Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research initiative that will generate data and train AI models to design proteins and genes that don’t exist in nature — sharing the results freely to help others develop new medicines and materials.

The initiative, called AI BioDesign, brings together the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, with funding from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), created by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

AI BioDesign is led by David Baker, the UW biochemist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computers to design new proteins, and Jay Shendure, a leading genome scientist at the UW and the Allen Institute.

The plan is to “hijack a lot of the machinery that evolution provided us” — the cellular assembly line that turns DNA into proteins — to design and measure millions of novel biological molecules, Shendure said in an interview in advance of the announcement.

That will help AI models learn the rules of biological design from a huge set of examples, instead of inferring them from the relatively limited number that nature has produced.

The field, Shendure said, is “putting too much emphasis on taking the cranks that we have and just running with them, as opposed to building the right cranks.”

The goal is to make designing biology more like ordering a part: a molecule that latches onto a cancer cell, for example, or a genetic switch that fires only inside brain cells and nowhere else.

Potential outcomes could include everything from new therapies for disease, to proteins that dissolve plastic in the environment, to cells that travel through the body in a programmed way, said Sanjay Srivatsan, a Fred Hutch assistant professor who leads the cancer center’s work on the initiative, in a video released with the announcement.

“For the first time, the speed of AI is beginning to match the experimental power of synthetic biology,” Baker said in a statement. “That changes the question from ‘what has nature already made?’ to ‘what else is possible, and how can we test it?'”

Where the money goes

The Fund for Science and Technology is providing $94.6 million for AI BioDesign over five years. The foundation launched publicly last year with a mandate to direct a large share of Allen’s fortune into bioscience, environmental and AI research.

The funding from FFST is allocated as $46.1 million to the Allen Institute, $43.8 million to the UW and $4.7 million to Fred Hutch, according to an Allen Institute spokesperson.

The initiative had 62 people as of mid-August, including some new hires and others redirected from existing projects at the three institutions. The UW accounts for 41 of them, the Allen Institute 13, and Fred Hutch eight. AI BioDesign is expected to continue growing over time.

“AI BioDesign is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science FFST was created to support,” said Marc Malandro, the foundation’s chief programs officer and co-lead, in a statement. He joined FFST in May after nearly a decade at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, most recently as chief operating officer of CZI and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network.

Malandro and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Liz Carey have been leading FFST on an interim basis since founding CEO Lynda Stuart stepped down in May.

Inside the lab

On a recent tour of the AI BioDesign lab, research associate Jack Boylan pulled up results from a run he’d done on their new DNA sequencer that morning — on free kits donated by a neighboring biotech company, a year past their expiration date.

“We decided, let’s give it a roll,” he said. It worked fine.

The sequencer is what makes the whole approach possible. It reads all of the millions of DNA sequences in a single tube at once and reports which ones performed. One recent experiment ran 6 million distinct sequences through it at once.

“The scale comes not from robotics, but from parallelizing inside the test tube,” said Jesse Gray, executive director of strategy and platform for AI BioDesign and the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, and a former Harvard Medical School geneticist.

The lab, at Dexter Yard in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a short walk from the Allen Institute’s headquarters, is organized into teams of five or six people, each working on a different design problem.

A separate four-person team of machine-learning specialists takes the incoming results and works with the bench teams to decide which experiments come next — the ones that will teach the models the most. Each round is judged on how much the models improved.

The Allen Institute calls projects like this “accelerators,” a term Rui Costa, the institute’s president and CEO, traced back to Paul Allen himself. The word came up in early planning sessions, Costa said. Allen wanted to “exponentially accelerate the field.”

Other accelerators at Dexter Yard include the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the Allen Institute’s collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the UW, which Shendure also leads; and Cell Science, which works on engineering cells to assemble themselves into tissues.

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the separate Seattle research organization also founded by Paul Allen, is involved informally rather than as a funded partner, Costa said.

