June 05, 2015
Apptio co-founders reunite to launch enterprise AI startup Thira with $21M in funding led by Madrona
July 14, 2026
Thira co-founder and executive chairman Sunny Gupta at a 2017 event. (GeekWire File Photo) Sunny Gupta has led two prior enterprise tech companies with backing from venture capital firm Madrona in the past 20 years. iConclude sold to Opsware. Apptio sold to Vista Equity Partners, then to IBM for...
Salesforce’s Tableau renews Fremont office lease, signaling long-term Seattle commitment
July 14, 2026
Tableau’s Data 1 building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. (Weber Thompson Photo) Salesforce’s Tableau business has renewed its lease for roughly 114,000 square feet at the Data 1 office building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, extending its long-term home in the city. The lease renewal...
Motorola leads $125M round for Brinc, fueling 911 drone expansion amid U.S. import crackdown
July 14, 2026
The multi-sensor camera array on Brinc’s Guardian drone, which the company says is built to replace police helicopters. (Brinc Photo) Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has raised $125 million in a new funding round led by Motorola Solutions, boosting its ambitions to...
Grunge meets slop: An AI time traveler visits 1992 Seattle when music, not tech, ruled the city
July 13, 2026
“Roxy” the AI time-traveling vlogger in front of the famed Crocodile Cafe music venue in what’s supposed to be 1992 Seattle. (@roxyintime via Instagram) The best thing about Seattle’s grunge era is that it existed before the internet could completely spoil it — although the mainstream media, MTV...
Tech Moves: Remitly CMO departs; Temporal names EVP; Veeam and Qualtrics leadership changes
July 13, 2026
Rina Hahn. (LinkedIn Photo) — Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games. The...
Venture funding drops in Seattle area as AI boom reshapes startup world
July 13, 2026
Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago. The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report...
Archives to avatars: Famed historian is moved by Microsoft’s AI-powered Theodore Roosevelt at new library
July 13, 2026
The lifelike avatar of President Theodore Roosevelt, which relies on artificial intelligence to answer visitors’ questions, at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D. (Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Photo via Microsoft) “Speak softly and carry a big prompt.”...
Augmodo raises $21M to push its spatial AI beyond just retail toward the broader physical workforce
July 13, 2026
(Augmodo Image) Augmodo, the Seattle startup that straps AI-powered cameras onto retail workers to track store shelves, has raised $21 million as it pushes its technology beyond grocery aisles and into warehouses, factories, and other physical workplaces. The new funding, led by existing...
Etzioni on AI: Who disagrees with you about AI? Here’s what the research shows
July 12, 2026
(AI Illustration via Google Gemini) Attitudes towards AI differ by country, gender, profession, age, and political affiliation. A few of those gaps are startling. This article is chock-full of stats. Read it for the surprises, or glance at the bar graph below for a quick overview. Let’s...
Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of July 5, 2026
July 12, 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 July 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...
What to know about Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley legend whose family is buying the Seahawks
July 12, 2026
Vinod Khosla speaks at a fireside chat at AI House in Seattle in March 2025. (GeekWire File Photo) Vinod Khosla has spent four decades building and funding companies around a single idea: hire the right people and get out of their way. He’s one of the most respected and influential investors in...
Microsoft’s reset, a new era for Seattle startups, and how AI is changing everything for founders
July 11, 2026
Scenes from this week’s founder open house on the deck at GeekWire HQ in Seattle, where we also recorded this week’s podcast. Thanks to Delta Air Lines, Prime Team Partners, WTIA and ALLtech for sponsoring the event. (Photos by Kurt Schlosser and John Cook) On this week’s show, we’re on the...
Elon Musk’s Mars illusion
July 11, 2026
Elon Musk takes a bow at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in May 2020 after the launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission, which carried two astronauts to the International Space Station, about 250 miles up, and a world away from Mars. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Ever since its founding,...
What’s Howard’s end? Former Starbucks CEO is ripping Washington state again
July 11, 2026
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) For the second time in the past 60 days, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has penned an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that takes direct aim at the state’s political leadership, calling Seattle Mayor Katie...
General Fusion set to become the first publicly traded fusion stock on a major exchange
July 10, 2026
General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26, its fusion demo device. (General Fusion Photo) British Columbia-based General Fusion on Friday completed its deal to become first publicly traded fusion stock on a major exchange. The 24-year-old company is trying to harness the atom-smashing reactions that...
Data vs. gut instinct: Seahawks coach leans into analytics to support, not drive, in-game decisions
July 10, 2026
Seattle Seahawks head coach and self-professed football nerd Mike Macdonald just doesn’t understand why any coach or team would ignore the chance to lean into data and analytics. “Why wouldn’t we use the best information out there?” he said during an interview this week on the Dan Patrick...
The awkward timing of the Xbox CEO’s new Federal Reserve gig
July 10, 2026
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. (File Photo) Which is worse, sailing your superyacht through the city where your company just made mass job cuts, or getting named to a U.S. Federal Reserve panel on jobs and productivity three days after announcing thousands of layoffs? It might not be a full Zuck, but...
Opinion: The WALL-E Economy
July 10, 2026
A scene from Pixar’s 2008 film WALL-E. (Image: Disney/Pixar) [Note: Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum, was co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company that was founded in 2013, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and sold to IBM in 2025. In his role, he spoke...
Why the video game industry may be sliding toward its next big crash
July 09, 2026
4 generations of Xbox hardware. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde) Commentary: The last couple of weeks have served as a capstone to what’s become a bad few years for the international video game industry. Now it appears the larger sector is headed directly into a significant crash, as several...
