Hannah Freeman, co-founder of Ganaz. (LinkedIn Photo)
Seattle startup Ganaz, which provides payroll and HR tech for agricultural workers and employers, has been acquired by Beacon Holdings.
Ganaz co-founder and CEO Hannah Freeman announced the deal Wednesday on LinkedIn, saying the public benefit corporation “is in great hands” at Beacon, which “is building momentum for our next exciting season.”
Freeman indicated she is stepping away from the company to “catch my breath, spend more time with my daughter, and dream about what’s next,” she wrote. “I’ll miss our team & customers, but will be cheering you on from the sidelines.”
Ganaz launched in 2017 and has raised more than $10 million, with its last disclosed funding round in June 2021. That financing valued the company at $26 million, according to PitchBook. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Beacon, based in Toronto, buys software businesses serving traditional industries and provides shared technology and operational resources. The company said in September that its portfolio included 45 software businesses.
Ganaz’s platform provides employee onboarding, training, communication and analytics tools. It also offers a Mastercard payroll card that gives unbanked workers access to digital banking. Employers save time and money by skipping paper checks, while workers keep more of their pay by avoiding check-cashing and high remittance fees.
Ganaz received GeekWire’s 2023 Geeks Give Back Award. “We founded Ganaz to make life better for farm workers, and we do that by building technology that agricultural employers love and can’t live without,” Freeman told GeekWire in 2023. “We build our tools to help both workers and employers prosper, and that kicks off a virtuous cycle that helps agricultural communities prosper as well.”
At that time, the startup was serving more than 250,000 agricultural workers in the U.S. and Mexico and 100 employers in the sector.
The company has about 17 employees, according to LinkedIn. Freeman did not say in her post whether Ganaz will continue as a subsidiary or whether its employees will receive job offers from Beacon. GeekWire has reached out to Freeman for comment and will update the story with any reply.
The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the […]
Seattle-based PicoBrew set out to revolutionize home beer brewing with a line of machines it initially sold on Kickstarter. (PicoBrew File Photo)
The patents behind PicoBrew, the Seattle startup that once promised to do for home beer what Keurig did for coffee, are up for sale again — six years after the company collapsed into receivership and after two changes of ownership.
Hilco Global, an Illinois-based diversified financial services company, announced this week that its Intellectual Property Services group has been retained by PicoBrew’s current owner to market the startup’s technology to potential buyers.
The sale includes 17 patents and patent applications, two of them pending, along with engineering and design files and product concepts. Buyers can bid on all or part of the portfolio, and non-binding indications of interest are due Nov. 18. Hilco is pitching the assets to companies in coffee, tea, kombucha, spirits, beverage appliances and housewares.
The seller is Pico Craft Group, which Hilco described as led by a former PicoBrew investor. After PicoBrew’s 2020 collapse, its bridge lender took over the assets. That lender, PB Funding Group, was managed by former Microsoft software developer Greg Whitten, The Seattle Times reported at the time. Pico Craft Group bought the assets from the lender in 2024 for an undisclosed amount, according to Hilco, which did not say who runs the group.
“PicoBrew was a true innovator in the consumer and commercial craft beverage space, and its portfolio has applications well beyond beer,” Eric Hurwitz, a senior director at Hilco, said in a news release.
The portfolio covers technology from PicoBrew’s full product line, according to the release, including the Pico Pro and Pico C home brewing appliances, the PicoStill accessory for spirits, the Pico U Multibrew platform for beer, coffee, tea and kombucha, and Z-Series brewing machines and KegSmarts kegerators for commercial use.
Bill Mitchell, a former Microsoft vice president and longtime homebrewer, founded PicoBrew in 2010 with his brother Jim Mitchell, a food scientist, and Avi Geiger, an engineer who also worked at Microsoft. Their countertop machines automated the brewing process using PicoPaks, ingredient packs based on recipes from craft breweries.
The startup became a Kickstarter regular. Its 2017 campaign for the Pico Model C raised $1.93 million from 4,301 backers, a record at the time in the site’s food category, and the $549 machine landed at retailers including Best Buy, Williams-Sonoma and Amazon. A 2018 campaign for the Pico U pushed PicoBrew into coffee, tea and kombucha.
But the company struggled to land more funding. In February 2020, after failing to close a new round, PicoBrew entered receivership. It had raised more than $15 million and cut its staff to fewer than 40, down from a peak of more than 80.
PicoBrew ceased operations in 2020, and no one has supported existing devices since, according to Hilco. Any decision about future support would be up to a buyer. The King County Superior Court approved the 2020 sale, which freed PicoBrew’s bridge lender from the company’s liabilities and from responsibility to past customers, The Seattle Times previously reported.
