A user scans a palm in the Amazon One mobile app. (Amazon Photo) Amazon released a new mobile app for its Amazon One palm-recognition technology, letting users sign up for the service on their phones by taking a photo of their palm to register it for later use for entry, identification and...
Jen Haller. (Ascend Photo) — Startup veteran Jen Haller has been named partner at Ascend, the Seattle-based pre-seed venture capital firm. Haller first joined the firm in January 2022 as chief of staff, and the new role will expand on her duties offering operational guidance to founders,...
SPOKANE, Wash. — Jack Githens didn’t plan to stay here after college. A senior at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Githens grew up in Issaquah, Wash., in a part of the region that people in Seattle call the Eastside. He has spent his college years in a part of the state that people in Spokane...
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown during a meeting at Gonzaga University about the region’s Tech Hub designation. (Gonzaga University Photo / Zack Berlat) SPOKANE, Wash. — Lisa Brown brings a unique background to her role as Spokane’s mayor, taking office in January after a tightly contested race....
Point of View, a new women’s clothing label started by two founders with experience at Amazon, offers pockets that accommodate smartphones, along with other design features meant to make it more practical for women to wear stylish clothing at work. (Photo courtesy Point of View) Aditi Sinha was...
Environmental activists with a group called the Troublemakers blocked entrances at Amazon’s Day 1 building in Seattle on the morning of March 27, 2024. (Troublemakers Photo) Dozens of environmental activists this morning blocked the entrances at Amazon’s Day 1 building at its Seattle...
The Deal of the Year finalists at the GeekWire Awards include, clockwise from top left: Fund raisings by Recurrent, Oleria, Treasury4 and Rhythms, and the acquisition of Icosavax. Four big startup fundraising rounds and one major acquisition in the biotech space make up the finalists in this...
Nala, a Seattle Police Department K9 that specializes in electronic storage detection, can sniff out everything from smart phones to hard drives to micro SD cards as part of her work combatting child sexual exploitation. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Nala has a nose for electronics. But...
Skywatchers gather at Seattle’s Gas Works Park to watch the progress of 2017’s solar eclipse. (GeekWire Photo) After a seven-year gap, a total solar eclipse is once again due to make a coast-to-coast run across North America, boosting popular interest (and airfares) to astronomical...
Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader accepts the Next Tech Titan award at the GeekWire Awards in 2016. Eight years later, Smartsheet is a publicly traded company valued at more than $5 billion, recently surpassing $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Which...
Grocery delivery company Instacart has settled with the Seattle Office of Labor Standards for alleged violations of the city’s Gig Worker Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance. Instacart will pay $730,041.15 to 5,567 affected workers to remedy the company’s alleged failure to comply with the...
Goodbill co-founders Patrick Haig, left, and Ian Sefferman. (Goodbill Photo) Goodbill, a startup working to reduce medical costs to patients and a subset of insurers, has raised $2 million in new capital and expanded its market. The Seattle-based company is targeting errors in hospital...
BirchAI CEO and co-founder Kevin Terrell. (BirchAI Photo) Seattle-based BirchAI, a startup that builds software to streamline customer support for healthcare companies, announced Tuesday that it is being acquired by Sagility, a Denver-based health-tech company. BirchAI was spun out of...
The 2024 GeekWire Awards CEO of the Year finalists, clockwise from top left: Gaurav Oberoi of Lexion; Linda Lian of Common Room; Ozan Unlu of Edge Delta; Vijaye Raji of Statsig; and Nancy Xiao of Mason. The finalists for CEO of the Year at the 2024 GeekWire Awards include software veterans...
Javier Luraschi poses with his new Tesla Cybertruck, which he took delivery of in Seattle last week. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) “Does it still have that new spaceship smell?” That was the quip from Dave Boone, walking past the GeekWire office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood last week...
OpenPipe co-founders Kyle Corbitt (left) and David Corbitt. (OpenPipe Photo) OpenPipe, a Seattle startup that wants to make it easier and cheaper for companies to train and deploy large language models, announced a $6.7 million seed round. The company, part of Y Combinator’s summer cohort...
