Decentralized social network Bluesky revealed on Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. The round closed in April 2025. Bluesky previously...
The finalists for Deal of the Year at the 2026 GeekWire Awards. Clockwise from top left: Temporal co-founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev; Protect AI co-founders Badar Ahmed, Daryan Dehghanpisheh, and Ian Swanson; Kestra Medical Technologies’ cardiac monitoring device; the ribbon cutting at...
The TMF program is a partnership between the City of Seattle and community organizations improving digital literacy and skills for underserved communities. (City of Seattle Photo) The City of Seattle is awarding $455,000 in Technology Matching Fund grants to help support 11 community...
San Francisco startup Nooks hosted a panel in Seattle last month focused on vertical AI agents. From left: Chinmay Barve, vice president of engineering at Nooks; Nikhil Cheerla, CTO at Nooks; Sharbani Roy, VP of AI Services at Arm; and Joe Duffy, CEO and founder at Pulumi. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor...
Research underway at UW Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Nobel Laureate David Baker will lead a new University of Washington initiative that’s launching with $7 million to develop designer enzymes and proteins to solve challenges in medicine, technology...
An artist’s conception shows Portal Space Systems’ Starburst spacecraft at left and its larger Supernova platform in the distance at right, both outfitted with Paladin Space’s Triton payload for orbital debris tracking and removal. (Portal Space Systems Illustration) Bothell, Wash.-based Portal...
Eclypsium co-founders Yuriy Bulygin, left, and Alex Bazhaniuk. (Eclypsium Photo) Eclypsium, a Portland-based cybersecurity startup, raised $25 million in new funding to expand its hardware and firmware security platform. The round was led by PEAK6 Strategic Capital, with participation from...
Screen grabs from the Lamu app show various interactions with AI, including, from left, answering profile questions, receiving a “love score” and completed profile, and discussing date location options. (Lamu Images) Ada Jin was suffering from dating app fatigue. She was tired of the constant...
(BigStock Photo) This story originally appeared on Real Estate News. One of the biggest lawsuits to capture the real estate industry’s attention over the past year has come to an abrupt end. Compass International Holdings announced Wednesday that it is dismissing the lawsuit it filed last...
Microsoft’s Fairwater data center near Atlanta is part of the company’s broader AI expansion. (Microsoft Photo) Amid widespread blowback against the spread of data centers, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it is abandoning its practice of secrecy with local governments when deploying new...
Phaidra leaders, from left: CTO Vedavyas Panneershelvam, CEO Jim Gao, and COO Katherine Hoffman. (Phaidra Photo) Phaidra, a startup using artificial intelligence to make data center operations more energy efficient, this week announced key collaborations with Nvidia, CoreWeave and Applied...
Part of the Seattle skyline as seen from the waterfront. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle ranks No. 3 nationally in AI industry growth according to a new study that measures employment, salaries, job concentration and more in metropolitan areas across the U.S. The new report from...
There’s a new No. 1. Fusion power company Helion Energy has taken the top spot in the latest update of the GeekWire 200, our quarterly ranking of the top privately held technology startups in the Pacific Northwest. Helion replaced Highspot, which announced a merger with Seismic in a...
Vantari co-CEO Vijay Paul, COO Jagrup Kahlon, and co-CEO Nishant Krishnanathan. (Vantari Photos) Vantari, a virtual reality startup that builds “flight simulator” software for doctors and nurses, has officially moved its headquarters to Seattle as it ramps up work with health systems and device...
The team from Auger accepts the Startup of the Year trophy at the 2025 GeekWire Awards. (GeekWire File Photo / Dan DeLong) Boot up the robot trophies, it’s time to vote for the finalists for the 2026 GeekWire Awards! This is your chance to help us honor the top innovators and entrepreneurs in...
The Cove team. (Photo via Cove) Cove, a Silicon Valley startup that helps workers collaborate while using AI agents, announced Tuesday that its team is joining Microsoft. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cove will shut down its product on April 1. “When we started Cove, we set out...
