The U.S. Army is testing two rival versions of a new digital command network by putting them in the hands of soldiers in two active-duty divisions at once, and the service’s testing command says it can now judge how each performs within one to two weeks of a field exercise ending, down from the months […]Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona released its sixth annual Intelligent Applications 40 list this week, naming 45 private AI companies (the five extras come from ties) that have collectively raised $410 billion from investors across the industry.
Three of them — Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks — account for 92% of that total.
The uneven distribution of funding reflects a larger split in the tech industry, as the largest AI companies make huge bets on the computing capacity needed to meet demand for their models, while almost everyone else builds businesses on top of them.
The frontier labs are “increasingly funded by strategic capital from the likes of Amazon, Google, Nvidia and SoftBank rather than traditional venture,” Madrona’s Matt McIlwain and Rolanda Fu wrote in a post accompanying the list. That scale, they added, “makes every other category on this list look capital light by comparison.”
On top of that, he said, hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into OpenAI and Anthropic.
“And what I say to both the big tech companies and to the people funding the model companies: thank you very much,” McIlwain said on Bloomberg TV, noting that the five largest tech companies will spend an estimated $750 billion in capital expenditures this year.
But even setting those big three aside, McIlwain said, the rest of the winners have raised an average of more than $800 million each. That’s a total of $34 billion combined. Companies across the list are raising far more than they used to, enough that Madrona had to redraw its own categories.
The list sorts companies by total capital raised, and this year the ceiling for “early stage” rose to $50 million, up from the $30 million threshold that held for the previous five lists. The cutoff for “emerging enablers,” its category for smaller infrastructure companies, doubled to $100 million.
“Companies across the board are raising more money, and the definition for what ‘early’ means continues to shift higher,” McIlwain and Fu wrote.
Madrona has published the IA40 since 2021 as a roster of the private companies it considers most important in building and enabling AI applications. According to the firm, this year’s list drew on input from 72 investors representing 54 venture and corporate firms, who nominated and voted on more than 450 companies, with PitchBook data factored into the scoring.
Two Seattle-area companies made this year’s list:
Last year’s list included two other Seattle-area companies in addition to Clarify.
Madrona, one of the Seattle region’s largest and oldest venture capital firms, is an investor in all four — Clarify, Gradial, Statsig and Dropzone AI — although it also invests outside the region, and many of the companies on the IA40 are not in its portfolio.
Several of the companies on this year’s list have engineering centers in the Seattle region, including Anthropic, which leased 113,000 square feet in South Lake Union this year; OpenAI, which expanded to nearly 300,000 square feet in downtown Bellevue after the Statsig acquisition; and Anduril, which employs about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle.
Databricks, the San Francisco-based data and AI company (which leased 142,000 square feet in Bellevue this year), is the only company to appear on all six IA40 lists. That said, 23 of last year’s 40 winners returned this year, a 58% repeat rate, up from 33% the year before.
McIlwain and Fu wrote that the biggest and most established companies on the list are holding their spots, noting that “the age of experimentation is giving way to an age of enterprise readiness,” with buyers and investors “paying premiums for companies that can demonstrate real ROI.”
Madrona will recognize the winners at its IA40 Summit in Seattle on Sept. 29 and 30.
Updated with Matt McIlwain’s comments to Bloomberg TV.
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon’s delivery drones are going national, nearly 13 years after Jeff Bezos unveiled them on 60 Minutes. We listen back and discuss what’s next.
Plus: We go inside Anduril’s unmarked Bellevue office as the defense company builds toward 1,000 Seattle-area engineers; a reporter hides an AirTag in a rare book and tracks it to a secret Amazon book-scanning facility in Las Vegas; and an Anduril-themed trivia challenge.
Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.
Mentioned at the top
Amazon drone delivery
The AirTag and the book-scanning facility
Anduril in the Seattle region
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BELLEVUE, Wash. — There is no prominent signage outside Anduril’s downtown Bellevue office. The name isn’t listed in the building directory, on the suite door, or in the lobby. That may be by design: Inside, Anduril engineers are quietly building AI-driven, autonomous technologies intended to keep the U.S. and its allies ahead in a rapidly changing military landscape.
Step through the front doors and it becomes clear that this is no ordinary tech company.
Scattered across desks, production tables, conference rooms and showroom labs are autonomous drones ranging in size from a microwave to a ping-pong table, alongside next-generation digital night-vision goggles and military-grade edge computers designed to keep soldiers connected in an increasingly data-rich battlefield.
