In perhaps a matter of weeks, Bill Gates-backed TerraPower expects to receive federal permits to begin building the nuclear components of its first-of-a-kind, next-generation power plant in Wyoming.

The permits will put the company “a year ahead of anyone else,” predicted TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque. “We just keep proving that we’re the leading nuclear project in the U.S.”

After being largely mothballed for decades, America’s nuclear sector has kicked into hyper speed as tech giants scramble to power data centers nationwide and energy demands are spiking for commercial, residential and industrial uses.

TerraPower, which launched 20 years ago, aims to be the first in the U.S. to deliver on a new model of smaller, less expensive nuclear reactors that can be produced in three years from fabricated components — instead of the past approach of constructing giant, one-off structures that take a decade to erect.

The company is waiting for a green light from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to break ground on the crucial next phase of its demonstration plant, whose construction in Kemmerer, Wyo., began in 2024. The goal is to start splitting atoms there by the end of 2030.

TerraPower’s Natrium technology features 345 megawatt nuclear devices that include a molten-salt thermal battery that increases output to 500 megawatts of power for limited periods.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company has announced a string of new partnerships supporting its operations:

• It recently signed a deal with Meta to build up to eight advanced reactors in the U.S. with the first two coming online as soon as 2032. If the full order is fulfilled, all of the reactors aim to be operational by 2035. The companies are exploring multiple sites for the facilities.
• TerraPower shared last week that the electric utility giant Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) is now an investor, joining via a previously announced $250 million investment by SK, a South Korean multinational conglomerate.
• Last year, the company announced memorandums of understanding with government departments in Utah and Kansas to explore the potential siting of Natrium reactors in those states.
• TerraPower and HD Hyundai last March announced a collaboration in which the South Korean company will help manufacture components for the Natrium reactor.

“We plan to build hundreds of Natrium reactors,” Levesque told GeekWire. “We’re very focused on delivering the first one on time,” he added, and then quickly begin scaling.

A slate of challenges

TerraPower is competing against a slate of next-gen nuclear companies. Oklo was part of the announcement from Meta to support nuclear deployments, and could have a reactor operating as early as 2030 under the deal. Kairos Power is building a demonstration reactor in Tennessee in collaboration with Google that aims to come online that same year.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded two grants supporting nuclear projects, one to the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a plant in that state and another to Holtec Government Services, which has a project in Michigan. Earlier this summer, X-energy and Amazon shared updates on a planned facility in Eastern Washington.

While TerraPower’s leadership is bullish on its prospects, there are plenty of hurdles ahead. They include limited supplies of reactor fuel, ongoing concerns about nuclear reactor safety, and construction cost challenges as designs evolve and a supply chain takes shape.

Finding fuel sources: Russia was the world’s only commercial producer of HALEU (high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel, pronounced hay-lou), but that source was cut off after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the U.S. has restarted and been ramping up its domestic fuel production.

Levesque said the company will have what it needs for the Wyoming reactor, and is working with partners in South Africa and the U.S. to manufacture additional supplies.

Safety concerns: There are ongoing fears about the potential for a nuclear reactor to meltdown and release radioactive material, and concerns about the disposal and storage of spent fuel that remains radioactive for thousands of years.

At a recent public hearing in Olympia, Wash., regarding the potential for new nuclear facilities in the state, multiple participants cited worries about nuclear safety and environmental contamination.

Cost concerns: Research from Boston University analyzed nuclear plant construction costs going back decades, finding they were on average double the expected price tag, running nearly $2 billion over.

Levesque acknowledged the poor record, but said that as TerraPower goes into production mode, lessons learned from the demonstration project and each additional reactor will be incorporated to cut costs. He pointed to the SpaceX aerospace company as a model for that iterative approach.

But even if costs are controlled, some utility customers have expressed worries about who will pay for the deployment of the facilities and whether the projects will drive up electric bills.

The Wyoming plant was estimated in 2021 to cost about $4 billion; no updated figures have been provided. Levesque said private investments and a $2 billion federal grant mean that “we’re building that project without burdening the ratepayers.”

Pining for nuclear

And demand for nuclear has never been greater. “Almost any governor in the country now wants a nuclear plant,” Levesque said.

While wind and solar installations have expanded across America, electricity demand is projected to soar over the next years and decades. And while these renewable power sources are increasingly being paired with energy storage solutions such as giant batteries, nuclear is attractive for its 24/7 production capabilities.

Levesque said the company is being cautious in signing future deals, recognizing that it will be mid-2030s until it can hit its initial target of producing six reactors a year.

“We’re very careful not to over promise or over commit,” he said.

Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it’s the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. 

The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon’s latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google’s most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others.

The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft’s data center near Des Moines, Iowa. Microsoft says Maia 200 is powering OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal projects from its Superintelligence team. A second deployment at a data center near Phoenix is planned next.

It’s part of the larger trend among cloud giants to build their own custom silicon for AI rather than rely solely on Nvidia. Google has been refining its TPUs for nearly a decade, and Amazon’s Trainium line is now in its third generation, with a fourth already announced. 

Microsoft first revealed its custom chip ambitions in late 2023, when it unveiled Maia 100 at its Ignite conference. Despite entering the race late, Microsoft makes the case that its tight integration between chips, AI models, and applications like Copilot gives it an edge. 

The company says Maia 200 offers 30% better performance-per-dollar than its current hardware. Maia 200 also builds on the first-generation chip with a more specific focus on inference, the process of running AI models after they’ve been trained.

The chip competition among the cloud giants has intensified as the cost of running AI models becomes a bigger concern. Training a model is a one-time expense, but serving it to millions of users is a big ongoing expense. All three companies are betting that custom chips tuned for their own workloads will be cheaper than buying solely from Nvidia.

Microsoft is also opening the door to outside developers. The company announced a software development kit that will let AI startups and researchers optimize their models for Maia 200. Developers and academics can sign up for an early preview starting today.

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Jan. 18, 2026.

