Loomerang made its first sale less than 12 hours after it went live in June. A customer in Houston bought a shirt designed by Joe, an independent artist in Japan.

Four months later, the Seattle-based marketplace for artist-designed T-shirts has 40 artists from 15 countries and recently expanded to India.

Loomerang works by handling everything but the art. Artists open storefronts for free, set their own prices, and get 60% of what’s left after manufacturing costs. The company prints, inspects and ships every order, for now out of co-founder Matt Koyama’s garage.

Koyama described Loomerang as an attempt to run a more responsible business in a capitalist system, one built around people who spend their lives working on a craft.

“How can we reward them for that rather than making them feel like they’re being pushed to the margins constantly?” he said.

Loomerang was started in early 2024 by CEO Vijay Roy, a nearly 11-year Amazon veteran. He and Koyama had worked together on Amazon’s print-on-demand book business. Koyama joined as a co-founder a few months later and went full time this spring after leaving Xbox. A third co-founder, Arka Majumdar, leads design.

The company is bootstrapped. Its 14-person team is spread across Seattle, Minnesota and Kolkata, India, and the founders aren’t taking salaries.

Koyama, who also spent time in gaming, sees the same pattern across creative industries.

“The best stuff comes out of the indie space because these are the people that are willing to take risks, to invent, to revolutionize,” he said.

We caught up with Loomerang for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Loomerang connects people with the artists and stories behind their clothes: a tattoo artist in Seattle, a painter in Pune, India, an illustrator in Ibaraki, Japan. Artists launch apparel brands for free and keep most of the profit. We print, inspect and ship every shirt.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Starting an apparel brand is expensive. You need inventory, a manufacturer, a storefront and a way to reach customers. Most talented artists can’t take that risk. The ones who license their work to big brands usually get a small cut. We want to flip that by removing the upfront cost, handling production with real care, and making sure the artist keeps most of the profit.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

Almost nobody knew who designed their clothes. The exceptions were luxury pieces from designers who were already famous, or a shirt someone bought directly from an artist at a market or art fair. Those people could tell us the artist’s name and why the piece mattered to them. We’re trying to give every Loomerang purchase that same feeling.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

We’re very intentional when using AI, because it’s a threatening presence for many of the artists we work with. We don’t use it to make art. We use it behind the scenes in our code and operations, and in tools that help artists with practical work like upscaling files. Keeping our overhead low means more of each sale goes to the artist.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

People think it’s too good to be true. Artists pay nothing to join and keep 60% of the net profit on every sale. The first question is usually, what’s the catch? There isn’t one. The fashion industry has trained artists to expect a small cut of what their work earns. We think that’s backwards.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Holding off on new products. We planned to add hoodies and crewnecks before the holidays, but we decided to prioritize our artist roster and our quality promise. We’d rather ship fewer things we can stand behind than have a wide product range we aren’t fully ramped up on.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Build something that creates value for people instead of taking it from them. It’s slower and harder, but those are the kinds of companies we need in today’s world. Technology keeps making it easier to cut people out. The best businesses will find ways to bring more of them in and lift them up.

We’ll know our company has made it when… 

An independent artist’s first thought for launching a brand is Loomerang, not a big platform that pays them a fraction of what their work is worth. When artists in Seattle, Pune and everywhere else make a real living through us. And when “who made this?” becomes a normal thing to ask about your clothes.

Businesses spend heavily to attract visitors to their websites, but traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. Bellevue, Wash.-based Zeacon is building AI tools to help companies connect their marketing content with customer behavior and understand what actually drives conversions.

Co-founded by Kris Naidu and Jay Gounder, Zeacon uses AI to generate videos, personalize website content and track how visitors interact with it. The platform is also designed to identify bot traffic and analyze how both people and AI agents navigate websites — an increasingly important capability as AI changes how people discover and interact with businesses online.

Zeacon’s goal is to help companies move beyond traffic and content creation to understand what turns visitors into customers. As Naidu and Gounder see it, the real measure of success isn’t how many visitors a website attracts, but how many convert.

