LAS VEGAS — After spending nearly two hours trying to impress the crowd with new LLMs, advanced AI chips, and autonomous agents, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman showed that the quickest way to a developer’s heart isn’t a neural network. It’s a discount.

One of the loudest cheers at the AWS re:Invent keynote Tuesday was for Database Savings Plans, a mundane but much-needed update that promises to cut bills by up to 35% across database services like Aurora, RDS, and DynamoDB in exchange for a one-year commitment.

The reaction illustrated a familiar tension for cloud customers: Even as tech giants introduce increasingly sophisticated AI tools, many companies and developers are still wrestling with the basic challenge of managing costs for core services.

The new savings plans address the issue by offering flexibility that didn’t exist before, letting developers switch database engines or move regions without losing their discount. 

“AWS Database Savings Plans: Six Years of Complaining Finally Pays Off,” is the headline from the charmingly sardonic and reliably snarky Corey Quinn of Last Week in AWS, who specializes in reducing AWS bills as the chief cloud economist at Duckbill.

Quinn called the new “better than it has any right to be” because it covers a wider range of services than expected, but he pointed out several key drawbacks: the plans are limited to one-year terms (meaning you can’t lock in bigger savings for three years), they exclude older instance generations, and they do not apply to storage or backup costs.

He also cited the lack of EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) coverage, calling the inability to move spending between computing and databases a missed opportunity for flexibility.

But the database pricing wasn’t the only basic upgrade to get a big reaction. For example, the crowd also cheered loudly for Lambda durable functions, a feature that lets serverless code pause and wait for long-running background tasks without failing.

Garman made these announcements as part of a new re:Invent gimmick: a 10-minute sprint through 25 non-AI product launches, complete with an on-stage shot clock. The bit was a nod to the breadth of AWS, and to the fact that not everyone in the audience came for AI news.

He announced the Database Savings Plans in the final seconds, as the clock ticked down to zero. And based on the way he set it up, Garman knew it was going to be a hit — describing it as “one last thing that I think all of you are going to love.”

Judging by the cheers, at least, he was right.

Modern Hydrogen — a clean energy startup with technology that at one time seemed to delight Bill Gates and attracted his investment — has now laid off most of its employees and left contractors and vendors anxious about unpaid invoices.

The Seattle-area company has not publicly offered an explanation for the downsizing or said how many workers were impacted. In a recent email to business partners, officials referenced recent funding changes and said it was undergoing a “broader restructuring effort.”

Modern Hydrogen raised $125 million since launching a decade ago. It developed a device for cracking natural gas molecules, producing hydrogen as a climate friendly fuel and a material known as solid carbon that has a variety of industrial uses, including as a key ingredient in asphalt.

Gates explored that application during a visit to Modern Hydrogen last year. The Microsoft co-founder grabbed a wheelbarrow and shovel to fill a parking lot pothole with the carbon-trapping asphalt.

The layoffs hit as the company was preparing to finish its first commercial unit for a customer in Texas and had performed two successful pilot projects with utilities in Portland, Ore., and Miami.

In January, Modern Hydrogen announced a memorandum of understanding with Puget Sound Energy, a major Seattle-area utility, to collaborate in identifying industrial customers interested in the clean hydrogen technology. That was expected to include steel and cement makers and pulp-and-paper manufacturers that use processes requiring ultra-high temperatures that could be met by hydrogen.

Given that the company had seemingly solved the new technology’s technical hurdles and was building commercial momentum, employees and business partners were surprised by the layoffs.

“A lot of folks were rooting for us,” Michael Jung, Modern Hydrogen’s former government affairs and public policy lead, told GeekWire. “I think we would have solved some key problems in the energy transition.”

On Oct. 30, Amir Moftakhar, Modern Hydrogen’s chief financial officer, sent an email to some of its subcontractors and vendors disclosing the change of course.

“We wanted to inform you that, due to recent changes in our funding situation and a significant reduction in company operations, we must terminate our engagement with you effective 10/30/2025,” stated the email, which was shared with GeekWire by one of its recipients.

“This decision is part of a broader restructuring effort which is being developed and does not reflect on your work,” Moftakhar continued. “We want to sincerely thank you for the professionalism, dedication, and quality you’ve shown throughout our collaboration and for your understanding.”

It is unclear if the company is closing entirely, what will happen with the machinery and technology, and if some component of the effort will continue in a different form.

GeekWire reached out to Modern Hydrogen CEO Tony Pan for an official comment and will update the story if he responds. We contacted a Gates’ representative for a comment as well.

One subcontractor, who asked not to be named, said that until the email went out, “things were cooking along” in their collaboration with Modern Hydrogen. Now the company is anxious about if and when it will get paid for outstanding invoices that total tens of thousands of dollars.

Modern Hydrogen got its start in 2015 at Intellectual Ventures, an innovation hub created by former Microsoft researcher Nathan Myhrvold with backing from Gates. The startup, which was originally called Modern Electron, initially focused on devices that paired with home furnaces and hot water tanks to capture the appliances’ wasted heat and turn it into electricity.

In 2023 it pivoted to focus on hydrogen and changed its name. The company’s most recent round was $25 million raised a year ago. It had approximately 80 employees at the time, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data. Modern Hydrogen co-founder and former CTO Max Mankin left the company in January.

Gates has in the past been an enthusiastic supporter of hydrogen fuel. In June 2022, he posted a Gates Notes touting the so-called “Swiss Army knife” of clean energy given its versatile applications. He was a prominent investor in the company, whose other backers included NextEra Energy, one of the world’s largest utilities; Miura; National Grid Partners; IRONGREY; Starlight Ventures; Valo Ventures and Metaplanet.

Hydrogen saw a surge of interest during the Biden administration, which created hydrogen hubs around the U.S. to bolster the technology. That funding and support has been largely curtailed under the Trump administration.

And on Oct. 28, Gates posted a memo on his personal blog that dampened his earlier excitement around climate efforts.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Seattle biotech startup Curi Bio, which enables the screening of new drugs using cells and 3D tissue models derived from human cells, announced $10 million in new funding.

Curi Bio’s customers include large biopharmaceutical and biotech companies such Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, UCB, Novartis and others. Its Series B round was led by Seoul-based DreamCIS, which supports biopharma R&D through extensive research services.

“We are thrilled to partner with DreamCIS, who shares our conviction that drug discovery urgently needs more human-relevant data at the preclinical stage,” said Michael Cho, Curi Bio’s chief strategy officer, in a statement. “The vast majority of new drugs fail in human clinical trials because preclinical animal and 2D cell models have failed to be good predictors of human outcomes.”

Curi Bio’s platform integrates bioengineered tissues created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with data collection and analysis. The additional funding will expedite its development of new platforms for cardiac, skeletal muscle, metabolic, smooth muscle and neuromuscular diseases, the company said.

The Seattle area is a hub of life science and biotech companies, including numerous efforts focused on AI-assisted research. Researchers have emphasized the need to test computer-generated drug candidates in the lab to verify their capabilities and impacts.

“Curi Bio’s unique integration of cells, systems, and data is a paradigm shift for preclinical drug discovery,” said Jeounghee Yoo, CEO of DreamCIS. “We were incredibly impressed by the company’s innovative platforms and their ability to generate functional data from 3D human tissues at scale.”

Curi Bio has raised $20 million from investors and $12 million from federal grants.

The company spun out of the University of Washington a decade ago as NanoSurface Biomedical. In April, Curi Bio celebrated the opening of its new 13,942-square-foot headquarters and research facility on the Seattle waterfront.

Yoodli is on a roll.

The Seattle startup, which sells AI-powered software to help people practice real-world conversations such as sales calls and feedback sessions, announced a $40 million Series B round on Tuesday to fuel growth. WestBridge Capital, a $7 billion global investment firm, led the round.

The fresh funding comes less than a year after the company’s $13.7 million Series A round in May.

Yoodli’s software lets users create personas to simulate conversations with another person or multiple people. The company’s model is trained on effective communication techniques and can be customized depending on an organization’s goals. Customers include SAP, Google, Snowflake, the University of Washington, Korn Ferry, and others.

“At a moment when AI is replacing human jobs, we’re doubling down on a different belief: that AI should help people become the best version of themselves in the conversations that matter most,” co-founder and CEO Varun Puri wrote on LinkedIn.

Yoodli’s revenue has grown around 900% in the past year. Its headcount has tripled to more than 40 people.

Puri told GeekWire earlier this year that Yoodli is like a “batting cage before game time,” or a flight simulator for communication. The idea is to replace passive formats such as slide decks and training videos with interactive practice that builds conversational muscle memory.

The company said it will use the new funding to expand into what it calls “experiential learning.”

“Experiential learning is the next step of conversation coaching — helping people learn, practice, and apply skills with roleplays at the center of their experience,” Puri wrote. “We’re making learning more fun and actionable for individuals and much more closely tied to ROI for organizations.”

The raise comes amid competition in the AI-powered workforce training market, as employers look for tools to upskill workers in communication, leadership, and customer engagement — areas where traditional learning management systems may have limitations.

Puri and Esha Joshi launched Yoodli in 2021 at the AI2 incubator in Seattle. The startup got off the ground with a consumer-focused offering targeted at practicing public speaking.

Neotribe and Madrona also participated in the latest funding round. Total capital raised is nearly $60 million.

LAS VEGAS — Amazon is pitching a future where AI works while humans sleep, announcing a collection of what it calls “frontier agents” capable of handling complex, multi-day projects without needing a human to be constantly involved.

The announcement Tuesday at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference is an attempt by the cloud giant to leapfrog Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, OpenAI, and others as the industry moves beyond interactive AI assistants toward fully autonomous digital workers.

The rollout features three specialized agents: A virtual developer for Amazon’s Kiro coding platform that navigates multiple code repositories to fix bugs; a security agent that actively tests applications for vulnerabilities; and a DevOps agent that responds to system outages. 

Unlike standard AI chatbots that reset after each session, Amazon says the frontier agents have long-term memory and can work for hours or days to solve ambiguous problems.

“You could go to sleep and wake up in the morning, and it’s completed a bunch of tasks,” said Deepak Singh, AWS vice president of developer agents and experiences, in an interview. 

Amazon is starting with the agents focused on software development, but Singh made it clear that it’s just the beginning of a larger long-term rollout of similar agents. 

“The term is broad,” he said. “It can be applied in many, many domains.”

During the opening keynote Tuesday morning, AWS CEO Matt Garman said believes AI agents represent an “inflection point” in AI development, transforming AI from a “technical wonder” into something that delivers real business value.

In the future, Garman said, “there’s going to be millions of agents inside of every company across every imaginable field.”

To keep frontier agents from breaking critical systems, Amazon says humans remain the gatekeepers. The DevOps agent stops short of making fixes automatically, instead generating a detailed “mitigation plan” that an engineer approves. The Kiro developer agent submits its work as proposed pull requests, ensuring a human reviews the code before it’s merged.

Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others are all moving in a similar direction. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot is becoming a multi-agent system, Google is adding autonomous features to Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude Code is designed to handle extended coding tasks. 

Amazon is announcing the frontier agents during the opening keynote by AWS CEO Matt Garman at re:Invent, its big annual conference. The DevOps and security agents are available in public preview starting Tuesday; the Kiro developer agent will roll out in the coming months.

Some of the other notable announcements at re:Invent today:

AI Factories: AWS will ship racks of its servers directly to customer data centers to run as a private “AI Factory,” in its words. This matters for governments and banks, for example, that want modern AI tools but are legally restricted from moving sensitive data off-premises.

New AI Models: Amazon announced Nova 2, the next generation of the generative AI models it first unveiled here a year ago. They include a “Pro” model for complex reasoning, a “Sonic” model for natural voice conversations, and a new “Omni” model that processes text, audio, and video simultaneously.

Custom Models: Amazon introduced Nova Forge, a tool that lets companies build their own high-end AI models from scratch by combining their private data with Amazon’s own datasets. It’s designed for businesses that find standard models too generic but lack the resources to build one entirely alone.

Trainium: Amazon released its newest home-grown AI processor, Trainium 3, which it says is roughly 4x faster and 40% more efficient than the previous version. It’s central to Amazon’s strategy to lower the cost of training AI and provide a cheaper alternative to Nvidia GPUs. Executives also previewed Trainium 4, promising to double energy efficiency again.

Killing “Tech Debt”: AWS expanded its Transform service to rewrite and modernize code from basically any source, including proprietary languages. The tool uses AI agents to analyze and convert these custom legacy systems into modern languages, a process Amazon claims is up to five times faster than manual coding.

Stay tuned to GeekWire for more coverage from the event this week.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Plenty of startup founders and product builders envision what they’re making as something that will simplify processes or improve workflow for customers. Kiana Ehsani sees her creation as a means to spending more time outdoors.

Certainly there’s much more to it than that, but when Ehsani — the co-founder and CEO of Seattle AI startup Vercept — is running an ultramarathon, climbing up a mountain or skiing down one, she can’t help but consider how her technology makes it all the more enjoyable.

“I’m just the happiest when I’m in nature, when I’m not behind my computer, letting my mind be present in the moment, listening to the steps of my foot on the trail, or on snow or ice,” Ehsani said.

It’s what motivated her and her colleagues at Vercept to build Vy, an AI product that “sees” and understands computer screens like a human would. It records a user performing tasks across different software or websites — and then autonomously runs the same workflow from a natural language command.

The idea is to use AI to automate repetitive tasks, like entering data, producing video content, organizing invoices, and more. And Ehsani said Vy makes it so not everyone needs to know how to work so many specialized software programs.

“I don’t want to become skilled in every single dimension that exists out there,” she said. “The more time you’re not spending on repetitive work that is not using your brain power, then the more time you have to be creative.”

Ehsani’s goal is to be able to send emails or check code and Slack messages when she’s somewhere in nature without good internet service. Vy handles the tasks on its own and reports back about what it completed.

“I am most creative when I’m on a hike,” she said. “If I could just have that more often, to be able to have that creative mind, flowing and producing more, and I didn’t have to be stuck behind the desk, then the world would be my playground.”

‘Repeatedly transformed herself’

Ehsani’s journey to AI innovator and Seattle startup founder started in Iran, where she lived until she graduated from Sharif University. She ranked 64th in the country’s University Entrance Exam.

