Seattle’s Copper has landed a high-profile new backer as it looks to accelerate growth of its consumer rewards platform, announcing Tuesday that Grammy-winning artist, DJ and entrepreneur Diplo has invested in the company.

Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

“I’m always looking for things that actually make sense for people,” Diplo said in a statement. “Copper’s one of those — you’re already on your phone, you’re already spending money, and this gives something back. That’s real.”

Copper says more than 4 million members use its platform to earn money through mobile games, cash-back offers and purchases.

Copper CEO Eddie Behringer, who previously co-founded Snap! Raise, said the company is building an alternative to consumer apps that monetize users’ attention.

“Most consumer apps are designed to take more from the user — more time, more money, more attention,” Behringer said in a LinkedIn post. “At Copper, we’re building the opposite.”

Founded in 2019, Copper originally launched as a banking app for teenagers. GeekWire covered the startup in 2022 after it raised $29 million in funding to expand into investing products, at a time when the company had nearly 1 million users.

The startup has since evolved into a broader consumer rewards platform. Copper has raised $42 million to date and recently ranked No. 2 among the Pacific Northwest’s fastest-growing companies in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 rankings, based on three-year revenue growth.

Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, has built a business portfolio that extends beyond music, investing in technology and consumer startups while launching ventures such as Diplo’s Run Club, a series of 5K races paired with music festivals.

He’s a three-time Grammy winner, and has collaborated with artists like Labrinth and Sia as part of the musical group LSD and worked with musician Mark Ronson on Silk City. He’s also the founder of record label Mad Decent.

In 2024, Copper discontinued its banking services following the collapse of fintech infrastructure provider Synapse, forcing the startup to pivot away from its original business. “Despite our prior planning, this event has forced us to close banking accounts much sooner than anticipated,” Behringer wrote at the time.

The company has since rebuilt around its rewards platform, which it says now serves millions of users.

Behringer said that the company’s mission was always about helping families improve their financial lives.

“As household costs rose, we saw an even bigger opportunity to help the person making everyday spending decisions earn more from the things they were already doing—from buying groceries to shopping in-store and spending time on their phone,” Behringer tells GeekWire via email. “Diplo’s investment is meaningful validation of how far that evolution has come.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the opportunity Seattle startup Hedgehog is chasing.

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

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

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

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

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

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

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

What surprised you after talking to customers?

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

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Twice over.

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

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

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

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

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

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

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

Pick the wave, not just the surfboard.

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

We’ll know our company has made it when…

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

Vieu, a Seattle startup aiming to replace cold outreach with warm introductions, launched what it calls the “Business Graph,” a live map of trusted relationships that drive business-to-business sales, marketing, recruiting and fundraising.

The 40-person company, which raised an $11 million seed round in October 2024, has grown to more than 100 enterprise customers including a number of well-known companies. Vieu competes with sales-intelligence tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach, and overlaps with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

The company is led by CEO Samir Manjure and CTO Simon Skaria, both Microsoft alumni. Manjure went on to found KenSci, a healthcare AI startup acquired by Providence in 2021. Skaria has also founded and sold two other startups, Office365Mon and Albits.

The Business Graph, which launched Tuesday, maps relationships between people and companies based on observed signals — such as shared work history, co-authored research, board affiliations, and joint ventures — rather than the self-reported connections that populate LinkedIn.

Common use cases include finding someone who can make an introduction to a decision-maker at a target account, quietly checking references on a job candidate, and figuring out which LinkedIn connections a salesperson actually knows versus the ones they simply accepted a request from.

Vieu says the graph can be used inside its own app or queried directly by AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, and it integrates with CRM, email, and Slack.

Manjure said Vieu still has the majority of its 2024 seed round in the bank and has not raised new funding. The company charges customers a platform fee for access to the Business Graph plus outcome-based pricing tied to specific use cases like sales, recruiting, and fundraising.

Seattle-based Overland AI has landed a U.S. Marine Corps contract to produce autonomous ground vehicles, a milestone the defense-tech startup says makes it the first ground autonomy company to serve as the prime contractor on a military production deal. 

The nearly $20 million agreement — $19.7 million, according to the Department of War — calls for Overland to deliver more than a dozen autonomous ground vehicles, along with the software that runs them. Initial deliveries are expected to begin sometime in early 2027.

