GEEK News
GeekWire Awards: AI Innovation of the Year finalists transform HR, retail, biotech and more
The 2026 GeekWire Awards AI Innovation of the Year finalists, clockwise from top left: Avante CEO Rohan D’Souza; ConverzAI CEO Ashwarya Poddar; Envive AI CEO Aniket Deosthali; Synthesize Bio co-founders Jeff Leek (left) and Robert Bradley; and Spangle AI co-founders Maju Kuruvilla (left) and Fei Wang. The finalists for AI Innovation of the Year at the 2026 GeekWire Awards represent the cutting...
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Microsoft 365 Copilot and the end of the single-model era in enterprise AI
Steve Gustavson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for design and research. (Microsoft Photo) [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 event.] Using an AI model still comes with an unspoken asterisk: Verify before you act. Fact-check it. Google it....
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Opinion: How to read with AI
(Licensed via marketoonist.com) This is a follow-up to my recent piece “AI Coach or AI Ghostwriter? The Choice Is Yours,” which argued that AI can either sharpen your thinking or replace it. That piece was about writing. This one is about the other side of the coin: reading. The practical question is: how do you use AI to become a more productive reader rather than a lazier one? Back in...
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Portal Space Systems raises $50M as it gets set to launch its first orbital vehicle made for rapid maneuvers
An artist’s conception shows Portal’s Starburst spacecraft in the foreground with its Supernova space vehicle and three more Starbursts (plus Earth) in the background. (Portal Space Systems Illustration) Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems has raised $50 million in a funding round aimed at speeding up development of the Seattle-area startup’s highly maneuverable space vehicles. The...
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‘Not on a hunch’: Andy Jassy defends Amazon’s $200B spending spree
“It’s hard to overstate my optimism for what’s ahead,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy writes in his new shareholder letter. (GeekWire File Photo) Andy Jassy’s new letter to Amazon shareholders is a data-heavy defense of the tech giant’s biggest bets — from AI and custom chips to satellite internet and 20-minute delivery. In the process, the Amazon CEO discloses that AI revenue for AWS has hit a $15...
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Seattle startups combine: Inflection.io acquires Keyplay, reuniting longtime entrepreneurs
Inflection.io CEO Aaron Bird, left, and new CMO Adam Schoenfeld at the company’s office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. (Inflection.io Photo) Two Seattle startups with intertwined histories are joining forces. Inflection.io, a B2B marketing automation company, announced Wednesday that it has acquired Keyplay, a startup that helps sales teams identify and score target accounts. The deal...
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Microsoft Moves: Longtime exec Julia Liuson to retire; new accessibility chief; and other changes
Julia Liuson presenting at a conference in 2019. (Microsoft Photo) Big tech moves today from Microsoft: Longtime executive Julia Liuson is retiring, Neil Barnett is the company’s new chief accessibility officer, and Nanda Ramachandran has been named chief marketing officer for Windows & Devices. They’re part of a broader wave of executive departures and changes at Microsoft as CEO Satya...
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Avalanche Energy lands share of $5.2M DOD award to develop long-lasting ‘nuclear batteries’
An early prototype of Avalanche Energy’s radiovoltaic converter for the DARPA Rads to Watts program is exposed to high-energy ion-beam irradiation. (Avalanche Photo) Seattle fusion startup Avalanche Energy was awarded a share of a $5.2 million contract announced Wednesday from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop compact nuclear batteries. The award comes from the DARPA Rads to Watts...
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Defense giant Anduril is quietly building autonomous warships on Seattle’s historic ship canal
The old Foss Shipyard on Seattle’s Lake Washington Ship Canal, where defense giant Anduril Industries is building a new class of autonomous warships. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) There was no noticeable activity at the old Foss Shipyard in Seattle when I visited last week. No signs, and no visible presence of any workers. Behind the barbed-wire fencing, it looked like a ghost shipyard:...
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Humanly raises $25M to put AI to work for job seekers, not just the companies hiring them
Humanly’s job seeker-facing product offers AI-powered coaching on interview preparation, resume writing, salary negotiation and more. (Humanly Image) The market for recruiting software — tools that help companies find and screen candidates — is worth $14 billion. The market for actually placing people in jobs is worth $500 billion. Humanly just raised $25 million to chase the bigger...
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Opinion: Everyone is asking AI better questions — nobody is asking themselves better ones
(BigStock Illustration) Alonda Williams is the CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound. Last year, a peer CEO told me she’d been using AI for eight months and still couldn’t explain to her board how she benefitted beyond saving time writing. She wasn’t an outlier. Surveys suggest that while many organizations are now using AI in some form, only a small fraction describe their use as...
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Golf star Bryson DeChambeau leads acquisition of Seattle-area startup Sportsbox AI
Bryson DeChambeau swings while the Sportsbox AI app captures his motion on a smartphone. (Sportsbox AI Photo) First Bryson DeChambeau used Sportsbox AI to win a major. Then he invested in the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup. Now he’s taking a swing at the entire company. DeChambeau, the two-time U.S. Open champion and one of golf’s most tech-obsessed players, is leading a group of investors...