“I was a geek,” she said. “I was publishing papers as an undergrad, and I would go and give talks at conferences internationally, and I was so proud of what I was doing.”

She came to the U.S. in 2015 to get her Master’s and PhD in computer science at the University of Washington.

“Within the first year I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of possibility in AI and I want to get more involved,'” Ehsani said.

After internships at Google and Meta, she joined Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) where she spent four years, overseeing the Ai2 robotics and embodied artificial intelligence teams as a senior researcher.

At the end of 2024, Ehsani launched Vercept alongside Oren Etzioni, the longtime AI specialist and UW professor who was founding CEO of Ai2. They were joined by Matt Deitke, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick.

Etzioni said that while some people are “all heart” — good people with high emotional intelligence — or “all brain” — smart, sharp and cerebral — it’s rare to find someone who is both. Ehsani, who he called brilliant, dedicated and intuitive, is that person.

“One uncommon thing about Kiana is how she has repeatedly transformed herself,” Etzioni said via email. “From a brilliant theoretician in Iran to a creative and award-winning vision and robotics researcher at UW and Ai2, to kick-ass founder and CEO now. And the best is yet to come!”

Competing with fewer resources

Ehsani remembers being frustrated and bored by the challenges that AI was being tasked to solve, such as simple image classification, just 10 years ago. She wanted to solve real problems and show that AI could interact with the real world.

That mindset drove her interest in computer vision and robotics research. But again, she grew frustrated by the slow pace of hardware development and decided she wanted to work with AI models and virtual robots that take actions on behalf of a user.

Growing up in Iran she had become accustomed to limited resources. Working in academia and then in research for a nonprofit, she again had to think outside the box and find ways to compete against big AI labs.

She still embraces a scrappy startup mentality as Vercept competes against OpenAI (Operator), Google (Project Mariner), Amazon (Nova Act), and others with tools that automate tasks across browsers and apps, fueled by advances in generative AI.

“That’s the mindset that made me grow more, and that’s why at Vercept we are training models a lot more efficiently and less resource-heavy than anyone out there,” she said. “We love being scrappy and proving that you don’t need billions and trillions of dollars to make AI work.”

Just this week, Vercept launched a newly built version of Vy that works on both Windows and MacOS. Ehsani said the app is more robust and Vercept’s benchmark results have improved drastically.

The startup has grown to a team of 12 and in June raised a $16 million seed round. In July, Ehsani lost Deitke, one of her co-founders, who was lured by Meta to join its newly formed Superintelligence Lab.

Deitke called Ehsani “an incredible leader and visionary” whose strong background in robotics makes her extremely well suited for working at the frontier of computer use, which he said is really just robotics without many of the challenges of the physical world.

“Working with her is infectious and inspiring,” Deitke said. “She has an incredible work ethic and is constantly energized and comes up with amazing ideas while brainstorming that only become obvious to the rest of us after a while.”

But he said more than anything, Ehsani’s a “tremendous person” who leaves a lasting mark with her kindness and ambition.

“She’s truly an exceptional person,” Deitke said.

Several weeks ago, Ehsani was challenging herself in nature yet again, this time with a 50k ultramarathon that featured 8,000 feet of elevation gain.

Freezing, thirsty, and dragging herself up a hill, she likened the race to running a startup, writing on LinkedIn about how despite everything going wrong and plans changing last minute, she still had to stay flexible and believe she’d make it, even when others seemed ahead.

“That’s the story of my life,” she told GeekWire. “I live that every day.”

Nuclear power company TerraPower has passed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for a permit to build a reactor in Wyoming. The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America.

TerraPower’s Natrium design pairs a small modular reactor (SMR) with an integrated thermal battery. The SMR generates 345 megawatts of continuous electrical power. The thermal battery, which stores excess heat in molten salt, allows the system to surge its output to 500 megawatts for more than five hours, generating enough energy to power 400,000 homes at maximum capacity.

“Today is a momentous occasion for TerraPower, our project partners and the Natrium design,” said company CEO Chris Levesque in a statement issued Monday. The favorable assessment “reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

The company launched in 2006 and is building on technology used in an experimental breeder reactor in Idaho that operated for nearly 30 years before shutting down.

TerraPower set a goal of producing power at the Kemmerer, Wyo., site by 2030. The reactor is located near a retiring coal plant.

There is tremendous renewed interest in nuclear as tech giants and data center operators scramble for new energy sources to power AI operations. Microsoft, Amazon and others have invested in a combination of existing nuclear plants that can be restarted and construction of new facilities. The Trump administration has pledged to expedite permitting.

“We’ve finished our technical work on the Kemmerer review a month ahead of our already accelerated schedule, as we aim to make licensing decisions for new, advanced reactors in no more than 18 months,” said Jeremy Groom, acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

“We thank TerraPower for promptly addressing the agency’s questions to ensure safety and enable the NRC to efficiently process the application,” he added in a statement.

The NRC said there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing a construction permit for the reactor. TerraPower last year broke ground in Wyoming on non-nuclear components of the facility.

In June the company announced $650 million in new funding from Gates, who helped start TerraPower, as well as the venture arm of chip giant NVIDIA. It previously raised more than $1 billion, including investments from Gates as well as South Korea-based SK Inc. and SK Innovation, according to PitchBook. TerraPower has additionally been awarded roughly $2 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy.

There are still additional permitting hurdles to complete:

• In the coming weeks, the NRC staff will provide a safety evaluation and final environmental impact statement to the Commission for the final phase of the licensing.
• The Commission then determines whether the staff’s review supports the findings required to issue the permit, and votes on whether to direct the staff to issue the permit.
• If the NRC issues the permit, TerraPower will need to submit an operating license application for approval.

— Smartsheet’s C-suite shuffle continues with the hiring of Scott Torrey as chief revenue officer.

Torrey previously led salary data company Payscale as CEO from 2019 to 2021. He spent the past three years as executive chairman at finance software startup Tesorio, and was at Concur for nearly two decades, including six years as chief revenue officer.

His new role marks a reunion of sorts as he teams up again with Concur co-founder Rajeev Singh, who recently became CEO at Smartsheet.

“Smartsheet is on a growth trajectory, and Scott’s leadership will drive our go-to-market success,” Singh said in a press release.

Smartsheet earlier this year hired Pratima Arora as its chief product officer and Ravi Soin as chief information security officer. It also named Cynthia Tee as chief technology officer.

Founded two decades ago, Smartsheet is one of the Seattle region’s iconic tech companies, with a large customer base of major businesses and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It went private earlier this year in a $8.4 billion deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.

Speaking to the company’s annual Engage conference in Seattle last month, Singh said it’s time for Smartsheet to “step out of the shadows” and challenge old perceptions of Smartsheet as simply an online spreadsheet tool. The company recently announced new features as part of its “Intelligent Work Management” platform that combines AI agents, knowledge graphs, and automation. 

— Amar Subramanya, a top AI researcher who joined Microsoft in July as a corporate VP, is changing jobs again and joining Apple as vice president of AI.

Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, the tech giant announced Monday. He’ll lead Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation.

Apple also announced that John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down.

Before joining Microsoft, Subramanya was at Google for more than 16 years, where he helped lead work on Gemini. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2009 and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft for a year in the mid-2000s.

“AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release.

Apple has struggled to catch up with competitors in the AI race and recently delayed a new version of its Siri voice assistant.

— Torben Severson left Amazon after 17 years to take a new role as vice president and head of global business development at OpenAI. Severson held multiple business development leadership roles, most recently as chief of staff to Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.

“Joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Severson said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m drawn to moments of transformation — and it’s rare to be part of something so squarely at the frontier of what’s possible.”

Severson said he was the first person to join “what became Corporate Business Development” at Amazon in 2008. “I’m deeply grateful for the people I’ve learned from and worked alongside,” he wrote. “Amazon shaped how I think, taught me how to navigate complex problems, and gave me the opportunity to build and lead exceptional teams. Through those experiences I learned the value of high judgment, clarity in ambiguity, and building trust through curiosity and rigor.”

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, said last year that it opened an office in Bellevue, Wash. The company recently acquired Bellevue-based startup Statsig.  

Amazon on Monday officially launched Amazon Now, a new ultra-fast service it’s testing in Seattle and Philadelphia that promises delivery in about 30 minutes or less for household essentials and fresh groceries. 

The announcement confirms reporting by GeekWire last week that revealed Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Permit filings showed the company planned to test a new delivery concept using Amazon Flex drivers dispatched from the location at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

In a blog post, Amazon detailed the new service, available inside the existing Amazon shopping app and website. Customers in eligible neighborhoods can look for a “30-Minute Delivery” option in the navigation bar, browse a curated catalog, track orders in real time, and tip their drivers. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

Amazon Now covers a wide range of items that people tend to need quickly — including milk, eggs, fresh produce, toothpaste, cosmetics, pet treats, diapers, paper products, electronics, seasonal items, and over-the-counter medicines, plus snacks like chips and dips.

Amazon did not provide a timeline for expanding Amazon Now to additional markets.

To hit the 30-minute window, Amazon is using smaller, specialized facilities placed close to where customers live and work.

As GeekWire reported last week, permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

By operating its own Amazon Now micro-stores, the company aims to better control inventory, labor, and pickup efficiency as it pushes deeper into “sub-same-day” delivery — a sector where it is competing with quick-commerce and micro-fulfillment players such as GoPuff, DoorDash, and others.

The new stores could also boost Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.

Amazon previously shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery service that relied on Flex drivers picking up small orders from malls and brick-and-mortar retailers, after reports that drivers often left stores with just one or two items.

Washington state is moving to set its own regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in the absence of federal legislation, laying out recommendations for how lawmakers should regulate AI in healthcare, education, policing, workplaces and more.

A new interim report from the Washington state AI Task Force notes that the federal government’s “hands-off approach” to AI has created “a crucial regulatory gap that leaves Washingtonians vulnerable.”

The report lands as the Trump administration pushes a deregulatory national AI policy and briefly considered an executive order to preempt state AI laws before putting the idea on hold after bipartisan pushback, according to Reuters.

The new report published this week notes that AI has “grown more powerful and prevalent than ever before” over the past year, driven by technical advances, the rise of AI agents, and open AI platforms transforming work and daily life.

The report lays out eight recommendations to the Washington state Legislature, including a requirement to improve transparency in AI development — mandating that AI developers publicly disclose the “provenance, quality, quantity and diversity of datasets” used to train models, and explain how training data is processed to mitigate errors and bias. The recommendation includes carve-outs protecting trade secrets.

State lawmakers introduced proposals earlier this year on AI development transparency and disclosure but their bills stalled.

The task force also recommends the creation of a grant program, leveraging public and private money, to support small businesses and startups building AI that serves the public interest — particularly for founders outside the Seattle area and those facing inequitable access to capital.

The report notes that the program would help Washington retain talent and “maintain its relevance as a tech hub.” An earlier bill to create such a program, HB 1833, stalled in the 2025 session.

Other recommendations include:

• Promote responsible AI governance for high-risk systems — defined as those with “potential to significantly impact people’s lives, health, safety, or fundamental rights.”
• Invest in K-12 STEM, higher education AI programs, professional development for teachers, and expanded broadband in rural communities.
• Improve transparency in healthcare prior authorization — requiring that any decision to deny, delay, or modify health services based on medical necessity is made only by qualified clinicians, even when AI tools are used.
• Develop guidelines for AI in the workplace, including a call for employers to disclose when AI is used for employee monitoring, discipline, termination, and promotion.
• Require law enforcement to publicly disclose AI tools they use, including generative AI for report writing, predictive policing systems, license plate readers, and facial recognition.
• Adopt NIST Ethical AI Principles as guiding framework, building on existing state guidance that already relies on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

Most recommendations passed by wide margins, though the law-enforcement transparency proposal drew some dissenting votes from task force members, including a representative from the ACLU.

The interim report does not yet include specific Washington-focused recommendations on generative AI in elections and political ads, AI and intellectual property, or companion chatbots, even as it highlights those issues as areas of growing state activity elsewhere.

Washington is entering the AI policy arena behind some peers that have already put broad frameworks into place, including California and Colorado. Others have targeted specific use cases.

Washington lawmakers introduced multiple AI bills in 2025, but only one passed: HB 1205, which makes it a crime to knowingly distribute a forged digital likeness (deepfake) to defraud, harass, threaten, or intimidate another, or for an unlawful purpose.

The task force report notes that 73 new AI-related laws were enacted in 27 states in 2025 across areas such as child safety, transparency, algorithmic accountability, education, labor, healthcare, public safety, deepfakes, and energy.

Washington’s task force has 19 members spanning tech companies (including Microsoft and Salesforce), labor, civil liberties groups, academia, and state agencies.

The task force, created in 2024, must deliver three reports: a preliminary report released last year, this interim report, and a final report by July 1, 2026.

Read the full interim report below.

Washington state AI task force lays out blueprint for regulation by GeekWire

In an unusual act of philanthropy, an anonymous donor has committed more than $50 million to the University of Washington to support the little-known field of medical laboratory science. The funds will be distributed over the next half-century.

UW leaders called the gift “transformational,” noting it’s the largest gift they’re aware of for this particular specialty.

The donation will immediately impact the current class of 35 students in the Medical Laboratory Science Undergraduate Program by covering their tuition costs — waiving about $9,000 per student — during the two quarters of clinical rotations in their senior year.

When the students learned the news at an event Monday at the UW’s Seattle campus, many began to cry.

Students who graduate with a four-year degree in medical laboratory sciences are essential, behind-the-scenes healthcare workers. They collect biological samples, process the material, help interpret the results, and provide necessary data for individual patients and public health institutions.

Dr. Geoff Baird, chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at UW Medicine, praised the program for training these healthcare professionals.

“No one really ever pays attention to the glue that holds the whole thing together,” Baird said of their critical role.

Dr. Tim Dellit, UW Medicine CEO and the dean of the School of Medicine Tim Dellit, echoed the sentiment in sharing news of the gift with the students. “In many ways, you are the unsung heroes,” he said. “You work behind the scenes that allow all of the healthcare machinery to continue to work.”