“The Tomb Raider Experience” and video game icon Lara Croft are coming to Seattle this fall in a space near the waterfront. (Hourglass Attractions Image) A new waterfront attraction in Seattle will bring the popular video game and film franchise “Tomb Raider” and its protagonist Lara Croft to...
Pavan Davuluri. (LinkedIn Photo) — Longtime Microsoft exec Pavan Davuluri is taking on a new role leading the company’s Surface and Windows divisions, according to a report from The Verge. Following last year’s departure of former chief product officer Panos Panay, Microsoft split up its...
Claire Page, a senior associate scientist in process development, working in a fume hood at Sonoma Biotherapeutics recently opened new R&D center on Seattle’s waterfront. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Sonoma Biotherapeutics on Monday hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony at its new research and...
The 2023 Geeks Give Back honorees pose in the photo booth at last year’s awards in Seattle. This year, a new slate of exceptional recipients will be feted at the May event. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Technology can transform lives and strengthen communities when wielded for good. And the...
Sunny Gupta, co-founder of Apptio, spoke at an event in Seattle last week about his entrepreneurial journey. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) For Sunny Gupta, the inspiration behind Apptio started with a simple question: What are you struggling with? After selling two companies, Gupta wasn’t...
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of March 17, 2024. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Office-to-residential conversions are frequent fodder in discussions of the post-pandemic city, downtown regeneration, and hopes to contain rising housing costs. Remote work is here to stay, especially in hybrid form in the tech-centric...
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: We peel back the layers of Microsoft’s hiring of AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman and colleagues from Inflection AI, considering how it plays into the trend of the Redmond company striking deals that look a lot like acquisitions, without actually being...
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Europa Clipper probe flying over Europa. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration) Scientists have verified that a method to look for cellular life on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter, just might work. The technique could be put to the test in the 2030s, when...
Brent Frei helped start Smartsheet in 2005. Now he’s leading a rock-picking tech startup called TerraClear. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong) Smartsheet on Friday announced several changes to its board of directors, including the departure of co-founder Brent Frei and the addition of Katie Rooney,...
Manifold Freight co-founders Andrew Huff (left) and Oliver Jones. (Manifold Freight Photo) Andrew Huff and Oliver Jones aren’t done trying to build software for the trucking industry. The entrepreneurs are the co-founders of Manifold Freight, a new Seattle startup that is part of the latest...
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash. Pandion, a Seattle startup that helps online retailers deliver orders to customers, raised a $41.5 million Series B round. Founded in 2020 by former Amazon and Walmart executive Scott Ruffin, Pandion operates a residential parcel delivery system that...
Christie Lagally, founder and CEO of Seattle’s Rebellyous Foods. (Rebellyous Photo) As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos funnels $60 million into support for alternative meats, Rebellyous Foods founder Christie Lagally has some suggestions, one entrepreneur to another. “We have the recipes for a lot...
Microsoft’s Surface Pro 10, left and Surface Pro 6, right. (Microsoft Photos) Microsoft unveiled what it described as its first AI-powered Surface PCs for businesses, the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, with Intel Core Ultra processors and Neural Processing Units that the company says will...
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announces the Fire Phone in June 2014. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) The U.S. Justice Department’s landmark antitrust lawsuit Thursday morning against Apple, which accuses the company of illegally maintaining an iPhone smartphone monopoly, reads at times like a...
Graffiti along Interstate-5 in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Drone technology is already being used in Washington state to help fight wildfires and aid police. Now state transportation officials will use drones to address graffiti vandalism. Gov. Jay Inslee last week signed...
(Geekwire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Editor’s note: This is a guest analysis post written by S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Venture Group and a former Microsoft executive. GeekWire occasionally runs opinion and analysis pieces from members of the community. Microsoft is a...
Brinc’s new LiveOps software integrates drone fleet management with live streaming, real-time maps, call placing and recording, and data storage. (Brinc Photo) Public safety technology company Brinc announced a new software platform called LiveOps for managing and monitoring drone fleets, with...
Taking a spin in an all-electric Kia Niro at the Seattle 2023 Electrify Expo on Sept. 9. (Brent Roraback / GeekWire Photo) The Biden administration on Wednesday announced new national pollution standards for vehicles that will force automakers to increase their production of electric and...