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Amazon revamps S3 cloud storage for the AI era, removing a key barrier for apps and agents
Amazon Web Services is making it possible to access data stored in its S3 cloud storage service as a traditional file system, bridging a divide between two types of storage that has frustrated developers and data scientists for nearly two decades. The new capability, called Amazon S3 Files, lets applications running on AWS access an S3 storage bucket as if it were a local file system,...
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Earthset and eclipse, oh my! NASA releases magnificent images from Artemis mission’s moon flyby
A crescent Earth sinks behind the moon’s disk in a wide-angle version of the Artemis 2 crew’s “Earthset” picture. (NASA Photo) A day after the Artemis 2 mission’s historic lunar flyby, NASA has released a stunning set of high-resolution images documenting Earthset and Earthrise, a solar eclipse that set the moon aglow, and other views of the lunar far side and the astronauts who took the...
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From Pokémon GO to physical AI: Niantic Spatial unveils its global 3D mapping platform
Niantic Spatial’s Scaniverse app captures physical spaces, reconstructs them as 3D models and enables precise localization within them. (Niantic Spatial Images) Niantic Spatial, the company spun out of Pokémon GO maker Niantic, is launching a revamped version of its Scaniverse platform for businesses and a new global visual positioning system (VPS), in its biggest release since becoming an...
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Tech Moves: Microsoft leader jumps to Anthropic; Tagboard gets new CEO; Expedia names tech VP
Eric Boyd. (LinkedIn Photo) — Longtime Microsoft leader Eric Boyd announced today that he has joined Anthropic to lead its infrastructure team. “I’ve been privileged to have a front row seat to the explosion of LLMs, and the team at Anthropic is truly special,” Boyd said on LinkedIn. “The combination of the absolute leading models with a culture that is committed to their mission is...
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Former Tableau product chief launches Golden Analytics, using AI to challenge the BI old guard
Francois Ajenstat, Golden Analytics founder and CEO. Francois Ajenstat has been in business intelligence long enough to see two generational shifts, from the early days at Cognos to the self-service revolution at Tableau, ultimately serving as chief product officer at the Seattle-based data visualization company. Now he’s launching Golden Analytics, a Seattle-based startup built on the...
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Amazon sued by YouTubers for allegedly scraping their content to train AI video tool
Amazon’s headquarters campus in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A trio of YouTube producers filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon alleging the tech giant illegally used content from the video platform to train and improve its Nova Reel generative AI model. The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, describes how Amazon...
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GeekWire Awards: CEO of the Year finalists innovating across fintech, climate, real estate and more
The 2026 GeekWire Award CEO of the Year finalists, clockwise from top left: Tony Huang, Possible Finance; Sheila Stafford, TeamSense; Karen Huh, Zucca; Luis Poggi, HouseWhisper; Aina Abiodun, VertueLab. The finalists for CEO of the Year at the 2026 GeekWire Awards are leading startups and organizations across a diverse cross-section of the innovation economy, touching upon fintech, climate...
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Seattle startup Glacis brings longtime Microsoft leader aboard to target AI’s biggest blind spot
Rohit Tatachar, CTO and co-founder of Glacis. As a veteran engineer and product leader inside Microsoft Azure, Rohit Tatachar saw that many companies were building AI systems they couldn’t fully monitor or control in production. In his new role at a Seattle startup, he’s doing something about it. Tatachar is now co-founder and CTO of Glacis, which builds tamper-proof records of AI...
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Starfish Space raises $110M to scale up its satellite servicing missions
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter satellite servicing vehicle in geostationary Earth orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration) Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space says it has raised about $110 million in a funding round that will help the company execute its first satellite servicing missions and scale up operations for more business. The Series B round was led by Point72...
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‘Moon joy!’ Artemis 2’s crew sets a distance record, documents lunar far side and heads back toward Earth
NASA’s Artemis 2 crew captured an iconic “Earthset” picture, showing Earth dipping beneath the lunar horizon. (NASA Photo) Four astronauts today became the first humans to make a trip around the moon since the Apollo era — and added new pages to history books for the Artemis era. The Artemis 2 crew reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the distance record for...
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Plot twist in downtown Seattle: Barnes & Noble bookstore opening soon in Amazon’s backyard
Browsing in another new Barnes & Noble bookstore, in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A new retail storyline is close to beginning in downtown Seattle with the opening this month of a Barnes & Noble bookstore — six years after the chain closed its longtime downtown location. The new store at 520 Pike St. is about four blocks from Pike Place Market and another four from...
