A newly proposed payroll tax would add new costs for large businesses in Washington state. But Rep. Shaun Scott, a Seattle Democrat sponsoring the bill, argues it would protect the basic services that help companies recruit and retain talent.

“People are looking to the state legislature for leadership on protecting the programs that make our state actually a healthy climate to do business in,” Scott told GeekWire this week.

House Bill 2100, pre-filed this week in Olympia, would create the “Well Washington Fund” and levy a 5% payroll expense tax on “large operating companies” for employee wages above a $125,000 threshold. The bill defines a “large operating company” as one with more than 20 employees and more than $5 million in gross receipts or sales, among other criteria. Employers with total employee wages under $7 million in the prior year would be exempt.

Scott is pitching the bill as a state backstop against federal cuts hitting Medicaid, higher education, housing and other programs. He said it would generate more than $2 billion annually and impact the about 4,300 businesses — including Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant Microsoft and telecom behemoth T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue.

Seattle-based companies such as Amazon that already pay the city’s JumpStart payroll tax would be exempt.

Scott said there is a “corollary effect” on corporations from policies that benefit “everyday people.”

“My sense of it is that the public is on our side on this issue,” he said. “They understand that when you have very well-funded higher education, what that means is a well-trained workforce that could seek employment at a place like Microsoft or Amazon — and the company would benefit as a result.”

“When you have people who have very good housing options, that makes Washington that much more of a competitive place to come and do business,” he added.

Business groups are wary of the proposal. Rachel Smith, the new CEO of Washington Roundtable, called it a “tax-first, plan later” idea. She also cited the state’s recent tax increases impacting businesses — passed in part to help address a $16 billion budget shortfall — and broader economic uncertainty.

“If a job is cheaper somewhere else, and a company has an operational environment that allows them to deploy that job somewhere else, of course that’s going to be something they consider,” Smith said in an interview with GeekWire.

Lawmakers tried to pass a similar statewide payroll tax this year, but the bill did not advance. In March, Microsoft President Brad Smith criticized that tax proposal and said it would increase prices for consumers, reduce jobs, and hurt the tech industry.

Microsoft declined to comment on Rep. Scott’s proposal when contacted by GeekWire this week.

Rep. Scott said it’s “disingenuous” that critics raise alarms about companies leaving when the state talks about funding the safety net, but don’t ask similar questions when companies cut jobs on their own. He said the relocation question “does not come up when we see large tech firms investing in artificial intelligence, which is designed to divest from human labor.”

Washington is one of a few states without a personal or corporate income tax. Most state revenue comes from sales, property, and B&O taxes — a system critics say disproportionately burdens lower-income residents.

Gabriella Buono, interim president and CEO at the Seattle Metro Chamber, said that “raising taxes in an affordability crisis will mean higher prices on everyday essentials, fewer job opportunities, and more closures in sectors that are already on the edge.”

“Voters across the political spectrum are clear: they want smart spending, transparency, and results, not new taxes that make it harder to live and work in this state,” Buono said in a statement.

Revenue from the proposed bill would initially go to the state general fund in 2026, then split beginning in 2027, with 51% directed to a dedicated Well Washington fund account and 49% to the general fund. A new oversight and accountability board would guide priorities and report annually. Spending from the account would be limited to higher education, health care — especially Medicaid — cash assistance, and energy and housing programs.

Does everyone in Seattle hate AI?

That’s one of the surprising questions to arise this week in response to a viral blog post penned by Jonathon Ready, a former Microsoft engineer who recently left the tech giant to pursue his own startup.

In the post, Ready describes showing off his AI-powered mapping project, Wanderfugl, to engineers around the world. Everywhere from Tokyo to San Francisco, people are curious. In Seattle, “instant hostility the moment they heard ‘AI,'” he said.

“Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you’re advocating asbestos,” he wrote.

The culprit, Ready argues, is the Big Tech AI experience — specifically, Microsoft’s. Based on conversations with former colleagues and his own time at the company, he describes a workplace where AI became the only career-safe territory amid widespread layoffs, and everyone was forced to use Copilot tools that were often worse than doing the work manually.

