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...
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...
(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...
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...
“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...
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...
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 &...
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....
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...
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...
(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...
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...
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...
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...
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...