Its robotics team has been talking with AI BioDesign about scaling up the protein work, and the two expect to collaborate on models and on tools that generate research hypotheses.

Why give it away

The decision to focus on open science also came from Allen, Costa said in an interview this week. “He was so visionary in the early 2000s: radically open science to exponentially impact and change fields, not to compete.”

That raises a question the initiative will face as soon as it produces anything valuable: what happens if a company builds a lucrative drug on data given away free? In traditional science, Costa said, being beaten to a discovery counts as a loss. Here it’s the goal.

“We would be so lucky if many companies would be taking this data and changing the world for good,” he said.

At the same time, Costa left open the possibility of the three principal institutions spinning out their own startups, nonprofits, or other initiatives from the work done by AI BioDesign.

Betting against the field

AI BioDesign’s approach runs against much of the current thinking in the field. Costa said most efforts to apply AI to biology are chasing a single general model that could answer questions about how any cell works. AI BioDesign is betting on the opposite: narrow models built for specific design problems, trained on data generated for that purpose.

“This project is a clear bet on a different way of doing things,” Costa said.

The people running the initiative are careful not to oversell. Gray said it remains an open question as to whether their approach beats the alternatives. “The jury’s still out,” he said.

Shendure put it plainly: “It’s never as easy as you think it’s going to be,” he said.

Costa said AI BioDesign needs to show real progress within 18 to 24 months — ideally even sooner — and expand to researchers around the world within five years.

— Mehul Shah joined Oracle as group vice president for OCI data and storage services, ending a 14-year run at Amazon and Amazon Web Services.

In his last role at AWS, Shah led engineering and product for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Oracle and Db2, and ran the launch and expansion of Oracle Database@AWS, the partnership that put Oracle’s database inside Amazon’s cloud.

“Through that collaboration, I saw firsthand that OCI shares the same DNA that inspired me to join Amazon back in 2012,” Shah said on LinkedIn, citing “deep curiosity, a passion to innovate, the courage to make bold decisions, and relentless drive to excel.”

Shah, who is based in Seattle, spent more than eight years at AWS, earlier leading real-time data streaming services including Amazon Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Streams, and serving as director and general manager of Amazon EMR. He started at Oracle this month.

— Seattle Children’s named Dr. Natalie Pageler senior vice president and chief information officer, putting her in charge of digital strategy and IT operations for the pediatric hospital system.

Pageler comes from Stanford Children’s Health and the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was division chief of clinical informatics and earlier spent a decade as chief medical information officer. She is a pediatrician and clinical informaticist with more than 20 years of experience.

Seattle Children’s CEO Dr. Christopher Longhurst followed a similar path. He was chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health, the same role Pageler held, before spending a decade at UC San Diego Health, most recently as chief clinical and innovation officer.

— Zillow Group named Cassandra “Sandi” Knight its first-ever chief legal and policy officer, a role the Seattle company created this month as part of a broader leadership shuffle. Reporting to CEO Jeremy Wacksman, she oversees Zillow’s legal, compliance and government relations functions.

Knight joins from Google, where she spent four years as a vice president leading global civil litigation and discovery. She was previously vice president and chief litigation counsel at PayPal, and spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley in senior litigation and compliance roles.

She began her career as a trial lawyer at the San Diego Public Defender’s Office, the firm Keker & Van Nest and the San Francisco City Attorney’s office. She holds a law degree from Stanford and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She arrives at a busy moment: Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the companies’ $100 million rental listings deal. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year.

Two longtime Zillow leaders are heading out:

• Sara Bonert, vice president of industry engagement for Zillow Group and ShowingTime+, is leaving after nearly 20 years. One of Zillow’s earliest employees, she joined in the fall of 2006 as director of broker services, helped build Zillow’s first platform for taking in listing data, and signed the partner agreements that took the site from zero to a million listings in four months.
• Jeff Tompkins, head of corporate real estate and operations, wrapped up almost five years with the company. Tompkins, who is based in Denver, ran Zillow’s workplace strategy across North America and beyond. He said he will share his next role soon.