The agreement was announced June 29. The vehicles will work with a Marine Corps system that shoots down enemy drones. Overland’s vehicles will initially handle resupply for those crews rather than replace any existing vehicles, co-founder and CEO Byron Boots said in a media briefing, as reported by trade publications DefenseScoop and Defense One. 

Boots is a University of Washington machine-learning professor who leads the school’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He co-founded Overland in 2022 with Stephanie Bonk, the company’s president, spinning it out of the UW. 

The company’s technology is designed to let military vehicles drive themselves across rough, off-road terrain in places where GPS isn’t available. 

Overland has grown to more than 100 employees and raised over $140 million in venture funding, including a $100 million round in February led by the venture firm 8VC. It opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in Seattle last year, and ranks No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our index of the top privately held Pacific Northwest tech companies. 

The company isn’t alone in chasing military ground autonomy. One of its rivals, Maryland-based Forterra, won a larger, $92 million Marine Corps production deal earlier in June — but as the autonomy supplier under prime contractor Oshkosh Defense, rather than holding the contract itself. That’s the distinction Overland is claiming as a first. 

Overland’s deal came through a Pentagon program called APFIT — short for Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies — which fast-tracks funding to move promising technology from prototypes into production. For Overland, it marks a step from testing and demonstrations into building vehicles at scale for the military. 

“We’re registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation,” Boots said in the briefing, pointing to the war in Ukraine as evidence of a growing role for uncrewed vehicles.

Overland has been working for years with the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, also completing a multiyear DARPA autonomy program. The new contract builds on recent work integrating its self-driving technology into Marine Corps vehicles.

KredosAI, a Seattle-area startup that uses AI and behavioral science to help companies chase down late consumer payments, raised $7 million in a new funding round led by BMW i Ventures, the independent venture capital arm of automaker BMW Group.

The company, founded in 2021 by former T-Mobile executives Balaji Sridharan and Dave Thoms, is based in Issaquah, Wash. It focuses on the period after a bill is overdue but before the account gets sent to collections or written off. Its technology is able to tailor the wording, timing and channel of each overdue message based on a customer’s account history.

The premise, Sridharan said, is that most people aren’t being nefarious in their tardiness but are dealing with something more mundane, such as a forgotten due date, a short-term cash crunch, or possibly some kind of frustration with the service. 

“The majority of consumers who go late on payment actually want to pay,” he said. “There’s a very small subset of people that are fraudsters, but most of them want to pay.”

New investors Motley Fool Ventures and Walter Ventures joined existing backers Okapi Venture Capital, StartFast Ventures, SaaS Ventures and Stout Street Capital in the Series A round. Total funding to date for the company is a little over $10 million.

The BMW connection came through an introduction from an existing investor, Sridharan said. Having an automaker’s venture arm behind it matters, he added, as KredosAI moves deeper into auto lending.

Subprime auto-loan delinquencies have climbed to their highest levels since the 1990s. Lenders, Sridharan said, weigh the problem much the way telecoms do — balancing the cost of recovering a payment against the value of keeping the customer. That overlap, along with BMW’s footprint in the car business, made its venture arm a logical fit. 

KredosAI works with large enterprises, including some in the Fortune 50, though it doesn’t name most of them publicly. It got its start in telecom, which speaks to its roots: Sridharan and Thoms met at Bellevue-based T-Mobile. Sridharan spent eight years there, first running corporate strategy and later the carrier’s IoT unit, following an earlier stint at McKinsey. Thoms has spent much of his career in credit and collections at telecom and financial-services firms. 

Watching T-Mobile wrestle with millions of past-due accounts each month, they came to think there was a better way to handle the conversation with a customer who’d fallen behind. 

To decide what to send, the software weighs a customer’s account characteristics (how often they’ve been late before, their average balance, how long they’ve been a customer) while steering clear of off-limits signals like age. It reaches people through text, email and most recently RCS, along with AI voice agents the company began adding over the past year. 

The company says the approach delivers notable improvement: across its customers, it reports cutting write-offs by 11.5% and lifting customer lifetime value by 13.6% compared with conventional collections. It says its platform has handled more than 200 million customer interactions over the past two years, with revenue growing more than sixfold in that span. 

KredosAI is also a partner of FICO — the analytics firm best known for the FICO credit score — and integrates its technology into the FICO Platform, the software banks and other large companies use for credit decisions and collections.

