Pacific Northwest’s commercial space ecosystem, where a growing cluster of venture-backed startups is building hardware alongside major satellite operations like SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond and Amazon’s Leo constellation program.

Founded in 2023 by CEO Milton Perque and Adam Bily, Kapta uses metamaterials for its proprietary Metamaterial Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) architecture. The tech provides high-resolution, geospatial imagery and ground-target tracking without the extreme cost, power demands, and manufacturing complexity of traditional systems.

Both founders bring deep local expertise to the hardware: Perque and Bily were previously engineering leaders at radar maker Echodyne. Perque’s background also includes stops at Metacept and Intellectual Ventures, while Bily served as an antenna engineer at Apple and satellite startup Astranis.

The fresh capital will help Kapta expand manufacturing, qualify its hardware for spaceflight, and prepare for initial orbital demonstration missions.

Kapta’s software-defined architecture aims to make persistent satellite tracking feasible at constellation scale, letting spacecraft rapidly steer beams to continuously detect and hold custody of moving targets across air, sea and land.

“The mission calls for persistent awareness, and that requires us to rethink how radar has to work at constellation scale,” said Milton Perque, Founder and CEO of Kapta Space, in a release. “Traditional architectures are cost-prohibitive and were never designed for the scale these missions now demand.”

Washington Harbour Partners, which specializes in defense tech investing, led the round, with Bison Ventures co-leading. Previous backer MetaVC Partners joined alongside MYDA Capital, Entrada Ventures, Aurelia Foundry, and Fitz Gate Ventures.

“Kapta’s MESA architecture changes that equation with a modular, highly manufacturable approach to electronically steerable radar,” said Mina Faltas, Founder and CEO of Washington Harbour Partners. “We believe its combination of performance, cost, and scalability will make Kapta a foundational supplier to the next generation of U.S. and allied space architectures, and we’re thrilled to lead the Series A.”

Seattle-area startups raised $3.5 billion in venture capital in the third quarter, the most in any quarter going back at least a decade, led by big rounds for Kent-based rocket maker Stoke Space, Bellevue developer platform Temporal and Everett fusion company Helion.

That’s more than triple the $1 billion raised in the region in the same quarter a year earlier, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. It’s also more than $1 billion above the previous quarterly high of about $2.4 billion, reached in late 2018 and again in late 2022.

Most of the money went to a handful of companies building physical things: rockets, satellites, spacecraft and fusion power plants. Three space companies in the region raised $1.6 billion combined: Stoke, Redmond-based Starcloud and Seattle’s Hubble Network.

Nationally, the trend went the other way. U.S. venture funding fell 40% from the prior quarter, to $98.4 billion, as the giant rounds for frontier AI labs that drove the first half of the year tapered off.

Seattle ranked seventh among U.S. metro areas for venture dollars in the quarter. The Bay Area led with $40.7 billion, followed by Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Boston and Denver. Denver’s $4.2 billion came largely from a single $3.9 billion round for AI data center developer Crusoe.

By number of deals, Seattle ranked eighth, with 94.

The total includes Helion’s $500 million round, which the company announced in June but PitchBook counts in the third quarter. Even without it, the quarter would still be the region’s biggest on record.

Defense technology startup Shield AI has secured a $150 million contract from the U.S. Navy to advance development of its X-BAT autonomous fighter jet — providing fresh federal backing for the program as the company establishes its first major manufacturing footprint south of Seattle.

Last week, GeekWire reported on Shield AI’s plans to open a 420,000-square-foot engineering and production facility in Des Moines, Wash., dubbed “X-Forge 3.” The company, which is looking to add an additional one million square feet of space in the region, said it expects to employ about 4,000 workers in the Seattle area by the early 2030s.

The new $150 million contract with the Navy adds funding from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment through its Defense Exportability Features program. The agreement supports efforts to design security and export capabilities directly into the X-BAT, a process that enables advanced U.S. military hardware to eventually be sold to international allies without exposing sensitive domestic technologies.

San Diego-based Shield AI, which raised a $2 billion venture capital round at a $12.7 billion valuation earlier this year, is matching the award with $150 million of its own capital.

Combined with a prior $100 million joint investment finalized in August under the Navy and Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU) expeditionary strike effort, cumulative commitments behind the X-BAT now stand at $400 million.

Designed to take off and land vertically, the X-BAT is built to operate from amphibious assault ships, destroyers, commercial cargo decks, and highway strips without relying on traditional concrete runways or aircraft carrier catapults. It launches from a specialized Launch and Recovery Vehicle — a mobile trailer that erects the jet vertically, allowing it to be towed on interstate highways or loaded onto ships.

At the time of its introduction last year, Shield AI co-founder and president Brandon Tseng, a former Navy SEAL, called X-BAT a “transformative, runway-independent aircraft” and noted that “airpower without runways is the holy grail of deterrence.”

The urgency behind runway-independent airpower was underscored last weekend when the U.S. Air Force withdrew strategic B-1 bombers from R.A.F. Fairford in Britain following reports of potential drone threats targeting the air base.

Shield AI expects to begin producing aircraft in Des Moines in 2028, scaling to a target production rate of roughly 150 jets per year by the early 2030s. While prototyping is based in Frisco, Texas, and flight testing will take place at Newton City-County Airport in Kansas, the Des Moines plant will house the core production line and engineering teams.

In an interview with GeekWire, Shield AI executives emphasized the speed at which it hopes to roll out the AI-piloted aircraft in Des Moines.

“This is a large program,” Armor Harris, senior vice president of aircraft at Shield AI, told GeekWire. “Building a next generation fighter jet is no small endeavor, and with the amount of interest that we’ve seen, both from our U.S. government customers and from international customers, we could be looking at building these at rates greater than fighter jets have been built in a really long time.”

Harris noted that keeping development and manufacturing closely linked allows the company to move significantly faster than traditional defense procurement cycles.

“We are testing early and often while working on the aircraft, mission systems, ship suitability and production in parallel,” Harris said in Thursday’s press release. “That approach helps us identify and resolve issues earlier, reduce development risk and move more quickly toward flight testing.”

An engineering team of roughly 500 across Shield AI and key suppliers — including GE Aerospace — is currently building flight-test aircraft.

While the X-BAT has yet to make its maiden flight, the program cleared major hardware milestones in mid-2026. Engineers completed ground engine light-off and thrust-vectoring nozzle integration using GE Aerospace’s F110 engine, alongside wind-tunnel testing to validate internal weapons bay aerodynamics at both low and high speeds.

The aircraft is powered by Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software, an AI pilot designed to execute tactical strike missions in contested environments where GPS and satellite communications are jammed.

The jet features a 1,000-nautical-mile combat radius and a 2,000-nautical-mile total range, topping the estimated 590-nautical-mile combat radius of the conventional Lockheed Martin F-35A.