The field, however, is facing a challenge. Despite its importance, the workforce is aging, and there aren’t enough students graduating with the needed expertise, said Baird. The new gift is designed to help address that shortage by expanding the two-year medical laboratory sciences program from the current 70 students to 100 over the next decade.

Graduates earn a four-year bachelor’s degree and professional certifications, ready for employment at clinics and hospitals.

The university didn’t share details about the donor, except to say that he is a Washington resident and a big fan of the longtime, local burger franchise, Dick’s Drive-In. To celebrate the news, he requested that the students were served burgers at the announcement.

For the students, the financial relief felt profound.

Senior Lily Koplowitz-Fleming was grateful that she won’t have to juggle an additional job on top of the nine-hours, five-days a week that’s required by the clinical rotation. Instead, she’ll be able to focus on the training for her future career, which she said is a meaningful blend of “skills-based and knowledge-based” work.

Another senior, Keila Uchimura, also said she enrolled in the program because she “really likes being able to see the direct impact you make.”

While medical lab scientists typically work in the background, their roles became more noticeable during the pandemic as people rushed to get tested and waited anxiously for results.

Baird praised the donor and his gift in an earlier GeekWire interview.

“The morality, the righteousness of it — it’s just really impressive that someone was able to find that generosity,” he said. “And we’re all in the state of Washington forever indebted — not just the students.”

This story first appeared on Real Estate News.

Home search leader Zillow has changed the way that it shares climate risk information — directing visitors to the website of data partner First Street rather than surfacing it on Zillow home detail pages.

“This update ensures consumers continue to have access to important information to help them consider factors such as insurance, repair costs and long-term homeownership planning, and reflects our long-standing commitment to empowering consumers with transparent information,” a Zillow spokesperson shared with Real Estate News over email when asked about the move.

What’s less clear is the role one of the nation’s largest MLSs played in the change.

First reported by The New York Times in late November, Zillow’s removal of climate risk data from its listings comes as industry stakeholders vigorously debate over the ownership of listing data and as home insurance prices continue to skyrocket.

Why Zillow made the change — for all its listings

The New York Times story highlighted complaints from real estate agents along with the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) and its CEO Art Carter about perceived discrepancies and inconsistencies in the climate risk data, and implied that Zillow’s change was done under pressure from CRMLS.

In a statement shared with Real Estate News, a Zillow spokesperson said that the change was made to comply with different MLS requirements but did not highlight CRMLS specifically. Zillow’s change in the way it displays climate risk data has been applied to all listings on the site, not just homes in California or those within CRMLS’ jurisdiction. 

“Zillow remains committed to providing consumers with information that helps them make informed real estate decisions. We updated our climate risk product experience to adhere to varying MLS requirements and maintain a consistent experience for all consumers,” the spokesperson said.

However, other leading portals are still showing climate data in home listings. “You can still find property level climate risk scores on Redfin,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather wrote in a social media post that linked to the New York Times story. 

CRMLS’s role and response

“There was no change in the rules,” a CRMLS spokesperson said over email when asked if there was a specific update in MLS standards and practices that would have led to Zillow’s move.  

So why now? If Zillow has implied that the change was made in order to remain in compliance with MLS practices, what exactly was CRMLS’s role in the change to home search site’s display of climate data? The dispute between Zillow and CRMLS could also be viewed as another example of the ongoing fight among major industry stakeholders over the control of listings and listing data. 

In October, CRMLS and Compass engaged in a feud over the MLS’s end user licensing agreement, which Compass CEO Robert Reffkin argued forced “over 100,000 agents to accept a 10-page agreement giving CRMLS the right to sell the agents’ content and contribution.” Carter said the MLS serves its users by managing the data they provide “as a set, not as a bunch of individual fragments” and the agreement reflects that.

The impact of skyrocketing insurance rates

As organized real estate and home search sites debate the accuracy of climate data and the merits of displaying it on property listings, one issue that isn’t being disputed is the rising cost of home insurance. Zillow’s move to point consumers off the site to explore climate risks comes at a time when more homeowners are seeing major increases in their insurance premiums and others are actually seeing the steep costs of insurance eat into their home value. 

While speaking at a November event for ResiClub, Cotality Chief Data and Analytics Officer John Rogers said the average annual change in homeowners insurance premiums was 14% for both 2023 and 2024 and is expected to be 10% in 2025. Rogers also forecasted an 8% rise in premiums for 2026 and in 2027. 

But California home owners and buyers are being hit particularly hard. According to the California Association of Realtors’ latest State of the Market annual report and survey, over a quarter of member agents signaled that their buyers were having difficulty obtaining insurance. And the number of buyers losing out on a home because of issues with home insurance has been increasing. Last year, over 14% of member agents reported that at least one sale fell through because buyers could not secure homeowners insurance while the number rose to over 16% in 2025.

— Expedia Group appointed Xavier Amatriain as its first chief artificial intelligence officer and data officer. He joins the Seattle-based travel giant from Google where he served as vice president of product in AI and Compute Enablement. Other past employers include Quora, LinkedIn and Netflix.

“[Amatriain’s] deep expertise in building large-scale AI platforms will help redefine how people experience travel,” Expedia CTO Ramana Thumu said in a statement. “Expedia Group operates at a scale few can match, and we invest deeply in our talent, giving technologists the space to learn, experiment, and push the boundaries of what AI can do.”

Amatriain, based in San Jose, Calif., has mapped a diverse career path — he’s been a university professor in Spain, a healthcare startup co-founder, a researcher, and an engineering leader.

— Textio co-founder and former CEO Kieran Snyder returned to Microsoft as vice president of AI transformation.

“My goal in this new role is to help Microsoft be the best living case study of effective, human AI transformation in the world,” Snyder said on LinkedIn.

Snyder began her tech career at Microsoft in 2004, working on the Bing search engine and Windows. In 2014, she launched Textio, which claims to be the first-to-market venture using AI for HR functions. The company’s software helps organizations recruit, hire and retain inclusive teams.

Over the past two years, Snyder ran a business called “nerd processor,” which offered research and leadership coaching, and served as chief scientist emeritus at Textio, where she is now on the board of directors.

— Ross Tennenbaum is leaving his role as president of Avalara for a new role with an unnamed public company, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Tennenbaum joined the tax software giant in 2019 and was previously CFO. He worked at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse before joining Avalara, which relocated its headquarters from Seattle to North Carolina following its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2022. It filed to go public, again, earlier this year.

— After more than 12 years at T-Mobile, Janice Kapner is leaving the telecommunications giant. Kapner was chief communications and corporate responsibility officer and executive VP at the Bellevue, Wash., company where she led a team of more than 160 employees.

“From Magenta sneakers and confetti cannons to competitive stunts, big bets, and a front-line team that made the brand burst off the page and into the world — these are moments I’ll never forget,” Kapner said on LinkedIn. “They shaped me as much as I helped shape them.”

Prior to T-Mobile, Kapner was at Microsoft for more than a decade.

— Former Microsoft and Amazon leader Vinita Ananth is now senior director of product for the cloud company Nebius. Ananth, based in the Seattle area, has been working since July on stealth-mode startups HelpViber and FulcrumAX. Ananth called the decision to leave these ventures “difficult and emotional.”

“I’m thrilled that my co-founder will continue driving both HelpViber and FulcrumAX forward, with a strategic focus on customer traction, platform maturity, and meaningful funding milestones over the coming year,” she said on LinkedIn, adding that she’ll continue in advisor and co-founder roles.

— PayPal appointed Bo English-Wiczling as VP of global developer relations. English-Wiczling, based in Seattle, joins from Oracle, where she worked for nearly nine years in leadership roles in database product management and developer relations. Previous employers include Amazon and Best Buy.

“After an incredible journey working alongside talented engineers, community leaders, and innovation-minded partners, this new role feels like the perfect next step,” English-Wiczling said on LinkedIn. “I’ll be working at the intersection of PayPal’s global payments platform and developer ecosystems — helping build, grow, and energize the communities and relationships that power our future.”

— Jaimin Gandhi joined Seattle-based AI roleplay startup Yoodli as a product leader. Gandhi’s past roles include leadership positions at Nerdy, Binance, Uber, DocuSign, Microsoft and others.

Over the past year, Gandhi built FourPoint.AI, a tool that helps job seekers improve their communications. While he won’t be adding new features to FourPoint, “I am opening it up for free,” Gandhi said on LinkedIn. “If it helps someone land their next opportunity the way it helped me find mine, that is a meaningful way to pay it forward.”

— Kapil Hetamsaria is now chief business officer of Neo4j, a data analysis, graph intelligence platform. Hetamsaria joins from C3 AI, where he served as a vice president, and was previously co-founder and CEO of Viddl App, a Bellevue-based short-video platform.

— Dave Rosenbaum is leaving his role as senior publications manager at Seattle-based pet sitting company Rover to join Airbnb.

“I have always been a firm believer in the transformative power of travel — discovering new places, trying new foods, and having new experiences,” Rosenbaum wrote on LinkedIn. “Airbnb’s mission is central to this belief that the world offers limitless possibilities.”

Rosenbaum is also a deputy mayor and city council member for Mercer Island, a city east of Seattle, and previously served in legislative roles for members of Congress.

— Ambika Singh, founder and CEO of online clothing rental company Armoire, joined the board of trustees for the Seattle Metro Chamber.

— Pete Fewing, associate athletic director at Seattle University and longtime Sounders FC broadcaster, joined the board of directors for Starfire Sports. The organization provides coding classes, drone summer camps, and other free, after-school sports programming for underprivileged kids in South Seattle.

As we make our way to AWS re:Invent today in Las Vegas, these are some of the questions on our mind: Will Amazon CEO Andy Jassy make another appearance? Will this, in fact, be Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ last big closing keynote at the event? Will we be able to line up early enough to score a seat inside the special Acquired podcast recording Thursday morning? 

And how many million enterprise AI billboards will we see between the airport and the Venetian?

But more to the point for Amazon, the company faces a critical test this week: showing that its heavy artificial intelligence investments can pay off as Microsoft and Google gain ground in AI and the cloud.

A year after the Seattle company unveiled its in-house Nova AI foundation models, the expansion into agentic AI will be the central theme as Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman takes the stage Tuesday morning for the opening keynote at the company’s annual cloud conference.

The stakes are big, for both the short and long term. AWS accounts for a fifth of Amazon’s sales and more than half of its profits in many quarters, and all the major cloud platforms are competing head-to-head in AI as the next big driver of growth.

With much of the tech world focused on the AI chip race, the conference will be closely watched across the industry for news of the latest advances in Amazon’s in-house Trainium AI chips. 

But even as the markets and outside observers focus on AI, we’ve learned from covering this event over the years that many AWS customers still care just as much or more about advances in the fundamental building blocks of storage, compute and database services.

Amazon gave a hint of its focus in early announcements from the conference:

• The company announced a wave of updates for Amazon Connect, its cloud-based contact center service, adding agents that can independently solve customer problems, beyond routing calls. Amazon Connect recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue.
• In an evolution of the cloud competition, AWS announced a new multicloud networking product with Google Cloud, which lets customers set up private, high-speed connections between the rival platforms, with an open specification that other providers can adopt. 
• AWS Marketplace is adding AI-powered search and flexible pricing models to help customers piece together AI solutions from multiple vendors.

Beyond the product news, AWS is making a concerted effort to show that the AI boom isn’t just for the big platforms. In a pitch to consultants and integrators at the event, the company released new research from Omdia, commissioned by Amazon, claiming that partners can generate more than $7 in services revenue for every dollar of AWS technology sold.

Along with that research, AWS launched a new “Agentic AI” competency program for partners, designed to recognize firms building autonomous systems rather than simple chatbots.

Garman’s keynote begins at 8 a.m. PT Tuesday, with a dedicated agentic AI keynote from VP Swami Sivasubramanian on Wednesday, an infrastructure keynote on Thursday morning, and Vogels’ aforementioned potential swan song on Thursday afternoon. 

Stay tuned to GeekWire for coverage, assuming we make it to the Strip!

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Less than five minutes after meeting with Todd Humphrey at a Seattle coffee shop, the longtime tech exec is already sizing up the customer. He quickly assesses how coffee drinkers interact with each other and their technology devices, and wonders why they’ve come to this particular location.

Humphrey has spent decades focused on using technology to enhance the customer experience  — from his early days at Kobo working on e-reader services, co-founding healthcare startup League, a CEO stint at project management company LiquidPlanner, and more recently as an exec with the Seattle Kraken, where he was senior vice president of innovation and fan experience.

Humphrey left the NHL franchise earlier this year to embark on a new adventure: Highmark Sports Group, his own consultancy aimed at helping sports teams, leagues, and companies boost their operations.

The Canadian native and former professional hockey player isn’t straying far from Seattle’s hockey scene. He’s a senior advisor for the Seattle Torrent, the new women’s pro hockey team that plays its first-ever home game tonight at Climate Pledge Arena. He’s also working with the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

We recently caught up with Humphrey to learn more about his approach to helping organizations improve their customer experiences and how to balance new technologies like artificial intelligence with essential human touches. The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

GeekWire: Todd, thanks for speaking with us. How are you thinking about technology and the customer experience in 2025?

Todd Humphrey: “I’m old enough to remember what the experience used to be like. You’d read about a game that was happening that night in the newspaper. You’d show up, you’d walk in, it would smell like stale beer and popcorn, and there’d be peanuts on the floor. They would play the national anthem and the game would start. 

The in-venue fan experience has totally been revamped. Technology plays a huge part of that. I think about the door-to-door experience, and all the different touch points. From the moment someone wakes up, they’re going to check the app to see who’s playing. You can tell them the best way to get to the game and where to park. 

Once they walk through the doors, you’re thinking about lines. The average NHL fan spends more than one hour standing in lines during the three-hour experience. We tried to cut that by more than half, and I think we got there. 

You want to get people to, from, and through the venue in a really efficient manner. Technology helps with some of that — digital ticketing, way-finding, mobile ordering, mobile payments. 

We really used that Amazon approach of the customer experience and working backward — at the end of the day, what are all the friction points, and how do we alleviate those?

