Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, shows off a mockup of the New Shepard suborbital space capsule during a 2017 conference in Colorado. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Amazon paid about $1.8 billion last year to Blue Origin, the space company owned by its founder and...
Fetchlist founder Taylor Marean, left, helps move a used sofa. (Fetchlist Photo) Taylor Marean is a lifelong entrepreneur, tracing his first venture to mowing lawns in his Hood River, Ore., neighborhood at age 11. His latest startup is Fetchlist, which pairs delivery services with platforms like...
Helion CEO David Kirtley, left, with then Washington Gov. Jay Inslee at Helion’s Everett facility in July 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) David Kirtley always wanted to harness the power of the sun. But first he had to fuel some rockets. As a University of Michigan engineering student,...
SeekOut co-founders Aravind Bala (left) and Anoop Gupta, who is stepping down as CEO to become executive chairman. Bala will continue as CTO, working with new CEO Sean Thompson. (SeekOut Photo) Anoop Gupta is stepping down as CEO of SeekOut, the Bellevue-based recruiting startup he co-founded in...
Who will take home the coveted robot trophies at the 2026 GeekWire Awards? (GeekWire Photo) Voting closed April 16 at 1 p.m. for the 2026 GeekWire Awards, so we want to thank everyone who cast a ballot to help select the top innovators and entrepreneurs in Pacific Northwest tech. Now in...
The key players leading 2026 GeekWire Awards Startup of the Year finalists, clockwise from top left: Grin Lord, CEO of mpathic; Edward Wu, Dropzone AI CEO; Loopr CEO Priyansha Bagari; Dopl Technologies co-founders Wayne Monsky, Ryan James and Steve Seslar; and ElastixAI co-founders Saman...
A Microsoft Surface tablet at Lumen Field in Seattle on Wednesday running Copilot as it’s seen by Seahawks and other NFL personnel who use the devices and technology during games. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) When Bill Belichick famously spiked a Microsoft Surface tablet as the New England...
A slide from Snap’s investor update on highlights AI-driven efficiency gains, saying more than 65% of new code is generated by AI. Snap is cutting 95 jobs in Washington state as part of a broader restructuring that will eliminate about 1,000 positions, or 16% of the company’s...
Seattle-area quarterly VC deal activity from 2016 through Q1 2026, showing capital invested and deal count. Deal count dropped to 69 in Q1 2026, the lowest level since mid-2020, with total capital raised of $1.5 billion. (GeekWire Graphic / Data: PitchBook-NVCA Venture...
Windows Recall, originally available to all users of Copilot+ PCs in April 2025, stores screen caps of user activity. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft says its Recall app — which captures and stores screen shots every few seconds — is safe. Security researchers keep saying otherwise. Recall was...
The 2026 GeekWire Awards finalists for Young Entrepreneur of the Year, clockwise from top left: Kavian Mojabe (MediScan AI); Zheqing (Bill) Zhu (Pokee AI); Caleb John (Pioneer Square Labs); Charles Wu (Orchard Robotics); and Emily Choi-Greene (Clearly AI). From farm robots to cybersecurity to...
Prompting the Starbucks app inside ChatGPT returns suggestions related to various coffee drinks. (Starbucks Images) Starbucks is getting in on the agentic buzz. The Seattle-based coffee giant launched a beta app inside ChatGPT on Wednesday, leveraging OpenAI’s chatbot to help customers...
Ryan Holmes and Irina Novoselsky. (LinkedIn Photos) — Ryan Holmes is again leading Hootsuite, a Vancouver, B.C.-based social media management platform. Hootsuite’s focus will be “going even deeper with the businesses we serve, expanding what we can do with data and insights, and investing in AI...
Retired Gen. Keith Alexander. (Amazon Photo) Keith Alexander, a retired four-star Army general and former director of the National Security Agency, is leaving Amazon’s board of directors after more than five years. Alexander, 74, informed the company April 7 that he wouldn’t stand for...
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson is directing $500,000 from a state economic development fund to support the expansion of IonQ’s manufacturing facility for quantum computing hardware in Bothell, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) Leaders of the Pacific Northwest’s computing community gathered in...
The finalists for Hardware/Robotics/Physical AI of the Year at the 2026 GeekWire Awards. Clockwise from top left: AIM Intelligent Machines; Brinc’s Guardian drone; Starfish Space’s Otter spacecraft; Orbital Robotics; and Augmodo’s Smartbadge. (Company Photos) An emerging class of startups is...