Initial flight tests are scheduled for late 2026 in Kansas, with first production aircraft deliveries targeted for late 2028.

“X-BAT is being built to enhance the lethality, survivability and combat power of U.S. Naval Aviation,” said J.J. “Yank” Cummings, Shield AI’s head of mission solutions for the U.S. Navy and former commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. “Its runway-independent design and small deck footprint can increase sortie generation and extend long-range air combat power.”

A free-flying NASA robot aboard the International Space Station will soon demonstrate a system for capturing and servicing satellites in orbit, using a pair of autonomous robotic arms built by Seattle startup Orbital Robotics.

“This demo will prove our ability to capture, manipulate and upgrade satellites on orbit, moving humanity one massive step forward towards reusable satellites,” Orbital Robotics CEO Aaron Borger said today in a news release.

Borger told GeekWire that the company plans to send its robotic arms to the space station in the third quarter of 2027. Three separate demonstrations would be conducted, each about a month apart, he said.

The mission will mark a major milestone for Orbital Robotics, which was founded in 2024 by Borger and other veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, including lead hardware engineer Riley Mark, lead software engineer Sohil Pokharna and adviser Doug Kohl. Orbital Robotics has been developing arms controlled by artificial intelligence for use on free-flying spacecraft, and this will be the company’s first opportunity to prove out its capture technology and autonomous control software together in microgravity under real spaceflight conditions.

The demonstration is a joint effort with Arkisys, NASA’s sustaining and maintenance partner for the Astrobee program, which will provide integration support and in-space platform infrastructure. A successful demo would boost confidence that free-flying robots equipped with Orbital Robotics’ arms could conduct satellite servicing missions.

“Free flight proves you can get there, manipulation proves you can do something once you arrive,” Arkisys CEO David Barnhart said. “Pairing Astrobee with Orbital Robotics’ arms creates a powerful proxy for the servicing and assembly operations that will shape the future ISAM [in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing] economy.”

Three cube-shaped Astrobee robots — nicknamed Bumble, Queen and Honey — are currently available for testing aboard the ISS. In 2024, one of the Astrobees was outfitted with a set of tentacle-like arms that grabbed onto a boxy cube to demonstrate the system’s gripping ability. Borger said the Orbital Robotics / Arkisys demo would be similar to the tentacle test.

Orbital Robotics’ arms for the Astrobee demonstration will be scaled-down versions of the ORA-A arm that the company has built in its Seattle lab, Borger said.

“The arms will be sent up to the ISS and then installed onto one of the Astrobees by the crew,” Borger said in an email. “The Astrobee with the arms will then demonstrate the capture and servicing on a second Astrobee that is already on the ISS. … After the capture, we will replace a simple compute module we will launch and integrate with the Astrobee being captured.”

Borger said the ISS demonstration is an internally funded program. “We are paying for the launch and demonstrations with Arkisys as our implementation partner through their Space Act Agreement with NASA,” he said.

After the demonstration, the arms will remain available aboard the ISS to assist astronauts with moving cargo, to automate simple tasks involving robotic manipulation, and to provide opportunities for roboticists to conduct follow-up experiments.

NASA and its commercial partners are already preparing for the next step in space robotics: The Fly Foundational Robots mission, due for launch in late 2027, will deploy a satellite equipped with a commercial robotic arm for demonstrations of in-space servicing tasks.

How high can Washington state’s space industry rise?

Preliminary findings suggest that the economic impact of the state’s space sector more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, and nearly doubled again between 2022 and now. But at the same time, some leaders of the space community are questioning whether the Pacific Northwest can keep pace with other regional clusters in, say, Florida, Texas and Colorado.

That good news, bad news situation made headlines this week when Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa questioned whether he’d pick the Seattle area as his home base if he had to do it over — just before taking the stage as a member of Gov. Bob Ferguson’s Washington Space Council.

Ferguson isn’t the only elected official trying to make sure the Seattle area keeps up on the space frontier. Dana Ralph, the mayor of Kent, Wash., where Stoke is headquartered, made that clear in her remarks during the kickoff for Seattle Space Week at the Museum of Flight.

“We don’t take you for granted,” said Ralph, addressing a gathering of CEOs, investors and other VIPs. “I want you to hear that out loud: We don’t take you for granted.”

Seattle Space Week — highlighted by Tuesday’s Space Northwest Symposium in Federal Way — provided plenty of opportunities for discussing the challenges facing Washington state’s space ventures. Here are four problems to face, and four prospects to look forward to.

‘We have a problem’

The launch crisis: The availability of launch opportunities has shrunk dramatically. “It’s just crazy how there’s this mismatch between supply and demand right now in the industry,” said Tim Beard, Stoke Space’s chief financial officer. “It’s becoming a crisis.”

One factor is the increased demand for deploying satellite constellations for broadband data services (such as Starlink and Amazon Leo) and for future AI data processing (such as Starcloud, SpaceX’s Starmind and Google’s Project Suncatcher).

Another factor is reduced supply: Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance are dealing with setbacks in their next-generation rocket programs. Meanwhile, SpaceX is talking about phasing out its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket as it makes the transition to Starship. The resulting launch crunch is an industry-wide problem, but it hits Seattle’s satellite ventures especially hard.

The workforce challenge: There’s also a limited supply of skilled technicians and engineers. Bill Bruner, CEO of New Frontier Aerospace, ranks that as his No. 1 challenge. “It’s finding skilled, trained people to do, not just the hard engineering work, but the Grade 13, Grade 14 graduate technical work,” he said. “We need a national solution to that problem.”

Ralph said Kent and other Seattle-area municipalities need to partner with state government and commercial ventures to address the challenge. “We should be able to make it easier for employers to invest in apprenticeship, credentials and on-the-job training,” she said. “We need to build a workforce system that moves with industry, not several years behind it.”

Funding from faraway: Much of the funding that fuels Seattle’s space ventures comes from elsewhere. “There are a lot of VCs in Seattle, but they’re not necessarily space VCs,” said Mike Reilly, chief strategy officer for Varda Space Industries. “I feel like a lot of the space money comes out of L.A. and San Francisco.”

Brian Monnin, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Sophia Space, said midsize space ventures need to find ways to fill their funding gaps. “Debt financing is one way,” he said. “But I think there should be more public-private combinations of firms, traditional banks working alongside debt financiers, working alongside the public for us to fill that vast middle.”

Regional rivalries: Several executives said other states are much more aggressive than Washington when it comes to attracting space ventures. “The incentives just aren’t here,” Monnin said. “We’re looking at where we build our Factory One for Sophia Space tiles, and you have to look at the incentives from sovereign funds in New Mexico, Louisiana and others. They’re far more attractive than they are in this state currently.”