Judge denies FTC request to presume Zillow-Redfin deal ‘unlawful’
July 09, 2026
This story originally appeared on Real Estate News. Illustration by Real Estate News/Shutterstock A federal court has turned down the Federal Trade Commission’s request to declare a rentals deal between Zillow and Redfin “presumptively unlawful” before trial next month. On Wednesday, July...
Pulse Space wins $40M contract from Space Force to work on space laser power system
July 09, 2026
An artist’s conception shows a satellite receiving energy from a laser beam. (Credit: Pulse Space via Vimeo) Bellevue, Wash.-based Pulse Space says it has received a $40 million award from the U.S. Space Force to develop technologies for laser-based power beaming and orbital tracking...
Echodyne opens $40M radar factory near Seattle to meet booming demand for drone detection
July 09, 2026
Echodyne CEO Eben Frankenberg, left, gives a tour of the company’s new manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Wash., to U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, center, and Sen. Maria Cantwell on Wednesday. (Echodyne Photo) Echodyne, the Seattle-area radar-platform company, cut the ribbon Wednesday on a new $40...
Despite business angst, Washington climbs in CNBC’s state rankings — but still trails its former standing
July 09, 2026
Seattle’s skyline, the economic engine of Washington state. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) For much of the past year, the narrative surrounding Washington state’s business climate has taken a decidedly negative turn. Business leaders have criticized a wave of new taxes approved by...
Microsoft’s carbon emissions climb 25% as tech giants grapple with AI’s energy toll
July 09, 2026
Inside a Microsoft data center. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft has just four more years to reach its ambitious goal of removing more planet-warming carbon that it produces. But the company’s annual sustainability report, released Thursday, shows it’s moving in the opposite direction, as its 2025...
Supply chain startup Auger, led by ex-Amazon operations chief, raises $50M and lands big customers
July 09, 2026
Auger co-founders Leigh Anne Clark and Dave Clark at the company’s Bellevue, Wash., office. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was...
T-Mobile exec Mike Katz exits after 28 years, as carrier reshuffles top ranks and taps ex-AT&T leader
July 08, 2026
Mike Katz speaks at a T-Mobile event in 2025. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) T-Mobile’s longest-tenured Un-carrier architect just Un-carriered himself. Mike Katz, who started selling VoiceStream phones at Circuit City 28 years ago and rose to help T-Mobile go from an also-ran into the...
Tech Moves: Seattle tech exec named Dropbox CPO; Xbox VP among layoffs; C-suite changes at T-Mobile
July 08, 2026
Mike Torres. (LinkedIn Photo) — Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer. “As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this...
The drive to make a better golf app: Former pro athlete bets big on ‘Barkie’ and AI as a caddie
July 08, 2026
Dane Renkert, co-founder and CEO of Barkie, an AI-powered app for golfers. (Barkie Photo) Perhaps the only downside to building a golf-focused startup is that it leaves less time to actually play golf. Dane Renkert will take that tradeoff, for now, as he works on something that he says will...
This startup lets companies teach AI about their brands — and the chatbots are listening
July 08, 2026
Optimly founder and CEO Apurva Luty pitches at the Tech Alliance’s Seattle Investor Summit + Showcase in Redmond. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Seattle startup Optimly, which helps brands manage what AI understands and says about them, went into the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee,...
Former GitHub CEO’s startup Entire unveils its answer to the crush of AI coding agents
July 08, 2026
Thomas Dohmke’s startup Entire is offering a solution to what he calls “the strain of billions of agents and developers hammering a central server.” (Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Web Summit Rio, May 2023, via Sportsfile, CC BY 2.0) Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke‘s startup Entire is rolling out a...
10 new startups emerge from the University of Washington, with healthcare dominating the lineup
July 07, 2026
Leaders of startups recently spun out of the UW, top row, from left: Hilco Boerlage of Precision Cognition Labs; Jan Whittington of Climate Solutions International; Elena Cant of DetellaDx; Sura Alwan of PEAR-Net Society; and Min Sun of Colleague AI. Bottom row, from left: Jingcong Zhao of...
Former Impinj CEO Bill Colleran tapped to lead Seattle AI coding startup Adronite
July 07, 2026
Bill Colleran is the new CEO of Adronite. Bill Colleran, a veteran technology executive who previously led Impinj and sold Innovent Systems to Broadcom, has joined Seattle-based AI coding startup Adronite as CEO. Edward Rothschild, who co-founded Adronite in 2023 and served as its first CEO,...
Chicago software company plants flag in Seattle area as new leadership team seeks AI talent
July 07, 2026
LogicGate CEO Diego Panama. (LinkedIn Photo) Enterprise software company LogicGate is establishing a Bellevue, Wash., office and rapidly expanding its Seattle-area executive team, betting on the region’s deep technology talent pool as it embarks on a new chapter under newly appointed CEO Diego...
Etzioni on AI: Does AI bolster or undercut democracy?
July 07, 2026
An aerial view of Shasta Dam in California. After a July 4 visit, computer scientist Daphne Koller argued that America’s signature achievement is taking what was scarce and making it abundant: water into power at Shasta, electricity into a grid anyone could plug into, computation into a pocket. AI,...
An agent in the empty chair: Amazon vets launch Primitive Labs, using AI to model customer behavior
July 07, 2026
Primitive Labs co-founders, from left: CTO Jean Farmer, CEO Rohit Talluri and COO Gabriel Fong. (Primitive Labs Photo) Rohit Talluri learned the tradition at Amazon: always keep an empty chair in the room to represent the customer — a reminder of the people who will ultimately use whatever gets...
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