June 05, 2015
Amazon employees file civil rights complaint over company probe into data center testimony
June 18, 2026
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....
No billboard needed: This Seattle startup scored World Cup airtime with a scrappy cardboard sign
June 18, 2026
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,...
This startup wants to move kidney care out of the fax-machine era
June 18, 2026
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...
Tech Moves: Seattle tech exec Brian Hall joins Mistral; Amazon departures; new Dropzone AI leader
June 18, 2026
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...
Seattle’s AI2 Incubator rebrands as AI House, and adds key investor as managing director
June 18, 2026
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 raises $65M as startup sees rapid growth around agentic tools for enterprise marketing
June 18, 2026
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...
Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis exits Microsoft to launch stealth startup aiming to reinvent AI supply chain
June 18, 2026
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 raises $2.5M to take on the product coordination work that AI coding is leaving behind
June 18, 2026
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...
Loss of another Seattle-area billionaire? Valve’s Gabe Newell is reported buyer of Florida estate
June 17, 2026
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.,...
Seattle biotech heavy-hitters emerge from stealth with $46M for next-gen migraine treatments
June 17, 2026
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...
Amazon unveils new AI agents, trying to thread the needle between autonomy and human control
June 17, 2026
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...
Selling sunshine from Seattle: Solius raises $23M to launch new at-home light-therapy device
June 17, 2026
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...
Not just for coders: UW’s upcoming AI minor will reach beyond the computer science school
June 17, 2026
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...
Why startup vet Robbie Cape chose insurance — a tough VC, a trillion-dollar market and the money
June 16, 2026
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...
Egypt and Belgium tied, but drones grab a World Cup win over Seattle with lighted scoreboard
June 16, 2026
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...
Next-gen nuclear company TerraPower plants flag in UK
June 16, 2026
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...
SpaceX leapfrogs Amazon and briefly tops Microsoft in market value on Cursor acquisition news
June 16, 2026
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...
Helion secures world’s first regulatory licenses for fusion power plant being built in Washington
June 16, 2026
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...
Two pizzas and a prototype: How agentic AI is rewiring Amazon’s teams and upending its traditions
June 16, 2026
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...
Startup led by Microsoft veterans debuts the first real-time carbon tracker for AI workloads
June 16, 2026
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...
UW Allen School honors Ridwell and Focused Space co-founders with 2026 alumni awards
June 15, 2026
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...
Five years in, new analysis links Seattle’s ‘JumpStart’ tax to downtown decline
June 15, 2026
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 reportedly raised Anthropic Fable concerns prior to U.S. order forcing models offline
June 15, 2026
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...
Report: Seattle using AI to route certain 911 calls — without caller knowledge or public review
June 15, 2026
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...
Coffee town meets its matcha: Robots help power ex-Axon leader’s Seattle beverage startup Vale
June 15, 2026
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...
Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 7, 2026
June 14, 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 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...
Etzioni on AI: Backlash against AI-generated text mirrors the anti-GMO movement
June 14, 2026
(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...
Having sex in space would be tricky, but having kids in space is riskier
June 14, 2026
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...
What a longtime Google AI leader told UW computer science students at their graduation
June 13, 2026
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...
Following through in Cleveland: A GeekWire trip report, plus data center ‘theater’ and the SpaceX IPO
June 13, 2026
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 CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’
June 12, 2026
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...
Tech Moves: Microsoft exec departs Azure; Xealth gets first CRO; Slalom names Pacific NW leader
June 12, 2026
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...
Oregon data center battery maker ZincFive to go public via SPAC deal valued at $600 million
June 12, 2026
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...
As graduates push back on AI, UW’s Nobel-winning commencement speaker takes different approach
June 12, 2026
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...
Opinion: SpaceX is no Tesla
June 12, 2026
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...
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