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Most popular stories on GeekWire

The Microsoft-OpenAI Files: Internal documents reveal the realities of AI’s defining alliance

Internal emails, texts, slide decks, and deposition testimony show how Microsoft went from being sidelined at OpenAI’s founding to wielding decisive influence over the AI lab that launched the generative AI era — and how that power is now being tested as OpenAI emerges as a platform company with leverage of its own. … Read More

Tech Moves: Amazon employee retiring after 20 years; former Oracle and Microsoft execs take new roles

A longtime leader for Fulfillment by Amazon retires and offers parting thoughts, while former executives with Oracle, Microsoft and LevelTen take new roles. … Read More

Seattle’s ORCA transit system gets major tech upgrade with new ‘Tap to Pay’ feature

Seattle’s ORCA transit system is rolling out an upgrade that will let riders pay fares by tapping their credit card or smartphone — no dedicated ORCA card required. … Read More

‘Wildly productive weekend’: Former Amazon exec’s vibe coding post sparks debate over viral AI tools

A weekend vibe-coding project by the startup leader and former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO sparked debate over the speed, scalability, and real‑world value of increasingly popular AI development workflows. … Read More

Reports: Amazon’s latest layoffs could begin next week

Amazon laid off about 14,000 workers globally in October. … Read More

Meta laying off 331 workers in Washington state as part of broader cuts to Reality Labs division

The heaviest hit facility is the Reality Labs office in Redmond, followed by the Spring District office in Bellevue, according to a state filing. … Read More

Seattle startup that brings hedge fund investing capabilities to anyone raises $1.2M

The company aims to give everyday investors access to strategies traditionally reserved for hedge funds and ultra-wealthy clients. … Read More

The race to replace lithium: Seattle startup lands funding for salt-powered battery technology

Seattle startup Emerald Battery Labs raised just under $1.1 million in a pre-seed round to continue scaling its sodium-ion battery technology. … Read More

Tech Moves: Former Microsoft CVP joins Amazon; Chronus names CEO; REI hires AI leader

Amazon Quick Suite has a new vice president, Chronus named a CEO, Supio added to its C-suite, and REI got an AI lead, among other Seattle area tech moves. … Read More

Satya Nadella’s new metaphor for the AI Age: We are becoming ‘managers of infinite minds’

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella riffed on some famous lines from tech leaders past this week in an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and offered up his own trippy candidate to join the canon of computing metaphors.  Read More … Read More

They’re rivals in the cloud, and competitors for customers and talent. But Microsoft and Amazon are on the same page when it comes to Washington state’s housing crisis — literally, in the case of an op-ed Friday and full-page ad last Sunday in The Seattle Times.

The Seattle region “faces a housing emergency that threatens our state’s quality of life, health and economic competitiveness,” write Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, and David Zapolsky, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer.

It was an unusual joint byline, to say the least, but it reflected the similar big-picture goals of their separate housing initiatives. 

Combined, the two companies have committed $1.6 billion to preserve and build more than 26,000 affordable homes in the region. But the executives say even that isn’t enough, framing the problem as a supply issue that requires building “more homes of all kinds.”

They’re backing several bills in the current legislative session, including SB 6026, which would allow residential development on commercial land like strip malls and big-box stores. They also praise Gov. Bob Ferguson’s proposed $225 million in bonds for the state Housing Trust Fund.

“Going forward, legislators must commit to a simple test: If a policy makes housing more costly or takes longer to build, don’t pass it. Consider an alternative,” they write. “Enact policies that pencil in today’s market, not aspirational measures that might work down the line.”

They warn that other states are moving faster to attract developers. “Capital is fluid,” they write. “Banks, investors and lenders are going where they can make predictable returns.”

The joint push comes after Microsoft released a report last week outlining lessons learned from its housing investments. Read our earlier coverage for more details.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.

Plus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuts a new AI catchphrase at Davos, startup CEO Dave Clark stirs controversy with his “wildly productive weekend,” Elon Musk talks aliens, and the latest on Seattle-area physical AI startups, including Overland AI and AIM Intelligent Machines.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

One of the more seamless aspects on a recent trip to Japan was being able to simply “tap” my iPhone to pay for subway rides in Tokyo. That frictionless transit payment capability, common in many major cities worldwide, isn’t available in Seattle. But that’s about to change.

Seattle’s ORCA transit system is rolling out an upgrade that will let riders pay fares by tapping their credit card or smartphone — no dedicated ORCA card required.

The new “Tap to Pay” feature will let riders across the Seattle region use Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express cards, as well as mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

A soft launch is scheduled to begin Feb. 2 on the G Line, a bus rapid transit route, before expanding system-wide later in February — in advance of this summer’s World Cup in Seattle, as well as the debut of the new light rail line across Lake Washington connecting the region’s tech hubs.

The Tap to Pay rollout was formally briefed to the ORCA Joint Board during its meeting this week.

The technical upgrade is aimed at making transit easier for occasional riders, tourists, and anyone who doesn’t already carry an ORCA card — while modernizing fare payment across the region’s patchwork of transit agencies.

ORCA’s operations team worked with German tech company Init to implement Visa’s Mass Transit Transaction (MTT) payment model, which allows ORCA fare readers to function as point-of-sale devices capable of securely processing contactless credit card payments in real time.

During the soft-launch phase, riders who tap a personal credit or debit card will be charged a flat $3 adult fare and won’t be able to transfer to other transit services outside the G Line. Once the feature launches across the full ORCA system, transfers will work the same way they do today for ORCA card users, including the standard two-hour transfer window across most participating agencies, according to ORCA officials.

The system will support one rider per card and adult fares only, meaning reduced-fare programs such as ORCA LIFT, Senior, Disabled, and Youth cards won’t be available through Tap to Pay.

Fare inspectors will be able to validate contactless payments by asking riders to show whatever card they used to pay.

In a statement to GeekWire, ORCA officials emphasized that the new payment option is additive, not a replacement. Riders who receive employer-subsidized ORCA cards or rely on discounted fares are encouraged to continue using traditional ORCA cards. Cash and physical tickets will still be accepted.

Tap to Pay also won’t be available on every service. The feature will not initially work on Washington State Ferries, the Seattle Monorail, Community Transit DART, ZIP, or Pierce Transit Runner, according to board presentation slides.

Some users on Reddit this week complained about needing to remove their physical ORCA card from their wallet to avoid getting a credit card charge when tapping at a reader.

Notably, using an ORCA card inside Apple Wallet is a separate feature and is not part of this launch. ORCA officials said they remain committed to mobile payment options but declined to share additional details or timelines. ORCA launched a Google Wallet feature for Android users in 2024.

