Backstage at a Seattle tech event in the early 2000s, Chris Diorio was waiting his turn to speak. Next to him was Jeff Bezos, whose company was already becoming a household name.

Diorio, the leader of Impinj, then a tiny local startup, turned to the Amazon founder: “Jeff, you’ve got a much bigger near-term opportunity than we do,” Diorio recalls saying, “but we’ve got a much bigger long-term opportunity than you do.”

Before Bezos could respond, he was called onstage.

“The technology turned out to be way harder than I thought,” Diorio acknowledged after telling that story in a recent interview. “But that’s what I told him — and I still believe in those words. Our opportunity is to deliver physical intelligence for every item in the world.”

A quarter-century after that chance encounter, Diorio rang the Nasdaq opening bell Tuesday morning in New York City to mark the 10th anniversary of Impinj’s IPO. The company’s tiny, battery-free RFID chips — each smaller than a grain of sand — have been embedded in more than 160 billion items, including clothing, pharmaceuticals, airline luggage, and groceries.

Impinj commands nearly two-thirds of its market, won a patent war against a rival 15 times its size, and has grown from a $250 million IPO valuation to a market cap of more than $4.2 billion. Along the way, the company survived a billion-dollar industry hype cycle that killed nearly every competitor.

And yet, Impinj has posted exactly one profitable year since going public — thanks to a $45 million legal settlement at the time. Its accumulated deficit stands at $400 million, its financial reports show. Less than 1% of the items it envisions connecting are connected today. 

To Diorio, that speaks to the potential. The company is barely scratching the surface. He cited the 1% stat in his comments before ringing the Nasdaq bell on Tuesday morning, saying the “opportunity is so gigantic that we’ll still have a huge runway ahead of us 10 years from now.”

That the company has gotten to this point is as much a Seattle story as it is a technology story. Impinj has benefitted from a network of patient local investors, academic connections and supporters who gave the company the time that Silicon Valley never would have. 

But no one imagined it would take this long when they got started.

From Caltech to Seattle 

The origins of Impinj were at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1990s. Diorio was a graduate student working under Carver Mead, the physicist and engineer who helped coin the term Moore’s Law and helped lay the intellectual foundation for the modern semiconductor industry. 

Together, they discovered a way to change a transistor’s electrical properties after it had been manufactured — a quantum-mechanical phenomenon called “impact-ionized hot electron injection.” That made it possible to build chips so efficient and inexpensive that they could be embedded in disposable packaging. (“Impinj” is derived from that scientific name.)

In an oral history later recorded by the Science History Institute, Mead described Diorio as “a super-bright, super-high-energy guy” who “burned up the track” at Caltech.

After finishing his PhD, Diorio was recommended by Mead to the University of Washington’s computer science department. There was resistance among the UW faculty — his research in analog circuits wasn’t an obvious fit — but professor Larry Ruzzo carried the day. 

Ruzzo essentially said, “This guy is brilliant, and even if he is nothing other than our gift to the rest of the university, we should hire him,” recalled Ed Lazowska, the department chair at the time. 

Diorio joined the UW faculty in 1997. Over the next few years, his research earned a string of honors, including Packard and Sloan fellowships. A couple years later, Diorio met up with Mead on a trip to California, over dinner at Fresh Cream, a long-since-closed French restaurant in Monterey. Diorio asked Mead if it was time to start a company. 

“Are you up for it?” Mead asked. Diorio said yes. They started the paperwork the next day.

Impinj was incorporated in April 2000, headquartered in Seattle. It quickly got the attention of two local investment firms, with behind-the-scenes help from the everpresent Lazowska. 

On April 21, 2000, the UW computer science chair emailed Bob Nelsen at Arch Venture Partners and Tom Alberg at Madrona. He explained that he was urging Diorio and Mead “to get some local $ for the connections,” and that he had pointed them to Arch and Madrona. 

Patrick Ennis, then at Arch, reached out to Diorio that same day. As Ennis recalled in a recent interview, there were plenty of Silicon Valley firms that wanted in, thanks to Mead’s reputation, but Diorio and Mead decided to take Lazowska’s advice and go with Seattle investors. 