We caught up with Kris Naidu for our latest Startup Spotlight.

In 50 words or less, give us your elevator pitch:

We help businesses deploy AI agents that optimize their entire digital funnel, with an initial focus on video. Our AI agents can autonomously generate video content without prompting, publish it across social media and websites, personalize the experience for each website visitor and identify bots, while continuously analyze and optimize performance.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

We are obsessed with helping businesses turn the attention they already paid for into sales. Brands invest in advertising and great video content, but the website where customers actually buy often doesn’t connect with those investments. Zeacon brings that content onto the website, personalizes it to the visitor, and connects engagement to buying behavior. We can also create new videos from product photos and website data based on what converts. The question driving us is simple: How can we help this business sell more while taking work off its team?

What surprised you after talking to customers?

How much opportunity exists in what they already have. Businesses have videos, product photos, website traffic, and customer data. What’s missing is the connection between them. A marketing team wants to know: Which content helps people buy? Where are we losing customers? What should we create next? That reinforced our belief that the real value is turning information into a decision they can act on which we can provide with our platform.  

How has artificial intelligence changed the way you build your company?

AI changed what we could take off the customer’s plate. Zeacon can understand website and product information, generate video from pictures without prompting, choose relevant content for a visitor, and help teams ask questions about performance in plain English. We’re building those capabilities together: create, personalize, measure, and learn. Each result can inform the next decision. That’s a much bigger opportunity than making content faster which we can also do but it means helping a business continuously improve how it sells.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That revenue alone does not tell you how valuable an AI company is. Revenue matters it proves customers will pay. But data deserves equal attention because it determines what the system can learn and how useful it becomes. At Zeacon, we care about the connection between visitor behavior, content, and conversion. The advantage comes from the quality of that data and our ability to turn it into better customer outcomes. Investors should ask what a company is learning with every deployment, alongside what it earns that will help them understand the true growth value.  Upfront value without long term vision effects companies and we were always focused on the end goal which was delivering a product that adds value not only in the near term but cannot be easily replaced.  

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Deciding what to say no to. When your technology opens up several opportunities, it’s tempting to pursue all of them. But customers need you to solve their problem well. Our focus is helping businesses use video and data to improve their website experience and grow sales. We have to judge opportunities against that purpose, even when they’re exciting. The data helped us understand the entire flow of users for our customers that when we had our moment.  We realized it just was not about providing outcomes for sales but helping the customers fix issues within their website journey and using the content to help fill gaps for the desired outcomes.  

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Focus. Get close to your customers, understand the problem they will pay you to solve, and keep delivering against it. Do not confuse more features with more value. Make something customers use, trust, and want to keep. It is hard but being focused is the key to winning.  

We’ll know our company has made it when…

Zeacon is recognized for creating a new business science on relating content and user behavior to actual business outcomes.  

Eluum is taking aim at a problem created by the explosion of digital life: We chronicle our lives everywhere, but a single home for our most meaningful memories is hard to come by.

The Seattle startup’s new app brings together photos, videos, social posts, locations and other personal moments from across the digital landscape, using AI to help organize them into an evolving record of a person’s life, a feature it calls MyLifeStory.

The bootstrapped company, founded by former Microsoft and Avalara manager Bilkay Rose, former Microsoft software engineer Dale Rector and former investor relations exec Jennifer Gianola, sees an opportunity to create what it calls a user-controlled “memory layer” for social media.

The idea grew out of Rose’s own struggle to piece together years of family memories across a variety of platforms and devices. The app is available for iOS, Android and the web.