• Side note: Apple Wallet has a feature called Express Mode that lets transit riders pay for fares without waking or unlocking their device.
• And for those who want to purchase tickets via an app: Transit GO allows iOS and Android users to pay fares on King Country Metro buses, Sound Transit trains, and other regional transit services using in-app ticketing.

The date is set for a transportation milestone that could impact how thousands of Seattle-area commuters travel between home and work, especially at the region’s major tech hubs.

Sound Transit announced Friday that the “Crosslake Connection” of the Link light rail system will open to the public on March 28.

The route will carry light rail passengers across a floating bridge for the first time, serving as a 7.4-mile extension of the 2 Line and ultimately connecting downtown Seattle to downtown Bellevue and the Redmond Technology station at Microsoft’s headquarters campus.

• Are you a tech worker looking forward to using light rail to commute between Seattle and the Eastside? We’d love to hear from you: tips@geekwire.com

Testing of trains on the bridge, between new stations at Mercer Island and Judkins Park, began in September. A 6.6-mile East Link segment of the 2 Line, including eight stations, opened last April.

The entire Seattle-Eastside line — plagued by planning, construction and cost issues — has taken nearly 18 years to deliver, The Seattle Times noted after a test ride this week.

The region has changed substantially in that time.

The tech boom and subsequent population explosion in Seattle clogged area roadways, turning a roughly 13-mile commute between Seattle and Microsoft HQ into an often time-consuming headache.

Bellevue has also grown, thanks in part to Amazon, as the tech giant has shifted thousands of workers to various buildings in that city. Roughly 50,000 corporate employees work in Seattle.

While Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia and other companies run private buses between offices in Seattle and Eastside cities for their employees, light rail service adds another wrinkle to the commute landscape.

Sound Transit projects that the fully integrated 2 Line will serve about 43,000 to 52,000 daily riders in 2026.

Trains over Lake Washington will operate at speeds of 55 mph, running every 10 minutes from approximately 5 a.m. to 1 a.m., Monday – Saturday and from 6 a.m. to midnight on Sundays.

It’s no small engineering feat to run tracks and get a train to cross a floating bridge. The Seattle Times explained some of the challenges related to fluctuating lake levels and existing bridge infrastructure. This video also breaks down what goes into it:

Mark Griffith — Amazon employee No. 1,037 and the third hire for what would become Fulfillment by Amazon — is retiring after more than two decades with the Seattle-area tech giant.

Griffith spent most of his career at FBA, which handles shipping, customer service, and returns for third-party businesses. He was director of software engineering for FBA and then for Amazon payments. His final role was director of seller fulfillment services.

Griffith penned a lengthy reflection on Substack in which he shares his career journey, what he learned from working at the company, and pithy personal and professional advice.

“I have given my ALL to Amazon for 8 hours+ a day for a long time – but I’ve never given it everything – that is too dangerous – I don’t live to work – I work to live. I work hard; I try to work empathetically and smart and help others – but I am ready to let others carry on,” Griffith said.

— DigitalOcean named Vinay Kumar as chief product and technology officer of the infrastructure-as-a-service company. Kumar, based in Seattle, was previously with Oracle for more than 11 years, leaving the role of senior vice president of cloud engineering.

Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean, highlighted Kumar’s experience building cloud and AI platforms at scale, his “tremendous product strategy acumen” and his understanding of the “operational rigor required for mission-critical workloads.”

— Chris Hundley has joined Seattle RFID tech company Impinj as executive VP of enterprise solutions.

“Impinj has built an incredible foundation as the market leader in RAIN RFID, with strong momentum helping businesses wirelessly connect billions of items across use cases including loss prevention, shipment verification, and asset management,” Hundley said on LinkedIn.

Hundley is the founder and former CEO of the marketing automation startup Siftrock, which was acquired by Drift in 2018. He was also chief technology officer and president of AudioEye, which aimed to make digital technology inclusive for people with disabilities.

— Lindsay Bayne is now senior director of advocacy at UiPath, a New York-based company that helps businesses automate repetitive, complex tasks.

Bayne was previously at Microsoft for more than a decade, leaving the role of director of the Growth Innovation and Strategy Team.

“I’m honored to join and partner with this incredibly talented team, advocate for our incredible customers, and help showcase the real-world impact of automation and AI,” Bayne said on LinkedIn.

— Christin Camacho is now head of go-to-market for BuildQ, an AI platform for clean energy development and due diligence. Camacho joins the company following nearly seven years at LevelTen Energy, a Seattle-based clean energy marketplace, where she served as vice president of marketing. She previously worked at Redfin.

“BuildQ’s AI accelerates every stage of development for large wind, solar, and storage projects. Ultimately, that means more clean energy projects get built, faster, and that’s a mission I’ve dedicated my career to,” Camacho said via email.

In her new role, Camacho will work with Maryssa Barron, a former LevelTen colleague and founder and CEO of BuildQ.

— Lowell Bander, founding general manager of Seattle’s 9Zero, is changing roles at the climate tech entrepreneurial hub. Bander is taking the title of ecosystem advisor as the organization looks for a new leader. Bander is also an advisor on Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s transportation and environment transition team.

— Nate Frazier is now community liaison for the Oregon AI Accelerator. The Portland organization aims to coordinate the state’s entrepreneurial groups, investors and universities to foster AI innovation.

— The Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology has named the first cohort for its SeaBridge Fellowship, a research training program. In March, the effort received a $10 million grant from the Washington Research Foundation. The scientists will receive two years of financial support plus funding for career development, mentorship training and networking. They include:

• Changho Chun, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Washington’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine who is doing research that could aid in treating ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
• Ian Linde, a postdoc in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center studying the conditions under which gene mutations lead to breast cancer tumors.
• Abigail Nagle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology investigating communications between connective tissue and heart muscle tissue.
• Stephanie Sansbury, a postdoc in the UW Department of Biochemistry and Institute for Protein Design researching processes around engineered protein nanoparticles in pursuit of therapeutics.
• Zachary Stevenson, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences studying synthetic cellular circuits to broaden the scope of cell programming.
• Julie Trolle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences aiming to engineer cancer-fighting T cells that express multiple genes, thereby improving their ability to kill tumor cells.
• Arata Wakimoto, a postdoc in the UW Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology investigating embryonic development as relates to congenital spine and neural tube disorders.
• Rachel Wellington, a postdoc in Translational Science and Therapeutics Division of Fred Hutch researching cellular recording technologies in the differentiation of stem cells.