Diorio, who likes to take walking meetings, negotiated the terms with Ennis as they made their way on foot through the University of Washington Arboretum one day. The investment closed that summer: $15 million, split evenly between Arch and Madrona. 

Impinj at the time had patents, prototypes, and no real business plan. 

“That’s how venture capital should be done,” said Ennis, who has since become a Madrona venture partner. “You make big bets on great technology and great people.”

Betting the company on RFID

Bill Colleran joined Impinj as CEO in January 2001. He and Diorio had designed satellite chips together at defense contractor TRW in the 1980s. Colleran had just sold his Bluetooth startup, gotten married, and gone on his honeymoon. He came home to a message from Diorio: he’d started a company in Seattle and wanted Colleran to join. 

Colleran was soon in Seattle — one of six or eight people working out of what he warmly recalls as “a crappy little building” in the University District, several of them former TRW colleagues. 

“We were kind of getting the band back together,” he said. 

RFID wasn’t the original plan. Impinj’s first target was improving power efficiency for 3G wireless base stations, but the dot-com bust killed that market, and regardless, the company was too small to compete with the major chipmakers in the wireless industry.

The team spent two years exploring what to do with their technology. Cable modems required too much dependence on Intel, as Colleran recalled. Cell phone radios were dominated by players too big to compete against. GPS turned out to be a poor technical fit — Impinj’s chips excelled at low power, but GPS demanded low electrical noise, a different problem entirely. 

So they eventually settled on RFID, the technology that uses tiny wireless chips to identify and track physical objects. The industry was young, the standards were still being written, and Impinj’s low-power technology seemed tailor-made for it.

As Madrona’s Ennis and Tim Porter write in a piece pegged to the IPO anniversary, “When you have a truly powerful, groundbreaking deep technology, it behooves you to wander the product-market fit wilderness for a while, even when that is unsettling and downright frightening, and even when it runs contrary to what you learn in a VC class in business school.”

Then, a stroke of luck: In June 2003, Walmart announced it would require its top suppliers to tag every pallet and case with RFID chips. The Impinj team celebrated their good fortune. 

“We all high-fived,” Diorio recalled. “We did it. Eighteen months, we’re gonna IPO.”

In reality, it would be another 13 years.

Surviving the RFID hype cycle

Walmart’s announcement triggered a gold rush of venture capital investment into RFID technology startups. But there was no global spectrum allocated, no standard that worked, and no products ready to deliver on the promise. Walmart’s own January 2005 deadline came and went. Only half of its top suppliers could comply.

By 2008, the hype cycle had collapsed. Nearly every RFID startup died or got acquired. 

“More than $1 billion of VC money got poured into RFID,” Diorio recalled. “Way up, crashing down, and only one company that made it out the other side. … We were lucky enough that it was us.”

The real inflection didn’t come until around 2010, when retailers began tagging individual items, not just pallets. Knowing exactly which products were where, in real time, could lift same-store sales by as much as 10%, by solving a basic problem: getting items out of back rooms and onto shelves, making them available for purchase before customers gave up looking for them. 

Impinj filed to go public in April 2011, seeking to raise $100 million. But choppy markets — capped by the botched Facebook IPO in May 2012 — closed the window, and the company withdrew the filing that summer, raising $21 million privately instead.

After 14 years as CEO, Colleran stepped aside in 2014. 

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a lifelong RFID guy,” he said. 

An exit wasn’t in sight — the IPO window was shut, and a sale didn’t make sense because Impinj made both chips and readers, and “any of the companies that would be interested in boxes weren’t chip companies, and the chip companies weren’t interested in boxes.”

Diorio took over as CEO that November. The venture investors were 14 years in and needed a path to liquidity. He spent the next two years sorting things out and getting the company ready.

The long road to IPO

Porter, now a Madrona managing director, who had worked closely with Alberg on the Impinj investment since 2007, recalled the final stretch. One of the first target dates for trading landed on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union, sending markets into a tailspin. 

“It was a little bit like, are you kidding — what next?” Porter said. 

But on July 21, 2016 — some 16 years after its founding — Impinj went public on the Nasdaq at $14 a share, raising $67 million at a market cap of just over $250 million. 