We caught up with Rose, who is part of the CoMotion entrepreneurial community at the University of Washington, for the latest installment of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

In 50 words or less, give us your elevator pitch:

Eluum is building the future of social around people’s stories. MyLifeStory brings scattered photos, videos, social posts, places, and personal context into one evolving life story, helped by Lumi, our artificial intelligence memory companion, and controlled by the person whose life it represents.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Each of us creates thousands of digital artifacts, but they are scattered across camera rolls, social platforms, devices, and feeds. Nothing brings them together as the evolving story of a person’s life. Every person I know deals with this issue, but it seems too big to solve for most. We believe technology has finally reached the point where MyLifeStory can become real: a living story built across time, not another temporary feed built around advertising and engagement.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

People do not need another place to post. They want help making sense of what they have already created, and continue to create on a daily basis. What surprised us was how consistently people described feeling overwhelmed by their digital lives. They have the photos and posts, but the meaning — the people they actually create memories with, places they visit, experiences, and stories connecting everything — is being lost every single day.

How has artificial intelligence changed the way you build your company?

Artificial intelligence gives a small, determined team extraordinary leverage. It allows Dale, our CTO, and our broader team to build, design, test, and learn faster without requiring a massive organization or budget. More importantly, it makes our product possible.

Lumi helps users organize disconnected moments, add context, and gradually shape them into meaningful life stories. Artificial intelligence is the helper; the person remains the author. We have a bold vision for what technology can do for the average person, and we believe the first problem to solve is our memories. The most important thing in everyone’s lives is their journey through life. 

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

People sometimes assume Eluum is another social network or photo-storage application. It is neither. Eluum is building a human memory layer for social.

Our integrated social tools help people manage and share content, but MyLifeStory is the destination: a private, user-controlled story of their life that becomes more valuable over time. As a female founder, my mission is to build a company that can solve real problems. Our mission is to solve problems and make our users’ lives better. 

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Our founding team had to decide whether Eluum was primarily a life-memory platform or an integrated social platform. We see two enormous problems: social media needs a new, human-centered model decoupling our social lives from ad and algorithmic platforms, and people need a way to preserve their fragmented digital lives.

We ultimately realized these ideas are connected. Integrated social is how moments flow into Eluum; MyLifeStory is what gives those moments lasting meaning. Balancing that product vision with limited resources — while continually asking what users truly want, need, and would think is genuinely exciting — remains our hardest discipline.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Do not confuse limited resources with an inability to make progress. A determined small team, the right technology, and a meaningful problem can accomplish far more than most people expect. 

Listen closely to users, but maintain enough conviction to build what they cannot yet describe. Think big and don’t get easily discouraged early on. Prove your idea.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

I cannot imagine declaring that we have “made it.” That would be naive because trust must continually be earned. Success would mean Eluum becomes a trusted brand people rely on to build and preserve their life stories, knowing our products were designed to work for them, protect what matters, and become more meaningful with time.

When a new caregiver walks into an assisted living room for a shift, they usually hold a chart with a room number and a list of medical needs — and almost no background about the human being in the bed. They might be caring for a former machinist, a retired dancer, or a veteran, but in the rush of daily care, those life stories are often left behind.

Seattle-area software engineer Patrick Donahue wants to bridge that gap.

Donahue is the founder and sole builder of Porchlight, a newly launched life-story and reminiscence tool designed for assisted living and memory care communities. With the tap of a single button on a device, a resident hears a prompt, records their memories, and lets the platform automatically generate a concise “Know Your Resident” briefing for care staff, as well as a private audio feed for family members.

The goal is to give busy aides immediate context on a resident’s history, turning routine care into meaningful human connection.

The project stems from Donahue’s own history — both as a veteran backend developer who spent years scaling web platforms and as the son of medical professionals exposed to hospice care. Seeing how easily personal histories disappear without deliberate recording, he set out to build a tool that makes daily storytelling effortless for residents and care teams alike.

Donahue shared his inspiration, the realities of early-stage software development, and the power of asking the right questions is this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight.

In 50 words or less, what’s your elevator pitch?

Porchlight is a life-story tool for assisted living and memory care. A resident taps one button, hears a question, and talks about their life. Porchlight turns the answers into a briefing so every caregiver knows the person in the room, and a private page where family can listen and reply.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

The first shift. The aide walking into a room tonight often knows a room number and a care plan and nothing else. The resident might have been a machinist, a dancer, a veteran, and nobody has had time to find out.