New year, new Startup Radar.

We’re back with our regular spotlight on early stage startups sprouting up in the Seattle region. For this edition, we’re featuring Axel AI, DrunR, Eluum, and profileAPI.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — along with pitch assessments from “Mean VC,” a GPT-powered critic offering a mix of encouragement and constructive criticism.

Check out past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies and startup news.

Axel AI

Founded: 2025

The business: A self-described “reasoning layer” for retail media sales teams that aims to translate messy data into commercial narratives and proposals. The idea is to help sales teams spend less time on manual analysis and preparation. The bootstrapped company officially launched its MVP at CES and NRF 2026 earlier this month.

Leadership: CEO and co-founder Bobby Figueroa previously founded Gradient, another Seattle-based commerce insights company that was acquired by Criteo. He was also an exec at Amazon. Axel’s leadership and advisory team includes former sales and advertising leaders at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Mean VC: “You’re targeting a real friction point — sales teams juggling fragmented data with limited time to craft a compelling narrative. The pedigree helps, but long-term success will hinge on whether your product drives actual revenue lift, not just cleaner decks. I’d focus on embedding directly into the sales team’s existing workflow — don’t make users open another tool, make yours the one that quietly does the heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

DrunR

Founded: 2024

The business: A nutrition app that provides personalized guidance based on users’ goals and preferences, particularly while dining out or ordering food online. DrunR is running a closed beta in Seattle with restaurants and users, including people using GLP-1 medication. The startup is part of the WTIA Founder Cohort 13 program.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Yaya Ali is a financial analyst at Perkins Coie and previously worked for King County and Amazon. He also has food operations experience. David Greene, the company’s CTO, is a software engineer at Capital One and previously worked at Moody’s.

Mean VC: “The intersection of nutrition, personalization, and GLP-1s is timely — especially as eating habits shift alongside new weight-loss drugs. The challenge will be making the app feel essential day-to-day, not just ‘nice to have’ after a restaurant meal or clinic visit. I’d zero in on a high-frequency use case — something that keeps users opening the app daily, not just when they’re thinking about dinner.”

Eluum

Founded: 2024

The business: A new take on social media with a product that helps people organize their personal memories, stories, and digital artifacts into one user-controlled system. Built on community-driven moderation and works across different platforms. The bootstrapped company is onboarding early users and plans to launch a MVP later this year.

Leadership: CEO and co-founder Bilkay Rose was a VP at tax software company Avalara and a director at Clearwire. Other co-founders include CTO Dale Rector, who spent three decades at Microsoft, and Jennifer Gianola, also a former exec at Avalara.

Mean VC: “The concept taps into a real emotional need — people are overwhelmed by digital clutter and increasingly skeptical of algorithm-driven feeds. The key will be showing how your platform earns daily use without relying on dopamine loops. I’d push to define a sharp use case first — memory curation is broad, so lead with one thing people urgently want to preserve, then expand once you’ve earned their trust.”

profileAPI

Founded: 2024

The business: A business data layer for developers building AI-native chat, copilot, and agentic tools for go-to-market. Its platform tracks more than 10,000 signals across more than 10 million companies and 500 million professionals. The company, which was previously a sales AI agent product called Truebase, has raised $2 million in funding.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Wissam Tabbara has sold two startups and spent more than six years at Microsoft in the 2000s.

Mean VC: “The shift from product to platform is smart — selling infrastructure to power GTM copilots has stronger upside than building another agent. But you’ll need to show that your data isn’t just broad, but relevant and timely enough to drive meaningful in-app decisions. I’d focus on becoming the plug-and-play GTM brain — make integration dead simple, and let other tools build magic on top of your stack.”

Amazon is preparing for another round of corporate job cuts next week, according to a report from Reuters on Thursday. Bloomberg also reported that layoffs could begin next week. We reached out to Amazon for comment.

Amazon laid off about 14,000 workers globally in October. The company indicated that more layoffs could occur in 2026 while it would continue to hire in key strategic areas.

Reuters reported that the latest cuts will be “roughly the same as last year.” The overall number of cuts could be the largest in Amazon’s history, exceeding the 27,000 positions that the company eliminated in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs.

In a memo to employees sent in October, Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti wrote that the company was “shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

She added: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”

There was speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Amazon and other tech giants including Microsoft have trimmed headcount while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. And software development engineers made up the largest group of employees affected by the layoffs in Washington state last year, amid the rise of AI coding tools.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also told employees in June that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.

But on the company’s earnings call with analysts, two days after the layoff announcement in October, Jassy said the cuts weren’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers. Instead, he framed it as a push to stay nimble, and said Amazon’s rapid growth over the past decade led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making.

Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021, has pushed to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company. Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more cautious hiring approach.

Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time the company provided a public number. At that scale, the reduction of 30,000 represents about 8.5% of Amazon’s corporate workforce. However, the number is a much smaller fraction of its overall workforce of 1.57 million people, which includes workers in its warehouses.

The company employs around 50,000 corporate workers in the Seattle region, its primary headquarters. There were 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state that were laid off last year in October.

Amazon reports its latest quarterly earnings on Feb. 5. The company’s stock underperformed relative to the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants last year. Some analysts predict that Amazon’s cloud unit will help boost the stock as AI demand rises.

Submit news tips to GeekWire here, or to tips@geekwire.com.

Overland AI, a Seattle-based startup that develops autonomous driving technology for rugged terrain, is expanding its reach beyond military applications.

The company this week revealed a partnership with The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), which is testing the use of Overland’s technology for wildfire response.

CAL FIRE used two of Overland’s self-driving 4-wheelers for resupply (food, water, battery delivery) and wildfire logistics missions at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. It’s the first time CAL FIRE has evaluated autonomous ground vehicle tech for its firefighting operations.

“When we started this company, we always saw our technology as being inherently dual-use — meaning that it could be used for both military and civilian applications,” said Stephanie Bonk, co-founder and president at Overland. “This is the first time we’re actually demonstrating that.”

Bonk said Overland’s technology “thrives” in a rugged environment where wildfires often occur.

Fire departments are testing various technologies to help manage wildfires, including AI-trained cameras that spot plumes of smoke.