— Amir Pelleg, a veteran of companies including Amazon and Convoy, is the new chief product officer at Uber Freight. He is based in Seattle, working out of the shared Uber and Uber Freight office on Second Avenue.

At Amazon, Pelleg was principal product manager for Kindle Fire, launched the Dash Button and initiated Alexa’s smart home controls, then incubated and launched Amazon Shipping in India, the U.K. and the U.S. as a director and general manager in Amazon Transportation.

He was a vice president on Convoy’s executive team until the Seattle freight startup shut down in 2023, then spent two and a half years at dental tech company Dandy.

“I’ve seen what works and what fails in digital freight,” Pelleg said in a Q&A posted by Uber Freight.

— Seattle’s Frazier Healthcare Partners added Wes Wheeler to its Growth Buyout team as an executive in residence, advising on diligence and on life science logistics and infrastructure.

Wheeler was most recently CEO of LabConnect, a central laboratory services company serving clinical trials, and before that president of UPS Healthcare, where he built a vertical of 10,000 employees across 35 countries. During Operation Warp Speed he was the primary industry interface to the U.S. government, overseeing distribution of more than 1.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to over 100 countries.

— Dr. Heather Cheng was announced as the inaugural recipient of the Marty Lazarus Weiden Family Endowed Chair at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, which will fund her work detecting, preventing and treating hereditary cancers.

Cheng is clinical director of cancer genetics programs at Fred Hutch and directs its prostate cancer genetics clinic. In 2016 she was part of a team that found more than 10% of men with advanced prostate cancer carry inherited mutations in DNA-repair genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The chair is named for Marty Lazarus Weiden, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and died in 2001. The family learned only later that some of its members carry a BRCA mutation.

— Microsoft corporate vice president Darryl Willis was named to the board of ONE Nuclear Energy, a natural gas and advanced nuclear developer going public this quarter through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp.

Willis has led Microsoft’s energy and resources group since 2019. He was previously a Google Cloud vice president and a BP executive who ran the company’s Deepwater Horizon claims process and testified before Congress. He will officially join the board when the merger closes, and he is expected to chair its compensation committee.

— Jake Milstein was named head of healthcare solutions marketing at Zscaler, a return to healthcare cybersecurity. He joins from application security company Contrast Security and was earlier chief marketing and revenue officer at Critical Insight, the Bremerton, Wash.-based security firm acquired by Lumifi Cyber.

Before moving into technology, Milstein spent a decade at Seattle’s KIRO TV, including four years as news director.

— Michele Mehl left Amazon Web Services after nearly two and a half years to become senior public relations manager at ALSO, arriving the same week the electric vehicle company announced a $150 million Series D round led by Prysm Capital.

ALSO builds the TM-B consumer electric bike and the TM-Q commercial delivery quad, and counts Amazon and DoorDash among its commercial partners.

— Richard Van Bibber was named senior vice president of research and development at Verasonics, the Kirkland, Wash.-based maker of ultrasound research platforms used in fields including biomedical ultrasound, materials science and earth sciences.

Van Bibber has spent much of a 25-year medtech career in the Puget Sound region, including seven years as director of research at Kirkland’s Cardiac Dimensions and five years leading clinical affairs at Bellevue-based Aortica.

— Dave Cotter joined the board of Nickson, the apartment-furnishing startup led by Cameron Johnson, alongside MarcyPen Capital Partners and Larry Braithwaite. Cotter is CEO of Greenwood and has previously worked at Amazon, Nordstrom, zulily, RealNetworks and Leafly.

— PCC Community Markets president and CEO Krish Srinivasan will retire effective Jan. 29, 2027. Srinivasan was chief financial officer at Remitly and vice president of finance at Lyft before joining the Seattle grocery co-op as CFO, and earlier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft.