The inter-regional competition was one of the challenges cited by Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa — and by his CFO as well. “I need to be pretty direct in that we’re being actively courted by any number of states: Colorado, Texas, Florida,” Beard said. “They want us to move there, but Washington state is the right place for Stoke. … I hope our policymakers in Olympia, throughout the state, our senators hear this. We want to stay in Washington state. Help us do that.”

‘Light this candle’

Public-private partnerships: The newly announced Washington Space Council isn’t likely to set up a multibillion-dollar fund for space ventures anytime soon, but it could serve as a forum for business executives and government officials to work out realistic ways to foster the state’s space industry.

Will the work of the council go beyond virtue-signaling? Last year, the Governor’s Economic Development Strategic Reserve Fund awarded $350,000 to support Portal Space Systems’ expansion into a 50,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash. Such grants may serve as a model for future financial incentives.

Satellite offices: Space ventures don’t need to be headquartered in Washington to benefit the state’s space industry. Cowboy Space, for example, is based in California but recently announced the opening of a 291,035-square-foot spacecraft design and manufacturing facility in Kent. BlackSky is based in Virginia, but its satellites are built in a 22,000-square-foot factory in Tukwila, Wash. SpaceX may have moved its corporate headquarters from California to Texas, but it still makes more than half of the world’s satellites at its facilities in Redmond and Woodinville, Wash.

Just as Google and Meta maintain engineering hubs in the Seattle area, out-of-state satellite ventures are likely to establish Seattle-area outposts. “The fundamentals that made this region are still here: talent, a deep supply chain, industrial capacity, a culture of making things, and generations of knowledge that you simply cannot re-create overnight,” Ralph said.

Coming attractions: The silver lining to the launch crisis is that Stoke Space and other commercial space ventures plan to fill the gap. And when SpaceX’s Starship enters service, that could dramatically change the parameters of the launch market. Ron Faith, CEO of RBC Signals, said this week’s first orbital Starship flight was “a pretty big milestone event.”

“Having Starship go into orbit and deploy real satellites … that’s a significant increase in capacity for launch,” he said. “But with that said, we’re also seeing many, many more launchers come online.” The list includes Blue Origin’s New Glenn, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha, Relativity Space’s Terran R — and yes, Stoke Space’s Nova.

A pad of our own: When it comes to space facilities, the Seattle area lacks two big items: a nearby NASA center and an orbital launch pad.

During a recent visit to Redmond, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman didn’t offer much encouragement for the space agency’s fans in the Pacific Northwest. “I think it’s unlikely we’re going to be adding any additional centers right now,” he told me.

But at the Museum of Flight, Ferguson said the Washington Space Council “will look for ways we might be able to develop Washington-based commercial launch capabilities.”

At the Space Northwest Symposium, Monnin wondered why the Seattle area’s space ventures haven’t forged closer ties with the region’s military installations. “It’s a shame that over the last few decades we haven’t seen the affinity toward Fort Lewis-McChord or the naval base in Bremerton as innovation centers … because from an orbital compute standpoint, the biggest need is defense- or security-related,” he said. “How we haven’t tapped into that as a state, I think, is a miss.”

The Pacific Northwest’s geography would make it difficult to put a launch pad in a place that avoids posing a significant risk to populated areas. That’s why Blue Origin and Stoke Space have their orbital launch pads in Florida instead of Washington. But when Beard was asked about the prospect of using a pad closer to home, he wasn’t dismissive.

“Launching from the Washington coast would be fantastic,” he said. “Also, my geography is not great, but I think it’s slightly closer to ship a rocket to the Washington coast than it is all the way down to Cape Canaveral. So, that’s one advantage as well. We’d love to see launch here, and I think that we’d be good partners to do that with.”

Check out the Space Northwest website for the Seattle Space Week event calendar.

Starfish Space’s first full-scale Otter satellite servicing vehicle went into orbit today, marking a major milestone for the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup.

The Otter spacecraft was among 130 payloads launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Otter is roughly the size of a kitchen oven, with solar arrays that were folded up for launch.

Other payloads on the satellite rideshare mission, known as Transporter-18, included Cowboy Space’s first power-beaming satellite, a prototype for Google’s AI data-center constellation, and a NASA-funded probe that will track the energy released by galaxies and supernovas.

Today’s liftoff through surface-level fog — and the return of the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster to a nearby landing pad — proceeded like clockwork. A little more than an hour after launch, Otter separated from the rocket’s upper stage and powered up for orbital operations.

Once Otter is fully commissioned, it will rendezvous with and inspect a series of inoperable satellites for a $15 million NASA mission known as Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability, or SSPICY for short. The capabilities demonstrated by SSPICY could be used during future missions to check the health of active satellites, or dispose of defunct satellites.

SSPICY may not be the only mission that Otter takes on during its operating lifetime.

“Success in the mission is to actually go and provide this commercial inspection service on a number of these different spacecraft, and that will be a huge win in and of itself,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire last week. “But we’re also bringing Otter along to provide servicing well beyond that, so we could go and inspect more spacecraft, or potentially do some additional docking past the initial mission.”

This inaugural Otter mission follows up on two orbital flight tests involving smaller-scale Otter Pup prototypes. The first test fell short of linking up with its target satellite but was able to demonstrate Starfish’s satellite-tracking system. The second Otter Pup went into orbit last year and is currently closing in on its target.

Starfish Space is already preparing for future Otter missions — including a satellite disposal job for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, two commercial satellite servicing missions in geostationary Earth orbit, and two servicing missions for the U.S. Space Force.

More about Transporter-18’s payloads:

• Cowboy Space’s Reason-1 satellite is designed to collect solar energy in space and transmit it to a ground receiver with a kilowatt-class laser, advancing technologies central to the company’s planned orbital data centers. Cowboy Space, formerly known as Aetherflux, is headquartered in California but is setting up a 291,035-square-foot manufacturing facility in Kent, Wash.
• Google’s Project Suncatcher M1 prototype, built by Planet Labs, will test the tensor processing units that Google plans to use for its orbital AI data-center constellation. The prototype is “designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space,” Google said in a blog post.
• Star Catcher’s Protostar satellite will be involved in an experiment to beam power from the main spacecraft to a smaller deployable satellite equipped with off-the-shelf solar panels. The Protostar mission is meant to blaze a trail for the orbital power grid that Star Catcher hopes to create.
• The SPRITE CubeSat is part of a $4 million mission funded by NASA and led by the University of Colorado that will study how stars and galaxies shaped the evolution of the early universe. The satellite is equipped with a far-ultraviolet imaging spectrograph. SPRITE stands for Supernova Remnants and Proxies for Reionization Testbed Experiment.