Some owners kept their machines brewing without the company’s servers by using a workaround developed by a Facebook group of PicoBrew users, The Spoon reported in 2020. The founders were let go after the receivership, according to the site.
When PicoBrew went up for sale in 2020, Mitchell told GeekWire that hardware takes time and multiple funding rounds backed by firm investor commitment.
He shared advice he’d gotten from Dan Leviton of Maveron: “Startups only fail for one of two reasons — they run out of heart, or they run out of money.”
In just 7 days, TechCrunch Founder Summit takes over Boston’s SoWa Power Station on November 4. Your chance to save up to $100 on tickets is running out, and the opportunity to learn and connect directly with experienced founders, investors, and startup leaders is almost here.
— Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang has suddenly left Microsoft after 21 years with the company, just months after landing the role in July. Her past roles include leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise.
Verge first reported the news on Friday, citing a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that did not disclose the reason for her departure.
An Xbox spokesperson was likewise mum on details. “We don’t discuss individual personnel matters. We’re grateful for Helen’s years of service and wish her well,” the company said in an email to GeekWire.
Xbox has undergone a massive reorganization that included Chiang’s appointment, roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about 20% of the Xbox workforce — the spinoff of four game studios and a plan to dramatically flatten management.
Philip Su. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Seattle-based tech leader Philip Su has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff on beneficial deployments. The management role focuses on AI applications in global health, life sciences, economic mobility and education.
Su started his tech career with 12 years at Microsoft and later worked for Facebook. He has launched multiple ventures, including Audere, a global health software nonprofit, and Superphonic, a podcast player. In 2021, he worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to experience the holiday rush.
Su also created and leads an annual course for University of Washington computer science students on how to maximize their personal and professional growth.
SeekOut President John Tippett, left, and CEO Aravind Bala. (SeekOut Photos)
— More leadership changes are underway at SeekOut, a Bellevue-based recruiting startup launched in 2017. The company announced Monday that co-founder John Tippett is now president, moving from his role as chief client officer.
In April, SeekOut CEO and co-founder Anoop Gupta retired and passed the reins to enterprise software veteran Sean Thompson. In August, co-founder and chief technology officer Aravind Balatook over as CEO. Thompson is now listed as an adviser to the board.
Tippett will lead day-to-day operations and work with Bala “on the company’s direction,” according to a press release. SeekOut said it wants to integrate AI tools into customers’ operations to reduce recruiters’ workload.
SeekOut is No. 68 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
Merritt joins from Penn Medicine, where he was chief operating officer of Penn Signature Services. He has more than 25 years of experience in academic medicine, consulting, strategy, business development and operations.
— Industrial wastewater treatment startup Membrion has named Alexander Demihovsky as director of applications engineering. He joins the Seattle-based company from Xylem. His past employers include Evoqua Water Technologies and Bechtel National.
“Alex helps turn customer needs into viable project plans, mitigate execution risks and develop competitive proposals,” the company said.
— Marine geothermal energy startup Endurance Energy has named Marty Calvert as the director of turbomachinery. Calvert joins the Seattle startup from Blue Origin. He was previously a turbomachinery engineer at NASA for more than 13 years.
Endurance completed its fifth deployment to the ocean floor last month, testing Adélie, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.
— Lattice Semiconductor, a Hillsboro, Ore.-based company, has added two directors to its board:
Raejeanne Skillern, former VP and chief marketing officer of Amazon Web Services, who returns to Lattice after serving on the board from 2022 to 2024
John McCool, senior vice president and special adviser to the CEO at Arista Networks
Kivo Health co-founders from left: CEO Victor Sadauskas and Chief Technology Officer Vaughn Koch. (Kivo Photos)
Seattle-based Kivo Health today announced $10 million in funding to help increase access to its services, which target older adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The Series A round brings the startup’s total funding to more than $16 million.
Kivo ships equipment to patients’ homes and provides a nine-week program of therapist-led, live video sessions focused on exercise, breathing techniques and disease management. The company provides ongoing support following the program and says it uses AI to handle administrative tasks and communicate with patients, supporting its clinicians.
“We’re using the funding to build our AI health coach to blend AI-led care with human-led care,” Dr. Victor Sadauskas, Kivo’s co-founder and CEO, said via email. That pairing, he added, will help patients manage their chronic disease over the long term.
The company has approximately 50 employees, including clinicians.