There’s a huge opportunity for other teams and organizations to really rethink their experience. And it’s not just sports teams. It’s when you go to a concert, when you go to the Hockey Hall of Fame — what does that feel like? How do we turn it into a more of a holistic, overall experience beyond the time you spend in the building?”

GeekWire: How do you thread the needle of incorporating technology and automation — but also focusing on the human elements of an experience?

Humphrey: “Technology is a vessel that you have to use because it’s expected and it’s really convenient. Everybody’s got a computer in their pocket, sitting in their hand, and if you can use it in the right way, it’s a great leverage point.

At the same time, I don’t want to see teams and leagues and companies get too hung up on the tech, because I think little things like the human interactions matter.

When you walk into an arena for a concert or a game, you’re going have a touch point with ticketing and security before you get inside. If those interactions are awesome, your event is off to a really good start. 

I think that training the people who work there to greet people and engage with people and look them in the eye and get to know who they are — it’s a huge advantage.

When I go to QFC, I don’t want to check myself out. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well. And I’d miss that interaction with the cashiers. They’ve seen my kids grow up over the years. They know who I am and what I do. There’s a lot to be said for that. 

As much as technology is awesome and ChatGPT tells us all the answers, people still like human interaction. When people go to events, they really want to be seen, they want to be heard. And when I see an usher at Climate Pledge Arena high-fiving a Kraken fan during a celebration, it just warms my heart, because that’s what it’s all about.

AI is going to provide more efficiency for us and make things easier to do. But on the other side of that, because there’s so much bent toward technology, I think live events, concerts, games, theater — all the places where people can gather are going to be more important. People just have an innate desire to be together and cheer together.”

GeekWire: What advice do you have for startup leaders who may not be leading a sports franchise, but still interact with customers and want to improve their experiences? 

Humphrey: More companies need to take their customer experience and work backwards. You also need to have conviction in what you’re building and why you’re building it. And it’s talking to more customers. Some companies build in silos. The more you can talk to people to hear directionally where you might want to go, the better. 

But at the end of the day, you as a company, as a leadership group, have to pick your lane. I would get conviction around that. 

It’s also understanding what the whole journey is going to be for that fan or customer, whether it’s a SaaS customer or a cloud customer or an AI-driven customer. What is that customer going to feel all the way through the experience? And can you build a business that delivers an incredible, top-tier experience — and also drives revenue? It’s a hard thing to do.”

The University of Washington is powering up its vision for a brighter, more sustainable future with a newly completed solar canopy installed in a sprawling parking lot north of Husky Stadium.

The 84-kilowatt solar array is paired with Level 2 EV charging that can accommodate 20 vehicles simultaneously. The $3.7 million project includes electrical infrastructure to support the future installation of panels capable of nearly 30 times more power generation — up to 2.5 megawatts. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 2,000 homes.

The solar canopy is a pilot project supporting the UW’s goals to cut its carbon footprint, said Mark Huppert, interim director of UW Transportation Services.

“Located on the site of the former Montlake landfill, the pilot demonstrates how the land can be put to work to achieve more sustainable outcomes,” Huppert said via email.

Project partners include Sea Con as the general contractor and Prime Electric as the electrical contractor. The canopy system was fabricated by Trinity Structures, which has since rebranded as Trinity Energy.

The installation is connected to electrical grids powering the City of Seattle and the UW’s campus. The ability to generate energy onsite can curb the university’s reliance on the utility grid while reducing the impacts of power outages and fluctuating electricity costs.

“Generating solar power from a parking lot may sound modest, but the strategic value is enormous,” said Darin Leonard, president of Trinity Energy, in a statement.

The idea for the project grew out of a collaboration between the student organization UW Solar; Anne Eskridge, the retired director of UW Transportation Services; and Jan Whittington, director of the UW’s Urban Infrastructure Lab.

The university is currently drafting its 2050 Sustainability Action Plan, which includes the long-term expansion of the parking lot solar canopies.

The UW Solar students “will continue to support the efforts to achieve the vision of a complete build-out,” Huppert said.

The project was funded by UW Transportation Services, Seattle City Light and Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act, administered through the Washington State Department of Commerce’s electric vehicle charging program.

Editor’s note: Story updated to provide additional information on project partners.

When Ambika Singh, the CEO and founder of the online clothing rental company Armoire, began exploring AI applications, she had to thread the needle between embracing cutting-edge tech and deploying it mindfully.

The Seattle startup has always been “a very human-powered business,” Singh said, with a strong sustainability mission to curb clothing waste through rentals. Consequently, employees were anxious about turning tasks over to bots and troubled by the environmental impacts of data centers and AI computing — despite its potential to remove tedium and boost the company’s finances.

In Armoire’s first big AI splash, the company recently launched a virtual stylist to support customers in their search for the perfect tops, pants, jackets and dresses.

The AI initiative is just the latest challenge Singh has navigated since founding Armoire nearly a decade ago. The company survived the pandemic, pivoting from professional attire to leisure wear during lockdowns, before returning to its roots as in-office mandates took effect. She has responded to an evolving customer base, louder calls for resort and après ski outfits, and demand for an in-person storefront for trying on clothes.

Now, the business is weathering the current economic uncertainties driven by layoffs, fluctuating tariffs and rising prices. But while these conditions could raise expenses for Armoire, they are expected to bolster its customer base as clothing rentals become a cost-saving strategy to maintain professional and personal wardrobes.

“Renting your closet is another way to maintain the lifestyle that you want under different budgetary constraints,” Singh said.

‘No chatbot energy here’

The new Armoire AI app helps customers quickly find curated recommendations in a sea of apparel. The assistant asserts itself quietly with a prompt woven into the display of blouses and pants, asking what it can help find. Once a user clicks on it, the tech suggests items to search for and also allows for user-generated questions.

The app takes a few seconds to cross-reference the customer’s preferences — based on past rentals and items she’s liked or voted down — with clothes currently in stock and ready to ship. The AI provides chipper dialogue and refines selections based on feedback.

In pitching the tech, the company said the AI “talks to you just like a real stylist would (no chatbot energy here) and helps you discover the best pieces for your style in seconds — no scrolling required.”

Shopping assistants fueled by generative AI are proving an increasingly popular trend for online retailers, including Amazon’s recent introduction of Rufus to dig up product recommendations. The chatty tech is also showing up on sites like Redfin and Zillow to aid in home searches.

Armoire is developing additional AI technologies, such as a tool to help standardize clothing descriptions across different brands. It might sound trivial, but companies can have significantly different definitions for sleeve length, for example, whether short, long, capped or three-quarter.

The startup has worked to distinguish itself from larger competitors by offering consultations with stylists via phone and email, and Singh said this human touch will remain a core feature. And the AI, of course, isn’t perfect. In our own test, the assistant landed on a solid blazer suggestion but went on to pair it with an absurdly frilly blouse that a human stylist would not have picked.

And some components of the business simply can’t be automated. Armoire has a brick-and-mortar space south of Seattle’s downtown for trying on clothes. It regularly hosts in-person events for networking and fashion shows, including a collection of up-cycled athletic wear from former pro-soccer player Lu Barnes and an annual South Asian fashion event.

Trending upward

Armoire’s multi-faceted approach to clothing rentals and connecting to customers has found success, albeit with some snags along the way.

The startup has raised $12 million from investors, including a $3.5 million round in 2021 that included backing from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani and others. Armoire reached break-even this quarter, a first for the business.

While the pandemic shrank Armoire’s payroll from more than 60 workers down to 25, it has since rebounded to 100 employees. Last April, the company won Workplace of the Year at the annual GeekWire Awards.

The online clothing rental market is worth an estimated $2.6 billion worldwide, according to October data from Future Market Insights Inc., and it’s expected to grow to $6.4 billion over the decade, with China, India and the U.S. leading the expansion. The sector could benefit as cash-strapped customers look to rentals and secondhand.

“Services that can offer consumers the opportunity to keep their wardrobes fresh on an ongoing basis are really benefiting,” Sky Canaves, an analyst at market research firm eMarketer, said in a recent NPR story about online rentals.

Armoire remains a smaller operation than competitors such as Rent-the-Runway and Nuuly, which is part of a conglomerate including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People. Her customer base is thousands, Singh said, but not hundreds of thousands.

The success of the bigger outlets are useful as they demonstrate that the model works, she said. “Rental continues to grow and so we’re benefiting from that.”

Jonathan Duncan was laid off from Microsoft in May after more than two decades at the tech giant. Since then, he’s applied to roughly 200 jobs. The response has been silence.

“Not a squeak,” Duncan told GeekWire. He’s tried adapting resumes for each role, subscribing to job alerts, networking with peers, and internal referrals. Nothing has worked.

He’s not alone. Experienced tech professionals across the industry are learning they’re not immune to widespread layoffs — and that finding a new job isn’t as easy as it used to be.

For years, tech workers were told there was a talent shortage. Recruiters chased them. But in 2025, leaders who built their whole careers on growing headcount and mastering organizational processes are getting “mowed down right now in stunning numbers,” said Laura Close, CEO of Close Cohen, a job search and executive coaching firm.

Close said some “super high-value professionals” she works with are taking 12-to-18 months to find a new job.

“The golden age of the quick turnaround is over,” she said.

And in an industry that “equates youth with innovation and stamina,” Close said longtime workers are finding that their previous success metrics are no longer valued — decades of expertise have become liabilities, not assets.

“What we’re seeing right now is ageism on steroids,” Close said. She noted that in tech, age-related bias often begins as early as 40 — earlier than many assume.

A cooling market

Allison Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed, said it’s difficult for anyone trying to get hired — from new college grads to more veteran workers.

“If you’ve been trying to get a job or change jobs in a tech-related field, you’re probably really, really struggling,” she said.

While unemployment broadly remains low, the amount of time that people remain unemployed is increasing, Shrivastava said.

More than 114,000 tech workers have been laid off this year so far, compared to nearly 153,000 workers in 2024 and nearly 265,000 in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi. The pace has slowed from 2023’s peak, but the cuts continue.

Seattle-area tech giants Microsoft and Amazon have announced major workforce reductions in 2025. Both companies are investing heavily in AI infrastructure while emphasizing efficiency.

As a senior manager at Microsoft, Duncan said budgets were recently slashed across the board — training, travel, morale-building. When people left, they weren’t replaced. Every quarter brought new demands to return unspent funds.

He also noticed what he calls “underleveling” — senior director roles being posted at lower levels than before, manager positions offered at what used to be individual contributor levels.

“I think the days of high-paying tech jobs are drying up,” he said.

Shrivastava said the current layoffs are likely a “shedding” from a massive over-hire during the post-pandemic tech boom, not necessarily an AI restructuring story.

But at the same time, as The Wall Street Journal reported, many companies are betting that AI can help them grow — without growing headcount.

‘Who am I?‘

For many of these workers, the timing couldn’t be worse with aging parents, kids heading to college, and retirement on the horizon.

“I consider this the most expensive time of my life,” Duncan said. His eldest son is a sophomore in college, and his youngest starts next fall. He’s also pricing out family plans for insurance for the first time.

And then there’s the stock compensation. When Duncan was laid off, he had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unvested Microsoft shares.

“That was the kids’ college funds,” he said.

Nancy Poznoff, an executive coach at Close Cohen, said financial pressure is compounding an identity crisis for many laid-off executives.

“They’ve been high performers their whole career,” Poznoff said. “They’ve followed all the rules. They’ve done what they were supposed to do. And now they’re suddenly having this identity crisis on top of it, because a lot of them have been at their company for so long, they have this fear around, ‘How do I operate when I’m not at Amazon?’ Like, ‘Who am I?'”

“So you’ve got this financial pressure, and then you’ve got this ego bomb,” she added. “It’s a really tough time.”

Duncan still talks to his former teammates at Microsoft. The stress inside, he says, is brutal. He’s not sure he’d want to go back — even if he could.

Angus Norton, a former Microsoft and Amazon exec, recently wrote about the toll of perpetual layoffs on those who remain.

“It creates a hierarchy of fear. Everyone becomes a potential target. Everyone knows someone who was let go despite stellar performance,” he wrote. “The message is clear: no one is safe.”

If you’re building an early-stage startup and trying to raise venture capital dollars to fuel your big ideas — focus on solving a specific problem, make sure you have strong conviction, and think hard about distribution in the age of AI.

Those were some tips shared during a recent Seattle AI Week panel discussion I moderated with Kellan Carter, founding general partner at Bellevue, Wash.-based firm Fuse, and Rohan D’Souza, CEO and co-founder at Seattle-based healthcare benefits startup Avante.

The pair know each other well. Fuse led Avante’s $10 million seed round in late 2023, before the company was generating meaningful revenue.

Carter initially met D’Souza several years earlier. “There’s so much trust that had been built,” Carter said, reflecting the importance of relationship-building between founders and VCs.

The title of the panel discussion, hosted by Seattle VC firm Ascend, was “The New Series A Landscape” — a nod to shifting expectations in the AI boom.

The median Series A round in Q1 of this year was $7.9 million, according to Carta. But there were also nine companies that raised more than $200 million for their Series A rounds in Q3, according to CB Insights.

“The variance for Series A is wider than ever,” Carter said.

For those companies raising massive Series A rounds, Carter said it’s about “unfair insight” that creates conviction and opens doors to capital.

“The insight is so clear it’s getting investors excited to cut that big of a check — because the prize is so big right now,” Carter said.

Venture funding has increased to a 3-year high, largely thanks to AI, which accounted for 51% of all funding and 22% of deals in Q3, CB Insights reported.

Carter joked that AI is “always in the pitch now — even if it’s not AI.” For Fuse, assessing a pitch is about determining the best way to solve a customer’s problem — with or without AI.

Carter said investors lean toward founders who have domain knowledge and understand a first- or second-priority customer problem better than anyone else. “They have insight that’s going to give them credibility in a customer conversation,” he said.

And in a world where AI is shifting how software is sold, Carter said he’s looking for a clear distribution advantage. “Product won’t win,” he said. “Distribution will win.”

He added: “We love founders that have the domain experience, that have the insight, and they can get us super excited about a distribution strategy that’s a little more clever or unique in an AI world.”

When it comes to talking about AI during a pitch, the conversation will differ depending on whether you’re talking to a customer or investor, according to D’Souza.