Leadership changes at Bellevue, Wash.-based companies are dominating the news in this week’s Tech Moves, plus some notable items in neighboring Redmond.

— Former Amazon leader Asic Demberel is now chief technology officer for Scala, a Bellevue-based startup offering an AI operating system for contact centers and customer operations. Demberel was with Amazon for 15 years, first working on fraud technology for AWS and leaving the company as general manager and engineering leader for Amazon Pharmacy Kiosks.

“You don’t walk away from 15 years at Amazon for an incremental challenge. It takes an exceptionally complex problem and an opportunity so massive that you simply can’t look away,” Demberel said of his decision to leave.

Scala was founded by Smartsheet CEO Rajeev Singh and former Accolade executive Ardie Sameti. It raised an $8.5 million seed round in February.

— Flyhomes, a Bellevue-based company providing financial tools for home buying and selling, has named three leadership hires:

• Tyler Moynihan has been named vice president of business development. He most recently held a leadership role at Opendoor, following nearly 12 years at Zillow that ended in 2023. While at Zillow, Moynihan helped lead major deals including the purchase of ShowingTime and a partnership with Opendoor.
• Nihit Nirmal has joined as VP of product. Nirmal, who is based in Singapore, launched an AI agent startup to handle corporate conversations and worked in multiple fintech leadership roles.
• Wendy Tieu has rejoined Flyhomes as director of partner enablement. Los Angeles-based Tieu left the company in 2024 after seven years, taking leadership roles at MoeGo and Whatnot.

— Heinz Marketing, a Redmond, Wash.-based B2B marketing and consulting firm, is shaking up its leadership. The company has named Jenn Steele as its chief operating officer and president, while Matt Heinz, who started the business 18 years ago, is moving from president to CEO.

Steele joins Heinz Marketing from Seattle’s SoundGTM, which she co-founded and led. She has held executive roles at numerous Seattle-area companies including CEO of Kissmetrics and top marketing and revenue positions elsewhere.

Maria Geokezas is retiring as COO after nearly 17 years with the firm. The company credits her leadership with shaping the organization and said “the whole team is deeply grateful and will miss her.”

— Ludovic Fourrage announced that he is co-founder and chief AI officer for Untamed Intelligence, a Bellevue startup launched in May.

“Untamed Intelligence is an innovation studio dedicated to advancing human possibility. We begin by asking what human beings need to flourish and then explore how technology and learning science might help us get there,” the company said on LinkedIn.

Fourrage was previously senior program officer for the Gates Foundation. Before that, he was with Microsoft for more than 13 years, working in certification and learning leadership roles. Fourrage is also the founder of Nucamp Coding Bootcamp, serving as board chairman of the company.

The startup’s other co-founders are CEO Paul LeBlanc and Chief Product Officer Rachel Koblic. LeBlanc was president of Southern New Hampshire University for 21 years until 2024. Koblic has her own learning-focused consultancy and was chief learning officer for Matter and Space.

— LogicGate, a Chicago company offering a no-code governance, risk and compliance platform, has named two Bellevue-based leaders:

• Mike Zinne has joined as chief customer officer, after working at companies including Quiq, Outreach and Zendesk.
• Ram Venkat has taken the role of senior vice president of product, joining from Highspot. He also worked at Amazon and T-Mobile.

— The Technology Alliance has appointed Matt Medlin, a longtime CPA with a focus on venture-backed companies, chair of its board of directors. Two current board members have taken new roles, with Helion’s Jessie Thomas becoming vice chair and EY’s Alissa Garner Byersdorfer serving as treasurer. 

The UW Climate Risk Lab has named two new members to its leadership council:

• Brandon Middaugh, general manager of Microsoft’s sustainable markets and Climate Innovation Fund
• Peter Whitney, Amazon Web Services’ business development manager for AI and modern data strategy, for the Americas

— Seattle-based Nimbus Aerospace, which recently completed a test flight of its quarter-scale prototype, has added two advisory board members:

• Frank Paskiewicz, an aviation regulatory expert who served with the Federal Aviation Administration for 28 years, leaving as deputy director of the Aircraft Certification Service
• Sheikh Rabbi, CEO and co-founder of Magnetic Motion, a startup developing drop-in hybrid-electric propulsion systems for climate-friendly aircraft

— Evergreen Goodwill has promoted Derieontay Sparks to chief revenue officer, overseeing operations that support the nonprofit’s tuition-free education and workforce development programs.

— And in case you missed it, two top Microsoft executives shared this week that they’re leaving the Redmond tech giant: Peter Lee, the former head of Microsoft Research, and Ryan Roslansky, Microsoft executive vice president overseeing both LinkedIn and Microsoft Office. See the whole story here.

Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud has signed up to send its artificial intelligence data-processing hardware into lunar orbit on a Firefly Aerospace spacecraft.

Starcloud’s payload, known as SC-1L, will fly on Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle during a NASA-supported mission that’s scheduled for launch no earlier than 2028. The mission will demonstrate technologies that Starcloud plans to use on AI data centers in Earth orbit — and around the moon as well.

“Space is the future of data centers, and the moon is the next frontier for that vision,” Ezra Feilden, Starcloud’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said today in a news release.

Starcloud made its mark in Earth orbit last year with Starcloud-1, a satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 chip. Starcloud-1 successfully trained a large language model called NanoGPT, marking a first for orbital computing. “We successfully validated our ability to run and train AI models on enterprise-grade GPUs in low Earth orbit, and now we’re taking this proven technology to lunar orbit,” Feilden said.

Starcloud’s SC-1L payload will be integrated aboard the Elytra vehicle for a mission aimed at delivering Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander to a lunar region known as the Gruithuisen Domes. After the lander separates from Elytra and descends to the surface, the orbiting vehicle will serve as a data relay for Blue Ghost.

The data-processing demonstration begins when the Blue Ghost mission ends. SC-1L will ingest data from Elytra’s onboard Solux vision system, execute high-performance AI computing in orbit and transmit the processed data back to Earth.

The Solux system is designed to serve as an autonomous navigation and tracking tool in space environments where global positioning systems are otherwise unavailable. Firefly expects the Elytra orbiter to operate in lunar orbit for at least five years.

“We’re proud to collaborate with innovative customers like Starcloud and collectively take another step toward establishing the infrastructure that will power a permanent human and robotic presence at the moon,” said Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s vice president of spacecraft.

Elytra will also use high-resolution telescopes and Firefly’s Ocula moon imaging service for surface mapping, mineral detection and reconnaissance. Firefly recently announced a collaboration with Nvidia to process the data for Ocula using Nvidia’s Jetson module.

