Every so often, we get sucked into a list touting the top regional startups or the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Well, a startup list released today from Microsoft-owned LinkedIn — titled “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle” — grabbed our attention, for all of the wrong reasons.

Let’s just say: We know a thing or two about Seattle-area startups around here. And so we had to do a little fact-checking.

First of all, four of the companies on LinkedIn’s list — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are not even headquartered in the Seattle area.

San Francisco-based Anthropic — ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s Seattle startup list — has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of AI over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination bigger than most AI models could create.

If the LinkedIn team were studying GeekWire’s coverage, they’d also realize that #2 on their list, Auger, is not headquartered in the Seattle area, either. The AI logistics startup, co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark, moved its headquarters to Dallas in August, although it maintains a Bellevue engineering center.

It keeps getting more bizarre from there. The #3 company on LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Whatnot, the heavily funded video-based shopping startup that set up an engineering center in Seattle last year, but is clearly headquartered in the Los Angeles area.

Finally, ranked #9 on the Seattle list is data center upstart Armada — a company that, according to its own LinkedIn profile, is based in San Francisco.

So, just to summarize: Three of the top Seattle startups (according to LinkedIn) have their headquarters in California, and one has its headquarters in Texas.

GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald pointed out the flaws in the list, calling it a “half-assed” effort. “For a Microsoft-owned company, you’d think they’d have better insight into where Seattle is actually located,” Fitzgerald said.

The list does include some companies that are actually based in the Seattle area.

Making the top 10 are: Bellevue-based Truveta (#4); Seattle-based Yoodli (#5); Redmond-based Worldscape (#6); Seattle-based Overland AI (#7); Seattle-based Gradial (#8); and Kent-based Stoke Space (#10).

All of those companies (except for Worldscape) are listed on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top 200 privately held startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. The other companies — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are listed on our engineering center list.

Notably absent from LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Chainguard, which ranked #42 on LinkedIn’s accompanying report on the top 50 startups in the U.S. Chainguard is headquartered in Kirkland but is a fully remote company. The Seattle ranking counts only employees and hiring in the city, which may explain why a remote company like Chainguard didn’t make the cut.

For our purposes, given that one of the co-founders of the cybersecurity startup calls the Seattle area home, we claim it as a Seattle-area startup.

In its defense, LinkedIn describes a Seattle startup a bit differently than we do here at GeekWire.

According to its methodology, the ranking weighs four factors: employment growth, engagement with company pages, interest in job openings, and the ability to recruit talent from LinkedIn’s list of top companies. The data covers July 2025 through June 2026.

LinkedIn requires privately-held companies to be less than seven years old and headquartered in the United States to qualify for its U.S. rankings, but doesn’t require them to be headquartered in the Seattle area to make the Seattle list. All of which explains how a startup can make a list of Seattle’s top startups without actually being based in Seattle.

We have to admit, this is a new one on us.

As GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop notes: What the heck is going on, LinkedIn?

UPDATE: LinkedIn provided this statement to GeekWire:

“While companies do not need to be headquartered in Seattle to qualify, they must have at least 30 full-time employees based in the metro area. Our city lists are designed to spotlight startups gaining momentum, locally, recognizing that growing companies often have employees and operations across multiple markets. Further, the data for the city lists are reflecting employees based in that city only, versus the entire country.”

Seattle defense startup Overland AI has unveiled IBEX, a new fully autonomous ground vehicle selected by the U.S. Marine Corps to support counter-drone air defense operations and execute high-risk frontline missions, including resupply, breaching, and electronic warfare.

IBEX was developed under a Department of War APFIT production contract that recently expanded to $25 million with added funding for the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. The initial $20 million milestone deal made Overland AI the first ground autonomy startup to serve as a primary defense hardware supplier, with the Marine Corps selecting the platform for integration into its Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS).

Built on the chassis, engine, and drivetrain of the Polaris MRZR — an ultra-light utility vehicle already used, fueled, and maintained across the armed forces — IBEX can carry a 2,000-pound payload and reach fully autonomous speeds exceeding 35 mph. The vehicle offers a 250-mile cruising range at 20 mph and is sized to fit inside a V-22 Osprey for air transport.