The result, Ready says, is a kind of learned helplessness: smart people coming to believe that AI is both pointless and beyond their reach.

His post drew hundreds of comments on Hacker News and other responses on LinkedIn. Some felt he hit the nail on the head. Trey Causey, former head of AI ethics at Indeed, said he could relate, recalling that he would avoid volunteering the “AI” part of his job title in conversations with Seattle locals. He speculated the city might be the epicenter of anti-AI sentiment among major U.S. tech hubs.

But others said the piece paints with too broad a brush. Seattle tech vet Marcelo Calbucci argues the divide isn’t geographic but cultural — between burned-out Big Tech employees and energized founders. He pointed to layoffs that doubled workloads even as AI demand increased, creating stress levels beyond simple burnout.

“If you hang out with founders and investors in Seattle, the energy is completely different,” Calbucci wrote.

Seattle venture capitalist Chris DeVore was more dismissive, calling Ready’s post “clickbait-y” and criticizing what he saw as a conflation of the experiences of Big Tech individual contributors with Seattle’s startup ecosystem.

That dovetails with GeekWire’s recent story about “a tale of two Seattles in the age of AI”: a corporate city shell-shocked by massive job cuts, and a startup city brimming with excitement about new tools.

Ryan Brush, a director at Salesforce, put forth an intriguing theory: that any anti-AI sentiment in Seattle can be traced to the city’s “undercurrent of anti-authority thinking that goes way back,” from grunge music to the WTO protests.

“Seattle has a long memory for being skeptical of systems that centralize power and extract from individuals,” Brush commented. “And a lot of what we see with AI today (the scale of data collection, how concentrated it is in a few big companies) might land differently here than it does elsewhere.”

Ready ends his post by concluding that Seattle still has world-class talent — but unlike San Francisco, it has lost the conviction that it can change the world.

In our story earlier this year — Can Seattle own the AI era? — we asked investors and founders to weigh the city’s startup ecosystem potential. Many community leaders shared optimism, in part due to the density of engineering talent that’s crucial to building AI-native companies.

But, as we later reported, Seattle lacks superstar AI startups that are easy to find in the Bay Area — despite being home to hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Amazon, as well as world-class research institutions (University of Washington; Allen Institute for AI) and substantial Silicon Valley outposts.

Is it because Seattle “hates AI”? That seems like a bit of a stretch. But this week’s discussion is certainly another reminder of the evolving interplay between Seattle’s tech corporations, talent, and startup activity in the AI era.

Thoughts on this topic? Continue the discussion on LinkedIn.

Related: Seattle is poised for massive AI innovation impact — but could use more entrepreneurial vibes

Washington state regulators ordered Seattle-based cryptocurrency company Coinme to stop transmitting money for customers in the state, alleging the startup improperly claimed more than $8 million in customer funds as its own income.

The Washington State Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) announced Monday that it issued a temporary cease-and-desist order and statement of charges against Coinme, which lets people buy crypto with cash at kiosks nationwide and says it runs the largest crypto cash network in the world.

DFI said Coinme improperly treated more than $8 million owed to customers on unredeemed crypto “vouchers” as company income. The agency said Coinme did not adequately disclose how and when it would recognize those unredeemed amounts as revenue and failed to turn unclaimed funds over to the state as required under Washington’s unclaimed property laws.

DFI said those issues amount to unfair and deceptive practices and “unsafe and unsound” conduct that could lead to insolvency or loss of customer funds.

DFI also alleged that Coinme failed to maintain required financial reserves, filed inaccurate reports, and listed an inactive customer support phone number on vouchers for several months last year. The company had a negative tangible net worth at year-end 2022, 2023, and 2024, according to the charges.

The agency is seeking to revoke the company’s money transmitter license, impose a $300,000 fine, and ban CEO and co-founder Neil Bergquist from Washington’s money transmitter and currency-exchange industry for 10 years.

“Washington’s money transmission laws exist to protect consumers that rely on licensed companies to safely transmit funds,” DFI Director Charlie Clark said in a statement. “When our investigations reveal serious violations, we will take appropriate action.”