In August, Starcloud reported raising $250 million in funding to support the creation of a constellation of AI data-center satellites in low Earth orbit, powered by Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module. Starcloud has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to operate as many as 88,000 satellites as orbital data centers.

Companies building software for the AI boom and advanced machinery for space, energy and defense are remaking the Pacific Northwest’s tech economy, and both trends are showing up in full force on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.

The Fall 2026 update, released Wednesday morning, features a new No. 1: Temporal, the Bellevue, Wash., company whose software keeps AI agents running reliably. It raised $550 million this month at a $12.55 billion valuation, more than double its value earlier this year. Its annualized revenue has passed $250 million, up more than 200% in a year, with customers including OpenAI, Nvidia and Netflix.

Temporal replaces fusion company Helion, now No. 2. Helion grew its Series G round to $500 million and opened a Seattle office as its headcount topped 800, but questions have emerged about its timeline for delivering fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.

Six of the top 10 companies build advanced machinery: fusion reactors, rockets, drones, radar, military vehicles and weed-zapping robots. Several of them spent the quarter scaling up production.

• Stoke Space (No. 3), which is developing a fully reusable rocket, jumped three spots after it raised about $1 billion. It’s expanding its rocket test site in Moses Lake.
• Brinc (No. 6), which makes drones that police and fire departments send to 911 calls, is moving into a new headquarters and factory in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood with three times the production space of its current plant.
• Echodyne (No. 9), which makes compact radar used to detect and track drones, jumped 33 spots into the top 10 after it opened a $40 million factory in Woodinville to meet growing demand for drone detection.

The GeekWire 200 combines objective data, editorial insight and AI analysis of our coverage to provide a broad view of the region’s startup landscape. Dating to 2013, it has long served as a resource for investors, job seekers, service providers and others tracking the regional tech scene.

See the updated GeekWire 200, and continue reading for highlights. Here’s the new top 10.

Notable moves and news

Overland AI (No. 7, up 2): The military autonomy startup landed a Marine Corps contract worth nearly $20 million, which it says makes it the first ground-autonomy company to serve as prime contractor on a military production deal. It also opened a Bay Area office to recruit AI and robotics talent.

Carbon Robotics (No. 8): The laser-weeding company added Plant Profiles, letting farmers tailor its AI model to their own crops and fields.

Dropzone (No. 10, up 3): The maker of autonomous AI agents for security operations enters the top 10 after more than doubling its headcount over the past year, the fastest growth of any company in the top 20.

Starcloud (No. 52, up 23): The Redmond company building data centers in orbit raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, with Nvidia joining as an investor.

Levanta (No. 72, up 5): The creator-marketing platform raised $22 million and says revenue is up 80% this year.

AIM Intelligent Machines (No. 100, up 10): The autonomous construction startup laid out its vision for self-driving bulldozers on Earth and, eventually, Mars.

Portal Space Systems (No. 107, up 7): The Bothell company is getting its first Starburst spacecraft ready for launch.

Digs (No. 120, up 13): The Vancouver, Wash., homebuilding AI startup raised $25.3 million led by Builders FirstSource, which will offer its platform to 140,000 builder clients.

Augmodo (No. 122, up 23): The maker of AI camera badges for retail workers raised $21 million at a $350 million valuation and is expanding into warehouses, factories and other workplaces.

Clarify (No. 150, up 19): The AI-native CRM startup acquired San Francisco’s Seam AI and was named to Madrona’s IA40 for the second straight year.

Nuance Labs (No. 163, up 20): The AI lab founded by former Apple researchers raised a $50 million Series A led by Lightspeed.

NewDays (No. 172, up 14): The dementia-care startup expanded its seed round to $16 million and expanded to Nevada.

New to the list

Entire (debut, No. 101): Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke’s startup launched a distributed Git network built for the load of AI coding agents. It’s the highest debut this quarter.

BrainChild Bio (debut, No. 117): The Seattle Children’s spinout raised $116 million to advance a CAR T therapy for a deadly childhood brain cancer.

BuyWander (debut, No. 124): The retail-returns marketplace moved its headquarters from Spokane to Kent and raised $21 million led by Madrona and Inspired Capital.

Endurance (debut, No. 128): Former SpaceX engineer Andrew Redd’s startup is tapping undersea volcanoes for geothermal power.

General Robotics (debut, No. 130): The Redmond startup led by Microsoft veterans says its AI has cut robot setup from a month to hours.

Thira (debut, No. 140): Apptio co-founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer reunited to launch the enterprise AI startup with $21 million led by Madrona.

Golden Analytics (debut, No. 152): The Bellevue startup led by Francois Ajenstat, Tableau’s longtime chief product officer, is using AI to take on traditional business intelligence tools. It launched with $7 million from NEA and Madrona in April, then added a $14 million extension led by Insight Partners in June, bringing its seed funding to $21 million.

Resect AI (debut, No. 158): The Washougal, Wash., startup launched out of stealth with $25 million to catch AI hallucinations before they happen.

NLM Photonics (debut, No. 165): The UW spinout, which makes materials that cut the power needed to move data between chips, added Pangaea Ventures and Mitsubishi Chemical’s venture arm as investors.

Interlune (debut, No. 170): The moon-mining startup extracted helium-3 from ordinary helium, demonstrating a process it plans to use on the moon.

Harell Data (debut, No. 176): Adaptive Biotechnologies co-founder Harlan Robins raised $15 million to connect AI developers with proprietary scientific data.

Noösphere Labs (debut, No. 180): Former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg raised $10.25 million from Trilogy and Madrona for the stealth physical AI startup.

Leaving the list

Agility Robotics (previously No. 5): The Salem, Ore., humanoid robot maker left the list as it prepares to go public in a $2.5 billion SPAC merger expected to close in the fourth quarter. It unveiled Digit 5, which lifts 50 pounds and is designed to work alongside people without safety barriers.

Common Room (previously No. 80): The sales-intelligence startup left the list after agreeing to be acquired by Zoom.

Auger (previously No. 31): The supply chain startup led by former Amazon operations chief Dave Clark moved its headquarters to Dallas. Auger still has a major engineering hub in Bellevue, which we’ve added to our list of engineering centers established in the region by companies headquartered elsewhere.

XBOW (previously No. 35): The AI hacking startup left the list because it doesn’t meet our standard that a company’s headquarters and leadership be based in the region. Its CEO is based in Malta, and its Seattle headquarters is a mailbox at a coworking space.

Notes on the GeekWire 200

Our list is not scientific, by any means, and the specific rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. But it has proven to be a valuable tool for many years. We hear regularly from readers who use the GeekWire 200 to look for jobs, prospect for customers, scout potential investments and get a high-level view of the region’s tech community.

