Historian Margaret O’Mara, journalist Jonathan Weber, and GeekWire’s John Cook at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, recording a joint episode of the GeekWire and Blue City Blues podcasts with David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Tech remade Seattle and San...
Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain speaks at the IA40 Summit in Seattle on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Executives from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic and Stripe agreed on a lot this week about where AI is headed. But one big question was left unresolved: who...
The co-founders of Ultravox, which launched in 2022 as Fixie, from left: Hessam Bagherinezhad, Matt Welsh, Justin Uberti and Zach Koch. (Fixie Photo) Seattle voice AI startup Ultravox, which launched as Fixie, has been acquired by Inworld for an undisclosed sum. Ultravox was founded in 2022...
Dale Goulding, chief operating officer at Forge Digital, chats with Michael Reilly, chief strategy officer at Varda Space Industries, at the Space Northwest Symposium in Federal Way, Wash. One of Varda’s orbital capsules is on display in front of them. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) How high can...
A 3D rendering of the buildable envelope for a property in Seattle is part of the information displayed by Pascal Matta’s permitting information tool. (Screengrab via kolmo.io/permits) Pascal Matta has a background building software for tech giants like Google and T-Mobile. But when he wanted to...
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, shown at AWS re:Invent in 2025, says local opposition to data centers threatens the U.S. position in the AI race. (Amazon Photo / Noah Berger) Amazon says it will spend more than $1 billion over five years in the U.S. communities where it builds and operates...
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from its California launch pad, sending 130 payloads into orbit. (Credit: SpaceX via X) Starfish Space’s first full-scale Otter satellite servicing vehicle went into orbit today, marking a major milestone for the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup. The Otter...
Porchlight founder Patrick Donahue’s parents worked in medicine, and hospice care was part of his family’s life. (Photo courtesy of Donahue) 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...
Asic Demberel. (LinkedIn Photo) Leadership changes at Bellevue, Wash.-based companies are dominating the news in this week’s Tech Moves, plus some notable items in neighboring Redmond. — Former Amazon leader Asic Demberel is now chief technology officer for Scala, a Bellevue-based startup...
Peter Lee, left, and Ryan Roslansky both shared news this week that they’re leaving Microsoft. (LinkedIn Photos) Two top Microsoft executives announced this week that they’re leaving the Redmond, Wash., tech giant: — Peter Lee, the former head of Microsoft Research and most recently president...
Ture Armas, left, JPMorganChase’s CTO and head of Commercial Bank Lending Technology and the new leader of its Seattle Tech Center, and Kristine Baker, a JPMorganChase vice president who manages the Seattle Tech Center. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Ture Armas has been encouraging JPMorganChase...
Amazon’s $34.99 Kindle Click remote, shown with the new base Kindle in a purple shade Amazon calls “ube.” (Amazon Photo) Amazon’s Kindle is joining the ranks of TVs and garage doors. The company on Thursday unveiled the Kindle Click, a $34.99 Bluetooth remote control that lets readers prop up...
An artist’s conception shows Firefly’s Elytra spacecraft in lunar orbit, with Starcloud’s SC-1L data-processing payload highlighted in purple. (Firefly Aerospace Illustration) Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud has signed up to send its artificial intelligence data-processing hardware into lunar...
The UW’s Global Innovation Exchange program has moved into a new full-time space on the Microsoft campus. (UW Photo) The University of Washington and Microsoft today celebrated the opening of the permanent home of the UW’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX), an institute supporting tech leaders,...
Seattle Times Union members picket outside the newspaper’s offices on Wednesday. “Honk if you hate AI.” (GeekWire Photo / Grace Kaste) Members of the Seattle Times Union held a lunchtime picket outside the newspaper’s offices Wednesday, calling on the company to guarantee that AI won’t replace...
Artist rendering of the UW’s new Chemical Sciences Building. The design-build team is Skanska and Payette+EHDD. (UW Image) The University of Washington today marked the groundbreaking of its Chemical Sciences Building, a $231.1 million facility that will provide new laboratories for instruction...
A display at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual event. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Seattle’s economic engine is stalling, and downtown is taking the brunt of the hit. Between 2024 and 2025, Seattle shed 18,065 total jobs, with a staggering 70% of those losses—13,000 jobs—coming...
Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, left, speaks with Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain at Madrona’s IA40 Summit in Seattle on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Charles Lamanna, the Microsoft executive who oversees Microsoft 365...