It’s personal for me. Both of my parents worked in medicine, and hospice care was part of our family’s life. When my father died, I understood how much of a person’s story goes with them unless someone asks while there’s still time. I’ve also kept a journal my whole life, and I know what putting your life into words does for you. Porchlight is the tool I wish had existed.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

I don’t have paying customers yet, and I’ve had fewer conversations with activity directors than I’d like. The surprise in the ones I have had: the first question wasn’t about the technology. It was what does it cost, and who has time to set it up. That pushed me to make setup a printed QR card and nothing else, and to make it free while communities try it.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

It changed what’s possible. Transcription can now handle older voices, and language models can turn an hour of rambling memories into a one-page briefing or a family highlight. Our whole vision is to use that to strengthen human connection, never to replace it. There are three ways it does that:

• With family. The family relay lets a resident’s children and grandchildren hear their stories and reply in their own voices.
• With neighbors. A community can build events and a newsletter around the stories residents are telling.
• With the care team. Staff know the person, not just the chart.

What we’re after is a better quality of life, more dignity, and a way for residents to pass their wisdom on to the people they love. The resident talks and real people listen. Nothing in it pretends to be a person.

On the build side, I’ve spent ten years as a software engineer helping startups scale. AI coding tools are the reason a bootstrapped company can build and run something this careful at this pace.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

People hear “AI for seniors” and picture a companion chatbot, or a product only for people who are losing their memory. It’s neither. Reminiscence, meaning simply inviting someone to talk about their own life, is one of the oldest and most loved practices in eldercare, and it works for anyone with a life behind them. Porchlight makes it possible to do every day and keep what gets said. It isn’t a medical or therapy product, and I don’t claim it is.

What was the toughest decision you made in the past year?

Pulling claims off my own website. When I checked the marketing against the code, some of it described features that were planned, not built. Cutting that felt like making the product look smaller right when I needed it to look bigger. But I’m asking communities to trust me with their residents’ stories, so the copy has to match what the software actually does.

What’s one piece of advice for other entrepreneurs?

Make sure what you say matches what you’ve built. It’s tempting to describe the version in your head. Early on, trust is most of what you have to sell, and it’s easy to spend it without noticing.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

A new aide walks into a room on their first day, asks a resident about the dance where he met his wife, and watches him light up. And the community pays for Porchlight because that moment is worth it to them.

After working together for years — including at Seattle logistics startup Flexe — Adam Kapel and Ryan Morel reunited this spring to launch Kompeld, a Bainbridge Island startup focused on helping companies build better narratives.

Kompeld has developed a system for measuring how well companies explain what they do and why customers should care. The startup has tested it on more than 150 technology companies and found that about half have messaging that falls somewhere between average and weak.

The two-person, bootstrapped startup is using AI to turn the founders’ experience in business messaging into a system that helps companies focus their sales stories on what customers need, rather than on the products they sell.

We caught up with Morel for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about the startup.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

Kompeld narrative systems turn subjective storytelling into an objective revenue driver. We continuously diagnose, architect, improve and align commercial messages across every revenue funnel stage. We replace gut-feel branding with the structural logic that creates demand, increases win rates and accelerates growth.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

The hidden revenue barriers caused by self-centered, product-first corporate messaging. Most B2B organizations plateau at one point or another because they focus entirely on themselves rather than the buyer’s operational reality. 

What surprised you after talking to customers?

How many B2B leaders passionately want to be customer-centric yet lack any concrete framework to actually be customer-centric? Everyone treats it as a core goal, but struggles to turn that into action across the organization. They simply do not know how to hardcode buyer perspectives, behaviors and outcomes into their daily revenue process. That leaves customer-centricity as an abstract aspiration rather than an institutionalized system. And without that, go-to-market teams default to product-first habits, dilute messaging impact and hinder pipeline growth.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Three direct ways. First, AI allows us to turn our narrative expertise and best practices into the repeatable, defendable diagnostic structures and processes that customer-centric narrative systems require. Second, AI tools automate routine steps so we can deliver much faster. Third, AI shapes our delivery model. Instead of traditional software, we can deliver purpose-built narrative protocols based on customer’s specific needs.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

Executives misunderstand the difference between a creative brand story and a revenue narrative. And as a result, they misunderstand the focus, approach and value of narrative. Brand stories serve a subjective purpose aimed at emotion, whereas narratives are structured, repeatable systems built strictly to drive revenue and growth. 