He said customers may have “FOMO” when it comes to AI — fear of missing out — but they probably actually have “FOMU”: fear of messing up. D’Souza said it’s the founder’s job to help customers understand that it’s about “unlocking a whole new way of productivity.”

For investors, D’Souza said it’s important to show how AI improves margins — for example, by speeding up customer acquisition and onboarding.

Avante officially launched earlier this year as it scales its software product that aims to help companies decrease HR administration workload and reduce overall benefits program costs.

As he thinks about raising a Series A round of funding, D’Souza said one advantage of bringing in fresh cash is that it acts as a signal to enterprise buyers — some who may be wary of an early stage, 20-person startup tucked away in the Pacific Northwest.

“There’s a little bit of that perception of, what will happen if these guys go away?” he said. “So as a founder, I’m like, OK, should we really aggressively start to pursue more money on the balance sheet? To send a clear message out that, we’ve got a lot more gas in the tank, even though we didn’t necessarily need it.”

As for competitors, D’Souza said founders should focus less on similar startups and more on incumbents. “What are they doing to unlock a feature set? And how do you get there much faster?” he said.

Carter noted that Fuse stays clear of companies that might directly compete with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, or Anthropic.

“If we think that there is an inkling that they’re going to release a product and the next thing you know, everyone is competing against free or bundling — that’s a problem,” he said.

D’Souza, a former product chief at healthcare automation company Olive AI, stressed the importance of transparency with investors.

“Be very clear about your timelines,” he said. “If you need three months or six months to really build out the core of your product, be extremely transparent about it.”

D’Souza said Avante deliberately planned no recurring revenue for 2024, ran an early adopter program that wasn’t free, then came out of stealth in April 2025 and converted pilots into multi-year deals. “We created a little bit of scarcity and FOMO around this concept of an early adopter program,” he said.

D’Souza also advised his fellow founders to “focus on the one core thing that you do 100X better.”

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

BOTHELL, Wash. — Before he became the CEO of Portal Space Systems, Jeff Thornburg worked for two of the world’s most innovative space-minded billionaires. Now he’s working on an idea those billionaires never thought to pursue: building a spacecraft powered by the heat of focused sunlight.

Thornburg and his teammates are aiming to make Bothell-based Portal the first commercial venture to capitalize on solar thermal propulsion, a technology studied decades ago by NASA and the U.S. Air Force. The concept involves sending a propellant through a heat exchanger, where the heat gathered up from sunlight causes it to expand and produce thrust, like steam whistling out of a teakettle.

The technology is more fuel-efficient than traditional chemical propulsion — and faster-acting than solar electric propulsion, which uses solar arrays to turn sunlight into electricity to power an ion drive. Solar thermal propulsion nicely fills a niche between those two methods to move a spacecraft between orbits. But neither NASA nor the Air Force followed up on the concept.

“They didn’t abandon it for technical reasons,” Thornburg said. At the time, it just didn’t make economic or strategic sense to take the concept any further.

What’s changed?

“Lower launch costs, coupled with additive manufacturing, are the major unlocks to bring the tech to life, and make it affordable and in line with commercial development,” Thornburg said.

Thornburg argues that it’s the right time for Portal’s spacecraft to fill a gap in America’s national security posture on the high frontier. “There was no imperative for rapid movement on orbit in the 1990s,” he said. “Only recently have the threats from our adversaries highlighted the weaknesses in current electric propulsion systems, in that they have so little thrust and can’t enable rapid mobility.”

Portal’s vision has attracted interest — and financial support — from investors and potential customers. Since its founding in 2021, the startup has raised more than $20 million in venture capital. In 2024, Portal won a commitment for $45 million in public-private funding from SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force. And next year, Portal is due to demonstrate its hardware for the first time in orbit.

So, how did Thornburg hit upon the idea of turning a decades-old idea into reality?

The path to propulsion

Thornburg, who’s now 52 years old, has focused on making things fly for most of his career. It all started when he was a college student in Missouri in the early 1990s, earning his aerospace engineering degree with an ROTC scholarship from the Air Force. He recalled a conversation he had with an instructor who was an old F-4 fighter pilot.

“With my nearsightedness, I was out of the game from a pilot standpoint,” Thornburg said. “But he said, ‘Thornburg, if you can’t fly the planes, go be as close to them as you can.'”

Thornburg signed up for a program that fast-tracked him into an aircraft maintenance role. He traveled around the world with KC-135 cargo planes, supporting missions that included the NATO-led air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. During his time as a flight commander and aircraft maintenance officer at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, “I had a couple of hundred enlisted people who worked hard to keep me out of trouble,” he said.

The Air Force is where he earned his master’s degree in aerospace engineering. “My adviser had a friend that worked at the Air Force Research Lab,” Thornburg recalled. “He called him and said, ‘The Air Force is about to send this guy to do something with airplanes, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to be disappointed if he can’t come out and work on rocket engines.'”

Sure enough, Thornburg was soon working on rocket propulsion development, including a project to create what’s known as a full-flow staged combustion cycle engine. “We made what people thought was not possible possible with that program,” Thornburg said.

In 2004, Thornburg left the Air Force to work on rocket propulsion systems at Exquadrum, Aerojet and NASA. Then, in 2011, he took a phone call from SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk. “We talked for about an hour, hour and a half on the phone — and he said, ‘I’ve got a project I want to talk to you about,'” Thornburg said.

That project led to the development of SpaceX’s methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine, which leveraged the technology that Thornburg helped pioneer at the Air Force. “That was a wild ride, because that felt like about 15 or 20 years of experience in a five-year time period,” he recalled.

After five years at SpaceX, Thornburg needed to wind down. He decided to do some consulting at his home base in Huntsville, Alabama, also known as Rocket City. “About six months in, I’m like, I need a real job again,” he said. “And some friends of mine introduced me to, ultimately, Paul Allen. Paul called me and said, ‘Can you come out to my Seattle office?'”

The Microsoft co-founder and software billionaire enlisted Thornburg to become the head of rocket propulsion development for Stratolaunch, Allen’s space venture. Thornburg led the effort to create a liquid rocket engine known as the PGA — which stood for “Paul G. Allen.”

Unfortunately, Allen passed away in 2018, just one month after the engine was unveiled. Under new ownership, Stratolaunch pivoted to hypersonic testing, and the PGA project fell by the wayside. Once again, Thornburg and his family hunkered down in Huntsville.

Building a business

“I decided to start my first space company after Paul died,” Thornburg said. “I focused on hydrogen propulsion technology and solutions, kind of like what we were working on for Paul.”

That first company, Interstellar Technologies, started working on projects for NASA, Northrop Grumman and a couple of other customers. Then the pandemic hit. “The investors that were about to provide funding disappeared,” Thornburg said. “NASA went home, Northrop Grumman went home. And so I had to find my small team other jobs.”

Just as Thornburg was about to resign himself to riding out the pandemic in Alabama, Amazon’s recruiters called. They asked him to move to Seattle to run engineering and manufacturing for Project Kuiper, the satellite internet project that’s now known as Amazon Leo. “That’s ultimately what got us moved to Seattle,” Thornburg said.

His yearlong stint at Amazon was long enough to establish the process for building Project Kuiper’s two prototypes and the production-grade satellites that came after them. Then he took on engineering management roles at Agility Robotics and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

That’s when Portal Space Systems took shape.

To be fair, the seeds for Portal were planted back in 2016, just weeks after Thornburg left SpaceX. “Lawrence Livermore Lab had called and said, ‘We’re doing a seminar on the future of propulsion. Would you like to come be a speaker?'” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, what do you want me to talk about?’ They said, ‘We want you to tell us what the future of propulsion looks like.’ Oh my gosh, no pressure on that!”

As he did the research for his talk, he came across the idea of putting a nuclear reactor on a spacecraft, and using the concentrated heat from that reactor to blast a propellant through a thruster. The concept, known as nuclear thermal propulsion, seemed like a stretch — but then Thornburg had an uncommon thought.

“Can you concentrate solar energy to heat a thrust chamber and do the same thing?” Thornburg said. “You can. It’s not quite as effective as a nuclear reactor, for obvious reasons, but it’s all the same pieces. … Now I don’t have to wait on a low-cost, low-weight, space-rated nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist yet.”

Thornburg mulled over the idea for years. “I was thinking about Portal, and I was starting the beginnings of Portal in 2021, but I still had to pay the bills,” he said. For a couple of years, he worked during the day at Agility Robotics and Commonwealth Fusion — and spent nights and weekends laying the groundwork for the startup.

“When Portal could really start to stand on its own, as we started to win over the Defense Department, that’s when I made the switch with all of my time focused on what was going on in Portal,” Thornburg said. In April 2024, the startup emerged from stealth and announced it had received more than $3 million in funding from the Defense Department and the Space Force.

The road ahead

Portal’s flagship vehicle is called Supernova. It’s a rapid-transorbital, multi-mission vehicle that should be capable of moving itself and its payloads from one orbit to another — even from low Earth orbit to geostationary Earth orbit, more than 20,000 miles higher up. And it should be able to do that within hours or a day, rather than the weeks or months that are typically required.

The spacecraft itself will be about the size of a restaurant refrigerator. To concentrate sunlight on its heat exchanger and thruster system, Supernova will use sheets of reflective material that can unfold to a width of roughly 55 feet. Ammonia will serve as the propellant. The 3D-printed heat exchanger thruster, dubbed Flare, was successfully tested earlier this year.

Next year’s orbital demonstration will involve putting an instrument package known as Mini-Nova, which is about the size of a tissue box, on a satellite platform that’s due for launch on a SpaceX rideshare mission. The demonstration is meant to validate Supernova’s system design.

In late 2026, Portal plans to send up a free-flying spacecraft called Starburst, which will be equipped with thrusters powered by an electrothermal heating system. Starburst won’t be as powerful as Supernova, but it will provide Portal’s customers with an early option for rapid maneuverability in orbit. If next year’s test goes well, Starburst is expected to start taking on customer missions in 2027.

2027 is also the year when Supernova is scheduled to make its debut. All of the development work for Supernova and Starburst will be taking place at Portal’s 8,000-square-foot lab and 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Bothell.

Throughout Portal’s formative years, Thornburg has worked with fellow members of the “small team” he assembled at Interstellar Technologies. Both of Portal’s other co-founders — chief operating officer Ian Vorbach and engineering vice president Prashaanth Ravindran — crossed paths with Thornburg at Interstellar, and at Stratolaunch before that.

Vorbach, whose background includes startup experience as well as engineering experience, said Portal’s business model has been fine-tuned to make sure it addresses the needs of its target market. He and Thornburg identified the U.S. military’s need for tactical responsiveness in space as the top priority.

“What happens a lot in the space industry is that you have incredibly technical, talented people who have a technology that provides some very unique performance, and then they build it, and it turns out that performance isn’t needed,” Vorbach said. “There’s got to be a reason to bring that innovation to market.”

Vorbach is grateful for Thornburg’s leadership. “We work very long hours, but I think Jeff does a great job of making sure people know that they’re valued,” he said. “I appreciate that, and I think it’s why we, fortunately, are able to hire great talent from the places he’s come from, whether it’s SpaceX or Kuiper.”

Ravindran, who worked at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture before taking a founder’s role at Portal, agreed with that assessment. “It’s always amazing to have someone like Jeff out there, because he’s come up the engineering road to realize our pain points as well, and he doesn’t try to hold us to unfair standards,” he said. “That way, we are not set up for failure.”

Stan Shull, a space industry analyst at Bellevue, Wash.-based Alliance Velocity, gives Portal high marks. “In space terms, a highly maneuverable satellite is said to have high delta-V,” he told GeekWire in an email. “Portal, as a company, feels high delta-V too.”

Thornburg’s experience and expertise are big factors behind Portal’s rapid progress, Shull said. “He’s very knowledgeable about national security issues and is a straight shooter about the growing threat environment in orbit,” he said. “It’s no surprise the Space Force is among the many customers interested in what the company is up to.”

What will Portal be up to next? Looking long-term, Thornburg is intrigued by the quantum frontier. “I think there are some very interesting things happening in our understanding of quantum physics that will have propulsion applications, that won’t look like propulsion as we know it right now,” he said. “If we could fold spacetime in clever ways … there’s been plenty of writing about that.”

But when he takes a more realistic look at what could happen in his lifetime, Thornburg can’t stop thinking about nuclear propulsion. “Our Supernova spacecraft will have a version that will leverage a nuclear reactor at some point. That was always the going-in position,” he said.

The way Thornburg sees it, the nuclear option will revolutionize spacecraft — and expand humanity’s reach on the final frontier while we figure out how to fold spacetime.

“Nuclear thermal will get us further into the solar system, and this Earth-moon-Mars becomes our backyard,” he said. “But, you know, for my 12-year-old version of myself, that’s not enough.”

Sam Ransbotham teaches a class in machine learning as a professor of business analytics at Boston College, and what he’s witnessing in the classroom both excites and terrifies him.

Some students are using AI tools to create and accomplish amazing things, learning and getting more out of the technology than he could have imagined. But in other situations, he sees a concerning trend: students “phoning things into the machine.”

The result is a new kind of digital divide — but it’s not the one you’d expect.

Boston College provides premier tools to students at no cost, to ensure that socioeconomics aren’t the differentiator in the classroom. But Ransbotham, who hosts the “Me, Myself and AI” podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, worries about “a divide in technology interest.”

“The deeper that someone is able to understand tools and technology, the more that they’re able to get out of those tools,” he explained. “A cursory usage of a tool will get a cursory result, and a deeper use will get a deeper result.”

The problem? “It’s a race to mediocre. If mediocre is what you’re shooting for, then it’s really quick to get to mediocre.”

He explained, “Boston College’s motto is ‘Ever to Excel.’ It’s not ‘Ever to Mediocre.’ And the ability of students to get to excellence can be hampered by their ease of getting to mediocre.”

That’s one of the topics on this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, a collaboration with Me, Myself and AI. Sam and I compare notes from our podcasts and share our own observations on emerging trends and long-term implications of AI. This is a two-part series across our podcasts — you can find the rest of our conversation on the Me, Myself and AI feed.

Continue reading for takeaways from this episode.