Coinme pushed back on the allegations, calling it an accounting dispute over a discontinued product. In a statement, the company said it eliminated the voucher system in August 2023 and now credits purchases instantly to customer accounts.

“Following professional guidance, we treated unredeemed voucher payments the same way major retailers treat unredeemed gift cards — a widely accepted accounting practice,” Ben Enea, Coinme’s chief compliance officer, said in a statement.

The company said all vouchers can still be redeemed at any time with no expiration date, and customers can request refunds in U.S. dollars if they prefer. Coinme noted that the unredeemed vouchers represent less than 1% of the more than $1 billion in transactions the company has processed since its 2014 founding.

Coinme also expressed frustration with the regulatory process, claiming it wasn’t contacted during the investigation and only learned of the concerns when the order was announced.

Under the temporary order, existing Washington customers can still withdraw their assets but no new business is permitted.

The company, which raised $10 million in 2021, was licensed by Washington state in April 2014 and soon after launched its first “Bitcoin ATM.” It now operates cryptocurrency kiosks through partnerships with MoneyGram and Coinstar.

Coinme said it has requested an administrative hearing to contest the order.

Seattle startup Gradial raised a $35 million Series B round to expand its AI platform that automates the behind-the-scenes work of enterprise marketing. VMG Partners led the round, with participation from existing backers Madrona and Pruven Capital.

It’s the second round of funding this year for Gradial, which raised $13 million in May. Total funding is $55 million. The company is valued at $350 million.

Gradial is targeting what it calls the “content supply chain” — the workflows that move marketing content to live campaigns. Its AI “agents” plug into existing systems to handle tasks such as CMS authoring, brand redesigns, QA, and large-scale campaign operations.

“Every enterprise marketing team faces the same challenge. Their current tools and processes are too fragmented for them to move at the speed they need,” co-founder and CEO Doug Tallmadge said in a statement. “Gradial agents live inside the workflow and learn to do the work just like a human employee would.

Customers include AWS, Prudential, and T-Mobile. Gradial was featured during AWS CEO Matt Garman’s keynote presentation this week at AWS re:Invent.

Gradial sits in a fast-growing category of “agentic” AI tools that go beyond content generation to orchestrate complex workflows in real time.

“Gradial’s agents don’t just assist; they perceive, decide, and coordinate in the flow of real work,” Madrona wrote in a blog post. “They represent a new class of reasoning machines that work alongside humans to manage complexity, turn feedback into foresight, and compound improvement over time.”

Tallmadge previously worked at SpaceX as a software engineering manager. Other co-founders include chief growth officer Anish Chadalavada, a former AI strategy manager at Microsoft and investor at Point72 Ventures; CTO Deip Kumar, who also worked at SpaceX and Microsoft; and COO Anup Chamrajnagar, who worked at Point72. All four co-founders graduated from Dartmouth College.

Gradial raised $5.4 million in a seed round in February 2024. The company employs around 50 people.

Yoodli is on a roll.

The Seattle startup, which sells AI-powered software to help people practice real-world conversations such as sales calls and feedback sessions, announced a $40 million Series B round on Tuesday to fuel growth. WestBridge Capital, a $7 billion global investment firm, led the round.

The fresh funding comes less than a year after the company’s $13.7 million Series A round in May.

Yoodli’s software lets users create personas to simulate conversations with another person or multiple people. The company’s model is trained on effective communication techniques and can be customized depending on an organization’s goals. Customers include SAP, Google, Snowflake, the University of Washington, Korn Ferry, and others.

“At a moment when AI is replacing human jobs, we’re doubling down on a different belief: that AI should help people become the best version of themselves in the conversations that matter most,” co-founder and CEO Varun Puri wrote on LinkedIn.

Yoodli’s revenue has grown around 900% in the past year. Its headcount has tripled to more than 40 people.

Puri told GeekWire earlier this year that Yoodli is like a “batting cage before game time,” or a flight simulator for communication. The idea is to replace passive formats such as slide decks and training videos with interactive practice that builds conversational muscle memory.

The company said it will use the new funding to expand into what it calls “experiential learning.”