IBEX is powered by Overland AI’s proprietary OverDrive software stack, which combines real-time terrain perception with adaptive route planning to navigate complex, off-road environments at speed without relying on GPS signals or pre-mapped routes. Drivers can control multiple uncrewed vehicles simultaneously using OverWatch, the startup’s command-and-control software.

IBEX provides 5 kW of export power to run onboard sensors and defense systems, addressing energy limits in forward field operations. The company describes each vehicle as a combined power, communications, and compute node designed to operate independently in environments with limited or disrupted communications.

“We pride ourselves on developing technology that is informed directly by the warfighter,” Greg Okopal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Overland AI, said in a statement, adding that IBEX can be deployed on day one and maintained with the parts and fuel units already have.

The vehicle joins the startup’s existing flagship platform, ULTRA, as the company continues scaling production at its Seattle manufacturing facility to meet growing military demand for autonomous ground systems.

Founded in 2022 as a spinout from the University of Washington, Overland AI has rapidly expanded its defense operations, raising $100 million in Series B funding earlier this year.

The startup — No. 7 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups — has raised over $140 million in venture funding to date.

In 2025, Overland opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in the Rainier Beach neighborhood south of downtown Seattle. And this summer, the startup established an engineering outpost in Burlingame, Calif., aiming to tap into the Bay Area’s robotics and autonomy talent pool.

Overland AI’s growth reflects a broader defense technology boom across the Seattle region, where established firms and fast-growing startups are building major hardware and software footprints.

Companies expanding in the region include Shield AI, which selected the Seattle area for a massive manufacturing facility to build its autonomous X-BAT fighter jet; Anduril, which sees a path to 1,000 Seattle-area engineers across its Bellevue and Seattle hubs; and Echodyne, which opened a $40 million radar manufacturing factory in Woodinville to support drone detection demand.

— Ravi Vedula, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 26 years. Vedula, who is based in the Seattle area, led an organization of more than 1,000 people that runs the data and analytics platform behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

“26 years. It’s time,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Goodbye and thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a privilege. I gave it my all.”

Vedula joined Microsoft in 2000 and was the first engineering manager for Exchange Online.

His memoir, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” was published in March by Microsoft’s 8080 Books. It recounts his childhood in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, with each chapter followed by a lesson about leadership, engineering or life, as GeekWire reported at the time.

“I leave with gratitude for the people and experiences that shaped those years,” Vedula told GeekWire.

He said he is leaving room for “another professional chapter if the right opportunity comes along,” but for now plans to focus on travel, ways to contribute and writing, including a possible book based on his experiences receiving a heart transplant in 2017.

— AI and robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Rohit Prasad as its new CEO, effective Oct. 7. Prasad, who is based in the Boston area, was Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence until he left the company at the end of 2025.

He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, after Robert Playter retired in February following more than 30 years at Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group holds a controlling stake in the company.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and oversaw the creation of its Nova AI models. Boston Dynamics makes the Spot and Stretch robots and is developing the Atlas humanoid. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.

“Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise,” Prasad said in the announcement.

— Qualtrics has appointed Mike Potter chief technology officer of the experience management company. He joins from Petal, an Ontario healthcare company, and has worked in leadership at Qlik, IBM and Cognos.

“I have spent the better part of my career building platforms at scale, the kind of work that requires deep technical conviction, strong collaboration, and a relentless focus on what customers actually need. That is what drew me to Qualtrics,” Potter said.

Qualtrics has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah. It recently cut 117 jobs connected to its Seattle operations, largely affecting engineering and product teams. Last year, the company spent $6.75 billion to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.

— Shawn Stapleton has been named vice president and chief AI and innovation officer, a newly created role at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He joins the Seattle nonprofit from MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he led AI lifecycle management for more than three years. Before that, he was the Seattle-based head of data science for Philips.

Stapleton helped scale MD Anderson’s AI initiatives across clinical, research and administrative settings, Fred Hutch said, adding, “His experience at the intersection of strategy, governance and implementation will be instrumental as we continue building the foundation for AI-enabled medicine and discovery.”

— Seattle-based defense tech startup Overland AI has named Jon Abramovic as vice president of international growth. Abramovic has held sales leadership roles in Taiwan, Prague and Beijing. He was most recently director of global defense sales at SIG Sauer and spent eight years at Oshkosh Defense leading business development across Europe and Asia.