Alberg, the late, legendary investor, who was one of the first people to back Bezos’ fledgling online bookstore, personally invested $500,000 in the offering — a rare move among venture investors, who typically use IPOs to finally cash out, not double down. 

Porter called Alberg’s move “a really big signal” to the market that demonstrated his long-term belief in Impinj. It was also a smart investment, as it turned out. As noted during the Nasdaq bell-ringing Tuesday morning, Impinj’s share price has grown by nearly 900% since the IPO.

But there was one last hitch. On the night before trading began, the offering was so oversubscribed that the final allocation became a drawn-out negotiation between the board and the bankers over how many shares to issue. It dragged on so long that Diorio and CFO Evan Fein, stuck in Chicago for the roadshow, missed their flight to New York.

Fein had been one of the first people hired at Impinj, joining Colleran in the University District office in 2001 and staying through the whole ride. He was not about to miss the bell-ringing.

The CFO wanted to make a run for it, but Diorio told him there was no way — the flight departed in 30 minutes from O’Hare. Fein tried anyway. He didn’t make it. They stayed in Chicago overnight and caught a flight the next morning.

The company’s CTO at the time rang the bell in Diorio’s place. 

Trial by fire

The celebration was short-lived. After the IPO, demand for RFID surged — but Impinj, thinly capitalized after years of private fundraising, didn’t have the operational capacity to fill the orders. The stock quadrupled from its $14 IPO price to more than $60. Then it all came apart.

NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch chipmaker roughly 15 times Impinj’s size, moved aggressively on pricing and took business away. Customers who had been stockpiling RFID tags pulled back on orders. Revenue declined. On Feb. 2, 2018, the stock plunged 47% in a single day.

What followed was the darkest stretch in the company’s history. The company laid off 9% of its workforce. Then a former employee complaint triggered an audit committee investigation, forcing the company to miss an SEC filing deadline and drawing a deficiency notice from Nasdaq.

For months, the outcome was uncertain. Executives couldn’t trade their stock or issue grants to employees. The investigation cost $1.4 million. NXP, sensing an opportunity, continued to press its advantage.

Diorio described the investigation as mentally draining. The company was spending millions of dollars, the outside attorneys weren’t sharing their findings along the way, following the standard practice, and there was no way to know for certain how it would end. 

“You firmly believe you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, “but who knows if somebody actually did something wrong that you don’t know about.” 

The investigation ultimately cleared the company, finding “no credible evidence” of wrongdoing, and Impinj received what Diorio called a rare letter from the SEC formally closing the matter. The stock surged 35% on the news.

Diorio called 2018 a turning point. “It was the year where everything got really difficult, the team and the company rallied, and it was the strength and the persistence of the team and their dedication that pulled us out the other side,” he said. “I’ll never forget that.”

The following year, Impinj went on offense. In June 2019, the company sued NXP, alleging it had copied 26 of Impinj’s patents. NXP countersued. The litigation stretched across five years and four lawsuits. In 2023, a federal jury found NXP had willfully infringed Impinj’s patents and awarded $18.5 million in damages. NXP settled in 2024, paying $45 million upfront and agreeing to ongoing royalties of roughly $17 million a year.

Where Impinj stands today

Diorio helped coin an industry term for the technology Impinj had built: RAIN RFID, short for “RAdio-frequency IdentificatioN.” It distinguished what Impinj does (using battery-free chips to identify and track individual items at scale) from other flavors of RFID used for key cards, animal tags, and contactless payments.

Today the company employs more than 450 people, most of them based in its headquarters at 400 Fairview Ave. N. in Seattle, with a test and development lab on Beacon Hill. The workforce is a fraction of NXP’s, which has more than 32,000 employees — a reminder that Impinj has built a market-leading position with a comparatively small team. 

Impinj holds an estimated 64% of the global market for RAIN RFID endpoint chips, up from 51% the year before, according to ABI Research. The company first overtook rival NXP for the market lead in 2024. The industry shipped nearly 53 billion chips in 2024, roughly one for every six or seven people on Earth. Impinj has connected more than 160 billion items cumulatively.