“Experiential learning is the next step of conversation coaching — helping people learn, practice, and apply skills with roleplays at the center of their experience,” Puri wrote. “We’re making learning more fun and actionable for individuals and much more closely tied to ROI for organizations.”

The raise comes amid competition in the AI-powered workforce training market, as employers look for tools to upskill workers in communication, leadership, and customer engagement — areas where traditional learning management systems may have limitations.

Puri and Esha Joshi launched Yoodli in 2021 at the AI2 incubator in Seattle. The startup got off the ground with a consumer-focused offering targeted at practicing public speaking.

Neotribe and Madrona also participated in the latest funding round. Total capital raised is nearly $60 million.

— Smartsheet’s C-suite shuffle continues with the hiring of Scott Torrey as chief revenue officer.

Torrey previously led salary data company Payscale as CEO from 2019 to 2021. He spent the past three years as executive chairman at finance software startup Tesorio, and was at Concur for nearly two decades, including six years as chief revenue officer.

His new role marks a reunion of sorts as he teams up again with Concur co-founder Rajeev Singh, who recently became CEO at Smartsheet.

“Smartsheet is on a growth trajectory, and Scott’s leadership will drive our go-to-market success,” Singh said in a press release.

Smartsheet earlier this year hired Pratima Arora as its chief product officer and Ravi Soin as chief information security officer. It also named Cynthia Tee as chief technology officer.

Founded two decades ago, Smartsheet is one of the Seattle region’s iconic tech companies, with a large customer base of major businesses and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It went private earlier this year in a $8.4 billion deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.

Speaking to the company’s annual Engage conference in Seattle last month, Singh said it’s time for Smartsheet to “step out of the shadows” and challenge old perceptions of Smartsheet as simply an online spreadsheet tool. The company recently announced new features as part of its “Intelligent Work Management” platform that combines AI agents, knowledge graphs, and automation. 

— Amar Subramanya, a top AI researcher who joined Microsoft in July as a corporate VP, is changing jobs again and joining Apple as vice president of AI.

Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, the tech giant announced Monday. He’ll lead Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation.

Apple also announced that John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down.

Before joining Microsoft, Subramanya was at Google for more than 16 years, where he helped lead work on Gemini. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2009 and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft for a year in the mid-2000s.

“AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release.

Apple has struggled to catch up with competitors in the AI race and recently delayed a new version of its Siri voice assistant.

— Torben Severson left Amazon after 17 years to take a new role as vice president and head of global business development at OpenAI. Severson held multiple business development leadership roles, most recently as chief of staff to Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.

“Joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Severson said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m drawn to moments of transformation — and it’s rare to be part of something so squarely at the frontier of what’s possible.”

Severson said he was the first person to join “what became Corporate Business Development” at Amazon in 2008. “I’m deeply grateful for the people I’ve learned from and worked alongside,” he wrote. “Amazon shaped how I think, taught me how to navigate complex problems, and gave me the opportunity to build and lead exceptional teams. Through those experiences I learned the value of high judgment, clarity in ambiguity, and building trust through curiosity and rigor.”

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, said last year that it opened an office in Bellevue, Wash. The company recently acquired Bellevue-based startup Statsig.  

Amazon on Monday officially launched Amazon Now, a new ultra-fast service it’s testing in Seattle and Philadelphia that promises delivery in about 30 minutes or less for household essentials and fresh groceries. 

The announcement confirms reporting by GeekWire last week that revealed Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Permit filings showed the company planned to test a new delivery concept using Amazon Flex drivers dispatched from the location at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

In a blog post, Amazon detailed the new service, available inside the existing Amazon shopping app and website. Customers in eligible neighborhoods can look for a “30-Minute Delivery” option in the navigation bar, browse a curated catalog, track orders in real time, and tip their drivers. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

Amazon Now covers a wide range of items that people tend to need quickly — including milk, eggs, fresh produce, toothpaste, cosmetics, pet treats, diapers, paper products, electronics, seasonal items, and over-the-counter medicines, plus snacks like chips and dips.

Amazon did not provide a timeline for expanding Amazon Now to additional markets.