“Having spent years operating overseas, I’ve seen firsthand what our allies face against near-peer adversaries and what it takes to stay ahead. Overland AI’s technology represents a generational leap in the ground domain,” Abramovic said.

Overland AI is No. 7 in the GeekWire 200, a ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.

— Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area AI startup first covered by GeekWire in August, has announced its leadership team. The company, launched by former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg, is pursuing “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.

Its team includes:

• Tyler Simpson, co-founder and chief operating officer, who left Meta to start Noosphere Labs. He previously was co-founder and CTO of Luum by HealthEquity and spent more than 11 years at Microsoft.
• Andrew Ma, engineering leader, has more than 20 years’ experience across Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, most recently leading Google Cloud’s Apache Spark teams.
• Joshua Walton, founding design partner, was a director at Meta Reality Labs Research and worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Louis Barinaga, founding hardware partner, spent the bulk of his career at HP and more recently held leadership roles at Meta’s augmented reality program, Valve and Microsoft.
• Andrew Smith, founding AI engineer, led Zillow’s first agentic AI system and previously worked for Amazon and Sandia National Laboratories.
• Michael Iuzzolino, founding AI engineer, joined from Meta, where he worked on large language models, and previously held roles at Google Brain and Microsoft Research.
• Mikhail Shashkov, founding architect, was at Amazon Lab126 for more than seven years and previously at Sandia.

— Liz Pearce has been named Earth Finance‘s first chief commercial officer. She joined from Ever.green, where she was chief revenue officer. Past roles include CEO of LiquidPlanner, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, and vice president of marketing for GoDaddy.

Earth Finance, a Seattle-based startup helping businesses reduce their climate impacts, recently launched a platform called SpatiaFi that enables customers to make location-based capital decisions.

“Earth Finance is already delivering game-changing results for customers,” Pearce said. “I can’t wait to get to work with this team to scale that impact.”

— Charlie Bell, the longtime Amazon Web Services executive who left to run security, compliance and identity at Microsoft, has been appointed to the board of directors at the cybersecurity firm Tenable. The appointment was disclosed in an SEC filing and framed as “reinforcement for Tenable’s AI-driven exposure management push.”

— Two notable Amazon moves:

• Fırat Güder, a professor and chief engineer of Güder Research Group at Imperial College London, has joined Amazon as a scholar in the tech giant’s special projects organization. “Here, we are building the next generation of cutting-edge technologies that define the future of humanity. It is an incredible honor to join a small, elite group of innovators and researchers pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Güder said.
• Leonardo de Moura has been promoted to vice president and distinguished scientist with AWS in Seattle. He joined the company in 2023.

— Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has named Amelia Marckworth director of programs, innovation and entrepreneurship. She joins from Seattle University, where she has held leadership roles for more than a decade and also served as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Albers School of Business and Economics.

“Amelia has a proven track record of launching and growing startup programs, coaching founders directly, and being part of WTIA as a committee member and mentor. We’re excited to bring that experience and talent onto our startups team,” Randa Minkarah, WTIA’s executive director and CEO, said in a statement.

— Hernan Alvarez has taken a role at Seattle-based Hyperparam to lead product and go-to-market at the startup, which is building tools for collecting, storing and analyzing the data that AI systems produce. The company recently launched a product called HypAware to improve oversight of AI agents and catch their errors.

Alvarez joins from Great Expectations, where he was CEO. He earlier worked with Hyperparam founder Kenny Daniel at Algorithmia, a machine learning company co-founded by Daniel and acquired by DataRobot.

— Philip Jensen has joined Zap Energy as vice president of fuel programs and operations. Zap, an Everett, Wash.-based fusion startup, announced in April that it was expanding its focus to include nuclear fission. Jensen was previously at First American Nuclear and spent more than seven years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Zap said Jensen “brings deep expertise in nuclear fuel design, testing, and manufacturing, and a track record of launching new fuel programs and partnerships.”

— Christie Johansen-Pinney has joined Noble Studios as its Seattle-based vice president of client experience. She has held VP roles at firms including Rooster Punk, DEPT and The Marketing Practice.

— Anders Mortensen, formerly CRO at The Trade Desk, has been appointed to the advisory board of Scowtt, a Seattle startup helping advertisers optimize their ad spending. Mortensen spent more than 13 years at Google, leaving as vice president of U.S. mid-market sales lead generation.