— Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend promoted Nate Bek to principal. Bek joined the firm as an associate in January 2024 and was most recently senior associate and head of research.

Kirby Winfield, Ascend’s founding general partner, credited Bek with helping the firm’s companies launch with national press coverage, researching and communicating its investment theses, and sourcing deals including Neuramill and Endurance Energy.

“Nate has been a force multiplier for Ascend. It’s rare for a micro VC fund to have a resource like him,” Winfield said. “He not only executes and publishes novel market research and thought leadership that strengthens our brand and expands our reach; he’s also hyperconnected in the Seattle ecosystem and has sourced some of our most compelling investments.”

Winfield added, “We’re excited to see him continue to grow as Ascend becomes a nationally recognized pre-seed firm.”

Bek was previously a startups and venture capital reporter at GeekWire. He co-wrote a widely read GeekWire guest column in August making the case that many of Seattle’s most promising startups are building physical products such as rockets, power plants and off-road vehicles.

— Brandon Paddock left Microsoft to start his own AI software company. Paddock, who is based in Seattle, was a principal software architect in Microsoft’s Office organization and the technical lead for “Agent Mode” in Word, which shipped last fall and became the default Copilot experience in Word early this year. His last day was Sept. 11.

“I am incredibly excited about what I’m building, but not quite ready to talk about it here,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Paddock first worked at Microsoft from 2005 to 2013, including on search features in Windows 7 and Windows 8. He rejoined in 2016 after serving as CTO of Seattle startup Zealyst. He also built the Twitter client Tweetium as a side project.

— Seattle-based STEM education nonprofit Technology Access Foundation named Donya Loyd Kemp director of TransformED, which works with teachers at partner public schools to put TAF’s project-based STEM learning model into practice.

Kemp comes to TAF from Atlanta, where she was principal of Purpose Built Schools Atlanta and director of project-based learning at Charles R. Drew Charter School. She was most recently a senior consultant at Potential Unleashed Consulting.

In a TAF Q&A, Kemp said she was excited to contribute to work “that recognizes the brilliance of students, particularly students who have historically been underestimated.”

“So excited to have Donya on board. Leveling up for our children and teachers,” TAF co-founder and executive director Trish Millines Dziko wrote on LinkedIn.

— Zillow Group named Rikki Tremblay vice president and principal accounting officer as Jennifer Rock retires as chief accounting officer, according to a regulatory filing. Rock will stay on in an advisory role through March 1, 2027.

Tremblay has worked at the Seattle-based real estate company since 2014, most recently as vice president of reporting, technical accounting and controls. She previously held audit roles at Deloitte.

— Joy Chik joined the board of NewCore, a Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based startup building an identity platform for people and AI agents. NewCore emerged from stealth in June with $66 million in funding.

Chik, who is based in the Seattle area, spent 28 years at Microsoft, most recently as president of identity and network access. She announced her departure in April.

— Werner Koepf is now chief technology officer at VanillaSoft, a sales engagement software company. Koepf, a longtime Seattle-area tech leader, was previously chief product and technology officer at AI localization company LILT and senior vice president of engineering at Karat.

He has also held engineering leadership roles at Conversica, Ticketmaster, Expedia and Amazon, where he led the gifting business, including Wish List and registries.

— Mike Katz joined the board of MNTN, a publicly traded connected TV advertising company. Katz left Bellevue-based T-Mobile this year after 28 years, most recently as chief business and product officer. He remains an adviser to T-Mobile’s CEO.

— Christopher Budd joined Salesforce as director of security industry engagement, a new role connecting the company’s security team and research with the broader security industry. He joins Iain Mulholland and other former Microsoft colleagues. Budd, who has contributed many pieces to GeekWire over the years, previously led X-Ops communications at security company Sophos.

— Jay Carney joined venture capital firm SV Angel as general partner and head of public policy and communications. He will connect the firm’s portfolio companies and founders with policymakers in Washington and state capitals. A major focus will be Project Blueprint, SV Angel’s new effort to partner with tech founders and lawmakers to shape AI policy.

Carney, who is based in Washington, D.C., was previously global head of policy and communications at Airbnb, and Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs from 2015 to 2022. He was White House press secretary to President Obama from 2011 to 2014.

— Seattle-based A Place for Mom named Jason Conley chief technology officer. The company helps families find senior care. Conley will lead its technology strategy, engineering and data organization, including the use of AI across customer experiences and internal operations.

Conley will work remotely from Lexington, Ky. He was previously CTO at VIP Medical Group and Envera Health, and held senior technology roles at BrightSpring Health Services.

— Luis Montero rejoined the Seattle-based Gates Foundation to help shape its AI communications strategy across global health and development. Montero left the foundation about a decade ago for a career in tech.

His roles since then include global head of policy communications at Discord and public affairs positions at Edelman, Google and Microsoft, where he worked on executive communications for President Brad Smith. He is based in New York.

— Vancouver, B.C.-based defense tech startup Juno Industries expanded its board, advisory and leadership teams. The company develops AI-native command and control software and sensor systems for the Canadian Armed Forces and allies.

New leaders include head of engineering Dylan Neid, who spent nearly a decade at AbCellera; head of strategy Tania Belisle-Leclerc, former director of policy to Canada’s ministers of foreign affairs and national defense; and head of growth Bryan Riddell, former CEO of Team Rubicon Canada.

Claude Rochette and Alnesh Mohan will join the board once Juno goes public through a reverse merger with Trail Blazer Capital Corp., a shell company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange.