The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based defense giant — which closed a $5 billion funding round at a $61 billion valuation earlier this year and is reportedly targeting a $100 billion valuation — is rapidly building a massive engineering footprint in the greater Seattle region. It includes modern offices in downtown Bellevue and Seattle, and a multi-acre military testing facility near Carnation, Wash.
GeekWire got a peek inside the iconoclastic company’s Seattle-area operations this week. We toured the Bellevue offices, demoed products, and sat down with senior vice president Tom Keane. The former Microsoft cloud executive leads Anduril’s local presence and oversees its connected warfare division, including mixed reality, AI and edge computing technologies.
Keane was clear about the company’s growth ambitions in the Seattle region: “I could absolutely see a world where we get to 1,000 people here in terms of engineers,” he said.
Asked when that milestone could be reached, Keane said, “It’s sort of almost as fast as you can hire people.” Realistically, that will likely occur over the next two years.
Anduril currently employs 560 people in its Bellevue and downtown Seattle offices, up from about 30 four years ago. That’s when Keane, who had interviewed with 62 companies looking for a new challenge in edge computing, joined Anduril because of what he called “world-class teams in every discipline.”
With more than 110 open positions in Washington state and a newly leased third floor in downtown Seattle coming online, Keane said the regional expansion is only accelerating.
The regional workforce was until recently slated to include a maritime manufacturing hub along the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. However, as GeekWire reported this morning, Anduril has since vacated the former Foss Maritime shipyard space after the U.S. Navy canceled the autonomous warship program the company was pursuing.
But Anduril’s maritime ambitions haven’t gone away. Alongside its autonomous aircraft, low-cost cruise missiles and counter-drone interceptors, the company continues to develop a large subsea fleet, from modular survey vehicles to the extra-large, school-bus-sized Dive-XL.
The company’s Seattle-area ramp-up is a play for the region’s engineering talent — a mix of disciplines well-suited to a next-generation defense hardware company, and one Keane says is hard to find in one place. That includes distributed systems engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, and advanced optics experts.
Another advantage: proximity to major military installations including Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Naval Base Kitsap.
Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta have long dominated local engineering hiring. But Anduril is recruiting aggressively from those companies, pitching engineers who want to move fast and see their work in the field.
Deep pockets and close ties to the U.S. defense establishment don’t hurt, either.
Anduril got a large infusion of that talent 18 months ago, when it took over Microsoft’s IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) program along with about 100 local engineers who had spent years developing augmented reality hardware for the U.S. Army.
“If you take machine learning and AI… you can look out any of these windows and see places that we can recruit from,” Keane said from a conference room overlooking downtown Bellevue. “For a lot of software engineers, this is incredibly applied.”
Keane acknowledges the company’s culture isn’t for everyone. In fact, Anduril got plenty of buzz last year with its edgy recruiting campaign, “Don’t Work at Anduril.“
Rather than plush tech perks and work-from-home flexibility, Anduril pitches what Keane calls “grit” — a willingness to take ownership of hard engineering problems and test them in the field. It’s very much an in-office culture, in part because the company builds hardware.
Anduril also moves fast, an approach Hawaiian-shirt-wearing founder Palmer Luckey wields against slower traditional military contractors.
The company’s “grit” translates directly into how Anduril tests its gear.
In rural Carnation, Wash., about 20 miles east of Bellevue, Anduril operates a testing range with a built-out “shoot house” for low-light tactical work. It gives engineers a place to iterate on code and hardware in the mud and rain alongside active-duty warfighters.
Among them: members of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment from nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord, who recently put Anduril’s EagleEye mixed-reality system through its paces on the firing range and obstacle course.
During a walkthrough of the Bellevue facility, Anduril’s team showed us a wide range of hardware being designed, tested, and calibrated on site.
The centerpiece was EagleEye, the company’s heads-up hardware and software suite built for warfighters. Historically, soldiers have had to lug 3 to 5 pounds of glass and electronics on their helmets, paired with fragmented radios, specialized batteries and thick cables.
Anduril’s system strips that down to a 115-gram pair of augmented reality glasses — about four ounces — built in collaboration with Meta (for waveguides), Canon (for sensors), Qualcomm (for custom silicon) and Oakley (for ballistic protection).
I tried on the lightweight camouflage backpack and glasses — no helmet in this case — in a demo in the Bellevue testing lab. It ran through three operational “vignettes” driven by Anduril’s core Lattice software:
In each case, the user controls the system — navigating between maps and text — with a click of a button on a small device connected to the front of the backpack.