Each chip is battery-free, costs a few pennies, can be read wirelessly from 30 feet away, and identifies individual items at a rate of up to 1,000 per second. Vision systems can’t identify individual items. QR codes require line of sight. NFC has a range of four inches. Bluetooth requires a battery.

“Name any other technology that even gets close,” Diorio said. “You won’t come up with one.”

Privacy concerns nearly killed the RFID industry in its early years, when consumer groups campaigned against the technology in the mid-2000s. Although there’s privacy innovation still to come, Diorio said those fears have largely faded. The chips carry only a number, respond only when powered by an external reader, and don’t track people. 

One retailer already turns its tags invisible after the point of sale, though Diorio noted that’s “not the best solution because then that inhibits recycling.” 

His longer-term goal is cryptographic security, chips that can’t be cloned, putting “a dent in global counterfeiting” while keeping consumer data protected. 

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is shifting. Diorio views NXP as the only real competitor — “everybody else in the market is a partner,” he said — but the competitor list in Impinj’s SEC filings has grown from two names at the time of the IPO to more than six, including four Chinese chipmakers. When a product costs pennies, low-cost competitors have a natural opening.

Retail apparel remains the core market. About 60% of all RAIN RFID tags go on clothing. But that reliance has made the business volatile. Three times in 10 years as a public company, demand from retailers has dropped sharply, dragging revenue and the stock with it. 

Earlier this year, Impinj’s stock plunged after the company issued guidance well below expectations. Part of the challenge: the company’s top three customers account for 61% of revenue.

The financial picture reflects a company that is still proving itself. Revenue has grown from $123 million in 2018 to $361 million last year, but Impinj has posted just one profitable year since going public — a $41 million gain in 2024, boosted by the NXP settlement.

To Diorio, all of this is prelude. Apparel, he said, is “tiny” compared to the total market of every item manufactured, transported, and sold. General merchandise, supply chain logistics, pharmaceuticals, food — each is an order of magnitude larger, or more.

“We have a gigantic blue ocean,” he said. “It’s the size of the Pacific.”

Machine learning and AI

The company is also using machine learning to move beyond handheld inventory scanning. Fixed readers mounted in ceiling tiles and other locations can track items autonomously at store choke points, from receiving docks to fitting rooms to exits, replacing employees who currently walk the aisles waving handheld scanners. 

More broadly, Diorio sees tagged items as a data source for AI, generating hard information at every point in a product’s journey from factory to shelf to recycling bin. 

“Most of the modeling that goes on today is based on guessing,” he said. “If the models are based on hard data, it’s immensely more valuable.” 

The biggest bet ahead is food. Three of the top five U.S. grocers (Kroger, Walmart, and Albertsons/Safeway) are piloting RFID for food freshness, according to Diorio, using tags to identify items approaching their expiration dates so they can be marked down before they end up in the trash. 

A European grocer is pushing toward fully automated checkout, where a basket of tagged items moves down a conveyor and is read instantly, no scanning required.

These are pilots, not deployments. The grocery market dwarfs apparel in volume, and Impinj has yet to prove it can crack it at scale. But here again, Diorio sees this as untapped potential. 

“My enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been,” he said. “We are just getting going.”

And this time, he made it to New York to ring the opening bell. 

During his Nasdaq remarks on Tuesday morning, Diorio told the story of getting stuck in Chicago for the IPO a decade ago, using the anecdote to make a larger point.

“The team stepped in,” he said. “The team that was here covered everything, rang the bell, did all the process, and did it beautifully. In fact, probably better than we could have. And that is the story of Impinj. It’s the team.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated July 23, 2026, to reflect ABI Research’s 2025 market share estimate of 64% for Impinj, up from 51% in 2024 as originally reported. The spelling of former CFO Evan Fein’s name was also corrected.

The Seattle Sounders paused before Thursday night’s rivalry match against the Portland Timbers to honor one of their own.

Before the match at Lumen Field, the club paid tribute to S. “Soma” Somasegar, the longtime Microsoft executive, Madrona venture capitalist and Sounders minority owner who died in May at age 59. Fans stood in silence as Somasegar’s image appeared on the stadium video boards.

