GeekWire File Photo An employee group filed a civil rights complaint against Amazon with the City of Seattle on Thursday on behalf of three engineers who allege that the company is wrongly investigating them for testifying before the Seattle City Council in favor of regulating data centers....
A Yoodli.ai cardboard sign is visible at right during Fox’s FIFA World Cup broadcast on Thursday from Seattle, featuring, from left, Rob Stone, Stu Holden, Clint Dempsey, and Alexi Lalas. (Screen grab via Fox Sports) When a startup town turns into a soccer town attracting worldwide attention,...
Apacendo Health co-founders Chong Sun, left, and Jonathan Lin. (Apacendo Health Photo) Each year, more than 130,000 people reach kidney failure. It’s the most advanced and expensive stage of a disease that affects 37 million Americans, 90% of whom don’t know they have it. The tools being used...
Brian Hall (LinkedIn Photo) — Former Microsoft, Amazon and Google exec Brian Hall is now chief marketing officer for Mistral — and he’s bullish on the move. “I think this could be the most interesting marketing job in the world,” Hall said on LinkedIn. Mistral is a Paris-based enterprise AI...
The managing directors of Seattle’s AI House, from left: Yifan Zhang, Jacob Colker, and Sri Chandrasekar. (AI House Photo) AI2 Incubator has spent the past 12 years building AI companies in Seattle. Now it’s taking the name of the community it built around that work, rebranding today as AI House...
Gradial co-founders, from left: Anish Chadalavada, Deip Kumar, Doug Tallmadge, and Anup Chamrajnagar. (Gradial Photo) Seattle startup Gradial continued its hot funding streak, raising another $65 million for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing. The Series C round was...
Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of Convoy, is launching a stealth AI startup after leaving Microsoft. (GeekWire File Photo) Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of the online freight marketplace Convoy, has left Microsoft to start a new company focused on one of the most expensive problems...
Devplan co-founders Chris Bee, CEO, left, and Anton Safonov, CTO. (Devplan Photo) Devplan, a Seattle startup trying to automate away the meetings and status reports that eat up a product team’s week, is coming out of stealth Thursday with $2.5 million in seed funding. The company, founded by...
Is video-game industry leader Gabe Newell getting ready to vacate the Seattle area for sunny South Florida like some of his billionaire contemporaries? Reports of a luxury property purchase raise the question. According to The Wall Street Journal, Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve Corp.,...
Vedana’s lealdership team, from left: Dr. Rob Lenz, board chair; Leon Garcia, co-founder and chief scientific officer; Anurag Agarwal, co-founder and CEO; and Dr. Ernesto Aycardi, chief medical officer. (Vedana Photo) Vedana Therapeutics, a Seattle-based startup aiming to prevent migraine...
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, shows the Amazon Quick knowledge graph at the AWS Summit in New York. (Screenshot via live stream) Amazon Web Services is announcing a new set of AI agents for businesses, developers, and individual users, capable of everything from fixing security...
The Solius Pro hangs on a wall, scans a user’s skin and directs appropriate UVB light therapy. (Solius Photo) A Seattle-area startup that once asked people to step inside a glowing kiosk for light therapy is now bringing that same technology into the home. Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based...
Magda Balazinska, director of the UW Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, at an event last year. (GeekWire Photo) As students, teachers and employers wrestle with the demands of an increasingly AI-powered world, the University of Washington has a new proposition: an interdisciplinary...
Robbie Cape, then CEO of virtual primary care startup 98point6, accepts the award for Health Innovation of the Year at the GeekWire Awards in 2019. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Robbie Cape has been hinting for months that something was coming. Now he’s ready to say what it is. The...
The flags of Belgium, left, and Egypt are represented in the night sky near the Space Needle in Seattle after the teams tied 1-1 in a FIFA World Cup match on Monday. (Roman Yuferev Photo) Egypt and Belgium played to a 1-1 draw in a FIFA World Cup matchup in Seattle on Monday. Fans who looked to...
TerraPower’s lab tests the equipment and processes for next-generation nuclear reactors. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) TerraPower, the Bellevue, Wash.-based nuclear energy company, announced Tuesday the opening of a subsidiary office in the United Kingdom as it pursues its first...