Overland spun out of the University of Washington in 2022 and has inked various military-related partnerships, including a $18.6 million contract with the U.S. Army and Defense Innovation Unit. Overland also works with the U.S. Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a unit of the Department of Defense.

Last year the startup announced a $32 million funding round and opened a 22,000 square-foot production facility in Seattle.

The company is led by Bonk and CEO Byron Boots, a robotics researcher who leads the UW’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Overland is ranked No. 14 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held startups across the Pacific Northwest. Its investors include 8VC, Point72 Ventures, Overmatch Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Ascend, Osage University Partners, and Caprock. The company has 101 employees, up from 58 people a year ago, according to LinkedIn data.

Less than a year after layoffs and a public plea by its CEO for new investments, General Fusion on Thursday announced a $1 billion SPAC agreement to take the fusion energy company public.

Vancouver, B.C.-based General Fusion plans to merge with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III in a transaction that could close by the middle of this year, making it one of the first fusion companies to go public. It expects to be listed on the Nasdaq and trade under the ticker GFUZ. 

“We are completely focused on the future,” Megan Wilson, chief strategy officer for General Fusion, told GeekWire. “The path of any innovative company is not always linear.”

General Fusion is part of the race to produce abundant, clean energy by smashing together light atoms — replicating the reactions that power the sun and stars. The pursuit has become increasingly urgent as artificial intelligence and increased electrification of the economy drives up demand for climate friendly power.

Funding for fusion

Wilson said they explored various funding options, including a traditional IPO, but appreciated Spring Valley’s experience and track record in helping create 17 publicly traded companies to date. Spring Valley previously used a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) to bring NuScale Power, a fission startup, public in 2021.

The deal with General Fusion includes $230 million from the SPAC’s trust, presuming no redemptions, as well as a $100 million private investment in public equity, or PIPE.

The 115-person company previously raised a total of $400 million from investors, industry partners and government grants.

General Fusion’s merger news comes a month after fusion rival TAE Technologies announced its own agreement to go public.

“It’s really great to have competition in the market, and we think that that transaction is just another signal that the public markets are ready for fusion,” Wilson said.

California-based TAE has a $6 billion planned merger with Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded parent company of the social media platform Truth Social. With the merger and new funding, TAE said that it’s aiming to site and begin building a utility-scale fusion plant this year.

Pursuing scientific milestones

Despite the massive investments flowing into the sector, none of the companies have demonstrated the ability to produce excess energy from fusion reactions. But they’re all reporting progress toward that goal, with TAE and Washington’s Helion Energy working on commercial facilities.

General Fusion, which launched in 2002, is currently operating its Lawson Machine 26, a magnetized target fusion demonstration device that’s about half the size of its planned commercial‑scale machine.

The new financial support will fund initiatives to hit essential scientific milestones with the device by the middle of 2028. That includes reaching 100 million degrees Celsius — a target it had earlier set for last year — and achieving the conditions needed to create fusion reactions that produce excess energy.

General Fusion hopes to be able to deploy a commercial fusion machine by around 2035.

“This transaction with Spring Valley positions us with the capital we need to be able to continue operating the Lawson Machine 26 as we pursue really transformative technical milestones that will ultimately put us on a path to the first-of-a-kind plant,” Wilson said.

AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM), a Seattle-area startup developing software that lets bulldozers and excavators operate on their own, announced $4.9 million in new contracts with the U.S. Air Force to build and repair military bases and airfields.

Founded in 2021, AIM got its start in mining and construction, and is now expanding to defense applications. AIM’s technology works with existing equipment and is designed for dangerous or hard-to-reach places, including areas where equipment might be dropped in by parachute. One person can remotely manage an entire site of working vehicles.

For airfield repairs, the company’s tech can scan the area using sensors to create a 3D map of damage. Then autonomous machines clear debris and can repair the runway — all remotely and without people on the ground. Military advisors say the approach could speed up construction, reduce risk to personnel, and make it easier to deploy equipment in tough conditions.

Founded in 2021 and led by longtime engineers, AIM raised $50 million last year from investors including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Human Capital. The company is led by CEO Adam Sadilek, who previously spent nine years at Google working on confidential projects.

In a LinkedIn post this week, Sadilek wrote that “we’re asking the wrong questions about AI and work,” arguing that automation will enable construction companies to build more with their existing teams.

“The top line grows, but the bottom line doesn’t get ‘optimized’ into oblivion,” he wrote. “For example, each autonomous dozer we deploy uncovers, depending on the mineral type and current market price, between $3 million and $17 million in additional ore each season. Rather than replacing people, that gives them leverage. And yes, cost savings show up – fuel, maintenance, wear – but they’re not the main event.”

He added: “Instead of focusing on whether AI removes jobs, we should be focusing on whether we’ll use it to finally do more of the things we’ve always wanted but never had enough capacity to build.”

A three-person clean energy team in Seattle is chasing China in pursuit of an increasingly popular alternative to traditional lithium-ion batteries. Emerald Battery Labs, a startup working out of the University of Washington, recently raised just under $1.1 million in a pre-seed round to continue scaling its sodium-ion battery technology.

The burgeoning energy storage option avoids the use of lithium, which is highly sought, difficult to extract and has limited U.S. production. Sodium, by comparison, is much cheaper and comes from the same element that’s in table salt. The sodium-ion batteries also last longer and present fewer fire concerns.

Battery demand is rising rapidly as these systems pair with renewable, intermittent sources like sun and wind; enhance hydro dam capacity; provide backup power for data centers; power drones and defense devices; and work with EV charging stations to reduce grid strain during peak demand.

“As battery chemistries evolve, as technology evolves, people are going to find new ways to use energy storage technology,” said David Bell, Emerald’s co-founder and chief product officer.

Growing interest

A recent Sightline Climate survey of investors and entrepreneurs in climate tech selected sodium-ion batteries as a top-pick for a 2026 breakthrough technology, coming in just behind the use of AI for clean tech materials discovery.

But there’s already a clear leader in the space.

“China, with its powerful EV industry, has led the early push” into sodium-powered batteries, according to MIT Technology Review.

Chinese auto and battery makers Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., or CATL, and BYD are in hot pursuit of the technology, MIT reports. CATL claims to have a sodium-ion battery line operating at scale, while BYD is building its own massive production facility.