AI has a measurement problem: Sam, who researched Wikipedia extensively more than a decade ago, sees parallels to the present day. Before Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica was a company with employees that produced books, paid a printer, and created measurable economic value. Then Wikipedia came along, and Encyclopedia Britannica didn’t last.

Its economic value was lost. But as he puts it: “Would any rational person say that the world is a worse place because we now have Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica?”

In other words, traditional economic metrics don’t fully capture the net gain in value that Wikipedia created for society. He sees the same measurement problem with AI. 

“The data gives better insights about what you’re doing, about the documents you have, and you can make a slightly better decision,” he said. “How do you measure that?”

Content summarization vs. generation: Sam’s “gotta have it” AI feature isn’t about creating content — it’s about distilling information to fit more into his 24 hours.

“We talk a lot about generation and the generational capabilities, what these things can create,” he said. “I find myself using it far more for what it can summarize, what it can distill.”

Finding value in AI, even when it’s wrong: Despite his concerns about students using AI to achieve mediocrity, Sam remains optimistic about what people can accomplish with AI tools.

“Often I find that the tool is completely wrong and ridiculous and it says just absolute garbage,” he said. “But that garbage sparks me to think about something — the way that it’s wrong pushes me to think: why is that wrong? … and how can I push on that?”

Searching for the signal in the noise: Sam described the goal of the Me, Myself and AI podcast as cutting through the polarizing narratives about artificial intelligence.

“There’s a lot of hype about artificial intelligence,” he said. “There’s a lot of naysaying about artificial intelligence. And somewhere between those, there is some signal, and some truth.”

Listen to the full episode above, subscribe to GeekWire in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and find the rest of our conversation on the Me, Myself and AI podcast feed.

Verizon is laying off approximately 165 employees in Washington state, including analysts, engineers and retail workers.

The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end Jan. 23.

“Verizon is consolidating and restructuring its operations to maximize the utilization of company facilities and resources,” Eboni Gregoire, Verizon’s director of HR operations, said in a WARN letter.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that New York-based Verizon was planning to cut 15,000 workers, primarily through layoffs. That includes shifting about 200 of its stores into franchised outlets, which removes employees from the telecom’s payroll.

The WARN letter states that five facilities — in Redmond, Renton, Woodinville, Spokane and Bellingham are “being divested to an agent” and will no longer be operated by Verizon. It was unclear if the sites would close or become a franchise.

Approximately 22 of the workers being laid off are based at a corporate office in Bellevue, Wash., that Verizon took over from rival T-Mobile last year. T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue, sublet 32,682 square feet of space to Verizon at 90 North, a building located at 3255 160th Ave. SE., the Puget Sound Business Journal previously reported.

The layoffs come as Verizon lost 7,000 phone subscribers in the most recent quarter, while AT&T and T-Mobile have been adding customers, WSJ reported. On Thursday, T-Mobile announced a “Switching Made Easy” initiative launching next month to help Verizon and AT&T customers switch to T-Mobile in as little as 15 minutes.

Editor’s note: The number of workers impacted by the layoffs was off by three in the original story and was corrected Nov. 25.

Embattled electric bike maker Rad Power Bikes is facing another challenge as the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a warning to consumers Monday to stop using some of the Seattle-based company’s bikes because of danger posed by their lithium-ion batteries.

The product safety warning urges consumers to immediately remove and dispose of hazardous batteries that “can unexpectedly ignite and explode, posing a fire hazard to consumers, especially when the battery or the harness has been exposed to water and debris.”

The CPSC said Rad “has refused to agree to an acceptable recall” for the batteries, which are manufactured in China.

The batteries were sold as replacements and with a variety of Rad bikes via Rad’s website, Best Buy stores and independent bike shops. The battery model number (HL-RP-S1304 or RP-1304) is printed on a label on the back or rear of the battery and bike models included: RadWagon 4, RadCity HS 4, RadRover High Step 5, RadCity Step Thru 3, RadRover Step Thru 1, RadRunner 2, RadRunner 1, RadRunner Plus, and RadExpand 5.

The report adds another significant obstacle to Rad’s continued operations. Earlier this month, Rad revealed that it was struggling to survive due to financial difficulties, and the e-bike seller said that it was in danger of shutting down by early January.

On Monday, Rad disputed the CPSC’s findings. “Rad Power Bikes firmly stands behind our batteries and our reputation as leaders in the e-bike industry, and strongly disagrees with the CPSC’s characterization of certain Rad batteries as defective or unsafe,” the company said in a lengthy statement provided to GeekWire (in full below).

Rad said the significant cost of CPSC’s all-or-nothing recall demand would force Rad to shut down immediately with no way to support its riders or employees.

Rad said it offered “multiple good-faith solutions” to address CPSC’s concerns over at least 31 reports of fire, including what the agency said were 12 reports of property damage caused by Rad batteries, totaling approximately $734,500.

Rad said the incident rate associated with the batteries in the CPSC’s notice is a fraction of one percent.

“While that number is low, we know even one incident is one too many, and we are heartbroken by any report involving our products,” the company’s statement read.

The company said its batteries were tested by independent third-party labs as part of its typical product testing and again during the CPSC investigation, “and confirmed compliance with the highest industry standards.”

Rad upgraded its bikes to what it calls the Rad Safe Shield battery in early 2024, and the company said it offered to upgrade consumers to those batteries at a substantial discount as part of one of its solutions during the CPSC investigation.

The company stressed in its statement that all lithium-ion batteries, not just in e-bikes, can pose a fire risk if improperly handled or exposed to significant water, and the company promotes proper care and maintenance in its user manuals and customer safety guides.

Rad Power Bikes, headquartered in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, launched as a direct-to-consumer brand in 2015.

The company saw huge demand amid the pandemic as more people bought e-bikes. Its sales and workforce surged and it raised more than $300 million from investors in 2021. The company was valued at $1.65 billion that year, according to PitchBook, making it one of a handful of “unicorn” startups in the Seattle region at the time.

The company has attracted nearly 700,000 riders around the globe, but a series of missteps and macroeconomic challenges in recent years have led to more than seven rounds of layoffs and a remarkable downfall.

A spokesperson told GeekWire on Monday that Rad’s filing of a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification with the Washington state Employment Security Department earlier this month was due to the company’s financial circumstances and its obligation to comply with state law. It was not related to the CPSC investigation.

Three years ago, Rad issued a recall on its RadWagon 4 electric cargo bikes over an issue with tires and rim strips that created a fall and crash hazard.

In 2023, The New York Times reported on a rise in micro-mobility device fires or overheating incidents caused by poorly made batteries that the CPSC said was particularly acute in densely populated areas like New York City.

The CPSC urged consumers on Monday to immediately remove affected batteries and dispose of them following local hazardous waste procedures.

Rad Power Bikes statement regarding CPSC warning:

Rad Power Bikes firmly stands behind our batteries and our reputation as leaders in the ebike industry, and strongly disagrees with the CPSC’s characterization of certain Rad batteries as defective or unsafe.

We have a long and well-documented track record of building safe, reliable ebikes equipped with batteries that meet or exceed rigorous international safety standards, including UL-2271 and UL-2849. The CPSC proposed requiring these UL standards in January 2025, but has yet to adopt them. Rad ebikes have met these standards for years.

Reputable, independent third-party labs tested Rad’s batteries, both as part of our typical product testing and again during the CPSC investigation, and confirmed compliance with the highest industry standards. Our understanding is that the CPSC does not dispute the conclusions of these tests. It is also our understanding that the battery itself was not independently examined per industry-accepted test standards.   

Context Matters

The incident rate associated with the batteries in the CPSC’s notice is a fraction of one percent. While that number is low, we know even one incident is one too many, and we are heartbroken by any report involving our products.

It is also widely understood that all lithium-ion batteries—whether in ebikes, e-scooters, laptops, or power tools—can pose a fire risk if damaged, improperly charged, exposed to excess moisture, subjected to extreme temperatures or improper modifications to the electrical components, all of which Rad repeatedly advises against in user manuals and customer safety guides. Contrary to the CPSC’s statement, mere exposure to water and debris does not create a hazard; rather, significant water exposure, as warned against in our manuals, can pose a hazard.

These risks apply across industries and exist even in products that are fully UL compliant. Ebike batteries are significantly more powerful than household device batteries, which is why proper care and maintenance are so important and why Rad continues to invest in rider education and safety innovation.

Rad’s Cooperation with the CPSC

Rad hoped this process would be an opportunity to work with the agency and others in the industry to improve rider education and offer clearer, more consistent safety guidance on how to use and store ebikes and their batteries safely. 

Rad offered multiple good-faith solutions to address the agency’s concerns, including offering consumers an opportunity to upgrade to Safe Shield batteries (described below) at a substantial discount. CPSC rejected this opportunity.  The significant cost of the all-or-nothing demand would force Rad to shut its doors immediately, leaving no way to support our riders or our employees. 

A Commitment to Safety and Innovation

Rad has been a pioneer in promoting and advancing energy-efficient transportation, and our efforts to innovate and build safer, better batteries led to the development of the Rad Safe Shield battery. However, a product that incorporates new, safer, and better technology does not thereby mean that preceding products are not safe or defective. For example, when anti-lock brakes were developed, that did not render earlier cars unsafe; it simply meant a better, safer technology was available to consumers. 

That kind of thinking discourages innovation and limits the accessibility that ebikes bring to millions of people. Without the adoption of clear, common-sense standards, no electric bike manufacturer can operate with confidence. 

Previously:

• The rise and fall of Rad Power Bikes: From breakout success to the brink of shutdown
• Rad Power Bikes faces possible shutdown as it tries to survive ‘significant financial challenges’

Amazon will try a new twist on local deliveries at a shuttered site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood: a retail-style delivery hub for rapid dispatch of Amazon Flex drivers.

Permit filings describe it as a store in which no customers will ever set foot. Instead, Amazon employees will fulfill online orders — picking and bagging items in a back-of-house stockroom, placing the completed orders on shelves at the front of the space, and handing them off to Amazon Flex drivers for rapid delivery in the surrounding neighborhood.

The documents outline a continuous flow in which drivers arrive, scan in, retrieve a packaged customer order, confirm it with an associate, and depart within roughly two minutes. The operation is expected to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It will operate “much like a convenience store,” Amazon says in one filing.

The plans for the former Amazon Fresh Pickup site, at 5100 15th Ave. NW, haven’t been previously reported. The project uses the code “ZST4,” with the “Z” designation representing a new category of Amazon site that aligns with the recently introduced “Amazon Now” delivery type — short, sub-one-hour delivery blocks from dedicated pickup locations.

Recent screenshots shared by Amazon Flex drivers on Facebook show Amazon Now at similarly named sites, such as ZST3 in Seattle’s University District and ZPL3 in Philadelphia, suggesting the Ballard project is part of a broader rollout of small, hyperlocal delivery operations.

It’s part of Amazon’s larger push into “sub-same-day” delivery — in which smaller, urban fulfillment centers carry a limited set of high-demand items for faster turnaround. The company has been trying different approaches in this realm for several years, looking for the right combination of logistics and economics.

Amazon is far from alone in exploring new models for ultrafast delivery. GoPuff, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Glovo, FreshDirect and others all operate variations of quick-commerce or micro-fulfillment networks, often using partnerships or “dark stores” — retail-style storefronts that are closed to the public and used solely to fulfill online orders at high speed.

Amazon’s Flex program launched 10 years ago. Flex drivers are independent contractors who deliver packages using their own vehicles, signing up for delivery blocks through the Amazon Flex app. The program has often been described as Uber for package delivery. 

What’s different about the new Seattle site, and the Amazon Now initiative, is the speed and simplicity of the operation. As described in the filings. it emphasizes rapid handoffs, with drivers cycling through in minutes rather than loading up for longer delivery routes.

The permit filings emphasize that some delivery drivers will use personal e-bikes and scooters to make deliveries, reflecting the smaller size of the orders and the short distances involved.

Testing the economics

Supply-chain analyst Marc Wulfraat of MWPVL International, who tracks Amazon’s logistics network, said the approach is similar to its legacy Prime Now and Amazon Fresh local delivery sites, with the twist of operating more like a store than a warehouse, based on Amazon’s description.

He said that could mean Amazon will stock perishable items in cooler displays in addition to shelf-stable goods. (That could align with Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.)

The filing doesn’t detail the types of products to be available from the site, except that they will be “essential items and local products that are in-demand and hyper-focused on the needs of local customers within the community.”

“I tend to view these as lab experiments to test if the concept is profitable,” Wulfraat said. 

The challenge with these small-format sites, he explained, is that each order tends to be low-value, which means the combined cost of fulfilling and delivering it can take up a large share of the revenue — raising questions about whether the model can be profitable.

Amazon has experimented with similar ideas before.

In late 2024, the company shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery program that used Flex drivers to pick up small orders from mall and brick-and-mortar retailers. CNBC reported at the time that the service struggled because drivers often left the stores with only one or two items, making the cost per delivery far higher than traditional warehouse-based routes. 

That pullback illustrated the economic challenges of ultrafast delivery and smaller orders. But by operating the new Seattle “store” itself, the company should be able to control more of the variables, including inventory flow, pickup efficiency, and the labor required in the process.

Under the plan, the new Ballard hub will be staffed by four shifts of six to eight Amazon employees each — which translates into 24 to 32 employees per day. The site is expected to dispatch about 240 vehicles over a 24-hour period, with peak volumes of 15 to 20 trips per hour.

It will be the second time for this building to host an Amazon retail experiment. The site previously operated as one of only two standalone Amazon Fresh Pickup locations in the U.S., offering drive-up grocery retrieval and package returns for Prime members beginning in 2017. 

Amazon closed the Ballard pickup site in early 2023 amid a broader pullback from several brick-and-mortar initiatives, shifting focus to other Amazon Fresh stores, Whole Foods, and online grocery delivery. The building has been closed since then.

Fitting into the zoning

The emphasis on the retail-style nature of the new Seattle delivery hub could also serve another purpose: helping ensure the facility fits within its retail-focused zoning designation.

The site is zoned for auto-oriented retail and service businesses, and permitted as a retail store for general sales and services, a classification Amazon secured in 2016 when converting the building from a restaurant. (It was previously the longtime location of Louie’s Cuisine of China.)