COPD is an incurable lung disease in which damaged airways and air sacs make breathing difficult and can worsen over time. Common symptoms include shortness of breath, a persistent cough and fatigue. COPD is the third leading cause of death globally and the fifth in the U.S.
However, there are effective treatments to improve the condition, though many patients are not able to easily access care. A study of Medicare beneficiaries with COPD found that only 3.7% received pulmonary rehabilitation in 2012.
Kivo reports that a peer-reviewed study of its program found improvements in participants’ symptoms, physical function and mental health. The company also funded an analysis that estimated its model could reduce annual health care spending by $8,245 per member through fewer hospitalizations, ER visits and time in nursing homes.
Kivo says its program is covered by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers including UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross, Aetna and Priority Health.
“By thoughtfully combining high quality clinical care with AI, we can now scale proactive, accessible care to every senior, improving symptoms and reducing avoidable costs,” Sadauskas said in a statement.
Sadauskas launched Kivo in 2023 with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Vaughn Koch. Sadauskas previously was an emergency medicine physician for Kaiser Permanente and a senior investment fellow with Life Science Angels. Koch is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Movity to Trulia in 2010.
While its current focus is COPD, Kivo aims to expand into other costly chronic conditions affecting older adults.
Allumia Ventures led the round, with participation from Corewell Health Ventures, Y Combinator, Heuristic Capital and MassMutual Ventures.
Avante CEO Rohan D’Souza in a video announcing his startup’s new funding. (Avante via LinkedIn)
Avante, the maker of an AI platform to help companies manage employee health care and other benefits, has landed a $30 million Series A round.
Frist Cressey Ventures led the round, with participation from Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures, Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and existing investor Fuse. The new funding, announced Tuesday, brings Seattle-based Avante’s total raised to $40 million, following a $10 million seed round led by Fuse in 2024.
Benefits are one of employers’ biggest costs. Avante’s AI agents do work like comparing vendor contracts against actual claims, reviewing plan documents for errors and preparing for renewals. Employees can also use the platform to ask questions about their own coverage.
The startup plans to use the cash to expand internationally and develop more AI agents, building on a beta release of its “Ava Agents” last week.
Avante says it now has more than 70 customers, including Samsung Semiconductor, Real Chemistry, Zscaler and News Corp, and that bookings grew nearly fivefold over the past year. The platform reaches more than 385,000 employees and family members, according to the company.
Avante was founded in 2023 by CEO Rohan D’Souza; Carly Eckert, a physician and epidemiologist who serves as head of innovation and impact; and executive chairman Kabir Shahani, the co-CEO of Amperity.
D’Souza and Eckert previously worked as executives at health care automation company Olive AI, which shut down in 2023. The startup emerged from stealth in early 2024 and launched publicly in April 2025.
“Benefits teams are responsible for one of the largest and most consequential investments their companies make, yet they’re still operating with outdated information, archaic spreadsheets, and technology built for another era,” D’Souza said in a statement.
Avante is pitching its software as employers face rising health care costs. Large employers are projecting a median 9.2% increase for 2027, the company said.
The startup competes with benefits and HR software providers such as Workday, ADP, Deel and Rippling. It has also signed partnerships with benefits advisory firms including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden and USI Insurance Services.
Avante ranks No. 156 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.
Rohit Patel is departing Meta after eight years working on AI evaluations and reinforcement learning, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. His startup, Ndoc, aims to take on Microsoft Office Suite.
Part of the Emerald Nuclear team, from left: Erlend Haugsbø, head of engineering and testing; Hallgeir Juliebø, co-founder and chief commercial officer; and Wesley Deason, co-founder and CEO. (Emerald Nuclear Photo)
Emerald Nuclear today announced a $2.1 million award from The Research Council of Norway to support its efforts to bring nuclear energy to the shipping industry and offshore power. The Seattle-based startup is developing high-temperature gas reactors that use an encapsulated fuel designed to resist meltdowns.
“This award will enable Emerald Nuclear to work directly with our marine partners to validate integration of our technology with their state-of-the-art marine power distribution and control systems,” said Wesley Deason, co-founder and CEO.
The funding supports Norway’s Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project, which is being led by Emerald Nuclear’s Norwegian subsidiary.
Shipping accounts for roughly 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, making it a significant target for lower-carbon energy solutions. Some ferries serving shorter routes are adopting hybrid-electric propulsion. Shipping companies are exploring methanol, ammonia, biofuels and other alternatives to heavy fuel oil, but their climate benefits depend on how those fuels are produced and used.