U.S. competitors include Peak Energy, Nanode Battery Technologies and Unigrid.

While this alternative chemistry offers numerous benefits, there’s an important trade off: it’s less energy dense — meaning sodium-ion batteries need to be larger than competing technologies to deliver the same amount of power.

Emerald’s path forward

Emerald is operating out of the UW’s CoMotion Labs and using the university’s Clean Energy Testbeds for fabrication work. The startup is scaling production and looking for partners to pilot test its products.

It plans to hire additional employees in the coming year. Emerald’s investors include Seattle-based E8, a network of angel investors that backs clean-tech companies; E8 members who directly invested; and an undisclosed family venture office.

Emerald’s founders bring deep battery experience:

• Bell led product management and customer programs at Group14, which is manufacturing next generation silicon-anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, and worked at Ionic Materials.
• Kjell Schroder, CEO and chief technologist, held leadership roles at Form Energy, Ionic and EnPower.
• Aric Stocks, chief operating officer, is a trained materials engineer and former global business development leader at Group14.

Bicycles for the mind. … Information at your fingertips. … Managers of infinite minds?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella riffed on some famous lines from tech leaders past this week in an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and offered up his own trippy candidate to join the canon of computing metaphors. 

Nadella traced the lineage in a conversation with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

• “Computers are like a bicycle for the mind” was the famous line from Apple’s Steve Jobs.
• “Information at your fingertips” was Bill Gates’ classic Microsoft refrain back in the day.

And now? “All of us are going to be managers of infinite minds,” Nadella said. “And so if we have that as the theory, then the question is, what can we do with it?”

He was referring to AI agents — the autonomous software that can take on tasks, work through problems, and keep going while you sleep. Microsoft and others have been talking for the better part of a year now about people starting to oversee large fleets of them. 

Nadella said it’s already reshaping how teams are structured. At Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, the company has merged design, program management, product management, and front-end engineering into a single new role: full-stack builders. Overall, he called it the biggest structural change to software teams he’s seen in a career that started at Microsoft in the 1990s.

“The jobs of the future are here,” Nadella said, putting his own spin on a famous line often attributed to sci-fi writer William Gibson. “They’re just not evenly distributed.”

Nadella’s comments came during a live stream for LinkedIn Premium members, hosted from Davos by LinkedIn VP and Editor in Chief Daniel Roth, after Sunak mentioned his two teenage daughters, and the world they’ll enter. Young people may not manage lots of people at age 20 or 21, he said, “but they will be managing a team of agents.” 

Sunak was referencing an essay by Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti in Time. 

The agentic shift, Argenti wrote, requires “moving from being a sole performer to an orchestra conductor” — your team now includes AI agents that “must be guided and supervised with the same approach you would apply to a new, junior colleague.”

Nadella agreed, saying “we do need a new theory of the mind” to navigate what’s coming, before he offered up his new metaphor about managing infinite minds.

In other remarks at Davos, Nadella made headlines with his warning that AI’s massive energy demands risk eroding its “social permission” unless it delivers tangible benefits in health, education, and productivity. Energy costs, he added, will decide the AI race’s winners, with GDP growth tied to cheap power for processing AI tokens.

Whether “infinite minds” catches on like “bicycles” and “fingertips” remains to be seen. But it’s definitely more psychedelic. And if this shift is stranger than what came before, maybe we do need a mind-expanding metaphor to make sense of it all.

AheadComputing, a Portland, Ore.-based chip startup that designs and licenses CPU cores aimed at boosting performance for AI and data center workloads, announced a $30 million funding round.

Founded in 2024 and led by former Intel engineering leaders, AheadComputing says its CPU cores are faster and more efficient than existing options for AI-heavy workloads.

The startup is building CPU cores based on RISC-V, an open-source instruction set that lets companies customize chips instead of relying on proprietary architectures.

GPUs may dominate headlines, but CPU performance remains critical to how efficiently AI applications run at scale. CPUs manage data movement, run core software, and handle tasks that can’t easily be split up across multiple cores.

AheadComputing has nearly 120 employees and is led by CEO Debbie Marr, who spent more than three decades at Intel and was chief architect of the Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG) at the chip giant.

“This additional funding will allow us to continue to challenge traditional rules and sustain a fast pace of transformation and develop the fastest high-performance, general-purpose CPU because everybody deserves better compute,” Marr said in a statement.

Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, and Cambium co-led AheadComputing’s latest round, which included participation from Corner, Trousdale Ventures, EPIQ, MESH, and Stata. The company, which raised a $21.5 million round last year, also added Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller to its board.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’ll be ramping up an ultra-high-speed satellite data network called TeraWave, which will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network for business from data centers, large-scale enterprises and government customers.

The service appears to dovetail with Amazon Leo, the satellite-based broadband internet service that was Bezos’ brainchild while he served as Amazon’s CEO. Amazon Leo — previously known as Project Kuiper — promises downlink speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). In contrast, TeraWave is targeting higher-end data applications with symmetrical data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second (Tbps), a rate that’s 6,000 times faster.

In today’s announcement, Blue Origin said TeraWave’s constellation would consist of 5,408 laser-linked satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). It plans to start deploying the satellites in late 2027, presumably using the company’s New Glenn rockets.

Blue Origin’s plans are discussed in an application and technical annex filed today with the Federal Communications Commission. In its application, the company is seeking waivers from several regulatory requirements in order to get TeraWave off the ground quickly.

“TeraWave addresses the unmet needs of customers who are seeking higher throughput, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy and rapid scalability,” Blue Origin said. An array of 5,280 satellites in LEO would provide access speeds of up to 144 Gbps, while another 128 satellites in MEO would offer terabit-level speeds.

Blue Origin said the multi-orbit network design would facilitate ultra-high-throughput links between global hubs and distributed gigabit-scale user connections, particularly in parts of the world that are not well-served by optical fiber connections.

TeraWave could give Blue Origin a bigger role in knitting together a rapidly growing ecosystem of data centers and companies that are dependent on ultra-high-speed connections. SpaceX also plans to go after that market with Starlink V3 satellites that are said to be capable of terabit-level downlink speeds.

But what about Amazon, which is in the process of putting more than 3,200 satellites into low Earth orbit for Amazon Leo? Tech consultant Tim Farrar, the founder of TMF Associates, said the emergence of TeraWave raises questions about the relationship between the two best-known companies founded by Bezos.