— Seattle Foundation named Elizabeth Wong as chief philanthropy officer, reporting to President and CEO Alesha Washington. Wong spent more than a decade at Foundation Source and earlier worked directly with the Gates family at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And in case you missed it:

— Jay Bartot, a co-founder of the airfare-prediction startup Farecast and former chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs, was named CTO of Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an “AI co-founder” for entrepreneurs. Read more here.

— Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and promoted five other leaders, as it reorganizes its product and technology groups around AI. Read more in this GeekWire story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Jeff Lyon is now chief information security officer at Seattle’s Remitly. Lyon joins from Coinbase, where he was head of infrastructure security for two years. Past roles include security leadership at Robinhood and Amazon Web Services. Lyon also served as a petty officer with the U.S. Navy for more than nine years.

“Remitly’s mission to transform lives through trusted financial services that transcend borders resonates deeply and is a natural progression of my work building security organizations, secure applications, and safe-by-default platforms across fintech,” Lyon said in a LinkedIn post.

Remitly has seen a reshuffling of leadership since co-founder and CEO Matt Oppenheimer departed in February. Ankur Sinha resigned as chief product and technology officer in June, and Rina Hahn left as chief marketing officer earlier this month. Veteran tech and finance executive Sebastian Gunningham now leads the company.

— Joseph Williams, a longtime Seattle-area leader at the intersection of tech and public service, was named director of Cybersecurity Programs at Western Washington University.

Williams most recently served as the governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) practice director at consulting firm Artemis Connection. His varied career includes working as information and communications technology sector lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce; Seattle office director for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; and divisional CTO at Microsoft.

In 2025, Williams was named GeekWire’s Public Policy Champion for Innovation.

Williams’ experience “sets the stage for propelling our cybersecurity programs to new heights as we seek to equip and empower our graduates to be successful in exciting careers in a fast-changing technology landscape,” said Filip Jagodzinski, computer sciences’ department chair.

— Kartik Murthy was named vice president of product for Yoodli, a roleplay platform using AI to help people improve their professional skills.

Murthy joins the Seattle-based startup from the cybersecurity company Coalition, where he served as head of product for four years. He has held product management roles at companies including Meta, Google and Uber. 

“In a world where many AI products try to automate workflows, Yoodli is taking a bet on humans and it’s already paying off,” Murthy said on LinkedIn.

— Phoebe Weiser is now an investor at the longtime Seattle venture firm Madrona. She joins from Databricks, where she worked as a product manager, and previously held internship and full-time roles at Microsoft.

“After building in security at Microsoft and data engineering at Databricks, I’m looking forward to partnering with the next generation of founders. I’m especially grateful to the managers, mentors, and teammates over the past few years for everything they taught me about building products at scale,” she said on LinkedIn.

— Salman Taherian is now head of AI for Grant Thornton, a Chicago firm offering audit, assurance, tax and advisory services. Taherian, who is based at the company’s office in Bellevue, Wash., joins from Amazon Web Services where he was global head of agentic AI and strategic partner accounts. Past employers include Wipro Limited and Relx.

— Two Fred Hutch Cancer Center researchers have received endowed chairs:

• Kate Markey, an assistant professor at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine, has received the Innovators Network Endowed Chair. Markey is a bone marrow transplant physician and studies how gut bacteria affect recovery for cancer patients.
• Sita Kugel, a pancreatic cancer researcher and Fred Hutch professor, is the inaugural recipient of the Leung Roy Family Endowed Chair.

— Jeff Weintraub was appointed chief operating officer and chief financial officer for Nabu, a Seattle startup that publicly launched this year that’s building tools for software product teams. Its co-founders are Jon Grant and Eric Thompson.

Weintraub was most recently at Apple for more than 12 years, leaving the role of director of consumer and enterprise support engineering. Earlier in his career he was with Intel and also owned a bathroom fixture manufacturing company.