Nate Bek, left, with Ascend founding general partner Kirby Winfield at the firm’s Founders Bash event Thursday night. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook) — Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend promoted Nate Bek to principal. Bek joined the firm as an associate in January 2024 and was most recently...
An artist’s conception shows Gravitics’ Diamondback orbital carrier, which is due to make its debut as early as 2027. (Gravitics Illustration) Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics, which is developing orbital carriers for government and commercial customers, is getting ready for a reverse takeover...
Twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown co-founded Seattle’s HasOffers in 2009 and rebranded to Tune in 2014. (Instagram / Geeks in the Woods) Several years after leaving Seattle’s startup scene to build a “tech outpost” in the Alaskan wilderness, serial entrepreneurs and twin brothers Lee and Lucas...
Steve Hobbs, secretary of state for Washington, poses at his booth during the 2026 Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo/Thomas Wilde) If you explore the main expo hall during the Penny Arcade Expo, you can often find some interesting booths around the edges of the room. These can offer...
ModernVivo co-founders Colin Small (left) and Ian Levine (right). Seattle-based ModernVivo is using AI to help scientists design preclinical studies for drug discovery. The goal: better experiments that are also faster, cheaper and less reliant on animals. “You’d be shocked at the way...
Temporal co-founders Maxim Fateev, CTO (left), and Samar Abbas, CEO. (Temporal Photo) One of the hottest infrastructure companies in AI today is a startup established nearly seven years ago, tracing its roots to work its founders were doing before the cloud was a thing. Temporal, based in...
The Doolan-Larson House and Storefronts in San Francisco, a potential future KEXP location. (SF Heritage Photo / Alvis E. Hendley) Seattle independent radio station KEXP is exploring the possibility of building out a second physical home — far from its beloved base at Seattle Center — in San...
The Ravel team at its Seattle pilot facility in March 2025, from left: Forest Davis, process development scientist; John Goods, co-founder and chief technologist; Zahlen Titcomb, co-founder and CEO; Zack Wolford, research engineer; and Kristen Albrecht, chief sustainability officer and vice...
Saad Nadeem, co-founder of Seattle startup Local Crew. (Photo courtesy of Saad Nadeem) 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...
Antfly co-founders James McDermott, left, and AJ Roetker. (Photos courtesy of Antfly) Antfly, a Portland startup building software to streamline how artificial intelligence systems access corporate data, announced Thursday that it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led...
Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk. (Oracle Photo) Oracle is laying off 359 employees in Washington state — its second significant job cuts this year — according to a filing Wednesday with the state Employment Security Department. The cuts affect remote employees across Washington state as well as...
Elijah Yan, left, and Rudy Heredia-Jantz, members of the Solar Vehicle Team at UW, with Sakura, the solar-powered vehicle the student-led team constructed in their shop at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) In a cramped corner workspace in a mechanical engineering...
Taylor Brugh, Microsoft sustainability markets partnerships & ops lead, at Tuesday’s CoMotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator Demo Day, where the data center-focused program was announced. (CoMotion Photo) As public concern grows about the environmental impact of AI data centers, the University of...
Taoran Wang, senior food scientist at Rebellyous Foods, displays a tray of experimental chicken patties. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Subscribe to Positive Charge: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, All Episodes More than 40 years ago, the first commercial veggie...
An artist’s conception shows a mining operation on the moon, including harvesters and a solar power plant. (Interlune Illustration) Seattle-based Interlune has raised $5 million in fresh funding to support a business plan that involves building space infrastructure as well as mining the moon for...
An aerial view of Orion, Helion Energy’s planned fusion plant being built in Malaga, Wash. (Helion Photo) Helion Energy on Tuesday said that it added $35 million to a funding round initially announced in June. The Everett, Wash.-based fusion company originally shared news of a $465 million...