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year? 

Telling Adam (Kapel) he had to come out of semi-retirement to build Kompeld.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Recognize that it’s not about you. Founding a company requires deep personal passion for your idea, but winning requires turning that perspective entirely toward the buyer. Step away from the internal origin story and feature pitches and focus on the customer’s operational reality, their daily disruptions, their urgent challenges and their decision-making criteria. 

We’ll know our company has made it when:

Adam retires.

Saad Nadeem doesn’t have any professional background in home improvement. But like any self-respecting weekend warrior, his experiences as a homeowner have taught him some valuable lessons.

The biggest lesson, perhaps, was to create his own startup to solve his problems.

Nadeem is co-founder and CEO of Local Crew, a newly launched Seattle startup designed to make it easier to find laborers, assess bids, and hire a professional to perform everything from yard work to house repairs.

“Even for straightforward projects, I had to contact several pros, explain the same job repeatedly, arrange on-site visits, and sometimes wait days just to compare estimates,” Nadeem said.

Professionals are equally frustrated, he learned, because traveling to provide free estimates is time consuming, particularly for smaller jobs they may not win.

A Pakistani immigrant and tech veteran, Nadeem has spent nearly a decade working in marketplace operations at companies including Uber, Roblox, and TikTok, focusing on customer experience, support operations, and simplifying complex processes for users.

Local Crew relies on AI to analyze a video submitted by a customer in which a potential job is spotlighted. AI turns the video into a structured job post with a project description, relevant details, and a recommended price. The customer can adjust the price before posting, and local pros can accept it or submit a counteroffer. The main differentiator is Local Crew alleviates the need for multiple calls or in-home estimate visits.

Companies such as Thumbtack, Angi, and Taskrabbit are among the closest small-job and home-improvement comparisons.

Local Crew — now live on iOs and Android — is starting in the Seattle area, with plans to expand into major Midwest cities next and eventually grow nationwide.

“The goal is to prove the model in Seattle, learn from customers and pros, and then expand thoughtfully into additional markets,” Nadeem said.

We caught up with Nadeem for this edition of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about his startup.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch.

Local Crew is a platform that makes it simple for customers to find and hire local professionals for any task. Whether it’s homeowners who need a pro to come fix their leaking faucet, or a student looking for some extra hands to help them move. Local Crew cuts the back and forth and exhausting visits for estimates. Simply record a video of what you need done, and Local Crew analyzes your task, creates a detailed brief, and suggests a price you can set. Local professionals bid on your task and you pick the one that suits you.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Hiring someone for tasks is still surprisingly inefficient. Homeowners spend days coordinating visits just to compare quotes, while pros lose hours driving to estimates that never turn into jobs. We’re building a faster, simpler way for both sides to connect.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

We expected homeowners to be our biggest challenge. Instead, we learned that local pros were just as frustrated. Driving across town to provide free estimates for small jobs often wasn’t a good use of their time, especially when many estimates never turned into work. That’s when we realized we were solving a problem for both sides of the marketplace.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

AI has accelerated everything — from product design and engineering to marketing, customer support, and content creation. It has allowed a small founding team to move with the speed and output of a much larger company.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup? People often assume we’re another lead-generation platform. We’re not. Customers record their project, set the price, and pros bid or counteroffer. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth and quote visits before work begins.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Delaying our public launch. We could have launched earlier, but we chose to spend more time improving the experience based on real feedback from early users. It was the harder decision, but the right one.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Talk to customers far more often than you think you should. The best product decisions usually come from listening, not guessing.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

Hiring someone for a home project feels as easy and expected as ordering food or requesting a ride, and homeowners naturally think of Local Crew first.