Somasegar joined the Sounders ownership group in 2019, part of a wave of Seattle tech leaders — including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — who bought in that year.

After his death, the club said Somasegar viewed sports as a way to bring people together, and credited him and his wife, Akila, with strengthening the Sounders and Seattle Reign communities.

GeekWire chronicled the outpouring of tributes after Somasegar’s death, as colleagues, founders and friends remembered the former Microsoft executive and venture capitalist for his humility, generosity and commitment to helping others succeed.

During his 27 years at Microsoft, he helped lead the company’s developer tools business before spending more than a decade at Madrona, where he backed and advised a new generation of cloud and AI startups.

Live-shopping unicorn Whatnot is expanding its AI capabilities with the acquisition of Shaped, a startup that builds real-time recommendation and search technology.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will join Whatnot to lead a new applied AI research team focused on improving how buyers discover live streams, sellers and products across the marketplace. Before co-founding Shaped in 2021, Murrell worked on machine learning and recommendation systems at Meta.

Backed by Seattle venture firm Madrona, Shaped developed AI technology designed to deliver highly personalized recommendations in real time — a key capability for Whatnot’s fast-moving live shopping platform, where inventory and buyer interest change by the second.

The acquisition comes as Whatnot continues to invest heavily in engineering and AI. Last year, the company announced plans to significantly expand its Seattle engineering hub after leasing new downtown office space following a $225 million funding round that valued the company at $11.5 billion.

The company has said Seattle will serve as one of its key engineering centers as it continues to scale its platform. The Whatnot offices in Seattle are led by head of engineering Daniel Bear, the former head of infrastructure at Snap.

Whatnot is based in Culver City, California. The offices in the Seattle area are one of more than 100 engineering centers in the region, as tracked by GeekWire.

For Madrona, the deal represents another exit for a portfolio company applying AI to solve core business problems, reinforcing the firm’s continued focus on infrastructure and enterprise AI startups.

Sunny Gupta has led two prior enterprise tech companies with backing from venture capital firm Madrona in the past 20 years. iConclude sold to Opsware. Apptio sold to Vista Equity Partners, then to IBM for $4.6 billion.

Now they’re getting the band back together for the AI era. Madrona’s Matt McIlwain is calling it the biggest opportunity “by far.”

Gupta is launching Thira, a Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise AI startup, with Apptio co-founder Kurt Shintaffer, and leaders from companies such as Atlassian, Oracle, and Databricks. Thira announced Tuesday that it raised $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona, with participation from FUSE.

The idea: Thira is building AI to handle the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep big companies running, like setting up a new hire’s laptop, resetting a locked account, or approving a software purchase. The pitch is to enable a “back-office that runs itself,” according to the company.

It’s starting with IT support. The company is building software agents that can take an IT ticket, work it across the systems where the actual fixes happen — such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, and the identity and device-management tools that connect them — and close it out.

Finance and HR systems are also on the roadmap. Thira’s job listings describe agents built to “autonomously run the back-office work that consumes companies today, across IT, finance, HR, and beyond.”

Thira is entering a crowded market. ServiceNow closed its $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks last December to build autonomous IT ticket resolution into its service management platform. Startups including Aisera, Rezolve.ai, and Serval are pursuing similar territory.

Part of Thira’s bet is that Gupta and Shintaffer’s relationships with CIOs, which they built over many years at Apptio, will help to give it a foot in the door. Thira says it’s working with 10 companies as design partners ahead of a broader launch this fall.

In many ways, it’s a step beyond Apptio, which helps CIOs see where their companies spend money on technology. Thira is aiming to go past visibility to the “system of execution,” actually doing the work.

In a post on LinkedIn, Gupta said he began hearing from CIOs during Apptio tenure who wanted not only visibility into spending but also the ability to act on inefficiencies and automate work.

“In early 2026, I asked more than twenty CIO friends a simple question: has enough changed that what they’ve been asking for is finally buildable? The answer was yes, and bigger than I expected,” he wrote.