To hit the 30-minute window, Amazon is using smaller, specialized facilities placed close to where customers live and work.

As GeekWire reported last week, permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

By operating its own Amazon Now micro-stores, the company aims to better control inventory, labor, and pickup efficiency as it pushes deeper into “sub-same-day” delivery — a sector where it is competing with quick-commerce and micro-fulfillment players such as GoPuff, DoorDash, and others.

The new stores could also boost Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.

Amazon previously shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery service that relied on Flex drivers picking up small orders from malls and brick-and-mortar retailers, after reports that drivers often left stores with just one or two items.

Washington state is moving to set its own regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in the absence of federal legislation, laying out recommendations for how lawmakers should regulate AI in healthcare, education, policing, workplaces and more.

A new interim report from the Washington state AI Task Force notes that the federal government’s “hands-off approach” to AI has created “a crucial regulatory gap that leaves Washingtonians vulnerable.”

The report lands as the Trump administration pushes a deregulatory national AI policy and briefly considered an executive order to preempt state AI laws before putting the idea on hold after bipartisan pushback, according to Reuters.

The new report published this week notes that AI has “grown more powerful and prevalent than ever before” over the past year, driven by technical advances, the rise of AI agents, and open AI platforms transforming work and daily life.

The report lays out eight recommendations to the Washington state Legislature, including a requirement to improve transparency in AI development — mandating that AI developers publicly disclose the “provenance, quality, quantity and diversity of datasets” used to train models, and explain how training data is processed to mitigate errors and bias. The recommendation includes carve-outs protecting trade secrets.

State lawmakers introduced proposals earlier this year on AI development transparency and disclosure but their bills stalled.

The task force also recommends the creation of a grant program, leveraging public and private money, to support small businesses and startups building AI that serves the public interest — particularly for founders outside the Seattle area and those facing inequitable access to capital.

The report notes that the program would help Washington retain talent and “maintain its relevance as a tech hub.” An earlier bill to create such a program, HB 1833, stalled in the 2025 session.

Other recommendations include:

• Promote responsible AI governance for high-risk systems — defined as those with “potential to significantly impact people’s lives, health, safety, or fundamental rights.”
• Invest in K-12 STEM, higher education AI programs, professional development for teachers, and expanded broadband in rural communities.
• Improve transparency in healthcare prior authorization — requiring that any decision to deny, delay, or modify health services based on medical necessity is made only by qualified clinicians, even when AI tools are used.
• Develop guidelines for AI in the workplace, including a call for employers to disclose when AI is used for employee monitoring, discipline, termination, and promotion.
• Require law enforcement to publicly disclose AI tools they use, including generative AI for report writing, predictive policing systems, license plate readers, and facial recognition.
• Adopt NIST Ethical AI Principles as guiding framework, building on existing state guidance that already relies on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

Most recommendations passed by wide margins, though the law-enforcement transparency proposal drew some dissenting votes from task force members, including a representative from the ACLU.

The interim report does not yet include specific Washington-focused recommendations on generative AI in elections and political ads, AI and intellectual property, or companion chatbots, even as it highlights those issues as areas of growing state activity elsewhere.

Washington is entering the AI policy arena behind some peers that have already put broad frameworks into place, including California and Colorado. Others have targeted specific use cases.

Washington lawmakers introduced multiple AI bills in 2025, but only one passed: HB 1205, which makes it a crime to knowingly distribute a forged digital likeness (deepfake) to defraud, harass, threaten, or intimidate another, or for an unlawful purpose.

The task force report notes that 73 new AI-related laws were enacted in 27 states in 2025 across areas such as child safety, transparency, algorithmic accountability, education, labor, healthcare, public safety, deepfakes, and energy.

Washington’s task force has 19 members spanning tech companies (including Microsoft and Salesforce), labor, civil liberties groups, academia, and state agencies.

The task force, created in 2024, must deliver three reports: a preliminary report released last year, this interim report, and a final report by July 1, 2026.

Read the full interim report below.

