Trevor Noah, Rana el Kaliouby and Oren Etzioni discuss AI onstage at Boston’s Museum of Science on Oct. 19. (Nicolaus Czarnecki Photography for the Museum of Science, Boston) On Oct. 19, Trevor Noah launched Luminaries, a science conversation series at Boston’s Museum of Science. I joined him...
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 Nov. 1, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Firmly CEO Kumar Senthil says merchants shouldn’t have to build a new integration for every AI shopping channel. (Firmly Photo) Firmly, a Seattle-area startup that helps online retailers sell through AI shopping assistants, raised a $15 million Series A round led by Squarepoint Capital, with...
This week: Shield AI, the defense tech company building its X-BAT autonomous fighter jet south of Seattle, agrees to acquire Kirkland-based radar maker Echodyne in a deal valued at up to $5.3 billion. We discuss what it means for the Seattle region’s rise as a defense tech hub, how the...
At a conference, a fashion entrepreneur gave Glenn Kelman a bracelet that said “we are enough.” (Image via Glenn Kelman) After 20 years at Redfin, and 10 months of unemployment, I’ve co-founded a new company. My business partner and I will announce our plans after we’ve built our product, but in...
Amitabha “Guppy” Gupta. (LinkedIn Photo) — Amitabha “Guppy” Gupta, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center associate director who helps researchers translate their work to broader audiences, is leaving after 14 years to join Amazon. Starting Nov. 16, he will be a strategic advisor for nonprofit research and...
Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping agent fills a cart from a text request in this example from the company. (Amazon Image) Amazon is rolling out a new feature to let customers shop by text message — sending requests to its Alexa for Shopping AI agent, which will search for products, compare options and...
James Turrell’s “Light Reign,” a permanent skyspace installed at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 2003. Exterior lighting glows in different colors at sunrise and sunset. (Photo courtesy of the Henry Art Gallery) For most of the past dozen years, a James Turrell...
Agility Robotics co-founder and Chief Robot Officer Jonathan Hurst and the company’s Digit 5 humanoid robot, which was designed to work alongside people without a safety barrier. Agility began trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday. (Agility Robotics Photos) Agility Robotics of Salem, Ore., made its...
A hockey fan uses OneCourt’s tactile device during the NHL Heritage Classic, an outdoor game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Winnipeg Jets at Princess Auto Stadium in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Oct. 25. (Ticketmaster Photo) Seattle startup OneCourt is bringing its haptic devices for blind and...
Echodyne CEO Eben Frankenberg, right, leads Sen. Maria Cantwell, left, U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, behind her, and others on a tour of the company’s new radar factory in Woodinville, Wash., in July. Shield AI agreed to acquire Echodyne in a deal valued at up to $5.3 billion. (Echodyne Photo) Shield...
CEO Jim Huffman, left, and COO Tyler Stelter of Seattle-based apparel maker Neat make their pitch in front of the sharks on ABC’s “Shark Tank” during an episode that aired Wednesday night. (Disney Photo / Daniel Delgado Jr.) If Jim Huffman and Tyler Stelter were sweating during their pitch on...
Mary Brunkow receives her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in Stockholm on Dec. 10, 2025. (Nanaka Adachi Photo) Editor’s note: This series profiles five Seattle-area “Uncommon Thinkers,” who will be recognized Dec. 10 at the GeekWire Gala in partnership with Greater Seattle...
Martin Tobias. (Incisive Ventures Photo) Martin Tobias was pitched by about 4,500 startups last year. He wrote 10 checks. Now the pre-seed investor is offering the rest of them a consolation prize: an AI tool that tells founders which investors are most likely to say yes. Tobias, a...
(Amazon Image) Amazon is bringing Uber Eats inside its own app, letting U.S. Prime members order restaurant delivery without a separate Uber account and skip the delivery fee on orders of $25 or more. The deal replaces a Prime perk with Grubhub, which Amazon made an ongoing benefit in 2024...
Zillow Group CEO Jeremy Wacksman says home shoppers want to do the searching themselves, even as AI agents take on more everyday tasks. (Zillow Photo) People will let AI agents cancel subscriptions and book appointments, but most won’t want one to do their house hunting, predicts Zillow Group...
Smartsheet CEO Raj Singh unveils vsActual, an AI product that customers can use without Smartsheet, during his keynote at the company’s Engage conference in Seattle on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Smartsheet’s biggest new product in years doesn’t require Smartsheet. The Bellevue,...