(Image via Humanly) Bellevue, Wash.-based Humanly, a startup that makes AI-powered interviewing tools for employers, announced it has acquired Anthill, a platform that uses AI to help companies connect with and support frontline employees. It’s the latest acquisition for Humanly, which...
Ambassador leaders, from left: COO Mark Steffler, CEO Geoff McDonald, and Chief Strategy Officer John Larson. (Ambassador Photos) Seattle customer engagement startup Ambassador has acquired the operating assets of Tacoma-based programmatic ad platform Humming, part of a roll-up strategy that...
Fifth graders who worked on the Braille 3D Generator at Global Idea School in Redmond, Wash., from left: Valentin, Grayson, Ella, Hunter and Julian. (Photo courtesy of Juan Lavista Ferres) As the head of Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, Juan Lavista Ferres and his researchers can spend months...
Washington state’s Legislative Building, which houses the Legislature. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) Longtime Seattle investor and entrepreneur Chris DeVore is managing partner of Founders’ Co-op. I have a confession to make. I’m a Democrat. And a capitalist. Both, at the same...
Amazon announced an agreement Tuesday to acquire Globalstar, adding the satellite operator’s fleet, spectrum, and Apple partnership to its growing Amazon Leo network. (Amazon Image) Amazon isn’t just buying Globalstar — it’s inheriting Apple’s satellite roadmap. The Seattle-based company’s...
Parsnipp co-founders Awad Sayeed, CTO (left) and Andrew Higgins, CEO. (Parsnipp Photo) Seattle startup Parsnipp today launched its platform to help brands ensure that the likes of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini know them well enough to casually drop their names in conversation. The company,...
Julien Clayton of Next30Days, with one of the flyers promoting his civic engagement app. (Photo courtesy of Julien Clayton) Julien Clayton spent six years as an engineer working on propulsion systems for submarines. He got an MBA from Harvard. He worked as a product manager at Amazon, building...
(Google Gemini Illustration) Keeping track of the days of the week is exhausting enough. Managing a calendar full of various “tech weeks” in Seattle and elsewhere feels like a full-time job. There are now weeks dedicated to AI, energy, deep tech, regular tech, women in tech, tech for the...
An new OpenAI memo touts the Amazon partnership as a key enterprise growth driver. (GeekWire File Photos) OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft helped launch the generative AI era. Now Amazon is bringing the ChatGPT maker further into the booming market for enterprise AI. That’s the takeaway...
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 April 5, 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 co-founders Todd Bishop, left, and John Cook on Sound Transit’s 2 Line. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) This week on the GeekWire Podcast: we take the show on the road — or rather, on the rails — recording on Sound Transit’s 2 Line as we ride the world’s first light rail on a floating...
NASA’s Orion spacecraft splashes into the Pacific Ocean, as seen in an overhead view. (NASA via YouTube) Four astronauts and their Orion space capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today, bringing the first crewed trip around the moon and back since 1972 to a successful end. “What a...
Chris Pirillo tears up one of his fake rejection letters. (Photo courtesy of Chris Pirillo) At a time when finding a job in tech has turned into a frustrating cycle of rejections, ghostings or worse, Chris Pirillo‘s work speaks for itself — in that it makes a mockery of the whole...
A display of Microsoft Surface laptops at the company’s Build 2025 developer conference. (GeekWire File Photo) For the past few years, it felt as if Microsoft’s Windows org was on autopilot. (No, not THAT Autopilot.) Microsoft leadership seemed content to let Windows run its course as long as...
Syndio’s new leadership, top row from left: Erik Darby, Shonna Waters, Devin Luquist. Bottom row: Erin McClintock, Elizabeth Temples, Manuj Bahl and Meredith Conroy. (LinkedIn Photos) — Syndio, a Seattle startup that helps companies analyze and address pay equity, announced seven new additions...
Gov. Bob Ferguson shakes hands with Rep. Liz Berry (D-Seattle), sponsor of the bill, after signing House Bill 1155, which bans nearly all non-compete agreements in Washington state. (Washington State Photo / Ian Couch) A new Washington law wiping out nearly all non-compete agreements across the...
A view from a camera mounted on one of the Orion spacecraft’s solar array wings shows Orion’s engines and thrusters in the foreground, and Earth in the background. (NASA via YouTube) The crew of NASA’s round-the-moon test mission crossed the halfway point between the moon and Earth today on...
Dairy cows at the Puyallup Fair, now called the Washington State Fair. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Wastewater treatment startup Sedron Technologies — a Washington company that once served Bill Gates a glass of water purified from sewage — announced it’s being acquired by Ara Partners. The...
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...