Companies on the list must be privately held, founded within roughly the past 15 years and headquartered in the Pacific Northwest with their leadership based in the region. Companies generally leave the list when they agree to be acquired by another company or to go public.

To make sure your Pacific Northwest technology startup is eligible for the GeekWire 200, first confirm it’s included in the broader GeekWire Startup List. If so, there’s no need to submit it separately. If your startup isn’t among the companies on that larger list, you can submit it for inclusion here, and we’ll crunch the numbers to see if it makes the next GeekWire 200 update.

Email us at tips@geekwire.com with any questions.

Traditional military air operations rely heavily on fixed, vulnerable targets: long concrete runways and aircraft carriers.

Shield AI’s new X-BAT autonomous fighter jet is designed to bypass that infrastructure entirely, utilizing a vertical takeoff mechanism and a mobile launch trailer that can operate from highways, remote outposts or standard cargo ships.

Operated without a human in the cockpit, the aircraft relies on aboard algorithms to navigate and execute strike missions where GPS and satellite communications are jammed. The X-BAT has yet to make its maiden flight, but Shield AI and GE Aerospace cleared a critical milestone this summer by completing ground engine tests and integrating the jet’s F110 thrust-vectoring nozzle.

With news that the X-BAT will be mass produced in the Seattle area — bringing 4,000 jobs to the region by the early 2030s — we decided to take a closer look at this groundbreaking aircraft.

Meet the X-BAT: Specifications & Capabilities

• Aircraft Name: X-BAT
• Developer: Shield AI
• Aircraft Classification: Autonomous / AI-Piloted Strike Fighter (Runway-Independent)
• Fuselage Length: 26 feet
• Wingspan: 39 feet
• Service Ceiling: Greater than 50,000 feet
• Takeoff/Landing Style: Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL)
• Objective Combat Radius: About 1,000 nautical mile combat radius (out and back), topping the roughly 590 nautical miles of the Air Force’s F-35A.
• Total Range: 2,000 nautical miles.
• Internal Payload Bay Capacity: Up to 2,000-pound class weapons.
• Engine: GE Aerospace F110
• Software: Shield AI Hivemind autonomy system.
• Primary Propulsion & Flight Control: Autonomous AI agent, replacing human onboard pilot.
• Logistics & Mobility: Road-transportable via dedicated Launch and Recovery Vehicle (LRV) trailer; highway-mobile and ship-deployable (destroyers, LHA/LHD amphibious assault ships, expeditionary bases). Tagline: “Earth is our runway.”
• Target Production Rate: ~150 aircraft per year by early 2030s
• Key Operational Milestones: First vertical flights expected in 2026. Production is set to start in Des Moines in mid-2027. The first jet is projected to be built in early 2028 and fly by that summer. The Navy could start using it by the end of 2029. Full production is planned for the early 2030s.

DES MOINES, Wash. — Defense tech powerhouse Shield AI is establishing a massive advanced manufacturing hub in Washington state, tapping the Seattle region’s deep aerospace and tech roots to build a next-generation autonomous fighter jet called the X-BAT. 

The project could transform the regional labor market: Shield AI says it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s as it ramps up mass production of the AI-piloted, 26-foot long aircraft.

It marks a major expansion of advanced aerospace manufacturing in the Seattle region, bringing autonomous military aviation directly into Boeing’s backyard and cementing the state’s position at the center of the AI-defined defense era.

The San Diego-based company, valued at $12.7 billion following a $2 billion venture capital round earlier this year, is looking to complete construction on a 420,000-square-foot facility in Des Moines, Wash., just south of Seattle, next spring. 

That physical footprint is expected to grow quickly. Armor Harris, senior vice president of aircraft at Shield AI, told GeekWire that the company is actively looking to add another 1 million square feet in the region to support its long-term manufacturing push.

Named X-Forge 3, the initial facility will serve as the primary manufacturing and engineering center for the X-BAT. It’s now under construction about 15 minutes south of Sea-Tac airport in the Des Moines Creek Business Park West, at 1800 S 216th St.

Developed by Panattoni, the site was selected by Shield AI midway through construction. The company is now taking it to completion, with Harris noting that they are “putting the roof on right now.”

Unveiled last year, the X-BAT is an AI-piloted strike fighter that takes off and lands vertically, carries up to 2,000-pound class weapons in internal bays, and is designed for a 1,000-nautical-mile combat radius — which, when it takes flight, would top the estimated 590 nautical mile combat radius of the Lockheed Martin F-35A.

An economic analysis released by the company estimates Shield AI’s X-BAT program will inject roughly $73 billion into Washington state’s economy over the next two decades as production scales toward full capacity. Projections provided by the company say up to 27,000 direct and indirect jobs — including suppliers — will be generated by the expansion by 2046. 

“This is a large program,” said Harris in an interview with GeekWire. “Building a next generation fighter jet is no small endeavor, and with the amount of interest that we’ve seen, both from our U.S. government customers and from international customers, we could be looking at building these at rates greater than fighter jets have been built in a really long time.”

Harris said he expects the first X-BAT aircraft to roll off the line in Des Moines in 2028, with full production ramping up to about 150 aircraft per year by the early 2030s.  

The company evaluated more than a dozen sites for the facility, and chose the Seattle area for a simple reason: talent. 

Harris cited the region’s robust aerospace legacy, as well as technology giants like Amazon and Microsoft and a burgeoning space and satellite industry which has taken shape in recent years. A number of fast-growing and heavily funded defense tech companies — including Anduril, Armada and Nominal — have also established beachheads in the region in recent years. 

He described the X-BAT as a “modern sixth-generation fighter jet” that’s essentially a “flying sensor suite,” ingesting information in real time in order to make lightning-fast decisions. 

Deep aviation and technology roots

Building that type of aircraft takes a very specialized workforce, one that Harris said is rooted across technology, aerospace, artificial intelligence, materials science and advanced manufacturing.  Those are major strengths of the Seattle area workforce. 

“We’re able to tap into that existing lineage and not have to necessarily train a workforce from the ground up, which would be hard to do on the timelines we’re trying to execute,” said Harris, who is planning to relocate to Washington state from Dallas.

To support its ambitious production schedule, Shield AI is actively recruiting across both software engineering and specialized aerospace roles. The initial hiring push for the Des Moines facility spans autonomy developers, flight-control software engineers, composite technicians, and shop-floor assembly specialists. 

In one job listing for an engineering manager to lead the X-BAT hardware test software team, the company notes that the ideal candidate “has personally built or led the development of automated hardware test systems used in production, manufacturing, qualification, or other high-consequence environments.” 

In another Seattle area job listing for a staff fuel engineer, the company says it is looking for a someone with “strong thermofluid fundamentals, engineering judgment, and the ability to understand fuel system behavior across demanding aircraft operating conditions while serving as the focal point between propulsion, vehicle teams, suppliers, and flight operations.”

