The Cove team. (Photo via Cove) Cove, a Silicon Valley startup that helps workers collaborate while using AI agents, announced Tuesday that its team is joining Microsoft. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cove will shut down its product on April 1. “When we started Cove, we set out...
Steven VanRoekel. (ESP Photo) — Steven VanRoekel, a longtime former Microsoft leader and U.S. chief information officer under President Obama, is now CEO of Earth Species Project (ESP). The non-profit research lab is using artificial intelligence to better understand animal communication in...
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, will shift his focus to building frontier AI models and leading the company’s superintelligence efforts under a reorganization announced Tuesday. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Microsoft is reorganizing its Copilot organization, unifying its consumer...
Native CEO Amit Megiddo. (LinkedIn Photo) A new cloud security startup called Native came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, announcing $42 million in funding to build what it describes as a “control plane” for cloud security. The funding includes a $31 million Series A round led by Ballistic...
Amazon’s new one-hour and three-hour delivery options as seen next to products. (Amazon Image) Amazon is speeding up delivery times again. The company announced Tuesday that it is now offering one-hour and three-hour delivery options on more than 90,000 products to cities and towns across...
Juno co-founders Devon Tivona (left) and Sam Felsenthal. (Juno Photo) Fintech giant Ramp announced the acquisition of Juno, a startup founded in 2024 that built a corporate travel platform to help manage non-employee expenses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Juno will maintain its...
OpenCFO co-founders: On the left, Sankalp Singayapally, chief operating officer, and CEO Prudhvi Rao Shedimbi. (OpenCFO Photo) OpenCFO, a Seattle-based startup tackling the “fragmented and manual” nature of modern finance, has raised $2 million to automate financial functions for mid-sized...
The downtown Seattle skyline. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Five months after releasing its “responsible AI plan” providing guidelines for the municipality’s use of artificial intelligence, the City of Seattle has tapped the brakes on the tech’s official deployment for city...
Washington state’s Legislative Building, which houses the Legislature. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) Washington state lawmakers last week approved what’s known as the “millionaires tax,” a landmark shift for a state that has long been a tax-friendly destination for entrepreneurs and high...
Academy Awards host Conan O’Brien. (ABC via YouTube) Amazon has a solid record of success at the Academy Awards, scoring dozens of Oscar nominations and a handful of wins for its studio business over the past nine years. Amazon MGM Studios was shut out of the race this year, but the tech...
(Xbox press image) Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot plans to answer players’ in-game questions by searching the open internet for guide content and presenting it to gamers without attribution, at least based on a demo at last week’s Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. This is a...
Certiv co-founders, from left: CEO Jason Needham, CTO Paul Allen and Chief AI Officer Daniel Morris. (Certiv Photo) A Seattle startup called Certiv emerged from stealth Monday with $4.2 million in funding to build security software that monitors and controls AI agents operating on employee...
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 8, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Zeek Earl, Executive Creative Director at Packrat, on the set of the stop-motion shoot for AWS Kiro last year. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) On a rainy afternoon last November at Seattle Center, I walked into a darkened studio and found a film crew huddled around a miniature set, manipulating...
Inside an Amazon data center. (AWS Photo / Noah Berger) Big tech companies scored a big win in Washington state with the defeat of legislation regulating electricity rate and environmental impacts of data centers — but it lost a significant tax break for the facilities with the 11th-hour passage...
TerraPower signage. (TerraPower Photo) Employees of the nuclear power company TerraPower questioned CEO Chris Levesque on Thursday about connections between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and company board leaders Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. Levesque called the ties a “troubling...
Editor and reporter Taylor Soper joined GeekWire in 2012 out of the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) After more than 13 years as a GeekWire reporter and editor, Taylor Soper is preparing for his next big assignment: he’ll soon join AI2 Incubator as director of AI...
Rivian has a space at Seattle’s University Village where shoppers can look at, sit in, but not drive its electric vehicles. That will change Jan. 1, 2027 when Rivian and Lucid Motors are expected to gain permission in Washington to sell directly to consumers. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) In...
A team of entrepreneurial students from the University of Washington pitches their idea for a startup called Wayfinder to a room full of investors at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) It was a pitch-perfect evening at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle on...
Ali Farhadi has been CEO of the Allen Institute for AI since July 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Ali Farhadi is stepping down as the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), after a two-and-a-half-year tenure that brought growing recognition to the Seattle-based nonprofit research...
Mayor Katie Wilson speaks at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual event on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Seattle is witnessing a curious role reversal in its economic narrative. While the city finally gains ground on perennial challenges like crime and transportation, its...
Lauren Woodman. (USAFacts Photo) USAFacts, the government-data organization founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, named Lauren Woodman as its new president. Woodman, a longtime technology exec, is the second president in the Bellevue, Wash.-based group’s 10-year history and will...
Rajesh Jha speaks at Microsoft Build in May 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Rajesh Jha, who led Microsoft’s biggest consumer and business products as executive vice president of the Experiences + Devices group, plans to retire later this year after more than 35 years at the company. The...
Rajeev Rajan. (LinkedIn Photo) Enterprise collaboration software giant Atlassian is laying off 63 workers in Washington, according to a WARN notice filed with state regulators. Atlassian announced Wednesday that it will lay off about 10% of its staff, or 1,600 employees, as the 24-year-old...
(Images via Astound, GFiber) Stonepeak and Alphabet announced Wednesday that they have entered into an agreement to combine Astound Broadband and GFiber, creating an independent broadband internet provider and marking the latest shift for a telecom brand with deep roots in the Seattle...
From top left, clockwise: Makko CEO Jeremy Bird; Pipeshub CEO Rishabh Gupta; Flightline CEO Jesse Collins; AttorneyAide CEO Rohit Kundaji; and Liminary CEO Sarah Andrabi. Our latest Startup Radar spotlight features founders from the Seattle region using AI to help automate the assessment of...
Peter Lee, left, and Igor Tsyganskiy. (GeekWire File Photo and LinkedIn Photo) Igor Tsyganskiy is now executive vice president of Microsoft Research (MSR) as past president Peter Lee steps aside to become president of Microsoft Science, which spans physical, biological and medical fields....
Microsoft said the action against Anthropic imposes “substantial and wide-ranging costs and risks.” (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) A brief filed by Microsoft in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of War shows the deepening ties between the two companies, and Microsoft’s...
The Legislative Building in Olympia, Wash., is home to the state’s Legislature. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) The so-called “millionaires tax” passed the Washington House Tuesday night after more than 24 hours of debate, teeing up the bill for final approval today or tomorrow. [Update March...
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Screen grabs from the “Let’s Buy the Seahawks” initiative showing the proposal, center, and a receipt for a share. (LetsBuytheSeahawks.org) A new proposal to buy the Seattle Seahawks has been launched by a fan of the team who thinks such a community treasure should be owned by all of the 12s...
The blur of the morning commute: Sunrise and car lights during the trip across Seattle’s SR 520. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle-area Microsoft employees who are showing up in the office three days a week are also showing up on roadways and impacting commuters’ speeds, according...
Perplexity’s Comet browser, which includes an AI assistant that can shop on behalf of users, is the subject of a suit by Amazon. (Perplexity Image) A federal judge in San Francisco granted Amazon a preliminary injunction Monday blocking Perplexity from using its Comet browser’s AI agent to...
Tim Chen. (Photo courtesy of Chen) Essence VC, an early stage venture capital firm run by Tim Chen, is raising a new fund. A SEC filing revealed the new fund. Chen confirmed that Essence is aiming to raise about $7 million for the fund, which is separate from the firm’s $41 million fourth...
GeekWire co-founder John Cook, left, with Korell, his hair stylist at Amazon Salon in London. (GeekWire Photo) LONDON — Strolling among the food vendors and independent pop-up shops of London’s historic Spitalfields Market, I stumbled upon a modern slice of American retail. There, just a...