Seattle Times Union members picket outside the newspaper’s offices on Wednesday. “Honk if you hate AI.” (GeekWire Photo / Grace Kaste) Members of the Seattle Times Union held a lunchtime picket outside the newspaper’s offices Wednesday, calling on the company to guarantee that AI won’t replace...
Artist’s rendering of the UW’s new Chemistry Sciences Building. The design-build team is Skanska and Payette+EHDD. (UW Image) The University of Washington today marked the groundbreaking of its Chemistry Sciences Building, a $231.1 million facility that will provide new laboratories for...
A display at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual event. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Seattle’s economic engine is stalling, and downtown is taking the brunt of the hit. Between 2024 and 2025, Seattle shed 18,065 total jobs, with a staggering 70% of those losses—13,000 jobs—coming...
Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, left, speaks with Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain at Madrona’s IA40 Summit in Seattle on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Charles Lamanna, the Microsoft executive who oversees Microsoft 365...
Companies building software for the AI boom and advanced machinery for space, energy and defense are remaking the Pacific Northwest’s tech economy, and both trends are showing up in full force on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups. The Fall 2026...
Stanton Jandrell, CEO and co-founder of Fraxion. (Fraxion Photo) Seattle-based spending management company Fraxion has acquired Yellow Dog Software, which offers inventory management software for the hospitality, sports, food and beverage, and retail industries. Fraxion serves as a digital...
Shield AI’s new X-BAT autonomous fighter jet is designed to take off and land vertically. Rendering via Shield AI. Traditional military air operations rely heavily on fixed, vulnerable targets: long concrete runways and aircraft carriers. Shield AI’s new X-BAT autonomous fighter jet is...
The X-BAT autonomous fighter jet will be built at a new facility in Washington state. Renderings and images via Shield AI. DES MOINES, Wash. — Defense tech powerhouse Shield AI is establishing a massive advanced manufacturing hub in Washington state, tapping the Seattle region’s deep aerospace...
Karan Grover is CEO of the new Seattle startup Kanu AI. (Photo via PR Newswire) Seattle-based Kanu AI announced $11.7 million in new funding on Wednesday to expand a platform that automatically turns everyday employee tasks into custom, enterprise-grade software. Trilogy Equity Partners led...
Ascerta co-founders, from left: CTO Doron Holan, CEO David Tepper, and COO Erik Winters. (Ascerta Photos) Bellevue, Wash.-based startup Pay-i is rebranding as Ascerta and raising $18 million in new funding to expand its platform beyond AI cost tracking into measuring overall business ROI. The...
Analysts have traced the economic impact produced by scores of space ventures in Washington state. (Space Northwest Illustration) The preliminary results of a study commissioned by Space Northwest, an association focused on regional space ventures, suggest that Washington state’s space economy...
Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa speaks Monday at a Creative Destruction Lab-Seattle event at Alexandria’s Eastlake Avenue building in Seattle, calling on Washington state to do more to support the next generation of founders. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Making the entrepreneurial leap is hard...
(Amazon logo via mturk.com; Claude Opus 5.5 Illustration) An early pillar of the gig economy and the hidden labor behind modern tech is officially coming to an end as Amazon is permanently shuttering Mechanical Turk on Wednesday after 21 years in operation. Launched in 2005 as a platform...
Meadow AI’s co-founders, from left: Dragos Velicanu, Max Jai Sim and Abbas Guvenilir. (Meadow AI Photo) Seattle startup Meadow AI has raised $7 million in new funding to scale its AI-powered operational software for physical retailers and restaurants. The seed round was led by Ulu Ventures,...
From left: Franco Rodríguez Viau, CEO and co-founder of Satellites on Fire; Lisa Stiffler, Geekwire reporter and Positive Charge host; Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer for Amazon; and Jason Knauf LVO, CEO of The Earthshot Prize, at a Climate Week NYC session held at The Climate Pledge Hub...
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson kicks off the Washington Space Council, surrounded by the council’s members and 10-year-old Sebastian Yu. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has created a public-private council to elevate the Evergreen State’s profile as regional clusters...
701 N. 34th St. in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, where Outreach plans to move its HQ early next year. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Outreach confirmed plans to move its headquarters from Interbay to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood early next year, joining a campus that Adobe has anchored since...