— And in case you missed it:

• Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw will leave the company at the end of the year after overseeing its communications for nearly three decades, first at an outside agency and for the last 17 years as a Microsoft executive.
• Amazon named Kevin Mandia, founder of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, to its board of directors.

The Gates Foundation is pledging to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence for health workers, farmers and teachers, largely in the world’s poorest countries, funding AI tools for people the market would otherwise overlook.

The bet is that AI can help reaccelerate the world’s progress against child mortality, poverty and disease, which has slowed sharply as governments cut global health funding.

The Seattle-based foundation’s new financial commitment, released Monday evening in conjunction with its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, illustrates the double-edged sword of AI at a moment when the U.S. in particular is preoccupied with what the technology might damage or destroy.

Bill Gates, who issued his own AI warnings in an essay three weeks ago, writes in the new report that the risks “are real and deserve serious attention.” He adds, “AI could be a great equalizer — or widen the gap. This is not a long-range prediction. It’s a present-tense choice.”

In this case, Gates writes, he’s focusing on “the possibility that AI, if shaped well, could expand who has access to solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that has too often been out of reach.”

The window is short, he writes: “I believe that the decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months — about how AI is built, funded, and deployed — will determine whether this technology primarily benefits the people who already have the most or reaches those who have the least.”

Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, in an interview with GeekWire, called the $1 billion a “down payment,” saying he expects the figure to grow significantly after the first two years.

For this first installment, 40% of the money will go to education, 40% to health care, 10% to agriculture and 10% to digital infrastructure, including datasets in languages the models don’t handle, according to the foundation.

More than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, according to the report. Leading AI speech recognition systems make errors less than 6% of the time in English and more than 60% of the time in Yoruba, a West African language spoken by tens of millions of people, for example.

Most people in Africa use feature phones rather than smartphones, Suzman said, so the tools have to work by voice. That means collecting recordings of speech, not just written text, in local accents and including children’s voices. He said the foundation works with Google and Microsoft on AI language initiatives.

Winding down: Gates announced in May 2025 that he would give away virtually all his wealth and close the foundation in 2045, which requires doubling its spending over those 20 years. The foundation had previously planned to close 20 years after his death.

As part of that plan, the foundation will need to give away $200 billion before it shuts down. Its budgeted payout is $9 billion this year, the largest in its history. Suzman said the $1 billion over two years comes out of its core budget.

Goals for its final two decades include cutting preventable child deaths in half again, eradicating polio and malaria, and bringing tuberculosis and HIV under control.

The report’s data section shows how far off the pace the world is. Child mortality, neonatal mortality and HIV are all projected to miss their 2030 targets. HIV incidence is on track to fall only to 0.22 new cases per 1,000 people, more than 10 times the target of 0.02.

Early AI results: The report makes the case that AI could change those trajectories. It points to a number of tools already in use in different settings:

• Penda Health, a network of affordable clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, where an AI tool built into patient records has raised diagnostic accuracy by 16 percentage points.
• In the U.S., seventh graders using a tool called Kiddom Atlas across 21 middle schools gained the equivalent of six extra months of learning in a single year.
• In India, the state of Maharashtra runs a free AI advisory service called MahaVISTAAR that has signed up more than 740,000 farmers, with 70,000 more joining every month.

The foundation has supported all three, according to the report’s endnotes. The endnotes also cite OpenAI’s account of its work with Penda Health on the clinical copilot.

One caveat: the evidence behind the examples is early. Suzman said the education work is “still on a relatively small scale,” and pointed to agriculture as the area already operating at size.

Suzman said the foundation spent years experimenting with AI without committing at this scale, wary of getting ahead of what the technology could actually deliver in its areas. Progress in the models over the past year, and results from early investments, convinced him otherwise.

“We now can state with a pretty high degree of confidence there are real deliverables that we can see across health, across education, across agricultural development,” he said.

What AI won’t fix: Asked whether AI can substitute for the money the U.S. and other governments have cut from global health, Suzman said: “Sadly, no.” The cuts run to “tens of billions of dollars,” he said, and they are hitting basic services now. He cited the purchase of bed nets and antiretroviral drugs, and care for mothers before and after birth.

“That’s affecting families right now with a real impact,” he said. “Ideally, you combine the two [AI and aid funding], and that’s how you get hugely accelerated progress.”

Suzman said the foundation will keep pressing the U.S. to remain a leader in global health. Despite the cuts, he said, it has been encouraging to see the country stay a partner in programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and he noted that Congress has moved to fund these areas more fully than the administration has.

“We believe that currently reflects the U.S. public’s broad view and support for these areas, when you can see the concrete results,” he said.

The Epstein review: Asked how the scrutiny of Gates’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein has affected the foundation’s work, Suzman pointed to the external review the foundation released in July.

Conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, it found no evidence that Epstein received foundation money or that the foundation knew of his crimes. It counted roughly 30 meetings from 2011 to 2014, involving Gates and nine other foundation leaders and staff, and found that staff had repeatedly raised concerns about associating with him.

The board adopted the recommendations that followed, among them centralized vetting of brokers and co-funders and tougher conflict-of-interest rules.

Suzman expressed optimism that the review has cleared the way for the foundation to keep working across the full range of governmental and philanthropic partnerships. “Hopefully it’s full speed ahead,” he said, “and with these AI shifts, that’s more important than ever.”