If the city agrees the new use qualifies as retail, Amazon may avoid a formal change-of-use review — a process that can trigger additional scrutiny, including updated traffic assessments, environmental checks, and requirements to bring older buildings up to current codes.

Amazon’s permit filing repeatedly uses retail terminology and describes Flex drivers as proxies for customers: “Our store will have a small front-of-house area where customer selected products are available for customer representatives (Amazon Flex Drivers) to come in to pick up the purchased products,” reads a narrative included in the filings, dated Oct. 31. 

The approach could also double as a template for areas of the country where officials are cracking down on “dark stores” in retail corridors. Cities including New York, Amsterdam, and Paris have moved to regulate or ban micro-fulfillment centers from storefronts, arguing that they make urban cores less lively and violate zoning codes.

There’s no word yet on Amazon’s timeline for opening the new facility. We’ve contacted the company for comment on the project and we’ll update this post with any additional details.

[Thanks to the anonymous tipster who let us know to look for the filing. If you have newsworthy information to share on any topic we cover, email tips@geekwire.com or use our online form.]

Amazon plans to invest up to $50 billion to expand AI and advanced computing infrastructure for U.S. government agencies, the company announced Monday.

The investment, set to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of data center capacity to the Amazon Web Services regions Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (US) — locations specifically designed for classified and sensitive workloads.

Amazon said federal agencies will gain access to AI tools such as Amazon SageMaker for custom model training and Amazon Bedrock for deploying AI models and building agents. The centers will be equipped with AWS’s own Trainium AI chips and NVIDIA hardware.

The intent is to accelerate discovery and decision-making across government missions, which could mean faster modeling for scientific research, quicker threat analysis for intelligence agencies, or more accurate forecasting for disaster response and climate modeling, according to Amazon.

“Our investment in purpose-built government AI and cloud infrastructure will fundamentally transform how federal agencies leverage supercomputing,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a statement. “This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era.”

Amazon first launched government-specific cloud infrastructure in 2011. Today the company says it supports more than 11,000 government agencies.

Amazon Leo — the satellite internet service provider formerly known as Project Kuiper — says it has started shipping its top-of-the-line terminals to select customers for testing.

Today’s announcement serves as further evidence that Amazon is closing in on providing space-based, high-speed access to the internet to customers around the world after years of preparation. Amazon Leo is still far behind SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, but the Seattle-based tech giant has lined up a wide array of partners to help get its network off the ground.

The top tier of Amazon Leo’s global broadband service, known as Leo Ultra, will offer download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second and upload speeds of up to 400 megabits per second, Amazon said today in a blog post. That’s the first time Amazon has shared details about uplink performance.

During an enterprise preview, some of Amazon’s business customers will begin testing the network using production-grade hardware and software. Amazon said the preview will give its Leo teams “an opportunity to collect more customer feedback and tailor solutions for specific industries ahead of a broader rollout.”

“Amazon Leo represents a massive opportunity for businesses operating in challenging environments,” said Chris Weber, vice president of consumer and enterprise business for Amazon Leo. “From our satellite and network design to our portfolio of high-performance phased array antennas, we’ve designed Amazon Leo to meet the needs of some of the most complex business and government customers out there, and we’re excited to provide them with the tools they need to transform their operations, no matter where they are in the world.”

The 20-by-30-inch antennas for the Leo Ultra terminals are powered by a custom silicon chip that’s been optimized for applications including videoconferencing, real-time monitoring and cloud computing. The service can connect directly to Amazon Web Services as well as other cloud and on-premise networks, allowing customers to move data securely from remote assets to private networks without touching the public internet, Amazon said.

In addition to Leo Ultra, Amazon will offer two lower tiers of service: Leo Nano, which will use a compact 7-inch antenna to provide download speeds of up to 100 Mbps; and Leo Pro, which will use a standard 11-inch antenna supporting download speeds of up to 400 Mbps.

Amazon said it’s shipping Leo Ultra and Leo Pro units to select companies for the preview program. “We’ll expand the program to more customers as we add coverage and capacity to the network,” the company said. Pricing details have not yet been disclosed.

Among the companies listed as customers and partners in today’s announcement are JetBlue, Vanu Inc., Hunt Energy Network, Connected Farms and NBN Co, which operates Australia’s National Broadband Network. Amazon Leo’s other announced partners include Verizon, Vodafone and Vodacom, L3Harris, NTT and SKY Perfect JSAT in Japan, plus DIRECTV Latin America and Sky Brasil.

Photos released today by Amazon show installations of Leo hardware at Hunt Energy facilities, where the network will provide high-speed connectivity for Hunt’s infrastructure assets.

“Hunt Energy Company operates a wide range of energy assets across the globe, and this requires exceptional connectivity to be able to operate, maintain and deliver our products,” said Hunter Hunt, CEO of Hunt Energy Holdings and board chairman of Hunt Energy’s Skyward division. “The combination of Amazon Leo bandwidth capabilities and the secure private link is exactly what we needed.”

JetBlue intends to use Amazon Leo to boost the low-cost airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi service. “Having collaborated with Amazon before, we knew Amazon Leo would share our passion for customer-first innovation,” JetBlue President Marty St. George said. “Choosing Amazon Leo reflects our commitment to staying ahead of what customers want most when traveling, such as fast, reliable performance and flexibility in our free in-flight Wi-Fi.”

Amazon Leo plans to offer high-speed satellite internet service to millions of people around the world, as well as to commercial ventures and government entities. But it still has a long way to go to follow through on that plan.

Over the past year, 153 of Amazon’s production-grade satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit (also known as LEO, an acronym that inspired the newly announced name of the service). Amazon plans to fill out its first-generation constellation with more than 3,000 additional satellites. Under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, half of those satellites are supposed to be launched by mid-2026. It seems likely that Amazon will seek an extension of that deadline.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is continuing to expand its Starlink constellation and its subscriber base. There are more than 9,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, serving the needs of more than 8 million active customers around the world. Starlink satellites are built at SpaceX’s facility in Redmond, Wash., while Amazon Leo satellites are built nearby at a production facility in Kirkland, Wash.

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This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Jeff Bezos is back in startup mode (sort of) with Project Prometheus — a $6.2 billion AI-for-the-physical-world venture that instantly became one of the most talked-about new companies in tech. We dig into what this really means, why the company’s location is still a mystery, and how this echoes the era when Bezos was regularly launching big bets from Seattle.

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And finally…Todd tries to justify his scheme to upgrade his beloved 2007 Toyota Camry with CarPlay, Android Auto, and a backup camera — while John questions the logic of sinking thousands of dollars into an old car.

All that, plus a mystery Microsoft shirt, a little Seattle nostalgia, and a look ahead to next week’s podcast collaboration with Me, Myself and AI from MIT Sloan Management Review.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Washington state lawmakers next year are set to again discuss whether public sector unions can bargain over their employers’ adoption of artificial intelligence technology.

House Bill 1622 looks to require government employers to bargain with unions over the use of the technology if it affects wages or worker performance evaluations. 

This past session, the bill passed the House mostly along party lines, with Democratic support, before stalling in the Senate.

Opponents, including business groups and city officials, argued the measure would skew the balance of power between employees and managers too far toward workers. They also said the mandate could delay workplace innovation.

With hopes of getting it over the finish line in 2026, the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Lisa Parshley, D-Olympia, brought the idea to the state’s artificial intelligence task force on Thursday. The Legislature created the task force in 2024.

“Public sector bargaining covers wages, hours and working conditions and agencies are already required to bargain any change that touches those areas, but without legislation, that bargaining happens after implementation,” said Washington State Labor Council President April Sims. “With legislation like House Bill 1622, it would happen before.”

A state law passed in 2002 prohibits bargaining over technology for classified employees of state agencies and higher education institutions. 

“The biggest technology decisions made by management was, what kind of desktop, what kind of fax, what kind of phone,” Parshley said of the era when that law took effect. “Is that fair when we have a technology that now will actually impact our workers in ways that we have not even begun to realize?”

A separate statute governing workers at cities, counties and other agencies, on the other hand, requires bargaining over technology if it affects issues like wages, hours or working conditions.

Many workers are concerned about what the rapid rise of artificial intelligence means for their job security. 

A Pew Research Center survey conducted late last year reported over half of workers are worried about the future impact of AI on the workplace and about one-third think it will lead to fewer jobs. About one-in-six workers said AI was already doing some of their work.

Maryland, for example, is partnering with AI company Anthropic to help residents apply for food aid, Medicaid and other social welfare programs.

In early 2024, then-Gov. Jay Inslee issued an executive order outlining a future for state government’s use of generative artificial intelligence. It noted that the state “seeks to harness the potential of generative AI in an ethical and equitable way for the benefit of the state government workforce.”

In line with that guidance, a September directive from the state’s Office of Financial Management requires giving union-represented state employees six months’ notice of any use of generative AI if it “will result in a consequential change in employee wages, hours, or working conditions.” Under the memo, unions can file a demand to bargain over using the technology.

“Including workers at the beginning is not a courtesy. It is a practical necessity,” Sims said. “It identifies risk. It ensures human oversight where it is needed, and it builds trust among staff, who will ultimately have to operate, troubleshoot and rely on these systems.”

The memo also mandates human review for such systems when they’re used for employment-related decisions.

Parshley called the directive an “excellent first step.” But she says her proposed law “would allow future administrations to be held accountable” by codifying the order in law.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an executive order directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to sue states that pass regulations on AI. But it’s unclear if that would cover potential laws like this one, since it doesn’t directly regulate the technology itself.

It’s the latest salvo in the debate over a federal versus state approach to guardrails on the technology. In the debate over Trump’s signature tax cut and spending law over the summer, Congress considered putting a moratorium on state-level artificial intelligence regulations. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., led the charge to axe that provision from the final law.

One potential measure requested by state Attorney General Nick Brown could put Washington in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. 

Senate Bill 5708 looks to protect children from artificial intelligence-fed social media applications. This year, the legislation passed the Senate before stalling in the House. It can come back in 2026.

Parshley noted she is part of a new workgroup in the Legislature focused on AI “so that we can participate in this great debate.”

Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com.

— Andrea Chartock is now the head of Washington’s Office of Economic Development and Competitiveness, a division of the state Department of Commerce.

Chartock spent more than 21 years with international development company DAI, working on United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiatives in countries including Liberia and Moldova. Her most recent efforts focused on economic growth in Ukraine before USAID was defunded this year.

Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn said that Chartock “has the experience and dedication needed to elevate our existing business community and foster growth in innovative ways.”

The department earlier this year scaled back a key economic development program amid the state budget crunch. The department currently manages more than $8 billion across 485 programs, Nguyễn said in April.

— Julie Brill, Microsoft’s former chief privacy officer, has joined the board of directors of the enterprise software company Ethyca.

“Ethyca’s approach puts privacy, security, and policy at the heart of enterprise data infrastructure. I’m excited to help guide the company as it works with global organizations to scale AI responsibly,” Brill said in a statement.

Brill left Microsoft in July after more than eight years. Her title included corporate vice president for Global Privacy, Safety, and Regulatory Affairs. Brill is also serving as an expert in residence at Harvard University. She previously shared plans to open a consultancy this fall.

— Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella named Rolf Harms, a corporate vice president at the tech giant, as an advisor on AI economics to work with the company’s top leaders. Business Insider obtained a November memo from Nadella to Microsoft executives announcing Harms’ expanded role.

Harms has been with Microsoft for nearly two decades and penned a foundational whitepaper in 2010 addressing the economics of cloud computing.

“We need to rapidly rethink the new economics of AI across the company — just as we once did with the cloud,” Nadella wrote, according to BI. “This platform shift is all about building a new AI factory and family of Copilots and agents that drive diffusion and usage across the full stack.”

— Seattle Reign FC and Seattle Sounders FC announced Sean Coury as chief financial officer. Coury joins the soccer clubs from Bezos Academy, where he served as CFO of the educational nonprofit launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He previously worked in financial roles at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Apptio, where he helped the Bellevue, Wash., company go public.

The Reign and the Sounders last month hired Ro Vega as chief marketing officer.

— Francois Ajenstat is leaving his position as chief product officer at the software company Amplitude. Ajenstat was previously CPO at Seattle’s Tableau Software, where he spent 13 years, followed by a brief run at Salesforce that ended in 2023. Earlier in his career, Ajenstat was with Microsoft for a decade, holding titles including technical evangelist, product manager and senor director of environmental sustainability.

— The University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) has multiple leadership changes.

UW biochemistry professor Neil King is now IPD’s deputy director as Lance Stewart, former interim executive director, retires from the organization. King was previously an associate professor at IPD, and Nobel Laureate David Baker will stay in his role as director.

“When I joined the IPD in 2013, it was clear that helping to build the IPD would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute and observe firsthand the development of a whole new industry based on computationally designed proteins,” Stewart said on LinkedIn.

The IPD made three additional hires:

• Jenny Cronin is now director of translational research, joining IPD from AI2 Incubator, a Seattle-based startup organization. Cronin is also a venture partner with Pack Ventures, a fund that backs startups with UW connections.
• Roseanne Hampton Reich is assistant director of administration. Her past roles include positions at lululemon, UW’s Division of Nephrology, Seattle Children’s and others.
• Justin English is director of strategic development, previously working as an assistant professor at the University of Utah. English holds a PhD in pharmacology. 

— Alex Pettit is returning to Oregon to serve as the state’s digital transformation projects director. Pettit has previously held top technology roles for Oregon, Texas and Oklahoma, and was most recently Colorado’s chief technology officer for nearly six years.

“This next chapter allows me to bring hard-won experience from the field and apply it to familiar soil. I’m honored to once again contribute to Oregon’s technology future — helping modernize legacy platforms, evolve our enterprise architecture, and prepare for the demands ahead,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

— Brian Bishop is CEO of Portland, Ore.-based Skip Technology, a startup building long-duration, grid-scale batteries. Bishop takes over for Brennan Gantner, who co-founded the hydrogen bromine battery company seven years ago.

Bishop has more than 30 years of engineering, manufacturing and management experience in a variety of electronics-focused businesses. He was previously with Salt Creek Capital, which acquires and recapitalizes small companies.