Pay across those engineering roles ranges from $169,000 to $300,000 annually, according to the company job postings.

The company currently lists more than 110 open roles in the Seattle area, including a dozen or more in categories such as avionics and electrical; mechanical and thermal; software and networks; and aerostructures.

Choosing Washington also allowed Shield AI to buck a pervasive defense industry trend: separating engineering teams from physical factory floors to shave down labor costs.

While shifting assembly lines to lower-cost regions can cut costs, Harris said that remote manufacturing introduces hidden operational friction when building complex, software-defined aircraft like the X-BAT.

“We fundamentally believe in the colocation of engineering and production is the fastest way to bring capability to our customers,” said Harris, adding that combining engineering and production in a common facility is “one of the secret sauces of Shield.”

In a statement, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) — whose district includes Des Moines — welcomed Shield AI and the X-BAT manufacturing facility to King County. 

“This hub will create high-quality jobs, strengthen Puget Sound’s expanding technology and aerospace sectors, and further diversify our local economy,” Smith said. “Reimagining aviation will have a rightful home here in Washington’s Ninth District.”

Katherine Caffrey, the city manager for City of Des Moines, welcomed the new jobs and economic investment in the community.

“Des Moines sits at the heart of the Puget Sound aerospace industry, and these jobs and this investment reflects exactly what we want Des Moines to be, a place where families can build strong careers close to home,” Caffrey said.

The ‘holy grail of deterrence’ 

Shield AI officially introduced the X-BAT program to the public at an October 2025 event in Washington, D.C., unveiling the aircraft before an audience of military leaders, elected officials and defense industry partners. 

At the time, Shield AI co-founder and president Brandon Tseng, a former Navy SEAL, called X-BAT a “transformative, runway-independent aircraft” and noted that “airpower without runways is the holy grail of deterrence.”

That vision quickly gained momentum.

Last month, the U.S. Navy backed the program through an initial $50 million development contract, envisioning the autonomous fighter jets operating directly from destroyers, amphibious assault ships and converted cargo vessels to project long-range airpower without relying on traditional aircraft carriers.

That momentum grew internationally earlier this month, when Shield AI signed a five-year letter of intent with Polish defense companies PGZ and WZL-2. Under the framework, the companies are exploring plans to help build, supply, and repair the X-BAT, a partnership that could give NATO allies a fighter jet capable of operating even if local airfields and runways are destroyed or non-existent.

The X-BAT launches and lands vertically using a specialized Launch and Recovery Vehicle —a mobile trailer that erects the jet vertically, allowing it to be towed on interstate highways or loaded onto cargo ships to set up a field launch pad in minutes. 

Harris noted that while a final site selection for manufacturing the LRV trailers has not been made, expanding production into the Puget Sound region remains on the table given the area’s deep manufacturing base.

In addition to the mammoth manufacturing facility in Des Moines, Shield AI announced that it is expanding its presence in both Texas and Kansas. 

In Frisco, Texas, the company operates its X-Forge 1 site to handle core prototyping, software integration, and initial engineering for the autonomous fighter. Meanwhile, at X-Forge 2 in Newton, Kansas, Shield AI has expanded its airport footprint to serve as the program’s dedicated flight test, customer acceptance and maintenance hub.

Shield AI expects its X-Forge 2 site in Kansas to support approximately 1,800 regional jobs by the early 2030s, growing to 2,900 positions by 2046 with a projected $5 billion in regional economic impact over that period.

Addressing the cross-country logistics of moving completed aircraft from the Puget Sound assembly line to Kansas for flight testing, Harris explained that the X-BAT can be easily moved via the existing transportation corridors.

“The X-BAT is designed to be road transportable,” he said. “So we’re taking advantage of that.”

Beyond the immediate manufacturing logistics, Harris views the multi-billion-dollar expansion as a major long-term validation of the region’s industrial relevance.

“There’s been a strong narrative of like, ‘Hey, all the jobs are migrating elsewhere,’ and I think this is a big win for the region to capture a major program from a rapidly growing company like this,” Harris said. “This can be the backbone for years of growth in the future.”

That’s a message that Gov. Bob Ferguson is getting behind, saying Washington state is a place where “big ideas take flight.”

“Shield AI’s decision to build its new X-BAT manufacturing facility here is another sign that the future of aerospace is being built in Washington,” Ferguson said in a statement. “We welcome Shield AI and the thousands of good-paying jobs this investment will bring.”

The preliminary results of a study commissioned by Space Northwest, an association focused on regional space ventures, suggest that Washington state’s space economy contributes $8.1 billion in direct economic output annually.

The newly reported figures show that the space industry’s economic impact in the Evergreen State has nearly doubled since a similar study in 2022. That earlier report also documented a doubling effect over the course of four years, from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $4.6 billion in 2022.

Kelly Maloney, Space Northwest’s co-founder and the chair of the association’s board of directors, shared the latest figures today at the Space Northwest Symposium in Federal Way, Wash. She said the preliminary findings, developed by BERK Consulting and Alliance Velocity, reinforce the view that space is not just a niche industry in Washington.

“We are effectively the Space Tech State,” Maloney said.

She said the state’s space sector directly supports about 12,300 jobs and $2.3 billion in labor income. When indirect and induced impacts are included, the figures rise to about 34,200 jobs, $12.4 billion in statewide economic output and $3.9 billion in labor income.

“For every direct space job in Washington, another 1.8 jobs are supported elsewhere in the economy,” Maloney said.

She noted that the space sector’s direct labor income averages about $188,000 per worker.

“That is twice the statewide average,” Maloney said. “So, this is not just a growing industry in terms of employment. It is an industry generating significant economic value and exceptionally strong labor income here in Washington.”

Maloney added that 94% of the state’s direct space sector jobs are concentrated in three highly technical areas. “Nearly 6,500 people work in space vehicle and propulsion manufacturing; more than 3,000 in research, engineering and computing; and just over 2,000 in space electronics and hardware,” she said.

Washington’s space workers play a central role in the satellite industry. More than 68% of all active satellites in Earth orbit were built in the state, according to the analysis. Most of those made-in-Washington satellites were produced at SpaceX’s Starlink operation in Redmond.

The study also found that 24 space startups headquartered or operating in the state have collectively raised more than $4.3 billion, including more than $3.7 billion since 2021.

Space Northwest is lending support to eight space startups through a new program called the Space Technology Accelerator for Growing Entrepreneurship, or STAGE. The selected startups will participate in a 12-week program, with each startup receiving three hours of personalized coaching alongside specialized workshops.