Steven VanRoekel. (ESP Photo) — Steven VanRoekel, a longtime former Microsoft leader and U.S. chief information officer under President Obama, is now CEO of Earth Species Project (ESP). The non-profit research lab is using artificial intelligence to better understand animal communication in...
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, will shift his focus to building frontier AI models and leading the company’s superintelligence efforts under a reorganization announced Tuesday. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Microsoft is reorganizing its Copilot organization, unifying its consumer...
Native CEO Amit Megiddo. (LinkedIn Photo) A new cloud security startup called Native came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, announcing $42 million in funding to build what it describes as a “control plane” for cloud security. The funding includes a $31 million Series A round led by Ballistic...
Amazon’s new one-hour and three-hour delivery options as seen next to products. (Amazon Image) Amazon is speeding up delivery times again. The company announced Tuesday that it is now offering one-hour and three-hour delivery options on more than 90,000 products to cities and towns across...
Juno co-founders Devon Tivona (left) and Sam Felsenthal. (Juno Photo) Fintech giant Ramp announced the acquisition of Juno, a startup founded in 2024 that built a corporate travel platform to help manage non-employee expenses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Juno will maintain its...
OpenCFO co-founders: On the left, Sankalp Singayapally, chief operating officer, and CEO Prudhvi Rao Shedimbi. (OpenCFO Photo) OpenCFO, a Seattle-based startup tackling the “fragmented and manual” nature of modern finance, has raised $2 million to automate financial functions for mid-sized...
The downtown Seattle skyline. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Five months after releasing its “responsible AI plan” providing guidelines for the municipality’s use of artificial intelligence, the City of Seattle has tapped the brakes on the tech’s official deployment for city...
Washington state’s Legislative Building, which houses the Legislature. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) Washington state lawmakers last week approved what’s known as the “millionaires tax,” a landmark shift for a state that has long been a tax-friendly destination for entrepreneurs and high...
Academy Awards host Conan O’Brien. (ABC via YouTube) Amazon has a solid record of success at the Academy Awards, scoring dozens of Oscar nominations and a handful of wins for its studio business over the past nine years. Amazon MGM Studios was shut out of the race this year, but the tech...
(Xbox press image) Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot plans to answer players’ in-game questions by searching the open internet for guide content and presenting it to gamers without attribution, at least based on a demo at last week’s Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. This is a...
Certiv co-founders, from left: CEO Jason Needham, CTO Paul Allen and Chief AI Officer Daniel Morris. (Certiv Photo) A Seattle startup called Certiv emerged from stealth Monday with $4.2 million in funding to build security software that monitors and controls AI agents operating on employee...
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 8, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Zeek Earl, Executive Creative Director at Packrat, on the set of the stop-motion shoot for AWS Kiro last year. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) On a rainy afternoon last November at Seattle Center, I walked into a darkened studio and found a film crew huddled around a miniature set, manipulating...
Inside an Amazon data center. (AWS Photo / Noah Berger) Big tech companies scored a big win in Washington state with the defeat of legislation regulating electricity rate and environmental impacts of data centers — but it lost a significant tax break for the facilities with the 11th-hour passage...
TerraPower signage. (TerraPower Photo) Employees of the nuclear power company TerraPower questioned CEO Chris Levesque on Thursday about connections between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and company board leaders Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. Levesque called the ties a “troubling...
Editor and reporter Taylor Soper joined GeekWire in 2012 out of the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) After more than 13 years as a GeekWire reporter and editor, Taylor Soper is preparing for his next big assignment: he’ll soon join AI2 Incubator as director of AI...
Rivian has a space at Seattle’s University Village where shoppers can look at, sit in, but not drive its electric vehicles. That will change Jan. 1, 2027 when Rivian and Lucid Motors are expected to gain permission in Washington to sell directly to consumers. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) In...
A team of entrepreneurial students from the University of Washington pitches their idea for a startup called Wayfinder to a room full of investors at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) It was a pitch-perfect evening at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle on...
Ali Farhadi has been CEO of the Allen Institute for AI since July 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Ali Farhadi is stepping down as the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), after a two-and-a-half-year tenure that brought growing recognition to the Seattle-based nonprofit research...