The team also previewed its upcoming digital night vision system. Instead of the narrow “toilet paper roll” view of traditional analog goggles, Anduril’s VR-style digital displays offer an 84-degree field of view. That’s more than double the 40 degrees warfighters get in devices today.
Using machine learning models, the system fuses thermal imagery and low-light camera feeds in real time, making heat signatures leap out in pitch-black environments.
To ensure every pixel lands accurately without causing motion sickness, Anduril’s engineers use custom robotic arms to run geometric calibration on each lens distortion map before it leaves the facility. An engineer running the testing equipment politely asked GeekWire not to photograph the system.
The night vision system has not yet been deployed but will be part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command prototype delivery to the U.S. Army next year, said Stephanie Davis, communications manager for Anduril’s connected warfare group.
Operating a high-profile defense company in the Seattle area doesn’t come without friction. Activist groups recently staged protests outside Anduril’s downtown Seattle offices, targeting the company’s autonomous weapons development and military contracts.
At the time, Anduril issued a statement to GeekWire saying that it respects the right to free speech. “That said, it is perplexing when people choose to protest a company dedicated to supporting the very military that safeguards those rights,” the company added.
When asked about the pushback, Keane said critics don’t affect Anduril’s hiring. “There’s protests at every company, frankly.”
Anduril’s hiring reaches well beyond Big Tech. Drew Swanson, a lead architect, spent 13 years in the military working in communications supporting special operations units in the field. He described an Anduril technology called Squad-A, which helps squad leaders pick the best network connections to stitch together incoming intelligence feeds.
Swanson said the draw of Anduril is the chance to escape corporate bureaucracy and tackle high-stakes physical problems, reflected in comments he gets from others in Seattle tech.
“One of the biggest things that I always hear is: ‘I want to come over there because you guys are going after really hard problems,'” Swanson said of conversations with tech colleagues around Seattle.
Solving those problems often comes down to fundamental hardware redesigns, like combining a soldier’s ballistic vest, battery and edge computing device into a single body plate. Keane showed off a prototype as the tour wrapped up — an example of Anduril’s broader approach.
“Batteries are such a huge thing,” he said, pointing to the body armor. “If you put the three of them together… you can start to get rid of stuff. You take what was historically three separate heavy things and turn it into one software-enabled platform.”
Defense technology giant Anduril Industries has quietly vacated its maritime operations along Seattle’s Lake Washington Ship Canal.
The exit, confirmed by the company to GeekWire this week, comes after the U.S. Navy canceled the specific autonomous vessel acquisition program Anduril was pursuing at the historic former Foss Maritime shipyard site.
“Anduril has moved out of its shipyard space in Seattle,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The space supported a Navy program pursuit; the Navy canceled that program, and the shipyard footprint was no longer needed. The Seattle shipyard presence was always small — a handful of employees worked from the space. Anduril’s broader Seattle footprint continues to grow across its other offices in the city.”
The disclosure provides a sudden plot twist in a maritime push that GeekWire first reported on in April, after Anduril established a presence at the Foss shipyard. At the time, the company offered a muted response when pressed for specifics about its local shipyard activities.
The plans went back to late 2025, when Anduril announced a major partnership with South Korea’s HD Hyundai Heavy Industries.
The companies set out to build a new class of dual-use Autonomous Surface Vessels designed to compete for the Navy’s Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) program, which sought unmanned vessels capable of carrying large payloads over long distances.
At the time, Anduril pitched the Pacific Northwest as the ideal industrial launchpad, pointing to the region’s historic shipbuilding roots.
“Anduril has invested tens of millions of dollars to revamp a previously retired shipyard in the Pacific Northwest region at the historic former Foss Shipyard in Seattle, Washington,” the company said during the partnership rollout. “This facility will serve as Anduril’s initial U.S. hub for low-rate vessel assembly, integration, and testing of ASVs for the MASC program.”
That vision, however, was quickly upended. The U.S. Navy canceled the MASC initiative in March, replacing it with a new acquisition strategy for Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels, or MUSVs.
Rather than relying on a traditional program competition, the new marketplace allows the Navy to evaluate autonomous vessels through at-sea demonstrations, with successful systems eligible for follow-on production.
When the Department of the Navy announced the seven defense vendors selected to move forward in the new program, the lineup included defense contractors like Leidos, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Saronic Technologies and Sea Machines — leaving Anduril off the roster for initial testing.