— Kelly Goetsch has taken a new title at e-commerce logistics startup Pipe17, moving from chief operating officer to president. The Seattle startup announced a $17.5 million Series A round earlier this year.

Goetsch has also helped lead the creation of the first open standard to unify how commerce systems communicate, including AI-powered selling channels and payments, logistics and fulfillment. The effort was overseen by the nonprofit Commerce Operations Foundation, which released the initial standard this week.

— Tom Mara, executive director of SIFF, has left the nonprofit following the decision not to renew his contract, the Seattle Times reported. Mara previously ran the popular Seattle radio station KEXP, then joined SIFF in 2022.

The following year Mara announced the organization’s purchase of the historic Cinerama, a movie theater previously owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that ceased operations during the pandemic. The acquisition was celebrated by many, but the venue has struggled financially.

There’s a quantum paradox in Washington.

The state has strong ingredients for a quantum technology hub: powerful giants like Microsoft and Amazon, a hardware leader in IonQ, and world-class research at UW and PNNL. Yet it may be falling behind states like Illinois, Montana, and Colorado that are pushing forward on quantum.

Washington needs more speed and a better strategy to help bolster the region’s quantum ecosystem, according to panelists who spoke this week in Seattle at a Tech Alliance event focused on quantum technologies, which aim to solve complex problems and power new innovations faster than traditional computers.

Rep. Stephanie Barnard, a Republican who represents the 8th Legislative District in Eastern Washington, expressed a desire to inject $100 million as a way “to get quantum going where it needs to be.”

“It takes courage. It takes dynamic leadership,” Barnard said. “It takes a political will to recognize the needs of this state.”

But financial woes pose a roadblock with the state facing revenue declines. Beau Perschbacher, policy advisor for Gov. Bob Ferguson, offered a reality check.

“Big new significant investments at this time [are] going to be very hard,” he said, while suggesting the state focus on coordination and workforce strategy in the short-term.

“We don’t have to make a huge capital investment — but you can still really advance the cause,” he said.

Other states are charging ahead. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently earmarked $500 million for a quantum campus near Chicago. States including Montana, Maryland, Colorado are moving forward on strategy and workforce investment.

Barnard suggested that Washington might need to stop subsidizing established industries to fund emerging ones. She pointed to the hundreds of millions the state has invested in solar incentives.

“If you subsidized quantum $300 million over the next 10 years, think of where you would be,” she said. “So we need to maybe shift priorities.”

Washington state had budget language for a quantum strategy in 2025, but it was vetoed due to fiscal constraints, with the Department of Commerce directed to pursue partnerships and policy recommendations.

Quantum researchers will “go to where the funding is and where the environment favors success,” said University of Washington professor Charles Marcus, who serves as director of Northwest Quantum Nexus, a public-private coalition supporting the growth of the state’s quantum ecosystem.

Marcus called on companies to support a dedicated master’s program to churn out graduates ready to work immediately.

“The master’s program is what industry needs regionally,” said Marcus, “It needs a small number of PhDs, but it needs a large number of masters.”

Marcus described the quantum race as one “in which, if you’re standing still, you’re going backwards.”

Momentum has been building to help boost Washington’s position in quantum. In 2023, regional tech leaders said Washington had a chance to create a “Quantum Valley” modeled after Silicon Valley. 

Laura Ruderman, CEO of Tech Alliance who moderated the panel discussion this week, suggested that the near-term prescription isn’t to build a new initiative but rather scaling what already exists. “We need to fund NQN,” she said, referencing the Northwest Quantum Nexus, which was founded in 2019 by UW, Microsoft, and PNNL.

Margaret Arakawa, CMO of quantum giant IonQ, which recently opened the first dedicated quantum computer manufacturing facility in the U.S. near Seattle, said Washington’s leaders need to show up publicly and enlist private funding partners. She said states that are winning have governors who make quantum a visible priority and then bring industry in to co-invest.

“Please let it happen now, and don’t wait,” Arakawa urged.

Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Peter Lee.
• Day job: President, Microsoft Research. Lee leads the organization’s global labs and drives the incubation of new research-powered products in artificial intelligence, computing foundations, health, and life sciences.
• Out-of-office passion: Converting classic cars to electric.

When Peter Lee first started his research for a project to convert his replica 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder to electric, he used the AI model Davinci-003 (OpenAI’s early Chat GPT-4) for help with the engineering design.

When he explained to the AI what he wanted to do, the first response Lee got back was, “Why on earth would you want to ruin a beautiful classic car like that?” 

The head of Microsoft Research doesn’t just hear it from artificial intelligence. Now in the midst of converting another classic — a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback — Lee is used to plenty of human car fanatics expressing their displeasure with his hobby.

“Half the people I’ve told about this project think it’s the coolest thing, and the other half think it’s totally evil,” Lee said. “One guy actually told me I’m never going to heaven.”

Lee, who joined Microsoft in 2010 and previously spent 22 years at Carnegie Mellon University, was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in health and life sciences in 2024. Cars have been a passion since he was a kid. He raced karts and Formula Ford, and was even a licensed auto body technician for a time.

Frustrated by fuel system issues with the Porsche in 2020, Lee connected with Marc Davis, founder of Moment Motor Co. in Austin, Texas, a shop that “transforms vintage head-turners into modern electric cars.” Moment is dedicated to “preserving the art and beauty” of classics like those owned by Lee.

Some classic car lovers are quick to criticize EV conversions for messing with the original gas-powered intent of manufacturers, pointing out that the cost alone makes it irresponsible. Davis said Moment’s work generates “plenty of vomit emojis” from purists on the company’s social media posts.

“I personally believe what we’re doing is preservation,” he said, pointing to projects in which people bring new life to a car that was their all-time favorite or something that their dad drove. (This Bloomberg video shows how the conversion process works.)

The cost of such a conversion can depend on car condition, size, and performance and range requirements from the owner, but Davis puts the ballpark between $50,000 and $150,000. That’s on top of a classic car that might cost $200,000. The Mustang project entails 100-150 hours of engineering work and 400-500 hours of installation work.

Lee is drawn to many of the benefits of going electric — no gas or oil to worry about, modern components, and explosive torque.

In the wet Pacific Northwest, Lee’s Porsche is garaged for the winter at a 50% charge. On the first nice day in the spring, there’s little to fuss with.

“I’ll just check the air in the tires, turn it on, and it’ll just go. And it’ll go fast. It’s really a wonderful, wonderful thing,” Lee said, adding that speeds in the Porsche, which is a replica of the model in which Hollywood icon James Dean died, can be “a little scary.”

With the Mustang, Lee is involved in decisions big and small, from what type of shift knob he might like, to whether to retain the solid rear axle.

“I put thought into this, especially when I was driving the car to get to know it,” Lee said. “I ended up thinking that the car wouldn’t be a Mustang anymore if we got rid of the live rear axle, and it turned out that Marc’s design choice was exactly the same.”

When it’s done, the Mustang will be a unique build, and one that Lee says will demand plenty of attention on the car show circuit.

Asked whether he has a third vehicle in mind to convert next, Lee laughed before considering his growing collection and his desire to possibly change over an old pickup truck.

“My wife isn’t around is she?” he said.

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Lee loves that there are serious technical and design aspects of what he’s pursuing. In the case of the current project, he grapples with decisions that impact what it means for the car to still be a Mustang, and feel like a Mustang.

“The thing I’ve always loved about cars, and why I love to work on cars, is you actually finish something,” he said. “That never happens in software. Software’s never done. You might ship it, but you’re still working on it forever.”

Lee is also a believer in the growing business potential of converting classic cars to EV and he thinks it would be a thrill to be involved on the side with a company that’s doing such work.

“The whole idea of beautiful, classic-looking cars that have all the modern conveniences of being EV — I think that’s going to be a bigger and bigger thing,” he said.

The lessons he brings back to work: Lee has wanted to combine his passion around cars with his day job forever. Today, car technology and auto racing have become so technical that he now has fellow researchers at Microsoft who are generally interested as well.

He called cars “a great laboratory” for trying to understand action models — the AI systems designed to predict and determine the next best action an agent (like a robot or software) should take to achieve a specific goal.

At Microsoft Research, advancements in car software provide interesting ways to think about the architecture of an action model or training paradigms, with learnings that could impact what’s happening on your own computer.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if five years from now the ’68 Mustang conversion has more intelligence, more self-drive, more action model, more robotic capabilities,” Lee said. “I think you’ll see those things pop up even in your plain old Windows desktop over time.”

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Seattle founders are trying to improve space communication, hiring, restaurant marketing, jewelry sustainability, and finding a great bottle of wine.

We’re back with the latest Startup Radar, our regular spotlight on up-and-coming, early stage Seattle-area startups.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — and a pitch assessment from GPT-powered “Mean VC,” which we prompt to offer both positive and critical feedback.

Check past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies or startup news.

Aetheon

Founded: 2025

The business: Job-matching platform designed to map real world capabilities to work opportunities. Its software translates lived experiences — such as military service, caregiving, or community work — into market-ready skills. Aetheon is partnering with organizations including the World Economic Forum and Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program to pilot its skills intelligence system. The startup has raised $550,000.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Marie Gill was an exec at Executive Networks, Concertus, and Modifi. She also leads the Green Apron Alliance of Starbucks alumni. Co-founders include Gina Jeneroux, a 37-year veteran of BMO Financial Group, and longtime entrepreneur and product leader Mark Wayman.

Mean VC: “You’ve got real partners and credible operators, but in a saturated ‘skills’ space you need to show exactly where you win (segment, data, or workflow) and hard proof that pilots convert into sizable, repeatable contracts.”

Constellation

Founded: 2025

The business: Space communication software that helps satellite operators avoid losing valuable mission data by predicting when a ground connection is about to fail. Its system spots the problem early and automatically reroutes data through a better path. Constellation is testing its technology with defense and industrial partners.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Kamran Majid is a former software engineer at SpaceX and Xplore. Other co-founders include Raaid Kabir, a former engineer with Prudential Financial and Blue Origin; Omeed Tehrani, a software engineer at Capital One; and Laith Altarabishi, also a software engineer at Capital One.

Mean VC: “The problem and team both look strong, yet unless you can prove fast integration, real willingness to pay, and expansion inside operators, this risks being treated as a clever reliability feature rather than a standalone company.”

Feedia

Founded: 2025

The business: AI-powered marketing manager to help small, independent restaurant owners automate their digital marketing, cut costs, and save time. The startup aims to empower immigrant restaurant owners often underserved due to language barriers. Feedia has 15 pilot users and plans to begin paid subscription trials next quarter.

Leadership: CEO Deyi (Robert) Zhu is a Seattle restaurateur who co-owns the fast-casual chain Master Bing. He previously worked in business development leadership roles at SprintiQ and Beejern. Co-founder Dexuan Zhu is a senior engineer at Sea Group in Singapore.

Mean VC: “Founder-market fit is excellent and the immigrant focus is compelling, but without clear, quantified impact on revenue or hours saved and a very narrow core use case, you’ll blend into the noise of generic “AI for SMB marketing” tools.”

Redyoos

Founded: 2024

The business: Circular jewelry recycling system that recovers precious metals from pre-owned jewelry and returns them to the supply chain. The company partners with groups like Goodwill, Armoire, Starbucks, Dress for Success, and Phoenix Tailings, and is developing an AI-powered product for jewelry appraisal. Redyoos is bootstrapped and generating revenue.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Cleo Escarez was chief operating officer at Boma Silver Jewelry and a former brand manager at Starbucks.

Mean VC: “The circular jewelry angle and partnerships are promising, but your entire story hinges on whether you can beat existing recycling channels on unit economics and make the AI appraisal tool essential rather than decorative.”

Theodora

Founded: 2022

The business: Provides casual wine drinkers with personalized recommendations guided by answers about their taste and budget. Theodora suggests a bottle based on what’s available in a nearby store. The company is bootstrapped and just launched its iOS app this week.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Jess Thevenoz was a former data analyst at Flockjay, Hellosaurus, and CDC Group.

Mean VC: “The consumer problem is relatable and your store-based recommendations are logical, but you still need to prove sticky repeat usage and a path to monetizing retailer or brand value so you don’t become just another short-lived wine app.”

Just a week after a successful launch of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it will make New Glenn even heavier.

The new super-heavy-lift variant of Blue Origin’s most powerful rocket, known as New Glenn 9×4, will feature nine methane-fueled BE-4 engines on the first stage, up from seven; and four hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines on the second stage, up from two. The 9×4 rocket will also have a bigger fairing, or nose-cone section, measuring 8.7 meters (28.5 feet) wide, as opposed to 7 meters (23 feet) for the fairing currently in use.

Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin says it’s working to enhance the performance of the rocket engines on both the New Glenn 9×4 and the standard 7×2 model. Other upgrades will include a reusable fairing, a lower-cost tank design and a higher-performing thermal protection system.

The upgrades will be phased into upcoming New Glenn missions starting with the next launch, which is expected to occur early next year. “These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low Earth orbit, the moon and beyond,” the company said today in an online update.

Customers can choose between the variants for missions to low Earth orbit (including satellite launches for the Amazon Leo internet mega-constellation); to the moon and deep space (including next year’s Blue Moon Mark 1 uncrewed lunar landing); and for national security missions such as the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system.

Blue Origin said the 9×4 model will be capable of carrying more than 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit (vs. 45 tons for the 7×2), more than 14 tons to geosynchronous orbit, and more than 20 tons on a trip from Earth to the moon. That would make New Glenn 9×4 more powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket (64 tons to LEO), but less powerful than SpaceX’s Starship (100 to 150 tons to LEO).

The enhancements appear likely to up the ante in Blue Origin’s competition with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. New Glenn has been launched only twice, as opposed to hundreds of launches for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and scores of launches for ULA’s Atlas 5. But last week’s successful launch of twin probes to Mars and the first-ever recovery of an orbital-class New Glenn booster have raised Blue Origin’s profile in the launch industry.

That booster, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” flew itself back to a touchdown in the Atlantic Ocean atop Blue Origin’s recovery barge, which was named Jacklyn in honor of Jeff Bezos’ mother. This week the booster was brought back to port and transported to the company’s processing facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida, with Bezos looking on.