STAGE’s first cohort includes:

• Beyonders: “We’re opening the door to the wonder of cosmic discovery by creating your own spacecraft … gram-scale picosatellites,” said founder Mike Antares.
• Godel Space: Founded by Vikash Kodati and named after famed mathematician Kurt Gödel, this startup is building autonomous AI agents for satellite payloads.
• Kynthos: Co-founders Selvan Viswanathan and Priya Srinavasa are working on software that maintains continuous custody of high-value assets and non-cooperative space objects.
• Luthien Space: “We are in the business of making lunar landings and missions safe with a decision-grade intelligence tool that is physics-validated,” said founder Tammy Payne.
• Ora Biomedical: “What Ora Biomedical is focused on is creating the therapies that enable longer, safer spaceflight and crewed missions,” said co-founder and CEO Ben Blue.
• Signal Sights: This venture is developing systems that convert radio frequency signals into intuitive visual information to improve situational awareness and decision making.
• SQK: This three-year-old startup provides guided computational AI to reconstruct and validate complex scientific data from noisy, incomplete or low-signal measurements.
• Wave Motion: “What we want to do is turn the rocket equation on its head. … We essentially take the rocket fuel and beam it to the rocket as it’s needed,” said co-founder James Penna.

The preliminary findings reported by Space Northwest were produced by BERK Consulting and Alliance Velocity. Additional data sources include company-reported information, Crunchbase, and satellite data from Jonathan McDowell. The full report is still pending.

Check Space Northwest’s website for a schedule of Seattle Space Week events.

Making the entrepreneurial leap is hard enough, let alone launching a company into orbit. Andy Lapsa gave up a well-paying job, spent his family’s nest egg and went 15 months before paying himself half his old salary to get Stoke Space off the ground.

He said Stoke chose Washington state for its world-class talent in software, aerospace and manufacturing, and for a virtuous cycle in which iconic global companies bring talent and suppliers to the region, and their alumni go on to start companies of their own.

But if Lapsa and co-founder Tom Feldman were starting the Kent, Wash.-based rocket company today, he told a Seattle audience Monday, he’s not sure they’d do it here.

Lapsa cited factors including a political climate that vilifies successful companies and their founders; a state that does less than others to court promising startups; Seattle’s public schools, which he described as a failed institution; and the push for a wealth tax on unrealized gains, which he said would put startups out of reach for anyone who isn’t already wealthy.

“What will it take to ensure the next Stoke builds here, too? If Stoke were starting today, I’ll be straight honest with you: I’m not sure we’d make the same decision,” he said.

Lapsa delivered the keynote at “Manufacturing the Future in the PNW: Space, Defense & Robotics,” a Seattle Space Week event hosted by Creative Destruction Lab-Seattle.

The speech, which he read from multiple sheets of printed paper, drew on his family’s story and at one point left him choked up. The crowd gave him a standing ovation at the end. The talk was the buzz of the afternoon and the Space Week kickoff at the Museum of Flight in the evening.

Echoes of Schultz: Lapsa’s remarks tracked closely with a July op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who singled out Stoke as a test for the state.

“We should all be watching Stoke Space,” Schultz wrote, to see whether it and other companies “decide that Washington is the best place for them to grow.”

Schultz, who moved to Miami earlier this year, came up in Lapsa’s speech, too. Lapsa cited him and Jeff Bezos as examples of successful founders the region has vilified, and he pointed to Boeing’s headquarters move and Amazon’s HQ2 as part of the same pattern.

Other states calling: Lapsa said South Carolina, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Idaho and Illinois had all emailed him in the past week or two trying to get Stoke to open up shop there.

“I’ve never received the same in Washington state,” he said.

To be clear, in questioning whether he would make the same decision today, Lapsa was speaking hypothetically about founders starting new companies, and didn’t suggest that Stoke plans to leave Washington, where the company has been expanding its operations.

Hours later, Lapsa was among the 23 members of Gov. Bob Ferguson’s new Washington Space Council, introduced at the Space Week kickoff event, as GeekWire reported. Speaking there, Lapsa struck a similar tone, stressing the need for the state to move quickly.

“States like Florida and Texas and Colorado want this industry, and they want it bad,” he said. “They compete for it every day. Washington has every advantage it needs to lead them all, and the window to use those advantages is open right now.”

A rocket ship: Lapsa’s comments carry additional weight because of Stoke’s trajectory.

Stoke is developing Nova, a rocket designed so that both of its stages can return and fly again, with the goal of making access to space cheaper and more frequent. It’s only the second company to pursue full reusability, after SpaceX, which reuses the first stage of its Falcon 9 but hasn’t yet achieved full reuse with its much larger Starship.

The company announced a roughly $1 billion Series E round this month, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion. It has more than 350 employees in Washington state, a 168,000-square-foot factory in Kent, and a test site in Moses Lake that it’s expanding from 75 to 550 acres.

The first Nova launch is scheduled for early 2027 from Cape Canaveral.

The personal stakes: Lapsa made his case against a wealth tax by telling a personal story that he said he had never told before.

His father grew up in a post-war refugee camp and waited 12 years to immigrate to the U.S., arriving without speaking English. He became a university researcher, but Lapsa’s mother still worked a minimum-wage job to help put Lapsa and his two siblings through college. Lapsa and his wife graduated from college about $200,000 in debt and spent about a decade paying it off.

When he left Blue Origin to start Stoke in 2019, he gave himself nine months to get on track to earn a living wage. Small-business grants and a few angel investors kept the company going.

That’s why proposals to tax unrealized gains worry him. When a startup raises money, its founders become wealthy on paper overnight, he said, without a dime of cash to pay the resulting tax bill.

“It makes it so that the only people who can afford to start a company are the people who are already rich,” he said.

Washington doesn’t tax unrealized gains. However, Lapsa noted that the idea of a wealth tax has been popularized in California and to some extent locally. A one-time tax on California billionaires’ net worth is on the November ballot there, and wealth-tax bills introduced in Olympia haven’t advanced.

Washington’s new 9.9% tax on income over $1 million, which takes effect in 2028 if it survives legal and ballot challenges, applies to income, not to the paper value of a founder’s shares.

A note of optimism: Lapsa closed by urging the audience to look past the headlines in their feeds and think critically about the consequences of the policies being proposed. He warned that political extremism harms the country and benefits its adversaries, and that both sides of the aisle are feeding a dangerous cycle of rhetoric.

Americans have more in common than their differences, he said. The freedoms they share, including the ability to change public policy when it isn’t working, are what made the U.S. the greatest country in history, he added.

“These are the reasons I stubbornly cling to the hope that Washington state will come around,” he concluded, “and the next Stoke Space decides here is their place.”

Updated at 3:56 p.m. to clarify that Washington does not tax unrealized gains, and to add context about wealth-tax proposals and the state’s new tax on high earners.