Washington state AI task force lays out blueprint for regulation by GeekWire

Less than five minutes after meeting with Todd Humphrey at a Seattle coffee shop, the longtime tech exec is already sizing up the customer. He quickly assesses how coffee drinkers interact with each other and their technology devices, and wonders why they’ve come to this particular location.

Humphrey has spent decades focused on using technology to enhance the customer experience  — from his early days at Kobo working on e-reader services, co-founding healthcare startup League, a CEO stint at project management company LiquidPlanner, and more recently as an exec with the Seattle Kraken, where he was senior vice president of innovation and fan experience.

Humphrey left the NHL franchise earlier this year to embark on a new adventure: Highmark Sports Group, his own consultancy aimed at helping sports teams, leagues, and companies boost their operations.

The Canadian native and former professional hockey player isn’t straying far from Seattle’s hockey scene. He’s a senior advisor for the Seattle Torrent, the new women’s pro hockey team that plays its first-ever home game tonight at Climate Pledge Arena. He’s also working with the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

We recently caught up with Humphrey to learn more about his approach to helping organizations improve their customer experiences and how to balance new technologies like artificial intelligence with essential human touches. The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

GeekWire: Todd, thanks for speaking with us. How are you thinking about technology and the customer experience in 2025?

Todd Humphrey: “I’m old enough to remember what the experience used to be like. You’d read about a game that was happening that night in the newspaper. You’d show up, you’d walk in, it would smell like stale beer and popcorn, and there’d be peanuts on the floor. They would play the national anthem and the game would start. 

The in-venue fan experience has totally been revamped. Technology plays a huge part of that. I think about the door-to-door experience, and all the different touch points. From the moment someone wakes up, they’re going to check the app to see who’s playing. You can tell them the best way to get to the game and where to park. 

Once they walk through the doors, you’re thinking about lines. The average NHL fan spends more than one hour standing in lines during the three-hour experience. We tried to cut that by more than half, and I think we got there. 

You want to get people to, from, and through the venue in a really efficient manner. Technology helps with some of that — digital ticketing, way-finding, mobile ordering, mobile payments. 

We really used that Amazon approach of the customer experience and working backward — at the end of the day, what are all the friction points, and how do we alleviate those?

There’s a huge opportunity for other teams and organizations to really rethink their experience. And it’s not just sports teams. It’s when you go to a concert, when you go to the Hockey Hall of Fame — what does that feel like? How do we turn it into a more of a holistic, overall experience beyond the time you spend in the building?”

GeekWire: How do you thread the needle of incorporating technology and automation — but also focusing on the human elements of an experience?

Humphrey: “Technology is a vessel that you have to use because it’s expected and it’s really convenient. Everybody’s got a computer in their pocket, sitting in their hand, and if you can use it in the right way, it’s a great leverage point.

At the same time, I don’t want to see teams and leagues and companies get too hung up on the tech, because I think little things like the human interactions matter.

When you walk into an arena for a concert or a game, you’re going have a touch point with ticketing and security before you get inside. If those interactions are awesome, your event is off to a really good start. 

I think that training the people who work there to greet people and engage with people and look them in the eye and get to know who they are — it’s a huge advantage.

When I go to QFC, I don’t want to check myself out. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well. And I’d miss that interaction with the cashiers. They’ve seen my kids grow up over the years. They know who I am and what I do. There’s a lot to be said for that. 

As much as technology is awesome and ChatGPT tells us all the answers, people still like human interaction. When people go to events, they really want to be seen, they want to be heard. And when I see an usher at Climate Pledge Arena high-fiving a Kraken fan during a celebration, it just warms my heart, because that’s what it’s all about.

AI is going to provide more efficiency for us and make things easier to do. But on the other side of that, because there’s so much bent toward technology, I think live events, concerts, games, theater — all the places where people can gather are going to be more important. People just have an innate desire to be together and cheer together.”

GeekWire: What advice do you have for startup leaders who may not be leading a sports franchise, but still interact with customers and want to improve their experiences? 

Humphrey: More companies need to take their customer experience and work backwards. You also need to have conviction in what you’re building and why you’re building it. And it’s talking to more customers. Some companies build in silos. The more you can talk to people to hear directionally where you might want to go, the better. 