The company competes with a range of collections-software players, including larger, more established Symend, a Calgary-based company that also uses behavioral science to interact with late-paying customers. The field also includes online debt collectors and companies selling older collections software. 

The company has about 25 employees, roughly eight of them in the Seattle area. 

Sridharan said the funding will go toward sales and marketing, further product development around agentic AI and voice agents, and eventually international expansion. He expects to roughly double headcount over the next year, to 50 people or more. 

The additional funding, he said, “gives us a bit of fuel to go to market a little more aggressively than we have in the past.”

Venice.ai, a privacy-focused AI startup with strong Seattle ties, has raised $65 million in its first outside funding, valuing the 2-year-old company at $1 billion. 

The company positions itself as a private and unrestricted alternative to mainstream AI services, offering access to a range of open-source and commercial AI models. Venice says it doesn’t log or store users’ prompts and responses on its servers, keeping conversations on people’s own devices. It also strips out many of the content filters built into competing tools. 

The Series A round, announced Wednesday morning, was led by Dragonfly, a crypto-focused investment firm, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Morgan Creek, Liquid2 Ventures and Seattle-based Founders’ Co-op. 

The company was founded in 2024 by crypto entrepreneur Erik Voorhees, its CEO. Voorhees founded the crypto exchange ShapeShift and has long argued against heavy government regulation of cryptocurrency.

Seattle tech veteran and serial entrepreneur Jesse Proudman is Venice’s president, CTO and co-founder. The two met as classmates at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.

“We want Venice to be thought of in the consumer landscape on the same terms as a ChatGPT or an Anthropic,” Proudman said in an interview. “We want people to open their phones and have our app sitting alongside those apps.”

The case for privacy comes from how people are starting to use AI. As chatbots become go-to tools for sensitive matters — medical questions, legal issues, job negotiations, relationship advice — users hand over intimate details that accumulate in the databases of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

That data, Proudman said, is only as safe as the company holding it.

“It only takes one breach, one disgruntled employee who is going through that data, a government subpoena, a change in government policy — and then all of that data no longer is private to you,” he said. “It can be health records, it can be legal questions, it can be job negotiations, it can be relationship advice.”

Venice’s answer is to create no central trove to breach or subpoena in the first place.

Marketing AI with fewer restrictions can make Venice more useful in some cases, but it also raises the misuse questions that lead mainstream services to build in guardrails in the first place. Proudman said Venice includes some safeguards to prevent abuse and illegal activity. 

The company nonetheless bills itself as an “AI safety company,” casting the surveillance of users’ thoughts — rather than the content of their prompts — as the greater danger. 

Proudman is based in Seattle, where he has spent more than two decades starting and selling technology companies. He founded cloud-computing company Blue Box, which IBM acquired in 2015, and crypto trading startup Strix Leviathan, acquired by hedge fund Parataxis in early 2025. Strix spun out Makara, a crypto investing startup, in 2021, and Betterment acquired Makara the following year. 

Proudman spent about three years as a VP at Betterment, where he started moonlighting on Venice in 2024 — building it nights and weekends before leaving to go full-time.

Venice says it reached 3 million users in April and turned profitable in the first quarter. 

“That hockey stick that we always hear about, and that I’ve spent 25 years trying to build companies to find, finally manifested,” Proudman said. 

Venice makes money through consumer subscriptions and paid access to its developer API. It also has its own cryptocurrency, the VVV token, which developers can buy and lock up to reserve a share of the company’s computing capacity instead of paying per use.

Proudman said Venice will use the funding to build its own data center infrastructure — owning the GPUs that power its service rather than renting computing capacity — and to invest in growth as it tries to establish itself as a mainstream consumer brand. 

The company has grown to about 45 employees, up from roughly 15 people a year ago, with six in Seattle. It operates as a remote team and doesn’t currently have an office. 

Whether Venice expands its Seattle footprint long-term may hinge on state politics. Proudman has publicly opposed Washington’s new 9.9% “millionaires tax” — a state income tax on household income above $1 million that was signed into law in March and takes effect in 2028 — and said he won’t stay in the state if it does. 

He’s pinning his hopes on a repeal campaign that backers are trying to get on the November ballot. 

“I love it here … Seattle is a unique and phenomenal place to build a company, and I’ve been building companies here my entire life,” Proudman said. “I want to see us continue to be competitive against the Bay Area.”