Nuclear reactors have powered U.S. Navy submarines for more than 70 years. Now, a new wave of companies is working to expand nuclear power’s role in commercial shipping and other marine applications.
The award supports an early development step for Emerald Nuclear, with substantial work remaining before commercial deployment. The company has yet to build its first reactor, and its plans will require additional financing, regulatory approvals and a reliable fuel supply. The startup has previously received an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors.
Emerald Nuclear has five employees, most of them in Norway, and is targeting two applications: offshore ships that help construct facilities like oil platforms and wind turbines and lay deep-sea cables, and floating power plants for remote communities. Each reactor is designed to produce 5 megawatts (6,705 horsepower), according to the company.
Bringing nuclear to the marine environment poses several significant challenges. They include safety issues, regulations for vessels traveling internationally, management of nuclear fuel and waste, and the way shipping companies frequently buy and sell vessels.
Deason said the company’s approach helps address those concerns:
The reactor will use TRISO fuel, which consists of a uranium-containing kernel surrounded by protective carbon and silicon-carbide layers. The uranium is in short supply, but Deason is confident it will be available by the time the company is ready to deploy.
Nuclear regulations are still being developed for international vessels, though initial deployments will be within a single country’s jurisdiction.
Emerald Nuclear will have seaside manufacturing, providing easy access for ships and floating power plants that need installations, repairs and exchanges of fresh and spent fuel.
The company will lease, rather than sell, its systems, allowing customers to swap nuclear in or out depending on their needs.
Emerald Nuclear is designing its technology “to integrate with the unique power needs of the ship, but also to meet the ways that the maritime industry does business,” Deason said.
Other companies pursuing nuclear ship propulsion include Core Power, newcleo and Blykalla. Core Power, Westinghouse, Saltfoss Energy and Prodigy Clean Energy are also developing floating nuclear power stations. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom already has nuclear-powered icebreakers and a floating nuclear power plant in operation.
Prior to launching Emerald Nuclear, Deason, a nuclear engineer, worked for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. (USNC) developing reactors for space-based applications.
During his tenure at the Seattle company, a professor from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology approached USNC about applications for the maritime sector. USNC declared bankruptcy in October 2024 and the deal wasn’t pursued. But the idea interested Deason and Hallgeir Juliebø, a Norwegian entrepreneur who had been a consultant with USNC. The two co-founded Emerald Nuclear in 2024 and Juliebø serves as chief commercial officer.
Emerald Nuclear has signed a lease for an engineering center in Norway, where it’s designing and building its first prototype, a non-nuclear thermal device that will be used for the Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project.
Other partners for the project are VARD Group, Vard Electro, Island Offshore, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Imperial College London and Maskindynamikk, bringing together nuclear technology, ship design and integration, vessel operations and academic research.
The startup will build its first nuclear reactor, named the Gem Microreactor, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, with 2030 as its goal for completion. Emerald Nuclear will integrate equipment from Peregrine Turbine Technologies in Maine to convert the reactor’s heat into electricity.
The target for the first commercial deployment is 2031, on a Norwegian offshore vessel.
Deason is hoping to open a manufacturing site in the future in Western Washington on Puget Sound with an initial focus on floating nuclear power systems that replace diesel generators. That phase of growth is roughly targeted to the early 2030s.
"It's causing a lot of people to run who I don't want to be running," native Californian Palmer Luckey said. "But I'm planning on staying in California. I'm going to keep fighting it."
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey is vowing to bring computer manufacturing back to the U.S., and by that he doesn't just mean assembly, but every individual component, some of which are exclusively made in China today.
Stoke Space’s existing Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. (Stoke Space Photo)
Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space has secured a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital to build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral for a larger version of its fully reusable rocket.
The loan isn’t final until Stoke meets a list of financial, legal, technical and due-diligence requirements. The announcement Monday comes less than two months after Stoke raised roughly $1 billion in a Series E round, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion.
The new pad would serve Stoke’s Nova Block 2 rocket, which is designed to carry up to 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit. That’s five times the capacity of Nova Pathfinder, which Stoke plans to launch for the first time from its existing pad in early 2027. Block 2 is slated to debut in 2029.
The loan would be paired with private capital to pay for the pad, according to the Department of War. Jordan Sebold, senior managing director for investments at the Office of Strategic Capital, said in a statement that adding launch infrastructure would “enhance the overall capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base.”
The Office of Strategic Capital was set up in 2022 to draw private investment into technologies seen as critical to national security. The following year, Congress gave it the power to make loans and loan guarantees to companies in those fields. Space launch is one of the technology categories it targets.