Companies that successfully deploy vessels at sea will receive $15 million, and be eligible for follow-on production. At-sea testing was set to start in June, and is expected to conclude in October.
Anduril did not respond to additional questions about the Foss facility, its maritime operations in the Seattle area or its plans for the Navy’s new MUSV program.
Despite vacating its shipyard presence, Anduril’s broader push into Western Washington remains on a steep upward trajectory. The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company employs 560 people across its Bellevue and downtown Seattle offices — up from roughly 30 four years ago — and operates a multi-acre military testing facility in rural Carnation, Wash.
The high-flying defense giant, which closed a $5 billion funding round at a $61 billion valuation earlier this year and is reportedly targeting a $100 billion valuation in a new funding round, is rapidly building a massive engineering footprint in the greater Seattle region.
Senior Vice President Tom Keane told GeekWire the company could eventually grow its regional workforce to 1,000 people, including engineers working on augmented reality displays, edge computing hardware and other military technologies.
Anduril’s rapid expansion in the region is the subject of a separate profile story today on GeekWire.
Seattle’s emergence as a hub for companies building the next generation of industrial technology is drawing another high-profile startup.
Los Angeles-based Nominal, whose software helps engineers build, test and validate complex hardware systems, is establishing a permanent Seattle office as it ramps up hiring and looks for a larger home in the region.
The nearly 4-year-old company currently employs 11 people at a downtown Seattle co-working space, and expects to more than double that number by the end of the year.
The company is also relocating Head of Product Stephen Slattery, the former director of technical operations at defense tech giant Anduril Industries, from Los Angeles to Seattle to oversee the new office. Employing about 200 employees globally, Nominal also operates offices in Austin, New York, Washington, D.C., and London.
Seattle’s concentration of tech and aerospace talent, along with proximity to key partners and customers, attracted the fast-growing company.
Nominal CEO Cameron McCord said Seattle is one of only a handful of U.S. markets with a deep concentration of engineers experienced in solving large-scale infrastructure and reliability problems. Seattle’s aerospace heritage also appealed to the company.
“Some of the magic of Nominal is putting them in one room,” McCord told GeekWire.
The company boasts 75 customers, about half of which are in the defense sector. It also sells its software to companies in the energy, robotics and automotive arenas.
The Seattle expansion comes just months after Nominal raised an $80 million venture capital round led by Founders Fund at a $1 billion valuation, part of a growing trend of companies serving industries where artificial intelligence is accelerating innovation in the physical world.
“Nominal exists to help these engineering teams rethink their data supply chain: the end-to-end flow from instrumentation through acquisition, storage, analysis, reporting, and into the decisions that shape the next design,” the company wrote in the funding announcement.
Seattle has increasingly become a landing spot for companies operating at the intersection of AI and the physical world, while some of the region’s fastest-growing homegrown startups — including Overland AI, Carbon Robotics, Brinc and Stoke Space — are helping define the category.
In recent months, defense tech company Anduril has expanded its operations in the Seattle area. AI infrastructure startup Armada — which like Nominal is backed by Founders Fund — and AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI also have opened new offices or expanded engineering centers in the region.
Nominal’s McCord, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer who previously worked at Anduril, said conversations with former colleagues, including Anduril co-founder and COO Matt Grimm, helped reinforce Seattle’s appeal.
“I’ve been able to get a lot of advice and thoughts from him on what it looks like to properly enter the Seattle market,” said McCord. “Everything from him is incredibly positive on the talent and density.”
While Nominal has gained traction among defense contractors — McCord said four of the five traditional U.S. defense companies use its software — he said the company increasingly sees opportunities across a number of industries. The energy sector — including nuclear, fusion and batteries— as well as AI data center infrastructure are growing areas of interest for the young company.
The Seattle office will be more than an engineering outpost. McCord said Seattle will become a full cross-functional location, with engineering, sales, customer success, design and other teams represented as it grows.
The company expects the Seattle office to reach roughly 20 to 25 employees by the end of this year and could double again to 40 or 50 employees by the end of 2027. It is currently looking for a permanent office space, likely targeting downtown Seattle.
McCord said the Seattle office will play a key role in Nominal’s growth as it looks to reimagine the unique challenges that industrial companies face in building hardware systems for this new era.
“There’s a huge market opportunity as the world reindustrializes,” he said.
See this interview with McCord by General Catalyst’s Paul Kwan for more on the company:
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