Companies building software for the AI boom and advanced machinery for space, energy and defense are remaking the Pacific Northwest’s tech economy, and both trends are showing up in full force on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups. The Fall 2026...
Stanton Jandrell, CEO and co-founder of Fraxion. (Fraxion Photo) Seattle-based spending management company Fraxion has acquired Yellow Dog Software, which offers inventory management software for the hospitality, sports, food and beverage, and retail industries. Fraxion serves as a digital...
Shield AI’s new X-BAT autonomous fighter jet is designed to take off and land vertically. Rendering via Shield AI. Traditional military air operations rely heavily on fixed, vulnerable targets: long concrete runways and aircraft carriers. Shield AI’s new X-BAT autonomous fighter jet is...
The X-BAT autonomous fighter jet will be built at a new facility in Washington state. Renderings and images via Shield AI. DES MOINES, Wash. — Defense tech powerhouse Shield AI is establishing a massive advanced manufacturing hub in Washington state, tapping the Seattle region’s deep aerospace...
Karan Grover is CEO of the new Seattle startup Kanu AI. (Photo via PR Newswire) Seattle-based Kanu AI announced $11.7 million in new funding on Wednesday to expand a platform that automatically turns everyday employee tasks into custom, enterprise-grade software. Trilogy Equity Partners led...
Ascerta co-founders, from left: CTO Doron Holan, CEO David Tepper, and COO Erik Winters. (Ascerta Photos) Bellevue, Wash.-based startup Pay-i is rebranding as Ascerta and raising $18 million in new funding to expand its platform beyond AI cost tracking into measuring overall business ROI. The...
Analysts have traced the economic impact produced by scores of space ventures in Washington state. (Space Northwest Illustration) The preliminary results of a study commissioned by Space Northwest, an association focused on regional space ventures, suggest that Washington state’s space economy...
Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa speaks Monday at a Creative Destruction Lab-Seattle event at Alexandria’s Eastlake Avenue building in Seattle, calling on Washington state to do more to support the next generation of founders. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Making the entrepreneurial leap is hard...
(Amazon logo via mturk.com; Claude Opus 5.5 Illustration) An early pillar of the gig economy and the hidden labor behind modern tech is officially coming to an end as Amazon is permanently shuttering Mechanical Turk on Wednesday after 21 years in operation. Launched in 2005 as a platform...
Meadow AI’s co-founders, from left: Dragos Velicanu, Max Jai Sim and Abbas Guvenilir. (Meadow AI Photo) Seattle startup Meadow AI has raised $7 million in new funding to scale its AI-powered operational software for physical retailers and restaurants. The seed round was led by Ulu Ventures,...
From left: Franco Rodríguez Viau, CEO and co-founder of Satellites on Fire; Lisa Stiffler, Geekwire reporter and Positive Charge host; Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer for Amazon; and Jason Knauf LVO, CEO of The Earthshot Prize, at a Climate Week NYC session held at The Climate Pledge Hub...
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson kicks off the Washington Space Council, surrounded by the council’s members and 10-year-old Sebastian Yu. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has created a public-private council to elevate the Evergreen State’s profile as regional clusters...
701 N. 34th St. in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, where Outreach plans to move its HQ early next year. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Outreach confirmed plans to move its headquarters from Interbay to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood early next year, joining a campus that Adobe has anchored since...
The Seattle skyline and waterfront along Elliott Bay. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle, take a bow. You’re officially trailing only New York, London, and Paris on the world stage. The Emerald City landed at No. 4 overall in the newly released Oxford Economics Global Cities Index...
Nimbus Aerospace’s NX1, a one-quarter size prototype in a test flight this summer near the Pendleton Airport UAS Range in Oregon. (Nimbus Photo) The team at Seattle-based Nimbus Aerospace had planned to finish testing its quarter-scale prototype earlier in the summer, but struggled to schedule...
Seattle Aquarium President and CEO Meg McCann. (Seattle Aquarium Photo) At first glance, Meg McCann would not be the obvious choice to run the Seattle Aquarium, one of the city’s top attractions, drawing 1 million annual visitors to the waterfront and supporting critical research in marine...
What an off-limits list might look like, before the agents start working. (GeekWire Illustration / GPT-5.6 Sol) It’s difficult, to put it mildly, to figure out just what we ought to be concerned about today in AI’s widespread adoption given the expanding list of recent warnings around its...