“By expanding domestic launch facility capacity, this investment enables launch service providers to ensure our commercial and defense partners have reliable, high-cadence access to space,” David Lorch, the office’s director, said in the news release.
Stoke is already lined up for military launch work. In 2025, the Space Force added the company to a pool of providers that can compete for national security missions under Lane 1 of the program’s third phase. Lane 1 is the tier meant for newer launch companies and less demanding payloads. Stoke can’t bid on those missions until it completes a successful orbital flight.
The company has other federal ties as well. The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Stoke a $4.5 million contract in 2024 to study rapid delivery of cargo to orbit, and possibly back to Earth. In June, Stoke was one of 37 companies NASA chose for unfunded partnerships. Stoke’s project focuses on returning Nova’s upper stage safely through the atmosphere.
Nova is designed so both of its stages can return and fly again. The booster flies itself back for recovery. The upper stage uses a metal heat shield cooled by liquid hydrogen that circulates through channels inside it, to survive the heat of reentry. Only SpaceX, with its much larger Starship, is pursuing the same goal, and it hasn’t fully achieved it yet. Stoke has yet to launch a rocket to orbit.
Stoke was founded in 2019 by two Blue Origin veterans: Andy Lapsa, the CEO, and Tom Feldman, the chief technology officer. The company has about 400 employees. Most work at its 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters in Kent, and about 50 are at its test site in Moses Lake, which is expanding from 75 to 550 acres. About 50 more work at Cape Canaveral.
GeekWire reached out to Stoke Space for comment and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
Entire CEO Thomas Dohmke, speaking last month at Madrona’s IA40 Summit in Seattle, says AI agents have made code review a much bigger bottleneck for developers. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
A startup led by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke is introducing its own platform for storing, reviewing and shipping code written by AI agents, competing with the company he used to run.
The startup, Entire, on Monday unveiled what it calls a Git forge — a service for hosting code, reviewing changes and running builds, the core of what GitHub does — designed for teams whose AI agents write code faster than people can review it. The company is pitching it as an alternative to GitHub.
The news comes two days before GitHub’s annual Universe conference in San Francisco. Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 and has since folded it into its CoreAI division.
The biggest change is Trails, Entire’s replacement for the pull request, the standard way developers propose and review code changes. The pull request “has become an audit log that only the agent reads,” Dohmke wrote in a blog post Monday. Instead of reading through every changed line, developers see a dashboard of scores from AI agents evaluating the code on each update.
According to Entire, multiple AI agents check the quality of each change, so developers can merge code without reading every line. Teams can also require a person’s sign-off, or passing automated tests, before any code goes in, the company said.
The launch comes as GitHub strains under the load from AI agents. The platform has had several significant outages in recent months, including one in August that lasted nearly eight hours. GitHub is moving from its own data centers to Microsoft’s Azure cloud to add capacity. GitHub said developers and agents made 7.38 billion commits, or saved code changes, on the platform in September alone.
Dohmke, who is based in Bellevue, Wash., left GitHub last year after nearly four years as CEO. Entire says it now has 50 employees. The company is fully remote.
Entire isn’t alone in rethinking code hosting for AI agents. AI coding company Cursor launched its own code-hosting service, Origin, in August. And Anthropic recently described building its own source control system as the number of code changes it merged each day grew from about 2,500 in May to more than 30,000 in September.
With the latest updates, Entire now lets developers host private code repositories directly on its service in the U.S., Europe, India and Australia, and says its service can handle up to 89 times as many code pushes per second as GitHub, based on its own benchmarks. It’s partnering with Buildkite and Depot on build and test pipelines, giving developers a way to move off GitHub Actions. Public repositories and self-hosting are on the roadmap.
Entire is also adding what it calls Continuous Memory, which lets AI agents search past coding sessions for the context behind earlier changes. The company says one part of it, a map of the codebase, cut token use by up to 71% in its testing.
That goes beyond the startup’s July launch, which mirrored existing GitHub repositories on a faster network rather than replacing them. Developers can still mirror from GitHub, or now move their code to Entire instead.
Microsoft’s venture arm M12 was among the backers of Entire’s $60 million seed round in February. Felicis led the round, with participation from Seattle-based Madrona and Basis Set Ventures, along with individual investors such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.
“Code review was always a bottleneck,” Dohmke said at a Madrona event last month. “I’ve never worked in a software company where I didn’t wait for somebody else to review my pull request, and you have to ping people in Slack three times. And there was this one guy that had to review everything because he knew what to look for. And now that bottleneck is 10 times bigger.”
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