“This is a very different design from Amazon Leo/Kuiper, but there is certainly overlap with Amazon’s target customers in the government and enterprise sectors,” Farrar told GeekWire in an email. “Is this all part of an ongoing negotiation with Amazon? … Or an alternative source of launch demand [for Blue Origin] in case Amazon decides to scale back their near-term space investments while they try to prove the case for Amazon Leo Gen1, before spending more money to launch a Gen2 system?”

Farrar speculated that the TeraWave initiative might represent an effort by Bezos to pressure Amazon’s current leadership to keep investing in space, or to spin off the Leo system to Blue Origin. He also said Blue Origin (Bezos’ private space venture) may be in a better position than Amazon (the publicly traded retail giant) to build out a next-generation satellite network.

“One takeaway is that everyone recognizes the value of vertical integration, where rocket makers create their own launch demand by building a constellation, as SpaceX has done,” Farrar said. “Amazon doesn’t have that right now, and it is a problem when you want to develop a mass-market satellite system with good enough economics to meet consumer price points, because you end up paying the full retail price for your launches.”

Seattle-based Code.org laid off 18 employees, or about 14% of its staff, the nonprofit confirmed to GeekWire on Wednesday.

Following the cuts, Code.org’s staff now numbers 107. 

“Code.org has made the difficult decision to part ways with 18 colleagues as part of efforts to ensure our long-term sustainability,” the organization said in an emailed statement. “Their contributions helped millions of educators and students around the world, and we are grateful for their efforts.”

Code.org was launched in 2013 by brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi with a mission to expand computer science education to K-12 students. Backed by nearly $60 million in funding from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others, Code.org counts 102 million students and 3 million teachers on its platform today, with 232 million projects created by students around the world.

CEO Hadi Partovi is a former Microsoft manager and was an early investor in companies including Facebook, DropBox, Airbnb and Uber.

“Our mission remains unchanged,” the organization said in its statement. “We will continue our Hour of AI campaign, along with our work to reform policies and new curriculum supporting CS+AI education in classrooms.”

Previously:

• ‘We are all kids in the age of AI’: Trevor Noah teaches 5th graders — and learns a few things himself
• Code.org CEO rips NY Times for stoking ‘populist fears’ over computer science jobs and AI

Jigar Thakkar is now vice president of Amazon Quick Suite, a platform that uses agentic AI to automate business workflows, research and data access. Amazon launched the tool in October 2025.

Thakkar is returning to Seattle after more than seven years at New York-based financial services firm MSCI, where he worked as chief technology officer and head of engineering.

Before MSCI, Thakkar spent nearly two decades at Microsoft where he was the founding engineering leader of Microsoft Teams and held the title of corporate VP. He joined the tech giant in 1999 as a software developer on the Microsoft Money team.

“I’m excited about Jigar’s customer-centric approach and ability to scale transformative products, his passion for agent technology, and his experience building platforms that serve millions of users,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of agentic AI at AWS, in announcing the news.

— Sara Vaezy joined healthcare consulting firm Chartis as chief product and technology officer. Vaezy previously spent nearly a decade at Providence, where she was chief transformation officer with the Renton, Wash.-based multi-state healthcare provider.

This is Vaezy’s second stint at Chartis — she previously worked at the Chicago-based company from 2010 to 2015.

“We viscerally know the healthcare system is broken and needs to change. Clinicians are overburdened, patient care isn’t always well coordinated or affordable, and costs continue to increase unsustainably,” Vaezy wrote on LinkedIn. “This is an opportunity to help Chartis navigate a landscape that’s rapidly changing and actually do something about it, along with clients.”

Vaezy is also a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health.

— After raising $60 million last year, legal-tech startup Supio has named two new executives:

• Niki Hall is now chief marketing officer, joining the Seattle-based company from Five9, a startup that helps brands connect with customers. She was previously CMO at the French startup Contentsquare. 

• Kelli Dragovich, who has worked in HR for more than two decades, has taken the role of chief people officer. Dragovich was mostly recently CPO at Pendo and has served in leadership at companies including Google, GitHub, Yahoo, Intuit, Quizlet and others.

— Chronus named Ankur Ahlowalia as CEO of the Seattle-based mentoring software platform.

“I’m delighted to lead a company that has pioneered mentoring software and is now leveraging artificial intelligence to make mentorship more accessible, personalized, and impactful for all employees,” Ahlowalia said in statement.

Ahlowalia joins Chronus from the Dallas-based software company Korbyt, which he led for more than five years.

— Variant Bio has appointed Dr. Craig Basson as chief medical officer and president of research and development. The Seattle-based drug discovery company is working with genetically diverse populations globally to develop new therapies.

“Craig’s career uniquely spans deep human genetics, rigorous clinical science, and successful drug development at scale,” said Andrew Farnum, Variant’s CEO. “His leadership and experience translating genetic insights into medicines will be instrumental as we move our programs into the clinic.”

Basson has worked for more than 25 years biotech and academia. He joins Variant from Bitterroot Bio, which is focused on using immunotherapy to treat cardiovascular disease. Other past roles include leadership at Boston Pharmaceuticals and Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and instructional roles at Harvard Medical School and Weill Cornell Medical College.

— Longtime Seattle-area tech leader Larry Colagiovanni is now leading AI product innovation at outdoor gear retailer REI. Colagiovanni’s career has included multiple stints at Microsoft, most recently as lead of product vision and strategy for Microsoft Shopping where he launched the company’s first conversational shopping assistant.

Other past roles include partner at Madrona Venture Labs, C-suite roles at Limeade, and leadership titles at eBay and Decide.

Colagiovanni said on LinkedIn that the role “brings together my passion for the outdoors with my belief in human-centered AI that supports better discovery, decision-making, and experiences.”

— Diego Oppenheimer is now an executive fellow with the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The serial entrepreneur founded Algorithmia, which was acquired by DataRobot.

“Couldn’t be more excited to continue helping to build companies, invest in founders, and now helping shape the next generation of AI-native entrepreneurs,” he said on LinkedIn.