Thira’s team also includes:

• Mudit Goel, previously SVP of engineering at Atlassian;
• Grant Neuman, who was an AI engineer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure;
• Tarek Madkour, previously director of product management at Databricks;
• and Shashwat Srivastav, previously founder and CEO at AIVOT.

Gupta has been Smartsheet’s executive chair since August 2025, when longtime CEO Mark Mader retired. He also served as acting CEO until Raj Singh was named CEO in October 2025. Shintaffer was Smartsheet’s CFO from July 2025 to May 2026.

McIlwain, the Madrona managing director, is joining Thira’s board of directors. FUSE founding partner Kellan Carter is a board observer.

In a statement, McIlwain said the founding team pairs Gupta and Shintaffer’s two decades of enterprise credibility at Apptio with what he calls “AI-native innovators.” He added, “This is my third time starting and building a company with Sunny and it is by far the largest opportunity we have pursued together.”

Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke‘s startup Entire is rolling out a distributed network for mirroring code repositories, making the case that centralized platforms like he once ran as part of Microsoft will struggle to handle the demands of AI coding agents on their own.

Entire, which emerged in February with a $60 million seed round, is launching a preview of its distributed Git network on Wednesday, with active regions in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Developers can mirror an existing GitHub repository onto Entire in one step, keeping their code where it is while AI agents clone and pull from a faster, closer copy.

Dohmke cited a principle espoused by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and the Git version control system, in a 2007 talk: “If you’re not distributed, you’re not worth using.”

“In the era of agents, centralized Git hosting has become a fundamental constraint, as the strain of billions of agents and developers hammering a central server shows up in the form of rate limits, high latency, or even outages,” Dohmke said in a statement announcing the launch.

GitHub, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018, is the dominant platform for storing and collaborating on software code. It’s built on top of Git, the open-source system that tracks changes across a codebase, which was designed from the start to work without a central server.

Dohmke, based in Bellevue, Wash., left GitHub last year after nearly four years as CEO. He co-founded Entire with Cole Driver, a former GitHub deputy chief of staff. The fully remote company has grown to more than 40 employees across nine countries.

Entire’s $60 million seed round was led by Felicis, with participation from Madrona, Microsoft’s venture arm M12, and Basis Set Ventures, along with individual investors including Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. Felicis called it the largest seed investment ever for a developer tools startup, valuing the company at $300 million.

“We think it can be the next great developer platform,” said Tim Porter, a Madrona managing director, in an interview this week.

He cited the company’s complementary position to the major coding agents — working in conjunction with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others rather than competing with them — as a key factor driving its prospects for success.

Entire isn’t positioning itself as a direct competitor to GitHub, and the participation of M12 is a sign of the cooperative dynamic between the two. For now, the mirroring approach is designed to complement GitHub, not replace it.

Long-term, the company’s ambitions are much bigger. The announcement Wednesday morning about the preview of Entire’s distributed Git network says the company plans to ultimately let developers host new repositories natively, not just mirror existing ones.

Madrona, in a blog post earlier this year, described GitHub, while “incredibly important,” as “quickly becoming a legacy platform” and said Entire’s goal is “not only to supersede GitHub, but to superset it.”

The Seattle-based firm’s investment was led by Porter with the late S. “Soma” Somasegar, who was previously corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division and led the acquisition of Dohmke’s earlier startup, HockeyApp, announced in 2014.

Entire hasn’t disclosed pricing. Porter said the company plans to introduce commercial and individual tiers after the preview period, with a mix of seat-based and consumption-based pricing alongside a free tier and open-source components.

The new distributed Git network is one part of a broader platform. Entire also offers a tool that automatically records the reasoning and context behind AI-generated code changes — the instructions a developer gave, the steps the agent took, and why it made the choices it did — and stores them alongside the code itself in the repository.

The company says it now integrates with every major coding agent, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Factory AI, and GitHub Copilot.

Entire is also announcing other new features on Wednesday:

• Entire Blame, which traces a line of code back to the agent conversation that produced it.
• Entire Review, which runs automated code reviews using that context.
• Code and Semantic Search, which queries the history of code changes and the reasoning behind them.

“Session logs are now the second most important artifact in software development,” Dohmke said in his statement, “and they belong in the repository alongside the code.”