Elon Musk celebrates the SpaceX IPO last week. (Nasdaq Photo) Shares of SpaceX surged Tuesday morning, pushing the Elon Musk-led company above Amazon and into a neck-and-neck race with Microsoft for the title of the world’s fourth-most valuable public company, less than a week after its...
An aerial view of Orion, Helion Energy’s planned fusion plant being built in Malaga, Wash. (Helion Photo) Helion Energy announced Tuesday that it’s the first company in the world to receive regulatory licenses for a fusion power facility. The Everett, Wash.-based startup broke ground last year...
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, on stage at AWS re:Invent in December. (Amazon Photo / Noah Berger) [Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and agents. See coverage of our related...
Neuralwatt’s co-founders: CEO Chad Gibson, left, and Scott Chamberlin, chief technology officer. (LinkedIn Photos) Neuralwatt, a Seattle-based startup launched by two Microsoft veterans, has released what appears to be the first tool for calculating, in real time, the carbon emissions of...
From left: Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska, alumni award recipients David Dawson and Nodira Khoussainova, and Allen School Vice Director Dan Grossman. (UW Photo / Matt Hagen) Two University of Washington alumni who built companies out of everyday frustrations — hard-to-recycle...
Amazon’s headquarters and neighboring towers in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Updated with comments from Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson. A new Downtown Seattle Association report asserts that Seattle’s signature tax on big employers is backfiring, five years after it went...
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at an Amazon conference in 2025 in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was reportedly among the tech leaders who communicated with senior Trump administration officials about security risks in Anthropic’s most advanced AI models, before a...
A Seattle Fire Department truck during an emergency response. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The Seattle Fire Department has been quietly using artificial intelligence to help triage and divert 911 medical calls for more than two years — without telling the public — The Seattle Times...
Luke Larson, founder and CEO of Vale, with one of the company’s automated matcha dispenser units in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Luke Larson used to get a charge out of working on Tasers and body-worn cameras for law enforcement at Axon. Now he’s...
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 7, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
(Illustration generated by Google Gemini) Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have recently banned the use of large language models to generate or rewrite articles. Gartner reported that 53% of U.S. consumers distrust AI-powered search results, and 61% want to turn the summaries off. Add the “Made by...
Researchers say the mechanics of having sex in space would be easier to manage than the biology of pregnancy and fetal development in a reduced-gravity environment. (Credit: ID 309694213 © Anna Ivanova | Dreamstime.com) Sex in space is the perfect subject for levity and double entendres, and the...
Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and a UW alum, addresses Allen School graduates Friday at Alaska Airlines Arena. (UW Photo / Matt Hagen) Jeff Dean was a University of Washington graduate student in the 1990s, optimizing software compilers for object-oriented programming languages in a...
Scenes from GeekWire’s visit to Cleveland, where John Cook and Charles Fitzgerald spent several days reporting on the city’s comeback, including a stop at the abandoned Westinghouse light bulb factory where they recorded this week’s podcast. (Charles Fitzgerald and John Cook Photos) John Cook...
Microsoft has spent years subsidizing Xbox rather than profiting from it, CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged this week, as he addressed the gaming division’s need for a new approach. His comments came during a Wednesday evening taping of The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, released...
Marcus Fontoura, Microsoft technical fellow and CTO for Azure Core, with his new book, A Platform Mindset, during a recent conversation at the company’s Redmond campus. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) — Microsoft technical fellow Marcus Fontoura is leaving the company after serving as Azure...
One of ZincFive’s stacked battery units. (ZincFive Photo) ZincFive, an Oregon company providing nickel-zinc batteries for data centers, announced Thursday that it’s partnering with SparkLabs Group to go public through a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company). The deal is valued at $600...
Mary E. Brunkow, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the UW’s 2026 commencement speaker. (Institute for Systems Biology Photo) This year’s University of Washington commencement speaker has decades of experience in a field that increasingly benefits from AI and machine learning — but unlike some of...
Elon Musk rings the opening bell for the SpaceX IPO on Friday morning. Imagine missing the Tesla IPO. I understand the pull to invest in SpaceX (SPCX). But SpaceX at a $1.75 trillion valuation is a different ball game. Tesla went public at a valuation a thousand times smaller. And the Musk...