Members of the Suplari team, as pictured on the company website. (Suplari Photo) Some startups dream of getting acquired by a big tech company. Suplari has now done it twice. Docusign on Tuesday announced its acquisition of the AI-powered spending analysis company, five years after Microsoft...
The Washington State Capitol Building in Olympia. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Washington voters appear to have upheld the state’s new tax on high earners, putting the state on track to lose its place among the nine states without an income tax — a status that tech leaders have long touted...
A prototype of Shield AI’s X-Bat AI fighter jet, which will be built in the Seattle area. (Photo via Shield AI) Defense technology startup Shield AI has completed its first full-scale prototype of the X-BAT autonomous fighter jet as the company prepares its manufacturing and engineering hub...
Ai2 plans to use funding from Google to build an open-source AI model for projecting climate change decades into the future. (Ai2 Image) Google is giving Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI about $5 million in funding, plus another $1.8 million in cloud credits, to turn an AI weather model...
Racks of servers inside an AWS data center in 2023. (AWS Photo / Noah Berger) Amazon is moving toward building its first large-scale data centers in Washington state, with a proposed campus in Walla Walla County and a second in the Tri-Cities that the company confirmed this week. The...
Finpilot co-founder and CEO Lakshay Chauhan. (Finpilot Photo) Seattle startup Finpilot, which uses AI agents to take the paperwork off the plates of people who invest money for hospitals, pension funds and foundations, has raised $10 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Bay Area...
Rover CFO Vik Rajagopal, left, and Jensen Harris, the company’s new president of marketplace, product and technology. (Photos via Rover) Seattle-based pet care marketplace Rover is adding two executives to its leadership team: former Motus CFO Vik Rajagopal as chief financial officer and Textio...
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter spacecraft in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration) Starfish Space says it can no longer receive data from its first full-scale Otter space vehicle, bringing a $15 million NASA mission to inspect inoperable satellites to a premature end. In a...
Most of the employees in the latest Washington notice are based in Amazon’s Seattle offices. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A notice made public Tuesday evening, disclosing about 95 Amazon job cuts in Washington state, is part of the company’s previously reported layoffs in its retail...
Marc Brooker, an AWS VP and distinguished engineer, leads Velocity Labs, a small team inside Amazon’s cloud unit. (Amazon Photo) Last month, a small team inside Amazon Web Services called Velocity Labs went from concept to the public release of a new open-source AI model in less than a...
Scenes from a previous GeekWire Gala in Seattle. Tickets are now on sale for the big bash on Dec. 10. (GeekWire File Photo) Early bird tickets for the 2026 GeekWire Gala are on sale now. Join us Dec. 10 for Seattle tech’s biggest holiday celebration, with a new venue, fresh experiences and...
Mazar Mohammed. (LinkedIn Photo) — After more than 33 years at Microsoft, Mazhar Mohammed has left to become vice president of AWS Streaming and Messaging at Amazon. Mohammed joined Microsoft as a software design engineer on Windows NT straight out of a master’s degree program. Over the...
Seattle Metro Chamber CEO Joe Nguyễn found lessons for Seattle in a trip to San Francisco. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinions to highlight a range of perspectives on issues shaping the tech and startup community. To submit a guest column,...
Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar (left) looks on as members of the FROM YOUR EYES team hoist the trophy after winning the 2024 Imagine Cup at Microsoft Build in Seattle. The competition is expanding beyond students for the first time in 2027. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a...
According to University of Washington research, across job interviews, conference presentations and English proficiency tests, AI models generally ranked American and British speakers highest, Indian speakers in the middle, and Chinese and Nigerian speakers lowest. (BigStock Image) Picture two...
Starbucks says roughly half of its customers use the drive-thru, where the company is exploring a “fast pass” for people who use its app. (Photo by Hamza Inayat on Unsplash) Starbucks’ idea to use technology to recognize regulars at the drive-thru is getting plenty of attention, but the actual...
Voters might find some election levity in a quiz for choosing candidates and a bingo game to recognize rumors. (Voter Lifeboat and UW CIP Images) With Election Day tomorrow, a Seattle-area tech entrepreneur has a quiz to help voters sort through candidates and ballot measures, while University...
Thessai’s bundle of motion sensors and panic buttons alongside the monitoring app. (Thessai Photo) Thessai, a Bellevue, Wash., startup led by a former Microsoft HoloLens executive, is rolling out a home monitoring system for older adults that flags trouble without cameras, microphones or...