— Smarsh, a Portland, Ore., company that helps customers manage their business communications to identify regulatory and reputational risks, announced multiple leadership changes:

• Ian Goodkind is now chief financial officer after previously working as CFO of Jamf where he successfully led the organization through its 2020 initial public offering.
• Kamesh Tumsi is chief product officer, joining from HealthEquity where he was senior VP and head of product.
• Goutam Nadella, former CPO at Smarsh, is now the chief strategy officer.

— Northwest Quantum Nexus (NQN), a group supporting quantum research and innovation across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, named three leaders serving in a volunteer-capacity to spearhead its transition from an informal partnership into a formalized organization:

• Joseph Williams is executive director, having served as an NQN co-founder and co-chair. Williams was previously the interim director of the Washington State Broadband Office within the Department of Commerce. Williams has held various leadership positions for government agencies.
• Charles Marcus, a University of Washington physics professor who holds the Boeing Johnson Endowed Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, will serve as NQN chief scientist.
• Arry Yu is now NQN’s director of external affairs. Yu co-founded the Cascadia Blockchain Council, established the U.S. Blockchain Coalition, and was on the board of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA).

— Sarah Clifthorne is now interim director of the Washington State Department of Commerce as a permanent leader is being sought. Gov. Bob Ferguson appointed Clifthorne to the role following the recent resignation of Joe Nguyễn.

Clifthorne has served as deputy director at Commerce since February 2025 and was previously a policy director with the Washington State Senate. She has also worked in union leadership.

— Rachel Fukaya is now vice president of marketing at Textio, the Seattle startup that helps companies write job listings and other communications. Fukaya has been with Textio for more the two years and previously worked at multiple public relations companies. She was formerly VP of PR at Walker Sands.

— Stephen Delano is now principal software engineer at Seattle’s Yoodli, an AI roleplay startup recently landed a $40 million investment.

Delano joins Yoodli after five years at Tomo, a digital mortgage startup launched by former Zillow executives, where he was a founding engineer.

He previously spent more than a decade at Chef, a Seattle-based automation technology company that was acquired in 2020 for $220 million.

— Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is replacing Seattle City Light CEO and general manager Dawn Lindell. The new mayor has selected Dennis McLerran, the former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head for the Pacific Northwest region, for the role pending confirmation by the Seattle City Council. Lindell served as CEO for two years.

Wilson on Wednesday announced additional leadership changes within the City of Seattle with the selection of these acting directors:

• Quynh Pham at the Department of Neighborhoods
• Amy Nguyen at the Office of Arts and Culture
• Beto Yarce at the Office of Economic Development
• Lylianna Allala at the Office of Sustainability and the Environment
  

— Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for the real estate platform Redfin, joined the board of governors of Center for Land Economics. The education and research organization promotes equitable land and property assessments.

— WestRiver Group announced that Craig Lange has joined the Seattle-based firm as managing director and lead of the Disruptive Growth Fund. Lange spent more than three decades with the heavy machinery company Caterpillar.

Starfish Space has secured a $52.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency to dispose of military satellites at the end of their operational lives.

The Tukwila, Wash.-based startup says it’s the first commercial deal ever struck to provide “deorbit-as-a-service,” or DaaS, for a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. In this case, the constellation is the Pentagon’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which provides global communications access and encrypted connectivity for military missions.

The contract calls for Starfish Space to launch the satellite disposal service in 2027.

“This is not research and development. This is an actual service, in a structure that allows that service to scale for this constellation, for an entire industry,” Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire. He said the arrangement validates the Space Development Agency’s approach to building and maintaining its constellation, and also validates “the path that we can take with the industry at large.”

Starfish is developing a spacecraft called Otter that would be able to capture other satellites, maneuver them into different orbits, release them and then move on. In a deorbiting scenario, Otter would send the target satellite into a trajectory for atmospheric re-entry that wouldn’t pose a risk to other orbital assets. Starfish’s system doesn’t require the target satellite to be pre-outfitted with specialized hardware — which is a significant selling point.

The system provides an alternative to what typically happens to satellites toward the end of their lives. Today, most satellite operators either have to execute a deorbiting maneuver while they’re sure that the propulsion system still works, or risk having their spacecraft turn into unmanageable space junk.

Bennett compared Otter to a tow truck that can be brought in to carry away an old vehicle when it really needs to be scrapped.

“With the tow truck kind of capability, we can provide that service as needed, but we are not trying to replace normal operation,” he said. “We are augmenting it and extending it so the satellites that are being flown in that constellation can go fly longer. … Once it’s done operating and it’s time to dispose, we can provide that transit to the right disposable altitude.”

Starfish’s deal with the Space Development Agency builds on a previously awarded mission study contract that supported work on the concept in 2024 and 2025. The $52.5 million won’t be paid out all at once. An initial payment will cover costs leading up to the first deorbiting operation, and from then on, the agency will pay Starfish for services rendered. Bennett declined to provide further financial details, citing confidentiality.

Otter’s capabilities aren’t limited to deorbiting satellites. The oven-sized spacecraft could also be used to change a satellite’s orbital path, or bring it in for servicing. “With Otter, we’ve dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of satellite servicing across orbits,” Austin Link, Starfish Space’s other co-founder, said in a news release. “This contract reflects both the value of affordable servicing missions and the technical readiness of the Otter.”

Starfish conducted a partial test of its first Otter prototype, known as Otter Pup, in 2024. A second prototype, Otter Pup 2, launched in mid-2025 and is currently undergoing tests that could include a satellite docking attempt. “That vehicle remains healthy and operational, and is actually progressing through some additional mission milestones,” Bennett said.

Three other projects are in the works:

• Starfish is due to send an Otter spacecraft to hook up with a retired SES satellite in geostationary Earth orbit, or GEO, and maneuver it into a graveyard orbit. The Otter would then dock with a different SES satellite and use its onboard propulsion system to keep that satellite in an operational orbit for additional years of life. (The deal was originally struck with Intelsat, but that company was acquired by SES last year.)
• The Space Force’s Space Systems Command awarded Starfish Space a $37.5 million contract that calls for a different Otter spacecraft to dock with and maneuver national security assets in GEO.
• Yet another Otter is due to conduct up-close inspections of defunct satellites in low Earth orbit under the terms of a three-year, $15 million contract awarded by NASA in 2024.

“Those Otters are all under construction and in testing,” Bennett said. “Actually, we’ll see a couple of those launched this year. And so this is an exciting time, where Otters are about to go to space and start operating as commercial vehicles.”