Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s CTO of applications and former CEO at Statsig, speaks at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle on March 24. (GeekWire Photos / Kevin Lisota) Vijaye Raji wanted to figure out how to keep up with the firehose of Slack messages. After a couple prompts, he had a...
Manfred Markevitch, co-founder and CEO of GemaTEG, pitches alongside judges, from left, Bryan Hale of Anthos Capital, Yifan Zhang of AI House, and T.A. McCann of Pioneer Square Labs during GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Big Tech...
The finalists for Innovation of the Year at the 2026 GeekWire Awards. Clockwise from top: Starcloud; RevealDx; Alpenglow Biosciences; VerAvanti; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. (GeekWire / Company Photos) From the research lab to the healthcare clinic and all the way above Earth — the...
An Amazon Prime delivery van and a FedEx Ground van on a Seattle street. The two companies are expanding their rekindled partnership into returns. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon and FedEx are expanding their partnership after starting to patch things up last year. The companies...
GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation AI summit drew a full house to Block 41 in Seattle on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) The debate over whether AI will transform industries is over. At GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation summit in Seattle on Tuesday, the founders, executives and...
From left, Aetheon co-founders: Gina Jeneroux, Marie Gill, and Mark Wayman. (LinkedIn and Aetheon Photos) Aetheon, a new startup that helps job candidates map their real world capabilities into work opportunities, has raised $1.24 million as part of its seed round. Founded last year, the...
Charles Lamanna (left), Microsoft’s executive vice president of Business Applications & Agents, interviewed by GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event at Block 41 in Seattle on March 24. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Technical job candidates...
(Epic Games Photo) Epic Games, the gaming giant behind Fortnite, is laying off 82 employees at its Bellevue, Wash.-based office, according to a WARN notice filed with Washington state regulators. Epic announced Tuesday that it is laying off 1,000 employees across the company, or about 20% of...
Blake Resnick, founder and CEO of Brinc Drones, with the company’s new Guardian public safety drone in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Brinc Drones founder and CEO Blake Resnick has a big vision for what the company’s largest-ever drone can accomplish. “To replace the police...
The main floor of the new Brinc Drones factory and headquarters location in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of public safety drones for first responders, is moving its headquarters and factory space to a massive...
Lori Wright. (Photo via LinkedIn) — There’s more shake-up within Microsoft’s gaming unit as Lori Wright announced she is leaving “in the coming weeks.” Wright spent nine years at Microsoft, most recently leading global partnerships and business development and marketing for Xbox. “I leave...
Panelists Hang Huang (InsForge), Brooke Borseth (FUSE), and Nate Bek (Ascend) with moderator Ke Du, offer the perspective from investors at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase. (Photo courtesy B.E.L.L.E) Imagine you’re a property manager, and a washing machine breaks in one of your units. You text a...
Katherine Sizov, CEO and co-founder of Strella, was recognized this year as a 30 Under 30 leader by Forbes. (Photo courtesy of Sizov) Almost a decade ago, a shocking statistic put Katherine Sizov on a new career path. Sizov was doing neuroscience research at the NIH but knew the role wasn’t...
The Allen Institute for AI is releasing an open-source web agent that can navigate and complete tasks in a browser — letting developers look under the hood to understand what’s happening in ways not possible with closed systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The nonprofit...
The Link light rail 2 Line heads east toward Lake Washigton with downtown Seattle and Lumen Field in the background. (Sound Transit Photo) Sound Transit’s Link light rail will carry passengers across Lake Washington for the first time on Saturday with the opening of the Crosslake Connection, and...
Ali Farhadi speaks at the Tech Alliance State of Technology annual luncheon in Seattle, May 2024. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft is hiring a group of top AI researchers from the Seattle-based Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington, including former Ai2 CEO Ali...
There’s still time to grab a last-minute ticket for GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation, a half-day summit in Seattle on Tuesday that will explore how agentic AI is redefining work, creativity, and leadership. Keep reading for details about our speaker lineup, the schedule, logistical...
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Helion Energy’s Polaris fusion demonstration reactor operating with tritium and deuterium fuel. (Helion Photo) The Seattle-area fusion company Helion Energy is negotiating a deal to supply OpenAI with massive amounts of energy, Axios reported Monday. The deal under discussion would have...
Startup founders who pitched for a chance to join the latest Plug and Play Cohort. (Photo courtesy of Plug and Play) Plug and Play has selected the 10 startups that will take part in its third Seattle-area accelerator cohort as the program marks its one-year anniversary in the region. The...
Ryan Gosling set out to save the planet, and he may just save Amazon’s movie-making credibility. “Project Hail Mary,” the sci-fi epic that stars Gosling as a scientist sent on a mission to save Earth from extinction, grossed $80.6 million in its opening weekend, marking the biggest box...
Jeff Bezos framed this copy of a 2006 BusinessWeek cover, reflecting Wall Street’s skepticism about AWS. (Jeff Bezos via X, May 2022) In the early days of Amazon Web Services, technical evangelist Jeff Barr was putting in long hours on the road, pitching a novel concept: rent computing power for...
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 15, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (OneWeb Illustration) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is asking the Federal Communications Commission for authority to send up to 51,600 data center satellites into low Earth orbit, signaling its entry into an...
An artist’s conception of Amazon’s Leo satellite constellation. The satellite internet initiative sits in the same division as Amazon’s new phone project, raising the question of whether Amazon could eventually provide its own wireless connectivity. (Amazon Illustration) When Reuters reported...
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon is working on a new smartphone, code-named “Transformer,” more than a decade after the Fire Phone debacle, according to Reuters. We dig into the connection to a past GeekWire scoop: former Microsoft Xbox leader J Allard joined Amazon’s devices team...
Different this time? Jeff Bezos unveils the Amazon Fire Phone in June 2014. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon is working on another phone. That’s the jaw-dropper from Reuters this morning, reporting that the company is developing a new smartphone codenamed “Transformer” within its...
Marc Cummings, president and CEO of Life Science Washington, speaking at a one-day forum focused on AI-driven biotech that was held in Seattle in October 2025. (Life Science Washington Photo) Seattle is already a top global hub for AI-driven biotechnology. It just doesn’t know how to say...
Kevan Kryslter, CFO of Carbon Robotics. (Carbon Robotics Photo) Agtech company Carbon Robotics appointed Kevan Krysler as chief financial officer. The Seattle startup, known for zapping weeds with lasers, reports it has surpassed $100 million in annual revenue. Carbon has also been name-checked...
Amazon’s beloved Treasure Truck finally ran out of road in 2022, after about a seven-year run. But Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores and an early champion of the deals-on-wheels concept, once worried that Marshawn Lynch was going to crash the party just as it got rolling. In...
A Lime e-scooter rider cruises past on the sidewalk in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, home to Amazon HQ. New tech on the scooters coming this summer will generate audible and app alerts warning riders to move to a safer riding area. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Lime scooters in...
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...