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Seattle entrepreneur Robbie Cape’s lengthy job search takes unexpected turn with launch of new startup
Robbie Cape is a tech veteran and serial entrepreneur. (File Photo via 98point6) Robbie Cape, the Seattle tech entrepreneur who has dabbled in healthcare and fried chicken in recent years, has another new venture. In a post on LinkedIn on Monday, Cape said his nine-month search for a new job led somewhere he didn’t expect — and he’s starting a company. “We’re in stealth for now — the...
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Butter or sand in the gears? The question every founder must ask before choosing SF or Seattle
Yifan Zhang, AI2 Incubator co-managing director and AI House founder, speaks at the 2026 Seattle AI Startup Summit. (Ken Yeung Photo) The City by the Bay may be considered the center of AI and technology, but that doesn’t mean every founder should flock there to set up shop, right? That’s the argument put forth by Yifan Zhang, AI2 Incubator’s co-managing director and creator of the AI...
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Tech Moves: Microsoft names corporate VP; Amazon exec departs for Google; Zoom names CPO
Nadim Abdo. (Microsoft Photo) — After more than 26 years with Microsoft, Nadim Abdo is now the tech giant’s corporate vice president of Identity & Network Access (IDNA). The team’s services authenticate more than 1 billion users daily, and its Microsoft Entra technology is used by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies, Abdo noted on LinkedIn. “As the next wave of AI reshapes how people,...
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Data visualization all-stars unveil Ridge AI with $2.6M to fix the analytics problem for SaaS apps
Ridge AI co-founders Jeffrey Heer and Ellie Fields. (Ridge AI Photo) Ellie Fields and Jeffrey Heer know data visualization from the inside: Fields spent more than 12 years as a product and marketing leader at Tableau, and Heer is the University of Washington professor whose open-source tools are widely used for web-based visualization. But even as they and their colleagues pushed the field...
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New leash on life: Why this Tableau vet walked away from tech to roll with the dogs
Eric Howard, founder of Dog Tired, rides his One Wheel while running Boone, a golden retriever, near Lake Tapps, Wash. (Photo courtesy of DogTired) It’s tough to tell who has the bigger smile: the guy zipping by on the Onewheel, the dog running alongside him at full sprint, or the passersby lucky enough to witness it. This is Eric Howard‘s dream job. Howard is the founder and chief dog...
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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of March 29, 2026
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 March 29, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Rec Room, the Seattle-based social gaming platform once valued at $3.5 billion, is shutting...
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Amazon meets FedEx Office: A seamless return and one very dumb question about stamps
A microchip pet door awaits its fate at the FedEx Office on NW 46th Street in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) For a while now, since the closure of the Amazon Fresh Pickup in Seattle, I’ve been complaining about having to drive across the Ballard Bridge to Whole Foods to do my Amazon returns. So when news emerged that FedEx Office locations are now part of Amazon’s drop-off...
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Rec Room shutdown, robot umps, torpedo bats, FedEx meets Amazon, and OpenAI’s odd media buy
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Rec Room, the Seattle-based social gaming platform once valued at $3.5 billion, is shutting down — and Snap is picking up some of the pieces. Todd talks about what it was like fielding calls from distraught users on the night of the announcement. John offers his thoughts on what the shutdown says about the VR hype cycle, and whether everyone betting on...
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Tech Moves: Microsoft execs depart; TerraClear, UserTesting, EchoMark and Read AI add leaders
Joy Chik. (LinkedIn Photo) — Joy Chik announced she will retire from Microsoft in July after nearly three decades. Her eight roles there ranged from software design engineer to her current title: president of identity and network access. “I’m excited to expand my public company board work while also building new muscles in the startup, angel investing, and venture capital spaces, partnering...
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Rubin Observatory team discovers 11,000 new asteroids, with help from University of Washington software
A model of the inner solar system shows asteroids discovered by the Rubin Observatory in light teal. Previously known asteroids are dark blue. The model highlights almost 12,700 asteroids that the Rubin team has discovered over the course of a year and a half. (Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / AURA / R. Proctor. Star map: NASA / GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio....
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Flat tire? Dead battery? Speedy’s serves stranded Seattle riders as a quicker e-bike picker-upper
Speedy’s fouder Tyler Swartz with the electric van he uses to pick up and drop off e-bikes. (Speedy’s Photo) If you’ve ever tried to lift and fit a big, heavy e-bike into the back of a car, Tyler Swartz feels your pain, and went to work on a solution. Swartz, a Seattle native and cycling enthusiast, is the founder of Speedy’s, a roadside service for e-bike owners who are stranded by a flat...
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Stop trying to make people read instructions: 10 startup lessons from Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis
Convoy co- founder and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Dan Lewis at the Seattle AI Startup Summit on April 2, 2026. (Ken Yeung Photo) Dan Lewis’ career is hard to summarize in a sentence. He was a product manager at Microsoft, then an early employee at the Seattle AI startup Wavii, which Google later acquired. He made a stop at Amazon before ultimately boomeranging back to Microsoft, where...
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