The Seattle skyline and waterfront along Elliott Bay. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle, take a bow. You’re officially trailing only New York, London, and Paris on the world stage. The Emerald City landed at No. 4 overall in the newly released Oxford Economics Global Cities Index...
Nimbus Aerospace’s NX1, a one-quarter size prototype in a test flight this summer near the Pendleton Airport UAS Range in Oregon. (Nimbus Photo) The team at Seattle-based Nimbus Aerospace had planned to finish testing its quarter-scale prototype earlier in the summer, but struggled to schedule...
Seattle Aquarium President and CEO Meg McCann. (Seattle Aquarium Photo) At first glance, Meg McCann would not be the obvious choice to run the Seattle Aquarium, one of the city’s top attractions, drawing 1 million annual visitors to the waterfront and supporting critical research in marine...
What an off-limits list might look like, before the agents start working. (GeekWire Illustration / GPT-5.6 Sol) It’s difficult, to put it mildly, to figure out just what we ought to be concerned about today in AI’s widespread adoption given the expanding list of recent warnings around its...
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Sept. 20, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop, left, and John Cook open the GeekWire Podcast and VIP dinner, presented by Northern Trust, at Daniel’s Broiler in downtown Seattle. (Photo by Tanya Srisuthisuriya) This week: Amazon is blocking Meta’s new Muse AI assistant from shopping on Amazon.com, saying the...
Prabha Dublish, CEO of Hubble, lays out the startup’s vision to become the “Plaid for medical records” at AI House Demo Day on Wednesday. (Photo by Dan DeLong for AI House) AI House brought investors from as far as Boston, New York, Colorado and the Bay Area to Seattle this week for something...
Shankar Sundaram in front of a golf simulator at East West Club, the golf, social and wellness club he is building inside an old industrial building in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Inside a sprawling former industrial building just a chip shot from the...
Dave Citron. (Photo courtesy Niantic Spatial) — Niantic Spatial hired Dave Citron as chief product officer. He joined from Microsoft AI, where he was corporate vice president of product on the Superintelligence team and helped build and launch Microsoft’s first frontier foundation models. San...
Jacob Andreou, the Microsoft executive vice president who leads Copilot, presents the app’s new Home, Code and Autopilot sections at a company event this week. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft on Friday morning unveiled its long-promised Copilot “super app” — without officially calling it that —...
(GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft cut 277 jobs in the Seattle region as part of its latest round of layoffs, with artists, game designers and producers making up a large share of the affected roles, a new filing shows. The filing was made public Thursday afternoon under the Worker...
Kompeld founders Ryan Morel, left, and Adam Kapel, right, believe many go-to-market problems are actually messaging problems. After working together for years — including at Seattle logistics startup Flexe — Adam Kapel and Ryan Morel reunited this spring to launch Kompeld, a Bainbridge Island...
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella speaks onstage at Microsoft Build 2026 in San Francisco. (Photo by Dan DeLong for Microsoft) Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external and legal affairs organization led by Brad Smith, its...
An Amazon Prime Air MK30 package delivery drone flying over a neighborhood. (Amazon Photo) While Amazon touts its autonomous drone fleet as the ultimate convenience for rapid doorstep drop-offs, residents of one Texas neighborhood report a very different reality on the ground — complaining of...
(Image via Databricks) Row Zero, the Seattle-based startup behind high-performance spreadsheet software built for massive enterprise datasets, has been acquired by data and AI giant Databricks. Databricks plans to integrate Row Zero directly into its platform and Genie AI assistant, giving...
Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, speaks Tuesday morning at Amazon Accelerate at the Seattle Convention Center. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon is introducing tools to let independent sellers manage their sales on four of its biggest rivals —...
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter spacecraft in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration) Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space is ready for the first launch of its full-size Otter space servicing vehicle, following two orbital tests of scaled-down prototypes. Otter is due to lift...
Lauren Kiel, left, global head of community innovation for Bloomberg Media, and Ryan Spies, managing director of sustainability for Alaska Air Group. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) NEW YORK — With 2.8% profit margins and the harsh reality of aviation physics, Alaska Air Group needs to be...