Terry Myerson, Truveta’s co-founder and CEO, will retire at the end of September. (Truveta Photo) Terry Myerson, the former Microsoft executive who co-founded Truveta during the pandemic, growing it to 500 employees and a valuation of more than $1 billion, is retiring as CEO of the Bellevue,...
The 2025 “Uncommon Thinkers” award winners, from left: Anindya Roy, co-founder of Lila Biologics; Kiana Ehsani, co-founder of Vercept; Max Blumen of Tin Can representing winner Chet Kittleson, co-founder of Tin Can; Jeff Thornburg, co-founder of Portal Space Systems; Jay Graber of Bluesky; and...
Pointing to recent security incidents where networked AI agents spontaneously formed “swarms” to hack computer systems, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) took to the Senate floor Monday to demand urgent federal guardrails and mandatory independent safety testing for frontier AI models before...
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon Goldman Sachs is expanding its technology presence in the Seattle region, opening a new Bellevue engineering center that will accommodate more than 125 employees focused on artificial intelligence and cloud transformation. The New York-based financial giant...
Nuance Labs co-founders, from left, Fangchang Ma, Edward Zhang, and Karren Yang. (Nuance Photo) Nuance Labs, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup developing a foundational AI model designed to perceive and respond to real-time human expression, raised $50 million in Series A...
Oregon’s first hospital focused on women’s health will be built on the campus of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland. (Providence Illustration) Providence will receive $1.1 billion — one of the largest gifts ever pledged to a U.S. healthcare institution — from Nike co-founder Phil...
Neuramill co-founders Nick Khormaei (COO) and Nistha Mitra (CEO) at the Reindustrialize summit in Detroit. (Photo courtesy of Neuramill) When machinists with decades of experience retire, everything they know about how metal behaves under a cutting tool — or anything else they learned through a...
BuyWander co-founders Jordan Allen, left, and Brock Kowalchuk. (BuyWander Photo) BuyWander, an auction-based online marketplace for returned and overstocked retail items, announced Tuesday that it has raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group and Inspired...
Two views of Agility Robotics’ new Digit 5, which is designed to work alongside people without safety barriers. (Agility Robotics Photo) Agility Robotics unveiled the next version of its Digit humanoid robot, which it says is designed to work safely alongside people in warehouses and factories...
“AI could be a great equalizer — or widen the gap,” Bill Gates writes in a new Gates Foundation report. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) The Gates Foundation is pledging to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence for health workers, farmers and teachers,...
“You should tax things you want to discourage, like cigarettes, not jobs.” Microsoft’s Brad Smith at Monday’s launch of the Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound, with former Gov. Chris Gregoire at his left. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh each had their...
Valve’s Steam Frame virtual reality gaming headset. (Valve Photo) In a sudden shadowdrop, Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software announced on Monday that it’s launched its new standalone virtual-reality headset the Steam Frame. Initially revealed in Nov. 2025 as part of the same initiative that...
Temporal co-founders Samar Abbas, left, CEO, and Maxim Fateev, CTO. (Temporal Photo) Temporal has raised $550 million in a Series E funding round that values the Bellevue, Wash.-based infrastructure startup at $12.55 billion, more than double its valuation from earlier this year as demand...
Jeff Kohler is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify patent law after courts sided with Google to invalidate his software patent. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Kohler) Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web...
Silvia Candiani. (LinkedIn Photo) — Silvia Candiani has been named corporate vice president of Worldwide Telco & Media within the Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion initiative launched by the tech giant in July to embed engineers inside customers to build and run AI systems. In her new...
Satya Nadella says Microsoft welcomes the “deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right.” (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) “People matter more than AI.” That’s the premise of a draft code of conduct Microsoft published Monday morning for the AI models it’s developing in-house. The...
An artist’s conception shows several Sophia Space satellites in orbit. (Sophia Space Illustration) Sophia Space and SLI, an aerospace leasing venture based in Washington, D.C., say they’ve agreed on a $300 million asset-financing framework that will support the creation of a 10-satellite...
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 Sept. 6, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in decline but is in danger — finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring...