Startup radar time! Our latest spotlight on burgeoning startups out of Seattle includes companies developing real estate software, AI for consumer packaged goods brands, and kid-focused smartphones.

Read on to learn more about the startups and their founders, and check out past startup radar spotlights here. Email us at tips@geekwire.com to flag other companies and startup news.

Elora

• Care teams are overwhelmed. AI can help. That’s the thesis behind Elora, a new company building software to support frontline caregivers. Its tools aim to improve the intake process, documentation, and monitoring, while providing resources across social and community needs. The company is working on a pilot with a healthcare organization and is in talks for a multi-year contract. Elora CEO Shawn Ramirez previously led data science efforts at Glue, Shelf Engine and FutureFit AI.

Evvi Aftercare

• Evvi wants to help ease the emotional process of saying goodbye to a pet. Founded by University of Washington alum and former Apple manager Sydney Dahl, the startup offers cremation services and a virtual funeral director that supports families and veterinarians. Evvi recently acquired Resting Waters Aquamation and is opening a new pet aquamation facility in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood this month. The company graduated from Techstars NYC last year and has raised $1 million to date.

Realtie

• Redmond, Wash.-based Realtie helps brokers, developers, and investors identify off-market redevelopment opportunities. It’s looking to ride momentum from House Bill 1110, new legislation in Washington that promotes development of “middle housing” in residential lots. The startup recently signed an exclusive partnership with Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty (RSIR) that gives 250 brokers in the Seattle region access to Realtie’s platform. Realtie is led by longtime real estate leader Tadashi Shiga and tech vet Ofer Avnery.

Zalpha Mobile

• There’s a lot of discussion about the impact of smartphones and social media on children. Zalpha Mobile has a unique solution: a “dumb phone” for kids that looks like a modern smartphone but has limited functionality. There’s no internet browser, no social apps, no app store — just music, texting, and calling. “As I spoke to hundreds of parents, it became clear there was huge unmet need for a kid-safe alternative to smartphones,” Zalpha CEO and founder AJ Rice said in a blog post. Rice, a former manager at Esri, recently wrote about his experience using Zalpha’s phone.

Zucca

• Can generative AI help food and beverage companies develop ideas for new products? Zucca is a new spinout from Pioneer Square Labs building software to streamline the ideation, formulation, and sourcing processes for brands and manufacturers. The company has raised $1.5 million to date. “Zucca was born from a love of great food products and the insight that AI can have a radical impact on CPG product development,” said Karen Huh, CEO of Zucca. Huh previously led teams at Starbucks, Bulletproof 360, and Joywell Foods, where she was CEO. Zucca co-founder Jesse Guzman was most recently a principal at PSL and also spent time at Rain, NerdWallet, and Prophet. Former Amazon engineer Carly Rector is Zucca’s acting CTO.

Seattle-based cybersecurity startup Dropzone AI just launched a new free tool that aims to give security analysts an AI co-worker in their browser.

The tool, called “Coach,” analyzes alerts from applications such as CrowdStrike and offers real-time summaries, hypotheses about potential threats, recommended next steps, and learning resources.

It’s built on the same technology behind Dropzone’s AI security agents that help companies triage alerts autonomously. The tool is a browser extension currently available for Chrome.

The idea is to help cybersecurity workers reduce the cognitive burden of constant triage and decision-making in a sector known for burnout and being understaffed.

The company also aims to address a broader concern that relying on generative AI tools — such as those from Dropzone — could shrink the pipeline of future cybersecurity leaders by replacing entry-level roles.

Dropzone launched Coach in part to counter that narrative, giving aspiring analysts a way to learn and grow alongside AI.

“A junior or Tier 1 security analyst is part of the right of passage for most future security leaders,” said Dropzone CEO Edward Wu.

Anne Gotay, vice president of growth, said Dropzone isn’t trying to replace human workers.

“We never see ourselves as replacing the practitioner, but really augmenting their work and letting them focus on what matters,” she said.

Wu said he sees AI’s impact on cybersecurity more broadly as a rare “win-win” scenario.

“There’s so much additional capacity that cybersecurity teams need,” he said.

Wu previously spent eight years at Seattle-based security company ExtraHop before launching Dropzone in 2023.

Dropzone has raised more than $21 million from investors including Theory Ventures, Decibel Ventures, Seattle-based Pioneer Square Ventures, and In-Q-Tel. The company has 23 employees and more than 100 customers.

Seattle startup Avalanche Energy plans to open a first-of-its-kind facility for commercial-scale testing of radioactive fusion technologies in Eastern Washington.

The envisioned center, called FusionWERX, is a public-private partnership offering shared resources to universities, companies, and government labs in an effort to support fusion power producers and the sector’s supply chain. It aims to be one of the most advanced private-sector operations for handling tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope.

Robin Langtry, co-founder and CEO of Avalanche, compares the idea to the shared Lockheed Martin high-speed wind tunnel that he had access to when testing aerodynamic designs as a Blue Origin employee.

“There’s a really interesting model here,” Langtry said, that can spread costs among participants.

And the Pacific Northwest could be a good spot for such a resource. The region has established itself as a fusion hub with companies that include Avalanche, Zap Energy, Helion Energy, Kyoto Fusioneering, Altrusion and ExoFusion in Washington state, and General Fusion in British Columbia.

Fusion energy is created by smashing atoms together that fuse and release power — it’s the same reaction that fuels the Sun. Engineers can create fusion, but the challenge is capturing more energy from the system than it takes to generate the conditions needed for fusion to happen.

Avalanche is developing compact fusion devices that use tritium as a fuel, with a focus on space applications, driven in part by a Pentagon contract to develop nuclear-powered prototypes.

“We always thought of ourselves as a space and defense fusion approach first, and then, as we perfect the technology, we’re going to move into clean energy,” Langtry said. “You’re seeing a huge amount of interest and funding go into defense and space companies.”

FusionWERX will take over an existing facility in the Tri-Cities town of Richland, Wash., which is home to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The building was previously licensed for tritium operations and the new effort’s plans include blanket and shielding test beds, hot cells for handling radioactive materials, and systems for extracting, purifying and recycling tritium.

The site could also be used to produce radioisotopes for medical and space applications.

Langtry said they’re putting together private and public funding to build out the site, and expect to start construction this summer. He did not share cost estimates. About 15 Avalanche employees will be involved in the effort.

Axios on Thursday reported that Avalanche plans to begin raising a Series B round of up to $100 million. The news outlet cited unnamed sources. When asked by GeekWire, the company declined to discuss any future fundraising plans.

Avalanche has raised $50 million to date from investors that include Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Founders Fund, Toyota Ventures, Azolla Ventures and others. It has received $8 million in government grants and contracts, and has 50 employees.

The region’s leaders are welcoming the new facility.

“Just as the United States chose the Tri-Cities to build the first fission reactor in 1943, we are overjoyed that Avalanche Energy will build the first-of-a-kind FusionWERX commercial-scale testbed in our region,” said Karl Dye, president and CEO of the Tri-Cities Development Council, in a statement.

The startup is looking for customers and partners whose work will compliment Avalanche’s research. The cost for using the facility could be an hourly fee.

Editor’s note: Story updated on 4/11 to add information from Axios regarding Avalanche’s potential funding round.

Long before the stock market ups and downs and the global economic uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s ever-changing tariff policies, Seattle-based laser engraver maker Glowforge made a decision to move some of its production back to the U.S. from Mexico.

The switch to a production facility in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood is looking especially smart not just because of the uncertainty around what Trump will do next — on Wednesday he instituted a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for most countries. But the 10-year-old startup can now better control how it innovates around manufacturing, including through the use of AI.

“An old mentor of mine said, ‘Strategy is the explanation you give for why everything you did was smart all along,'” said Glowforge co-founder and CEO Dan Shapiro during a GeekWire tour of the production facility and discussion about tariffs.

Founded in 2015, Glowforge originally made its laser engravers in California before switching to a major contract manufacturer in Mexico five years ago. Shapiro said that through periods of major change and swings in demand, a lack of flexibility in the structure of mass production in Mexico made it challenging to ramp unit production up or down.

“So we started talking about what seemed crazy at the time: What if we actually brought manufacturing home?” Shapiro said, adding that one of the company’s investors based in Washington, D.C., was offering strong advice about considering manufacturing domestically rather than in other countries. “No crystal ball, but just that the winds were turning.”

Glowforge, which has raised $183 million to date and is No. 133 on the GeekWire 200 startup index, went through a rough patch in 2023 and 2024, laying off employees after a funding round fell through. The company gave up on existing SoDo headquarters space to consolidate steps away in a warehouse building on Occidental Avenue South.

With a little over 90 full-time and contract employees in total, Glowforge now employs 15 production workers to assemble its highest-end machines — the $7,000 Glowforge Pro HD and the $5,000 Plus HD. The Glowforge Aura and Spark are still made in Mexico.

“The folks that we’re hiring are people who built airplanes, satellites, medical equipment — technicians who’ve been working on the kind of products that are made here in Seattle,” Shapiro said.

The first laser cutter made in the city rolled off the production line two months ago. But instead of conveyor belts, machines move from station to station on rolling carts. And instead of a traditional Henry Ford assembly line where each person does one thing, Glowforge technicians work with their product from start to the end.

Glowforge isn’t sharing actual production numbers, but right now Shapiro said Pro HD and Plus HD production is at about a quarter of where it was in Mexico. Hiring and training another wave of technicians will bring production to full speed over the course of the next two months, he said, and the finances are working out.

“We’re able to produce these for a cost that’s just slightly under what we were at our original factory in Mexico, despite paying Seattle wages, something we’re really proud of,” he said.

AI as a support tool

Beyond avoiding some of the costs and uncertainty related to tariffs, Glowforge was keen to experiment with how artificial intelligence could be implemented into its production process. But to innovate with speed and ease, it had to be a process owned by the company rather than one being facilitated elsewhere.

The production space has been outfitted with cameras and microphones to harness generative AI to improve efficiency and safety.

“We have created a system where we have the equivalent of 12 efficiency inspectors and 12 safety inspectors on site all the time,” Shapiro said, adding that the backend system measures real-time data against established best practices and provides feedback that can lead to useful adjustments, even if processes and people change.

When GeekWire entered the facility this week, Shapiro received an alert via Slack on his phone. A camera picked up that we were not yet wearing eye protection or sanitary smocks. The AI also sends a wrap-up of advice that it’s accumulated from the entire day and the Glowforge team can also proactively ask questions looking for things that may have happened on video.

Shapiro showed one video example of worker lifting a laser engraver part improperly. The worker had previously sought advice about how to avoid aggravating a shoulder injury. The AI searched its database to identify how a machine designed to lift and turn the component was not being used, and managers were able to go to the worker and solve the problem.

Production workers can also treat the AI as an “Alexa for the factory.” Speaking to Lumina, as Glowforge calls its disembodied tech, workers can ask questions or share ideas that are routed to a suggestion box.

“That idea of really placing the technicians first and building the AI as a support tool for them, rather than as a nanny, has been what I think has made this additive rather than something that’s frustrating,” Shapiro said.

The idea of being watched at work can be a tricky one, as a recent survey showed Amazon and Walmart employees taking some issue with the use of surveillance tech in warehouses. Asked if Glowforge employees are OK with cameras in the factory, Shapiro said feedback shows technicians embracing AI as a tool to improve safety, quality and speed.

Total cost for all the cameras and networking was under $5,000, according to the company, and the AI bill is in the hundreds of dollars a month.

While AI is changing the game for Glowforge in Seattle, the partial production move has not insulated the company from Trump’s tariff shocks entirely as some products and components still come from outside the U.S. Shapiro said the model of overseas manufacturing remains attractive for companies making low-cost, large-scale items that are identical every time, where one person does one thing and passes it to the next person.

When it comes to the manufacturing of Glowforge’s largest, most expensive and most popular product, Shapiro now believes there’s nothing that would happen politically that would send the production back to another country.

“It is very difficult to run a business when the rules of the game are changing so rapidly,” Shapiro said. “The thing that’s really unique about this is that by controlling our manufacturing, we also get to control the innovation, and that’s been the significant payoff that we’ve seen.”

Kelly Smith is making another startup leap as the founder of Hedfirst, a new telehealth company aiming to help patients that need migraine medication.

Hedfirst offers specialized prescription medication for different migraine treatments that are tailored to a patient’s needs. It works with licensed providers in most U.S. states and delivers medication within 2-to-3 business days.

Smith, a longtime Pacific Northwest entrepreneur and tech industry vet, said Hedfirst is “just the start” of a broader health tech roadmap.

“We’ll expand into other disease states, adding prescription medications, supplements, and non-prescription products,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Soon, we’ll launch AI tools to tackle hard-to-diagnose conditions. Patients often face a ‘diagnostic odyssey,’ seeing eight doctors before answers — it’s costly and impacts all stakeholders. Our AI will cut through faster, arming patients with insights.”

The company is coming out of Curious Office, the startup incubator Smith launched in 2007.

Hedfirst uses back-end software powered by another new company that Smith is helping lead called Teligant.

Smith is bootstrapping Hedfirst and Teligant. “We’ve seen startups stumble by raising too much, too fast,” he wrote. “Staying lean keeps us sharp. We may raise capital later, but for now, our money keeps us focused.”

Smith, who is based in Idaho, was most recently chief digital officer at nutritional supplement beverage company Athletic Greens. He held the same role at Hagerty, a classic car insurer, and MGM Resorts International. Smith also helped lead Starbucks’ digital and mobile app expansion.

Smith founded several Seattle startups, including RocketVox (sold to ThePlatform), ImageKind (sold to CafePress) and Zapd (sold to RealSelf). 

He’s teaming up on Hedfirst with the company’s chief medical advisor Dr. Alexander Mauskop, founder of the New York Headache Center and a neurology expert, and Daria Smith, co-founder and COO at both Hedfirst and Teligant.

Hedfirst competes against various telehealth startups, including those focused on migraines such as Cove, as well as other players including Ro, Lyra, and Amazon One Medical.

Longtime Seattle-area investor Brianna McDonald is leading a new organization called Ecosystem Venture Group that blends startup investment funds with services for entrepreneurs and investors.

McDonald has spent nearly two decades leading the Northwest chapter for Keiretsu Forum, a global investment community of accredited investors. She more recently launched startup investment firm NW Angel with her husband, Nathan McDonald.

Ecosystem Venture Group “really brings together all the best things we’ve done,” Brianna McDonald told GeekWire. The firm plans to launch a new fund later this year and invest in startups across various stages, verticals, and geographies.

Ecosystem also offers advisory and training services for entrepreneurs, and has a similar set of products targeted at investor education and deal analysis support.

Part of the mission behind the new group is to fill gaps between different stakeholders in the tech ecosystem. McDonald cited recent comments from former WTIA leader Michael Schutzler, who spoke to GeekWire about the lack of cohesion within the tech community in Seattle and Washington state.

“It operates a lot in silos, with angel investors only caring about themselves, VCs only caring about themselves — everybody only cares about themselves,” she said. “Ecosystem Venture Group works to bridge that together, because when the ecosystem works together, everyone benefits.”

McDonald describes the group’s structure as a mix of venture capital, private equity, and angel investing. She said she’s not focused on finding the next unicorn to emerge from Seattle.

“I am looking to help support great businesses get to a path of profitability, and [help] companies buy companies that are profitable,” she said.

McDonald added: “If a company needs to go raise $100 million, we are not the fund for you.”

Many founders don’t have enough guidance and support to grow their companies effectively, she said. “It’s not just about the next valuation inflection point,” McDonald said. “It’s actually about execution.”

Ecosystem is based in Seattle but will work with companies and clients across the U.S., taking advantage of its national network of partners.

Ecosystem, which also plans to generate revenue from events, is working out of the WRF Venture Center, part of the Washington Research Foundation in Seattle. It has six employees.

— Grant Goodale is jumping back into trucking. The Convoy co-founder announced Tuesday that he is now chief product and technology officer at Ryder, a Florida-based logistics giant.

Goodale previously served as CTO at Convoy, the Seattle trucking marketplace startup valued at nearly $4 billion before it shut down in 2023.

Goodale said he was contacted by Andrew Berberick, co-founder of Baton, a logistics tech startup that Ryder acquired in 2022.

“The team was looking for someone to fill Andrew’s sizable shoes,” Goodale wrote on LinkedIn. “So I’m back doing what I love — working at the intersection of the latest technology and the business that makes all of modern life possible.”

Goodale, who remains based in Seattle, co-founded Convoy in 2015 with his former Amazon colleague Dan Lewis. He began as CTO and later moved into a chief experience officer position before stepping down in 2023. The startup built software to match truckers and shippers, and raised money from the likes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Flexport acquired Convoy assets.

Lewis, who was CEO of Convoy, earlier this year joined Microsoft in a chief product officer role.

Ryder established a Silicon Valley office in 2023 after acquiring Baton, which aimed to help trucking companies boost efficiency. Ryder reported $12.6 billion in revenue last year, up 7%.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:

— Seattle e-commerce startup Shipium promoted Geoff Tamman to chief financial officer. After more than 12 years at Amazon, Tamman joined Shipium in 2022 and was previously vice president of finance and operations.

— Seattle venture firm Graham & Walker hired Ryan Hughes as its new chief of staff. Hughes, who is based in New York City, previously spent nearly five years at Goldman Sachs. Leslie Feinzaig, founder of Graham & Walker, previously wrote about the “old school hiring process” the firm used during its search for the role.

Proprio, a Seattle startup using artificial intelligence for improved surgical precision, received its second major clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to include measurements taken during operations, the company announced Tuesday.

The company’s technology platform, called Paradigm, captures high-definition images of the operating field from above and fuses them with images of pre-operative 3D scans. The system relies on advances in light field imaging, computer vision, machine learning, robotics and augmented reality.

Surgeons can assess progress against their pre-operative plans in real time during surgery, and make data-informed decisions during a procedure, reducing the need for revision surgeries, and improving patient outcomes.

“Evolving from highly educated guesswork to data-driven certainty with intraoperative measurements is game-changing,” said Gabriel Jones, CEO and co-founder of Proprio, in a statement.

The technology has been used in hundreds of surgical cases, including at leading healthcare institutions and spine centers such as UW Medicine and Duke Health.

“We’ve been using navigation in spine surgery for a while, but what this technology allows us to do is precisely find the right angle without intraoperative radiation and navigate it,” said Dr. Rick Bransford, a UW Medicine orthopedic surgeon at Harborview Medical Center. “The system can kind of tell us the trajectory and guidance to place screws with zero radiation. This is a big deal, as almost all other forms of navigation require some component of intraoperative radiation.”

Founded in 2016 and spun out of the University of Washington, Proprio employs more than 50 people and has raised $84 million to date. The company is No. 17 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of Pacific Northwest startups.

Proprio received a previous 510(k) clearance from the FDA in 2023. The company declined to share revenue metrics.

Seattle-based Brinc announced $75 million in new funding and a strategic alliance with Motorola Solutions, aiming to expand production and accelerate deployment of its emergency response drones for police and other U.S. public safety agencies.

Under the alliance, Motorola will become a distributor of Brinc’s products. The companies will also integrate elements of their hardware and software — for example, allowing Motorola radios to dispatch drones from citywide Brinc 911 response drone networks. 

Motorola, the mobile tech pioneer, is a major player in public safety technology, significantly expanding its business in recent years.

Brinc’s new funding round was led by its existing investor Index Ventures, with significant participation from Motorola, according to the company. Other investors in the round included Mike Volpi and Figma CEO Dylan Field.

The funds will support increased manufacturing capacity, next-generation drone research, and expansion of its workforce. The company currently has 116 employees.

Total funding is now $157.2 million. Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, was Brinc’s first outside backer, and he remains an investor in the company.

Founded in Las Vegas in 2019 by Blake Resnick, and now based in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, Brinc develops drones and related technologies for police, fire, and emergency response agencies. 

The funding comes at a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China over tariffs and trade. Brinc is one of the drone makers that China recently placed on its “unreliable entity” list. 

However, a company spokesperson notes that Brinc was already sanctioned by the Chinese government in late 2024, a move that the company says has had little impact on its operations. 

“There are no meaningfully different restrictions with being on this new list,” said David Benowitz, Brinc VP for strategy and marketing communications. “We have put a ton of resources, effort and time into making our drones with components sourced from the U.S. and allied nations, and that has made us resilient.”

He added, “We think the tariffs might actually help us as they make competitive drones much more expensive.”

The company says its products are used by more than 600 public safety agencies, including more than 10% of SWAT teams in the U.S.

Brinc’s Lemur 2 drone includes features such as glass-breaking capability, onboard communication, and low-light navigation. 

The company last year unveiled its Responder drone, designed to serve as a first responder, in some cases resolving calls without the need to dispatch officers, such as delivering medical supplies.

The company’s LiveOps platform enables livestreaming, incident coordination, and digital evidence storage for first responders. The software provides real-time visibility to commanders and support teams, in addition to drone operators.

Avante officially launched Tuesday, hitting a milestone in the startup’s journey to shake up how companies manage spending on employee benefits.

GeekWire initially covered Avante as it emerged from stealth made in early 2024. The company has now grown to 25 employees and is working with a handful of enterprise clients, including Datavant, OneDigital, Real Chemistry, and Zscaler.

Avante’s software aims to help companies decrease HR administration workload and reduce overall benefits program costs. It also offers an AI assistant designed to provide benefits guidance to employees.

The company declined to share revenue metrics.

Avante competes against a number of benefits management software companies, including the likes of Workday, ADP, Deel, Rippling, and others.

Avante is led by CEO Rohan D’Souza, former chief product officer for health care automation company Olive AI; and epidemiologist Carly Eckert, MD, Ph.D., Avante’s head of innovation and impact, who was executive vice president at Olive AI, which shut down in 2023 after selling its key business units.

Kabir Shahani, a serial entrepreneur who was CEO of Seattle-based marketing tech startup Amperity before exiting without public explanation two years ago, is Avante’s executive chairman.

Seattle-area VC firm Fuse led a $10 million seed round for Avante last year. Other backers include Ascend, HighSage Ventures, and angel investors. The company is ranked No. 172 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.

— Rathi Murthy, former chief technology officer for Expedia, is now CTO for Varo Bank, a digital financial institution based in San Francisco.

Murthy was previously a CTO at Verizon Media, and held executive roles at Gap, American Express, eBay, and Yahoo.

“I’ve been deeply inspired by Varo’s mission to make financial inclusion and opportunity a reality for all — empowering everyone with the tools to move their lives forward,” Murthy said on LinkedIn.

Murthy was at Expedia for three years, helping the Seattle-based travel juggernaut integrate AI into its platform.

She left Expedia last year in May, due to what the company described as a “violation of company policy.” Sreenivas Rachamadugu, a senior vice president in engineering, was dismissed at the same time.

Murthy defended her performance, saying in a statement to GeekWire at the time: “Throughout my career, I’ve conducted myself with a commitment to the highest level of integrity.”

— Jordan Selig left her role as executive vice president of Seattle’s Martin Selig Real Estate. Selig’s father launched the prominent firm in 1958. The business once claimed to own one-third of the city’s downtown offices, but has struggled since the COVID pandemic drew tenants out of downtown.

Martin Selig Real Estate has seven properties in receivership that are being operated by a third-party management company, according to the Seattle Times. Last week it laid off 86 workers.

“As I turn the page to my next chapter, I’m excited to pursue a long-held vision at the intersection of real estate and technology — reimagining how urban environments evolve and how innovation can play a role in shaping more sustainable, adaptive cities,” Selig said on LinkedIn.

— Point B, a Seattle-based tech consulting firm, appointed David Hanfland as its new CEO. Hanfland was previously at global consulting firm Kearney for more than 32 years, most recently as global vice-chair of strategy and corporate development.

Hanfland said on LinkedIn that he looks forward to working on Point B’s tech-enabled offerings, and that the company’s “commitment to combining industry expertise with cutting-edge technology is unmatched.”

— Seattle cannabis software company Leafly said Alan Pickerill resigned from its board, according to a regulatory filing.

— Nordstrom said Randy Kanai has taken the title of interim chief accounting officer, according to a new regulatory filing. He has been serving in the role of VP controller. Kanai joined the Seattle apparel company in 2001, beginning as an accountant.

— Microsoft AI added Yuki Zhu to its team as a principal product manager. Zhu joins the company from Instacart, and previously worked at Uber and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

— Brianna McDonald, a longtime Seattle startup and investing vet, is CEO of Ecosystem Venture Group, a new investment organization backing early stage companies that describes itself as a bridge between traditional VC and private equity.

— After nearly three decades at Wizards of the Coast, Christopher Perkins is retiring from the Renton, Wash.-based company behind “Dungeons & Dragons,” “Magic The Gathering,” and other games.

Perkins’ career included writing a blog that include tips on “dungeon mastering,” and roles as Wizards’ game design architect and creative director.

“With D&D’s 50th anniversary wrapping up and the revised rulebooks doing gangbusters, this is the perfect fairytale ending for me,” he said on Bluesky. “I can’t wait to enjoy D&D purely as a fan again, knowing the game is in good hands. See you in the Feywild!”

— Former Google and Dropbox legal counsel Amy Pitelka launched Deer Harbor Group, a Seattle real estate development effort focused on creating “sustainable, well-designed middle housing in Seattle,” she said on LinkedIn. The vision is to take underutilized lots and homes, and convert them into denser, environmentally friendly housing that can include renovations and accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

She is also the managing partner of the Barker Pitelka law and policy practice, and was a legal consultant for Executive Office of the President for President Biden.

President Trump’s recent tariff announcements have roiled global markets and left companies scrambling to adapt, including online retailers that ship products across borders.

Seattle startup FlavorCloud is meeting the moment.

The cross-border shipping and compliance startup, which helps e-commerce companies manage duties, taxes, and global logistics, is experiencing a surge in demand as brands grapple with rapidly changing rules and rising costs.

“Suddenly, we’re very popular,” said FlavorCloud CEO Rathna Sharad, who won Startup CEO of the Year honors at the GeekWire Awards last year.

Sharad said the current moment is exactly what the company was built for — helping brands navigate the complexities of international trade and compliance across dozens of markets. But even with three decades of experience in global trade, she described the speed and scale of the recent changes as “unprecedented.”

“We’re built for this,” she said. “But what is really different here is just the pace at which it is happening.”

The tariff plan last week wiped out more than $6 trillion in U.S. market value, with stocks continuing to fall Monday.

Sharad said every brand is impacted in some way. “It’s sweeping across all consumer goods categories,” she said.

One key change is the elimination of the “de minimis” exemption for imports from China, effective May 2. The U.S. trade rule allowed shipments valued under $800 to avoid tariffs. It’s described as a loophole for cheap products from China, fueling the rise of low-cost platforms like Shein and Temu.

“It allowed for a lot of these sellers to really take advantage of that model — and that model no longer exists,” Sharad said.

The elimination of “de minimis” could impact Seattle tech giant Amazon, which recently launched discount storefront Amazon Haul, its answer to rising competition from Chinese e-commerce giants.

There are also millions of third-party sellers on Amazon — which make up more than 60% of the company’s store sales — who source products from China and other countries.

“Amazon sellers are going to now pay tariffs,” Sharad said.

Trump on Monday threatened an extra 50% tariff on China.

Sharad advised companies to develop new strategies to avoid customs-related delays or fees; focus on creating localized market pricing; and consider alternative manufacturing locations.

Ultimately, Sharad said signs point to increased costs for consumers.

Sharad previously led online boutique startup Runway2street and worked for UPS and Microsoft.

Founded in 2017, FlavorCloud has raised $19 million to date and employs more than 50 people. The company is ranked No. 130 on the GeekWire 200, our index of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.

When investors assess a potential startup, they examine the business model, the total addressable market, the competitive moats, and many other factors.

But especially for early stage companies just getting off the ground, investment decisions often hinge heavily on the founders themselves.

A trio of Seattle venture capitalists shared insights last week on panel discussion at Founder Day, an event hosted by Seattle-based investment firm Graham & Walker to help train early stage founders.

They offered pointers on founder characteristics and behaviors that give them pause when considering an investment. The discussion was moderated by Grin Lord, founder and CEO at Seattle startup mpathic.

Lack of growth mindset: Founders who are unwilling to listen to feedback or appropriately adjust their thinking are a no-go.

• “Obviously you have to have your own opinions as a CEO and as the founder — you’ve got to stand your ground when you believe in something,” said Sabrina Wu, an investor with Madrona. “But if you’re not willing to take advice and listen, then that’s often a red flag for sure.”
• Jason Stoffer, partner at Maveron, said founders can be incredibly difficult to work with — and sometimes that’s OK. But he draws the line if they can’t adapt to facts or listen to good advice from others.

Customer obsession: Wu also said it’s concerning when founders don’t think deeply enough about the customer.

• She said it’s a concern if founders are “too siloed in their thought process and not thinking beyond that.”

Storytelling: Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op, said he’s turned off by unremarkable pitches.

• In fact, he doesn’t mind bad storytelling. “Maybe there’s something here — you’re so inside your head, you have such a unique perspective in the market,” he said. “But if you’re just like ‘meh’ — I can’t work with that.”
• Ginzburg, who helped run Techstars programs in Seattle, said he noticed a similar pattern when working with accelerator startups. “The ones who came in that were just talking gibberish, you could help them. And the ones who came in, they never needed you, those were the successful ones,” he said. “The ones who were right in the middle just never made it.”
• Stoffer added that he looks for founders who can fluidly switch between visionary storytelling and detailed operational thinking.

Earth Finance, a Seattle-area company that helps businesses reduce their climate impacts, acquired Climate Engine, a startup that provides analysis and visualizations of satellite, meteorological and other climate data. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Climate Engine’s five employees will join Earth Finance, bringing its total headcount to more than 40.

Nevada-based Climate Engine launched in 2014 as a research and academic tool that was developed by researchers from Reno’s Desert Research Institute and the University of California Merced. 

In 2020 it spun off a commercial venture focused on bridging planetary change and Earth sciences with economic and financial systems. The company partnered with Google Cloud and became a founding member of the Google Cloud Sustainability Ready initiative. 

Climate Engine created a platform called Spatial Finance technology (SpatiaFi) that incorporates environmental and economic data to help users reduce their business and investment risks, determine the vulnerability of assets to natural disasters, and increase resiliency to climate impacts. Earth Finance will incorporate SpatiaFi into its operations.

“We are making this important acquisition because of the quality of the technology, the team, and because every sector — aviation, maritime, trucking, utilities, finance and banking, technology, built environment, consumer and retail — must understand how global environmental data can be used to make better business decisions,” said Reuven Carlyle, co-founder and executive vice president of Earth Finance, in a statement.

Earth Finance launched in 2023 and its other co-founders are climate policy expert Garrett Kephart and Bryan Weeks, former leaders at Russell Investments. Reuven is a past Washington state senator.

Earth Finance raised a $14 million seed round, and previously acquired Water Foundry, which helps clients manage water scarcity and quality, and Molecule, a firm with expertise in the transportation sector and renewable fuels.

Editor’s note: Story updated to clarify the origins of Climate Engine.

If you’ve already tried everything to reduce the amount of time you spend scrolling on social media, perhaps a Portland startup has the motivator to finally get your attention, or, more accurately, limit your attention — money.

Dayo officially launched a new app Monday that rewards people for staying off those others apps — Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. By limiting social media use to 30 minutes per day, users can earn financial rewards redeemable for special pricing on products from participating brand partners.

The app runs in the background and monitors a user’s social media consumption, sending reminders to encourage “mindful engagement.” If you can keep social time under a half hour, it’s good for $5 toward products from such brands as JBL, Rumpl, Ruff, and Yeti. Earned rewards accumulate in a Dayo wallet and can be applied toward purchases within the app’s marketplace, up to 40% off on selected products.

Users who go over 30 minutes will start to see money deducting from the $5 daily total.

It’s all an answer to limiting the effects of apps and algorithms designed to keep us hooked for countless hours, and Dayo launches during an increased time of concern over excessive screen time and social media use by young people. The startup cites research from the American Psychological Association that suggests limiting social media use to 30 minutes per day can have neutral to positive effects on mental health.

“We’re witnessing the first generation raised entirely on social media, and the consequences are devastating,” Dayo co-founder and CEO Corey Scholibo said. “These platforms weren’t designed to connect us — they were designed to extract maximum profit from our attention, regardless of the societal cost. At Dayo, we’re aiming to reduce that trend by rewarding folks for staying offline.”

Dayo generates revenue from its brand partnerships.

The startup, co-founded by COO Patrick Triato, is bootstrapped and the founders have funded most of the work. Dayo received two institutional investments as winners of the Oregon Entrepreneur Network’s 2024 Tech Prize and the City Of Beaverton 2024 Startup Challenge.

Future updates for the platform are expected to include additional features such as peer-to-peer rewards and a Dayo debit card designed to enhance user earnings.

Dayo employs eight people.

A team of students from the University of Washington is developing self-charging drones that use AI to survey electrical lines to look for potential threats that could knock out power or spark a fire.

The group is the winner of the $15,000 grand prize at the UW’s annual Environmental Innovation Challenge. Team Voltair competed against 22 student-created startups from around the Pacific Northwest in the final pitches held Thursday at Seattle Center.

The students are tackling the challenge of energy grid reliability as demand is increasing thanks to the electrification of transportation, building heating and cooling, data center expansions, industrial manufacturing and other uses.

But grid outages are increasing due to issues such as extreme weather events, while line workers who maintain the infrastructure are retiring at rising rates.

“If you are considering getting an EV or installing a heat pump on your house or any sort of electrification, it doesn’t make a lot of sense if your power goes out every month. So ensuring 100% uptime of the power grid is a huge unlock for consumer electrification,” said Ronan Nopp of Voltair.

Voltair’s drones are designed to monitor thousands of miles of power lines, particularly in rural areas. The drones will initially survey for vegetation growing into the lines, with future plans to look for the degradation of insulators and other hardware. Their technology will use AI to analyze the videos and other data collected to identify problem areas, pinpointing sites for crews to check out.

The team developed the technology that allows the drones to take breaks and recharge directly from the power lines, saving the need to recall the devices — an important feature considering the distances spanned by utility lines.

The drones currently can operate semi-autonomously, but Voltair aims to make them fully autonomous.

The students have bootstrapped their effort so far. They’re talking to utilities about potential partnerships to test their system, and team member Hayden Gosch has been an intern at Seattle City Light for nearly two years.

“We interviewed over a dozen local utilities trying to find out what their pain points are, and what kind of product they’re looking for to help them with maintenance inspections,” Gosch said.

The next steps for Voltair are “working pretty rapidly towards a functional, minimum viable product,” Nopp said, and prepping for the UW’s upcoming Dempsey Startup Competition.

Other members of Voltair are Aryan Sharma, Hunter McKay, Andy Legrand and Isabella Crosby.

This is the 17th year of the student competition hosted by the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship in the Foster School of Business.

Additional prize winning teams:

Metallyze (University of British Columbia, Electrical Engineering, Business, Computer Science, Environmental Engineering, Finance, Commerce)

• $10,000 second-place prize, presented by Kathryn Gardow
• Metallyze is targeting pollutants in wastewater with an IoT sensor network that can detect heavy metals in real time.

JanuTech (UW, Chemical Engineering)

• $5,000 third-place prize, presented by Alaska Airlines
• JanuTech is engineering a novel battery material to enhance the performance of drones used for deliveries.

EnviroTect (UW, Applied Bioengineering)

• $5,000 Climate Action Prize presented by the UW Clean Energy Institute
• EnviroTect is developing a device that filters the volatile gasses that are released into the environment during surgical procedures.

Elementrailer (UW, MS in Entrepreneurship, Mechanical Engineering, Accounting and Entrepreneurship, Technology Management MBA, Environmental Science)

• $2,500 Reimagine Prize presented by Meliorate Partners
• Elementrailer is working on an electric-powered utility trailer that can address range anxiety for EV owners worried about the extra juice needed while towing, and also provide more a energy-efficient towing option for gas-powered vehicles.

Subvision Robotics (Simon Fraser University – British Columbia, Mechatronic Systems Engineering)

• $2,500 Leo Maddox Innovation in Oceanography Prize, with support from the Leo Maddox Family Legacy
• Subvision Robotics is building an autonomous marine rover for cleaning the hulls of ships that uses UV light and avoids the costs of hauling out a vessel for maintenance.

Solar IndusTrees (UW)

• $1,000 Connie Bourassa-Shaw Spark Award
• Solar IndusTrees is developing a low-cost, sustainable solution that enhances solar cell performance.

CureXsco (UW)

• $1,000 Connie Bourassa-Shaw Spark Award
• CureXsco is creating a cost-effective and sustainable solution for regenerating filters that are saturated with PFAS or “forever chemicals.”

A record 43 teams entered the contest this year. Other participating schools included UW Tacoma, the Global Innovation Exchange, Portland State University, Gonzaga University, and the University of Idaho.

Past contenders have launched startups to commercialize their technology. They include PFAS destroyer Aquagga; beanless coffee maker Atomo; wastewater membrane innovator Membrion; and sustainable beverage producer NoWhere Foods.

RELATED: University student entrepreneurs pitch planet-protecting ideas in annual ‘Environmental Innovation Challenge’

Startups are a long game. Focus on your product and your customers.

That’s the message some venture capitalists are sharing with startup leaders following President Trump’s tariff announcement Thursday, which sent U.S. stock markets tumbling and erased more than $3 trillion in market value.

“One of the best things about venture-backed startups is that you have to take a ten-year view because that’s how long it takes to build a company that matters,” said Chris DeVore, founding managing partner at Founders’ Co-op. “In that context, the tariff nonsense is mostly just noise.”

Peter Mueller, founding partner at Breakwater Ventures, echoed that sentiment in a note to entrepreneurs at Foundations, a Seattle startup community.

“In theory, a high-growth startup succeeds because it finds a thing people want, builds it, and sells it, not because the Fed decides to cut rates or because the administration issued a tariff policy,” he wrote in the note, which was shared with GeekWire.

But for startups in industries like hardware, manufacturing, and consumer-packaged goods — or those that deal with global supply chains — the new tariffs may pose short-term challenges.

“We are closely monitoring the situation,” said Kenny Lee, co-founder at Aigen, a Seattle-area agriculture robotics startup. “Our supply chain and manufacturing processes were designed with flexibility in mind, which helps insulate us from market/policy shifts, but this recent development is significant.”

Jim Xiao, an exec at Seattle startup Mason, said the tariffs will impact the company’s hardware costs and will be passed through to the customer. Mason offers a hardware-software platform for companies managing device fleets.

“Since we go directly to manufacturers and pass savings to our customers, the overall impact compared to using consumer alternatives isn’t as big as other devices,” he said. “However, the market sentiment is definitely causing slowdowns in purchasing across gov and healthcare.”

Paul Mikesell, CEO of Carbon Robotics, another agtech startup in Seattle, said his company is also monitoring the tariff news but he doesn’t expect any material impact on Carbon’s business.

Amish Patel, founder of hardware-focused accelerator Conduit Venture Labs, advised early stage hardware startups to be proactive about their supply chains, with contingency plans for alternative sourcing, assembly, and distribution.

Beyond that, Patel said it remains unclear how the proposed tariff plans will affect startups overall.

Jeremy Korst, a longtime Seattle-area tech leader and partner at consulting firm GBK Collective, attended a meeting Thursday for the executive advisory board at the Wharton School. He described the mood as one of disbelief and confusion.

“No one seems to grasp what the real underlying strategy is and how long this approach will persist, so the default approach is to not invest or make any large moves until some steady state becomes more clear,” Korst said.

That hesitation could have downstream effects for startups seeking venture capital or planning to exit. Startup valuations may dip if they track public market trends, as Crunchbase noted. Tariffs could also delay IPO timelines and prompt some institutional investors to pull back, The Information reported. Update: Klarna paused its planned IPO and StubHub did the same, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The tariff plan brings little relief for the private market ecosystem, which has already been struggling under the pressures of low exit activity,” Paul Condra, global head of private markets research at PitchBook, said in a statement. “The industry now faces additional risk dimensions in assessing tariff exposure across portfolios, while added uncertainty extends the persistent hesitation toward dealmaking and capital deployment.”

This week serves as a reminder that relying on overseas production for cost savings may be an “outdated” strategy, said Dan Shapiro, CEO at 3D laser printer manufacturer Glowforge. He added that AI-driven technologies are making domestic manufacturing more attractive.

“When you weigh these concrete AI-driven improvements against the growing volatility abroad, the traditional offshoring calculation just doesn’t make as much financial sense as it used to,” Shapiro said.

Mueller ended his note to founders with straightforward advice: “Keep building. Keep talking to customers. Ignore the noise.”

Editor’s note: Comments from Xiao, Mikesell, and Condra added after initial publication.

— Jill Angelo, founder and CEO of Seattle menopause startup Gennev, announced that her chapter with the business is ending. Florida-based women’s health company Unified Women’s Healthcare acquired Gennev in 2022 for an undisclosed sum, and Angelo transitioned to president of virtual health at Unified. She is now resigning from that role.

The acquisition “was not just a milestone — it was validation of a vision that started with a small but mighty team determined to make menopause mainstream. It also set a precedent that a women’s health startup can successfully exit,” Angelo said on LinkedIn.

Angelo launched her business as Genneve in 2016. The company provided telehealth services and products for women going through perimenopause and menopause. Gennev continued operating as its own health unit within the larger company after the acquisition.

Before creating her startup, Angelo spent more than 15 years at Microsoft in marketing and product roles.

Angelo did not say what her next role would be, but that it would ideally include “more in-person time, creativity, and possibly a passport stamp or two.”

— Aurion Biotech has pushed out its CEO. Swiss healthcare company Alcon last week acquired a majority interest in Aurion, a clinical-stage startup in Seattle that is developing advanced cell therapies to treat eye diseases.

Following that deal, Alcon jettisoned founder and CEO Greg Kunst, replacing him with former Chief Scientific Officer Arnaud Lacoste.

According to Endpoints News, the two companies have been at loggerheads over Aurion’s IPO plans, taking the dispute to court in November. Last summer Aurion announced that it received special designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that should expedite development of its treatment for a common cornea disease.

— Temporal appointed Jim Cyb as president and leader of its go-to-market efforts, and Sahir Azam as its first independent board member. The Seattle startup helps companies write and run cloud applications. This week it announced $146 million in new funding, and is valued at $1.72 billion.

Cyb’s past accomplishments include helping scale SaaS companies Duo Security and Zendesk. Azam is the chief product officer of MongoDB.

— General Fusion, a Richmond, B.C., fusion energy company, welcomed former Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith as a strategic advisor. Smith worked for decades in aerospace, leading new product development at United Space Alliance, Sandia Labs and Honeywell Aerospace.

— Seattle’s apree health announced Jonathan Porter as its new CEO. The company formed in 2022 following the merger of Vera Whole Health, a Seattle primary care business, with Castlight Health, a San Francisco healthcare navigation company. Porter was previously chief product officer for apree, and has served as CPO for Bright Health Group and athenahealth.

— Ben Pitasky has returned to the world of trucking logistics. The former head of finance and accounting at Convoy, a Seattle startup that folded in 2023, is now chief financial officer for Alvys, a California-based company working to improve trucking efficiencies. Pitasky comes to Alvys from the career platform Handshake. He has also held roles at Amazon.

— Light AI, a Vancouver, B.C., healthcare tech company, appointed Anthony Schaller as chief technologist and president.

Schaller has led or advised on tech innovation at roughly 20 companies over his career. He served as CTO/senior vice president of technology at corporations including Match.com, Yahoo and Ticketmaster.

Light AI is using artificial intelligence to build diagnostic tools that operate on smartphones. Its first target is creating a tool that can diagnose Strep A through phone images.

— Seattle’s Augmodo announced Simon Morriss as its commercial director for the Asia-Pacific marketplace. The startup uses a variety of technologies including smart-badges worn by employees, computer vision, augmented reality, AI, spatial computing, 3D mapping and data analysis to help customers keep track of their inventory. The company raised $5.3 million in seed funding in October.

— Group14 Technologies, a Washington state next-gen battery materials company, announced two new members of its board of directors: Stellantis CFO Richard Palmer and former General Motors global manufacturing lead Gerald Johnson. Group14 is building what is expected to be the world’s largest manufacturer of silicon-carbon battery material in Moses Lake.

— Sigma Design, a product development and engineering company, has set up shop in Seattle. The 30-year-old business serves the aerospace, defense, tech and industrial sectors and is based in Camas, Wash. It has additional Washington offices in Kirkland and Vancouver, as well as in Oregon and Singapore.

Doug Hill, senior VP of strategic accounts, and Jim Berton, senior director of strategic programs, have relocated to the Seattle office on a “semi-permanent basis,” the company said.

Hydrolix, a Portland, Ore.-based “streaming data lake” startup that helps companies store and analyze huge volumes of log data, raised $80 million in a Series C round led by QED.

What Hydrolix does: The company stores, compresses, and queries huge volumes of log data — everything that happens in a digital system —  in real time. Fintech, media, and e-commerce companies use log data to detect security threats, debug issues, monitor live streams, and more. The startup is riding tailwinds from cloud, AI, and security applications driving up log data usage.

Revenue: Grew 8X in 2024; annual recurring revenue is close to $40 million.

Customers: Volkswagen, Paris Olympics, Navy Federal Credit Union.

Partnerships: Akamai, AWS, Quesma.

Founders: CEO Marty Kagan and CTO Hasan Alayli founded Hydrolix in 2018. Kagan was an exec at Akamai, Jive Software, and Fastly, and co-founded Cedexis, which was acquired by Citrix. Alayli previously worked at Splunk as a principal software engineer and was a technical lead at Cedexis.

Quotable: “Log data doesn’t just provide a history — it tells a story,” Kagan said in a blog post. “And it’s not just about what happened in the past. It provides the ability to make educated guesses about the future.”`

Investors: Other backers include Blumberg Capital, Frontline Ventures, Pruven Capital, Sozo Ventures, Akamai, AV8 Ventures, Ericsson Ventures, Nava Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund, S3 Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.

• Chuckie Reddy, QED partner and head of growth investments, will join the Hydrolix board as a director.

Other details:

• Total funding to date is $148 million.
• The company has 189 employees.

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems says it has raised $17.5 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its Supernova space vehicle, which aims to harness the heat of the sun to power rapid-response maneuvers in orbit.

The oversubscribed investment round was led by AlleyCorp, with participation from Mach33, FUSE, First In, TFX, Offline Ventures, Atypical and other strategic investors. Portal said the funding will support the first full-scale demonstration of Supernova, with launch scheduled for mid-2026.

“Our vision is to provide next-gen spacecraft that today’s space operations demand and our nation deserves,” Portal CEO Jeff Thornburg said today in a news release. “This funding is a testament to the increasing recognition that maneuverability at will is the critical need in both defense and commercial space operations.”

Supernova will make use of a solar thermal propulsion system, with large, lightweight reflectors that focus the sun’s rays on a heat exchanger. When an ammonia-based propellant passes through the heat exchanger, it rapidly builds up pressure and produces thrust.

Thornburg said Supernova can “deliver the performance of nuclear thermal propulsion without the burden of launching a reactor.” The system is designed to push Supernova and its payloads from, say, low Earth orbit to a geostationary orbit in a matter of hours. In contrast, it might take a traditional space propulsion system weeks or months to execute a similar set of maneuvers, according to Portal.

Brannon Jones, a former SpaceX engineer who is now an investor at AlleyCorp, said Portal is “introducing a new paradigm of space operations.”

“We were particularly impressed by their Supernova spacecraft, which will improve maneuverability in space by over an order of magnitude, while also significantly extending operational lifespans by enabling a more sustained presence in space,” Jones said.

Mach33 is one of Portal’s early investors. “Jeff’s track record pioneering propulsion at SpaceX, Stratolaunch and [Amazon’s Project] Kuiper gave us early confidence in Portal,” said Aaron Burnett, Mach33 Financial Group’s CEO. “But the team’s rapid transformation of technical breakthroughs into staggering customer demand sealed our decision to double down this round.”

The funding round announced today adds to $2.6 million in pre-seed funding, plus $5.5 million in small-business research grants. Last summer, Portal won a commitment for $45 million in public-private support through SpaceWERX’s STRATFI program. Since then, Portal has opened an 8,000-square-foot headquarters and development lab in Bothell and is now looking at sites for a manufacturing facility.

The development plan for Supernova calls for a critical design review and testing of the system’s 3D-printed heat-exchanger thruster in the next few months. System integration would begin by the end of this year, leading up to next year’s launch on a rocket yet to be named.

Supernova is meant to address a need for rapid maneuverability in orbit as an increasing number of satellites complicate space traffic management — and as the U.S. military is becoming increasingly concerned about the potential for threatening orbital maneuvers orchestrated by China and Russia.

Emovid, the startup aiming to upend business communication with a focus on video messaging, raised nearly $7 million in seed funding, the company announced Wednesday.

Emovid emerged from stealth last summer, and CEO Victor Cho told GeekWire that the goal is to do away with billions of written emails workers send every day and replace them with asynchronous video messages — content that is not live streamed but rather recorded and shared for later viewing.

The Emovid platform enables communication via unscripted 2- to 5-minute videos instead of long meetings or lengthy e-mails. Cho calls it a more authentic way of communicating.

“Over the past year, we have demonstrated that our features solve real problems for our customers, and we are now ready for a full product launch and further development of our generative AI capabilities,” Cho said in a statement.

Emovid videos can be recorded and sent directly from the startup’s platform and can be also embedded into an existing email client or dropped into a LinkedIn message, a messaging app, on Facebook or elsewhere.

Emovid also taps into generative AI, producing a summary of each video and a full transcript. Al also improves the background in a video as well as the appearance of a speaker as needed. But there’s no deepfake at play — Emovid is adamant about verifying who is doing the communicating and adds an “authenticity verified” seal to each video.

Cho, who is based in San Francisco, led the digital invitation company Evite for more than seven years. He previously worked at Microsoft, Intuit and Eastman Kodak, and holds board positions with a number of organizations.

Cho’s co-founders include Digvijay Chauhan, Emovid’s Seattle-based CTO, and chief experience officer Rupali Pathania.

The round was led by o-kaisha Investments, the investment arm of the Oki Family Office. Scott Oki was a senior vice-president of sales and marketing for Microsoft.

The new cash will be used to expand Emovid’s availability through more product tiers; invest in new AI features; and secure distribution and marketing partnerships.

• Prophetic launched last year and aims to improve the real estate development analysis process by automating site planning, extracting data, and other features. It’s similar to CityBldr, a Seattle-area startup targeted at commercial real estate clients.
• Prophetic founder and CEO Oliver Alexander previously founded medical clinic business Orchid Health that operates in Oregon’s rural communities.
• The funding round was led by Entrada Ventures, which recently backed Seattle maritime software startup OpenTug. Other investors include SilverCircle and Progression Fund. Prophetic employs 11 people and plans to hire.

heyLibby, a Seattle startup that helps small businesses in the health and wellness sector use AI to answer customer inquiries, raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by French firm Aglae Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Vertical Venture Partners.

What heyLibby does: The company, which we first covered in 2023, sells AI assistant software that can handle phone calls, emails, chats, and texts — both inbound messages that come from customers, and also proactive marketing out to customers. The idea is to help gyms, recreational facilities, yoga studios, and other wellness businesses improve customer service and free up staff to focus on other tasks.

• heyLibby spent the past two years figuring out product-market fit, eventually landing on health and wellness. “These businesses get calls and emails all the time — and they just really need help answering them,” said CEO Tony Small.

Customers: Arena Sports, Seattle Sun Tan, Desert Sun Tanning Salon. Arena Sports is able to automate about 70% of its communications with heyLibby’s software, Small said. heyLibby serves the U.S., and plans to expand to Western Europe and Canada soon. 

Revenue: More than $200,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Competition: Zenoti, another Seattle-area software company, also targets the wellness sector and has its own AI assistant. There are a number of other startups building AI assistants.

Founders: Small and his former Zillow Group colleague Anna Rodriguez co-founded heyLibby, alongside former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff, who is now CEO at Match Group.

• Rodriguez worked at Zillow for more than four years, leading teams that managed third-party applications such as Salesforce and Zendesk. She later joined Slalom and was most recently a director at Avalara before launching heyLibby.
• Small spent more than eight years at Zillow, where he oversaw the company’s core Premier Agent business that helps realtors advertise and find leads on the real estate platform. He also spent five years at Amazon before joining Zillow and was the chief revenue officer at Convoy, Pro.com, and Wiliot.

Other details:

• heyLibby also sells a white-label product used by businesses that want to offer AI assistant services. Small said that more than half of the company’s revenue comes from selling to other businesses.
• The 3-person startup uses an array of back-end AI infrastructure, including ChatGPT and ElevenLabs, to power its services.
• Rascoff, who is an investor in heyLibby, said the health and wellness sector is a “huge category with high customer service needs and a front-desk workforce frequently distracted with multiple tasks.” He added: “This is a perfect customer base for an AI sales assistant.”

Since 2014, UW Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design has spun off 10 startups, and the institute’s director, University of Washington biochemist David Baker, has co-founded 21 tech companies. After Baker won the Nobel Prize in October, interest spiked from graduate students and postdoctoral researchers eager to join IPD in pursuit of academic or entrepreneurial ventures.

The timing was perfect. The artificial intelligence used to create previously nonexistent proteins with the potential to provide new cancer treatments, tackle plastic waste, deliver life-saving vaccines, capture carbon and other essential tasks has hit its stride.

Then everything came to a screeching halt.

Due to Trump administration efforts to slash research budgets and threats to state funding, UW Medicine in February instituted a temporary hiring freeze for non-clinical roles, followed by a university-wide freeze on non-essential positions in March.

That means UW academic departments will likely accept fewer graduate students, and labs — Baker’s included — are unable to hire postdocs unless they successfully lobby leadership for exemptions. That means fewer highly educated researchers will get the chance to delve into these new technologies, potentially curbing the startups spinning out of IPD.

“In some sense it’s like [Charles] Dickens wrote — ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,'” Baker said in an interview with GeekWire.

“The opportunities are incredible. The amount of talent that would like to come here to work on these problems is enormous,” he said, thanks in part to the Nobel Prize. But with the freeze and other funding cuts, they’ve had to push applicants away.

‘A disaster’

If the timing had been different, David Younger could have been one of those people.

Younger is the CEO of A-Alpha Bio, one of the startups that launched out of IPD research. He did his PhD and postdoc at the UW, and co-founded Seattle’s A-Alpha Bio in 2018 after incubating at the UW’s CoMotion. The company is designing proteins and measuring their interactions with other proteins, looking for new connections such as those between antibodies and viruses.

The company has raised $65.5 million, including venture capital investments, Department of Defense funding and grants. It employs about 50 people.

Younger is troubled by diminished support for academic training and research, and its broader impacts.

“It’s a disaster for everyone,” he said. “There are so many different types of careers that are enabled only by those types of educational opportunities and experiences.”

The Trump administration has chopped away at university budgets through multiple avenues. In the name of efficiency, it wants dramatic cuts to National Institutes of Health reimbursements for costs including rent, utilities, administrative support and other infrastructure. Research funding at Columbia University and Harvard is facing uncertainty, with huge amounts of federal support withdrawn or under review amid allegations of antisemitic discrimination. The University of Washington is among the institutions the Trump administration may also penalize.

Added to that uncertainty is a revenue shortfall in Washington state that is pushing Gov. Bob Ferguson and state lawmakers to shrink spending.

“The cuts proposed by the Governor and state legislature disproportionately impact the UW — and do so at a time when the federal government’s damaging cutbacks to research and health-care funding are already hitting home, magnifying their impact,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce wrote in an email to alumni on Tuesday.

Potential for lost leadership

Marc Cummings, CEO of Life Science Washington, an organization promoting the state’s biotech sector, fears the economic impacts of the cuts. In this state, the industry “is primarily home grown with most local companies being able to trace their success back to technology or people that came from UW or other local research institutes,” he said by email.

“America has built a life science industry that is the envy of the world,” he added. “The industry employs 2.3 million people in the U.S. and we lead the world in biotech investment and new drug development. Why? Because we have the best research universities that attract the best global talent and conduct the most advanced medical research.” 

Helen Eisenach is a grad student working with Baker and IPD associate professor Neil King. She has funding for about another year-and-a-half to work on her PhD. What she does next is increasingly uncertain given the decreasing federal support for research.

The situation puzzles her.

While Eisenach is focused on engineering new proteins for treating health and environmental issues, science also stokes progress in communications, technology, military advancement, agriculture and manufacturing. Without funding, the U.S. gives up its leadership in these fields, she said.

“You’re up against countries,” Eisenach said, “who have absolutely no qualms about spending every dollar towards being the best in class.”

Making the world a better place

Daniel Adriano Silva co-founded two companies with IPD roots: Neoleukin Therapeutics, which launched in 2019 and later merged with Neurogene, and Monod Bio, a 20-person company started in 2021 that creates proteins for use in research, health diagnostics and clinical settings.

Silva participated in IPD’s Translational Investigator program, which helps academics transition into entrepreneurship.

He is now CEO of Seattle-based Monod, and believes the local biotech ecosystem is special.

“There is a concentration of talent around machine learning and AI and biosciences here that is unique,” Silva said.

Labs across UW Medicine, the UW and elsewhere in the U.S. are waiting to see how the funding questions are settled and how many researchers they’ll be able to support. Baker weighs the pros and cons of the situation he faces.

“It’s a big blow, just because everything was so poised and the opportunities are so great,” Baker said. With the uncertainty, he wonders “can we support the people who are here? Can we bring in new people? Can we really capitalize on all these amazing possibilities for designing proteins to make the world a better place?

The Dickens quote cited by Baker — which is the start of “A Tale of Two Cities” — continues: “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

RELATED: For Nobel Prize winner David Baker, it’s back to the lab as protein pioneer helps launch more startups

Juno, a platform designed to help manage corporate guest travel, raised $2 million in seed funding, the company announced Tuesday.

The round was led by Seattle-based Madrona and Bungalow Ventures. Steve Singh, managing director at Madrona and co-founder of Concur, led the investment for Madrona.

Denver-based Juno sees guest travel as a major pain point for companies that have already modernized employee travel with booking tools and automation. When it comes to guests — such as recruits, contractors, trainees, speakers, and customers — many companies still depend on travel agents, spreadsheets, and long email threads to manage their trips.

Juno’s platform guides coordinators and their guests through booking, logistics, payments, reimbursements, and reconciliation.

Portland, Ore.-based Devon Tivona and Denver-based Sam Felsenthal are co-CEOs and co-founders at Juno. They previously co-founded Pana, another corporate guest travel platform, that was acquired by Coupa in 2021.

“Guest travel has always been the glaring gap in the corporate travel stack,” Tivona said in a news release. “Guests don’t have logins. They don’t have corporate cards. They don’t know the travel policy. And yet, these are often the most important trips a company coordinates. The legacy tools just aren’t built for this.”

Singh co-founded the travel and expense management giant Concur, which was acquired by SAP in 2014 for $8.3 billion. He called guest travel a “glaring blind spot” in the corporate travel ecosystem.

“It’s still manual, fragmented, and underserved,” Singh said in a statement. “Juno is solving that with a modern, integrated platform built for today’s enterprises and their most important travelers. This team knows the space better than anyone.”

Singh has been busy investing in various travel-related startups. He led a group of investors in the April 2024 acquisition of Direct Travel Inc., a Colorado-based corporate travel management company, and is executive chairman of Otto, a Seattle-based startup developing an AI virtual assistant for business travel booking.

Singh also serves as executive chairman at Spotnana, a travel-as-a-service technology platform (he’s currently also interim CEO); Troop, a group meetings and events company; and Center, a corporate card and expense management platform that is being acquired by American Express. 

With the future of TikTok up in the air, two engineers from Seattle just landed funding from Mark Cuban for their short-form video app that differentiates itself with unique back-end technology.

Skylight Social announced Tuesday that it raised cash from the Shark Tank legend, as well as Seattle-based firm Graham & Walker. TechCrunch first reported on the funding.

The company just got off the ground and is led by Victoria White and Reed Harmeyer. Its app (iOS; Android) looks and feels similar to TikTok. But one important difference is that it’s built on the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol.

The AT Protocol lets users own their data, including their social graph, and move it across different apps. Bluesky, the popular X competitor, is built on the AT Protocol.

“We believe in giving users true ownership of their content and social connections,” Skylight says on its site. “By building on AT Protocol, we ensure that your videos, followers, and engagement aren’t locked into our platform. You’re free to take everything with you if you ever choose to use another AT Protocol-based service.”

Skylight is also unique in that it’s registered as a Public Benefit Corporation and is legally committed to creating positive social impact.

Skylight attended the recent ATmosphere Conference in Seattle, where Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and other leaders from the AT Protocol movement gathered to discuss the burgeoning technology.

Seattle tech veteran Marcelo Calbucci was at the conference and wrote a post on GeekWire about the potential impact from AT Protocol for social apps and the internet more broadly.

“It’s wrong to think of Skylight as a TikTok clone,” Calbucci wrote. “The experience might feel very similar, but users will be able to pack their data and move to another similar service when they want to and continue to benefit from the audience they’ve built.”

Skylight is gaining momentum as TikTok faces a U.S. ban this week.

“We all deserve social media platforms that give us control over our content, audience, and relationships, that won’t just flip the algorithm because of the founder’s politics, or get banned, or just arbitrarily change the rules and destroy what we love about them,” Leslie Feinzaig, founder at Graham & Walker, wrote on LinkedIn.

White and Harmeyer previously led Terris, a Seattle company that describes itself as an “AI whiteboard to help you from idea to prototype” and helps users generate code for React apps.

Related: The under-the-radar tech revolution that could change how the internet works

Agility Robotics, the Salem, Ore.-based company known for its Digit bipedal humanoid warehouse robot, is reportedly raising $400 million in new funding according to a report Tuesday by The Information.

The report cited a person who has seen the term sheet, which put Agility’s pre-investment valuation at $1.75 billion. The venture arm of private equity firm WP Global is leading the fundraising, with participation from SoftBank, according to The Information.

An Agility spokesperson told GeekWire that the company was not commenting at this time on the funding report.

Peggy Johnson, the former Microsoft executive who stepped down as Magic Leap CEO in 2023, has been leading Agility as CEO for the past year.

In a news release Monday, Agility announced new capabilities and advancements that expand the work Digit is able to perform. They include expanded battery capabilities; autonomous docking onto charging stations; additional safety features; new robust limbs and end effectors, giving Digit a wider range of grasping angles; and streamlined manufacturing of Digit.

Amazon previously invested in Agility in a $150 million round through its Industrial Innovation Fund, a billion-dollar venture capital fund that backs different forms of supply chain technology.

GeekWire saw Digit in action at an Amazon warehouse south of Seattle, where the robots were being tested for tote consolidation, a process that involved organizing and repositioning storage containers after all the inventory has been removed. Digit can autonomously sense, grasp, and move bulk objects such as the totes, while navigating an environment originally designed for humans.

Digit stands at a height of 5 feet 9 inches tall and can handle payloads up to 35 pounds. Its head includes internal antennas and LED eyes that blink to indicate which way it’s turning. The robot has multiple arrays of cameras and sensors, and a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system to scan its environment.

It has two robotic arms, and while its legs may look like those of a large bird, such as an ostrich or crane, the company says they reflect decades of research into how humans and animals walk, allowing it to navigate a variety of terrains.

In September 2023, Agility announced a Salem manufacturing facility that it said would ultimately be able to produce more than 10,000 robots a year.

Other startups such as 1X, Cobot and Figure AI are among companies leading a surge of interest and investment around humanoid robots, according to Pitchbook.

An Oregon State University spinoff, Agility is No. 6 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of Pacific Northwest startups.

• Founded in 2019, OpenTug sells a marine logistics platform that helps companies optimize freight efficiency on inland and coastal waterways by streamlining booking, quoting and tracking. Customers include barge shippers and tug operators.
• The company is led by CEO Jason Aristides, a former operations analyst with Curtin Maritime Corp; COO Michael Baldwin, who previously worked at Amazon Web Services; and CTO Luciano de la Iglesia, who spent time as a data scientist at Microsoft.
• OpenTug is one of several logistics/supply chain startups in the Seattle area helping companies move and manage physical goods. The company has raised $5.3 million to date.

Gierd, an Idaho-based startup that helps brands grow their e-commerce business on marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart, raised $8 million in a Series A round led by New York firm Nyca Partners.

What Gierd does: Founded in 2022, the 80-person company sells tools to brands that helps with sales automation, demand forecasting, fraud protection, pricing, and financial reconciliation, among other features.

Quotable: “Major retailers are aggressively shifting to marketplace models to broaden assortments, slash operational burdens and supercharge product selection,” Gierd co-founder and CEO Jordan Sielaff said in a statement. “Gierd’s cutting-edge tools are making this transition seamless for brands.”

Founders: Sielaff previously was an exec at Assurant, Amazon, and eBay. Gierd co-founder Jon Pederson also spent time at Amazon and worked in product management at Faithlife.

Investors in the round: Seattle-based Fortson VC and Spokane, Wash. angel group Kick Start also invested.

Portland-based Sturdy.ai, a startup whose platform uses AI to analyze customer communications across multiple channels to help minimize churn, raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Seattle-based firm Voyager, the company announced Tuesday.

What sturdy does: Sturdy analyzes emails, support tickets, calls, and other unstructured customer conversations to identify patterns, behaviors, and signals that lead to churn, expansion, or inefficiency.

Unlike tools that rely on analyzing telemetry data, manual tagging, or health scores, Sturdy autonomously surfaces proactive signals, giving teams a head start on protecting revenue and growing accounts. To get the data, Sturdy built integrations with 12 common customer-facing systems including Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Gong, Zoom, Jira, and more. etc. See here for further explanation about the tech.

Use case: One example of how a customer uses the product, as it relates to increased retention, is Syntrio, a B2B software company that identified a segment of customers expressing similar integration frustrations and response lags from the account management team. Sturdy triggered alerts and automated workflows that allowed leadership to intervene and save $1.2 million in at-risk renewals.

Quotable: “We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” co-founder and CEO Steve Hazelton said in a statement. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”

Founders: Co-founders include Steve Hazelton, CTO Nathaniel Hazelton and chief revenue officer Joel Passen. All three spent time together at Newton Software, and Passen and Steve Hazelton worked together at Gravity Technologies and Paycor.

Revenue: The company said it is approaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Headcount: Sturdy employs 15 U.S.-based employees, and it’s hiring in sales, engineering, product, and data sciences.  

Investors in the round: Fortson VC joined Voyager in the round, along with existing investor Grotech Ventures. Voyager General Partner Diane Fraiman is joining Sturdy’s board.

Editor’s note: “Tech Vets: Profiles in Leadership and Innovation,” is a GeekWire series showcasing U.S. military veterans leading companies within the Pacific Northwest tech industry. The series explores how military experience fosters leadership, resilience, and innovation in tech.

When Seattle entrepreneur Stephiney Foley was an undergraduate at West Point, she had a literal lesson in “to sink or swim” that helped shape her as a leader.

Though only a sophomore at the elite military academy, Foley was required to support 18 freshmen in their academics and other areas. That included an underclassman from Chicago who didn’t know how to swim and needed to learn.

Foley wasn’t a great swimmer herself and the other student towered over her by more than a foot. They met at the pool at 5 a.m.

“I want him to succeed,” Foley recounted thinking. “And I’m not that strong, and he just drags me down as we’re treading water. It’s such a small example, but you’re focused on helping the person that you are in charge of, doing the best that you can.”

Despite the inauspicious start, the pair met three times a week for many months. Her mentee’s swimming improved, and Foley became a stronger leader, someone who’s willing to give her best to tough assignments.

After graduating, Foley served in the U.S. Army as a platoon leader in Afghanistan and Hawaii, and a supply chain and operations officer in California. She worked at Amazon for six years, leaving the role of head of product for order management. In September 2023 she launched Yuzi, a startup providing post-natal care for new moms and families.

Reflecting on her time at West Point and the U.S. Army, Foley recalls the character-shaping experiences and the values that were driven into her — concepts that are motivational but not so much the stuff of embroidered pillow slogans. They include “choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong” and “the only constant is change.”

She relied on these lessons leading predominantly male teams at Amazon, setting boundaries and standards for communicating with her subordinates at the tech giant. She spoke out for a female employee on her team who was being treated disrespectfully.

Foley now draws on her military experience as a startup founder. That includes a recent decision to redefine the focus of her company.

She initially launched Yuzi to provide a post-delivery retreat for mothers where they receive meals, access to experts in taking care of newborns, and an opportunity to heal, with longer-term virtual resources.

But a six-month pilot demonstrated that the vision wasn’t going to pencil out. Foley had to lay off some staff and refocus.

Her new plan for Yuzi is creating a marketplace of services and AI-powered planning tools for women to easily assemble a personalized, post-partum support plan. That includes lining up assistance day or night, finding lactation consultants, physical therapy for pelvic floor recovery, mental health and nutrition guidance, and other needs.

While the experiences in the military, as well as at Amazon, provided Foley with needed tools for running her company, she admits certain traits don’t always translate well in other parts of life — and she’s working to refine them. For example, she sometimes she speaks too directly and charges ahead when the situation calls for a gentler approach.

“I don’t have tactical patience,” she said. “I’m just like, ‘Let’s go. Here’s the plan. Let’s execute. This is what I want to do.'”

The big picture, however, is that her service was formative in many positive ways.

“The combination of grit that the military gives you, because you’re put through so many crucibles, and then in addition to that your ability to adapt and your conviction in the mission” has been essential, she said. “The military really kind of formed who I am as a person.”

Temporal, a Seattle startup that helps companies write and run cloud applications, raised $146 million. The company is now valued at $1.72 billion — up slightly from 2022, when it raised $103 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it one of a handful of Seattle-area unicorns.

What Temporal does: Temporal’s open-source microservices orchestration platform replaces ad-hoc systems to help developers reduce time spent on scalability and reliability. It’s used by “hundreds and thousands” of developers globally. Temporal sells Temporal Cloud as a managed service.

Customers: Snap, Netflix, Hashicorp, Box, Datadog.

Revenue: Not disclosed, but up 4.4X in the past 18 months.

Quotable: “This funding allows us to advance our mission of making execution reliability the default, whether for traditional enterprises or the next generation of AI-driven workloads,” Temporal CTO and co-founders Samar Abbas said in a statement. “While many are rushing to build single-purpose tools, our general-use architecture is proving more effective for AI workflows while working within existing systems.”

Founders: Abbas and co-founder/CEO Maxim Fateev previously worked together at Uber and helped build an internal open-source orchestration engine called Cadence. The reception to that idea sparked them to launch Temporal. Fateev previously worked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Abbas also worked at Microsoft and Amazon.

Investors in the round: Tiger Global led the round. Other backers include StepStone Group, Amplify Partners, Index Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Conversion Capital, Hanwha Next Generation Opportunity Fund, and 137 Ventures.

Other details: 

• Total funding to date is $350 million. Temporal raised $75 million in 2023; its valuation was “just north” of $1.5 billion at the time.
• Temporal has around 250 employees. It recently hired software veteran Jim Cyb as president and added Sahir Azam, chief product officer at MongoDB, as its first independent board member.

Long gone are the days on the farm where getting up at the crack of dawn to run a tractor through fields might have been just the start of a long day’s work. Now, the tractor could very well have been running all night — by itself.

That’s the vision of Seattle agriculture-tech startup Carbon Robotics, whose latest product is called Carbon AutoTractor, an AI-powered, autonomous platform designed to fit on and control existing equipment and serve as an answer to labor shortages and increased productivity in farming.

“We learned from farmers that their biggest challenges continue to be around labor and labor availability,” said Carbon Robotics founder and CEO Paul Mikesell. “If they could, they would run everything 24/7. They would run everything every minute of farming season to get as much done as possible.”

Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics has been chiefly known for its signature LaserWeeder machinery, which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses an array of AI and computer vision tech to detect plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The latest version, LaserWeeder G2, was released in February.

Now the automatic weed zapper can be pulled by the AutoTractor.

And Mikesell, the longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems and led an infrastructure engineering group at Uber for four years, said the AutoTractor eclipses other providers’ attempts at similar autonomy.

The Carbon Autonomy Kit features several components, some of which are mounted on top of the tractor and some inside. It has cameras, a safety radar system, a crash safety bumper, and a box inside the tractor that connects to the electronics and tells the machine how to drive and do its farming activities.

One of the keys to making it all work is a complex supervision and management system, run from Carbon’s Remote Operations Control Center (ROCC) in Richland, Wash. Trained operators can monitor unmanned tractors on farms anywhere in the world and take control in the event that the AutoTractor encounters an unexpected obstacle, such as an irrigation line or wildlife in the field.

“If I have a tractor that I’ve been told is autonomous, and I put it in the field, and I expected it to do eight hours of work, and then I come back after the eight hours and see it stopped 45 minutes into its shift because it got confused by something, well, that’s a real pain,” Mikesell said. “And if it happens time and time again, then it’s just unacceptable.”

The AutoTractor autonomy kit is initially compatible with John Deere 6R and 8R Series tractors, requiring no permanent modifications, according to Carbon. Installation can be completed in less than 24 hours and tractors can toggle between autonomous and manual operation as needed.

Beyond the LaserWeeder, the AutoTractor can pull and adjust to machinery that performs ground preparation tasks such as tilling, plowing, cultivating, ripping, discing, listing, mulching and mowing without an in-cab driver.

Carbon has customers today working acreage with AutoTractor. And Mikesell believes there are more to come, as farmers continue to grapple with the reality of finding enough human workers.

“Labor has been the No. 1 issue since we started this company,” Mikesell said. “The challenge of putting people in tractors for 24/7 farming in the four to six months that any one of these farms is really operating is immense. And it’s limiting their ability to be profitable.”

Carbon Robotics raised $70 million last fall, and has raised $157 million to date. The company employs about 200 people and is ranked No. 13 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held startups based across the Pacific Northwest.

Gable, a Seattle startup that bridges gaps between software developers and data teams, raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Crane Venture Partners.

What Gable does: Gable helps companies ensure the accuracy and quality of their code as it is used and changed by various teams. It surfaces real-time information on any data-related changes being made across a business, and flags potential data corruption or compliance problems. The idea to make sure end users are not impacted by tweaks, and to streamline communication between internal groups.

Customers: Glassdoor, Grab, x15ventures.

Revenue: Not disclosed.

Quotable: “By moving data quality controls upstream to the point of data creation, we’re eliminating the costly cycle of fixing broken pipelines, resolving inconsistencies, and debugging downstream issues,” Gable CEO Chad Sanderson said in a statement.

Founders: Sanderson, CTO Adrian Kreuziger, and founding engineer Daniel Dicker previously led the data department at Convoy, the now-defunct Seattle digital trucking startup that was valued at nearly $4 billion before shutting down in 2023.

Investors in the round: In addition to Crane, other backers include Zetta Venture Partners, Databricks Ventures, B Capital, Capital One Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), and angel investors including Barr Moses and Tristan Handy. 

Other details: Total funding to date is $27 million. Gable has 24 employees.

It was a typical drizzly and grey morning in Seattle as hundreds of software developers gathered for a startup conference to share best practices and learn about new AI tools.

“You’re not out there on the beach in the sun playing volleyball,” said Vijaye Raji, a longtime Seattle tech leader and CEO of Statsig.

“It’s a great day to be productive,” quipped Ben Gilbert, another Seattle startup vet and co-host of popular business podcast Acquired.

Weather aside, Raji and Gilbert spoke on stage Friday at the inaugural Seattle Startup Summit about the strength of the city’s tech ecosystem amid the AI boom — and opportunities for more startup creation.

Cloud computing giants Amazon and Microsoft — two of the four largest companies in the world — are based in the Seattle region, as well as a bevy of leading AI-focused research organizations and a top computer science school at the University of Washington.

Raji said he sees the creation of profound AI applications coming from sectors such as disease research and biotech.

Seattle is also the home of Fred Hutch, the UW’s Institute for Protein Design, and many other groups developing cutting-edge science and medicine.

“If you think about Seattle, it’s uniquely positioned to bring all of those together,” said Raji, who previously led operations for Meta’s Seattle hub — one of more than 100 satellite engineering offices in the region.

Seattle has almost a quarter of America’s AI engineers, according to some estimates. And it’s consistently ranked among the top global cities when it comes to tech talent.

Raji called it a “quiet talent” that may be under-appreciated.

“It’s kind of good for us, because we’re constantly hiring, and I think the Seattle talent is really good,” said Raji, whose company is ranked No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest startups.

Yet the startup activity in Seattle still pales in comparison to Silicon Valley, or even other places like Los Angeles and New York, as measured by companies created and money raised from venture capitalists.

The delta between tech expertise and startup creation is a weird phenomenon, said Gilbert, who helped launch Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. He suggested there could be more celebration of people leaving big tech companies to make the startup leap.

Instead of applauding a 10-year anniversary at Microsoft, for example, perhaps the reaction should be instead to ask “when are you going to do something interesting,” said Gilbert, a former Microsoft program manager.

And given the speed and efficiency at which startups can get off the ground and grow in the age of AI, there could be even more opportunity for talented tech workers to jump into entrepreneurship.

“This is the coolest time ever to have a singular vision, because there are certain companies where you don’t need a large team to execute and create something really valuable,” Gilbert said.

Other tidbits from the conversation:

Raji on getting customer feedback: “One of the things that I always believe in: the faster you can get out of the vacuum and build based on feedback, you will build a product that people want. You will build something that people would want to pay money for.”

Gilbert on Acquired’s slow and then sudden growth: “You just need to make it through years and years of irrelevance. Even if the growth rate is high, in the world you are irrelevant. … If you’re doing something that customers like, you kind of need to just exist long enough for the world to say, ‘Oh, they’re trustworthy.’ … There’s some sort of magic around the six, seven-year mark, where people just believe that you’re going to be around for a long time.”

Raji on his biggest lesson from Meta: “The biggest thing I learned at Facebook is humility … there’s a lot of product intuition you learn over the years, but what I’ve also realized is products have gotten so much more complex, the abstractions that we now work on top of are so much richer, and it’s impossible for one person to fully understand the ramifications of new product features. Facebook was this personification of collect data, instrument everything, and then learn from how people use the product — don’t assume what’s going to happen. Data is the biggest feature of humility. And so I learned to rely on data, and not just on intuition.”

Gilbert on the common thread in successful companies: “Our study (at Acquired) is what causes you to be an extreme outlier … I would say every single founder of a TSMC or a Rolex or an Hermès or a Costco is extreme in some way, but they’re all extreme in different ways. And I think it’s about aligning the way in which you are extreme, with a skillset to build a particular product for which there is a market, and the right culture to run a company like that.”