But at the end of the day, you as a company, as a leadership group, have to pick your lane. I would get conviction around that. 

It’s also understanding what the whole journey is going to be for that fan or customer, whether it’s a SaaS customer or a cloud customer or an AI-driven customer. What is that customer going to feel all the way through the experience? And can you build a business that delivers an incredible, top-tier experience — and also drives revenue? It’s a hard thing to do.”

Jonathan Duncan was laid off from Microsoft in May after more than two decades at the tech giant. Since then, he’s applied to roughly 200 jobs. The response has been silence.

“Not a squeak,” Duncan told GeekWire. He’s tried adapting resumes for each role, subscribing to job alerts, networking with peers, and internal referrals. Nothing has worked.

He’s not alone. Experienced tech professionals across the industry are learning they’re not immune to widespread layoffs — and that finding a new job isn’t as easy as it used to be.

For years, tech workers were told there was a talent shortage. Recruiters chased them. But in 2025, leaders who built their whole careers on growing headcount and mastering organizational processes are getting “mowed down right now in stunning numbers,” said Laura Close, CEO of Close Cohen, a job search and executive coaching firm.

Close said some “super high-value professionals” she works with are taking 12-to-18 months to find a new job.

“The golden age of the quick turnaround is over,” she said.

And in an industry that “equates youth with innovation and stamina,” Close said longtime workers are finding that their previous success metrics are no longer valued — decades of expertise have become liabilities, not assets.

“What we’re seeing right now is ageism on steroids,” Close said. She noted that in tech, age-related bias often begins as early as 40 — earlier than many assume.

A cooling market

Allison Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed, said it’s difficult for anyone trying to get hired — from new college grads to more veteran workers.

“If you’ve been trying to get a job or change jobs in a tech-related field, you’re probably really, really struggling,” she said.

While unemployment broadly remains low, the amount of time that people remain unemployed is increasing, Shrivastava said.

More than 114,000 tech workers have been laid off this year so far, compared to nearly 153,000 workers in 2024 and nearly 265,000 in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi. The pace has slowed from 2023’s peak, but the cuts continue.

Seattle-area tech giants Microsoft and Amazon have announced major workforce reductions in 2025. Both companies are investing heavily in AI infrastructure while emphasizing efficiency.

As a senior manager at Microsoft, Duncan said budgets were recently slashed across the board — training, travel, morale-building. When people left, they weren’t replaced. Every quarter brought new demands to return unspent funds.

He also noticed what he calls “underleveling” — senior director roles being posted at lower levels than before, manager positions offered at what used to be individual contributor levels.

“I think the days of high-paying tech jobs are drying up,” he said.

Shrivastava said the current layoffs are likely a “shedding” from a massive over-hire during the post-pandemic tech boom, not necessarily an AI restructuring story.

But at the same time, as The Wall Street Journal reported, many companies are betting that AI can help them grow — without growing headcount.

‘Who am I?‘

For many of these workers, the timing couldn’t be worse with aging parents, kids heading to college, and retirement on the horizon.

“I consider this the most expensive time of my life,” Duncan said. His eldest son is a sophomore in college, and his youngest starts next fall. He’s also pricing out family plans for insurance for the first time.

And then there’s the stock compensation. When Duncan was laid off, he had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unvested Microsoft shares.

“That was the kids’ college funds,” he said.

Nancy Poznoff, an executive coach at Close Cohen, said financial pressure is compounding an identity crisis for many laid-off executives.

“They’ve been high performers their whole career,” Poznoff said. “They’ve followed all the rules. They’ve done what they were supposed to do. And now they’re suddenly having this identity crisis on top of it, because a lot of them have been at their company for so long, they have this fear around, ‘How do I operate when I’m not at Amazon?’ Like, ‘Who am I?'”

“So you’ve got this financial pressure, and then you’ve got this ego bomb,” she added. “It’s a really tough time.”

Duncan still talks to his former teammates at Microsoft. The stress inside, he says, is brutal. He’s not sure he’d want to go back — even if he could.

Angus Norton, a former Microsoft and Amazon exec, recently wrote about the toll of perpetual layoffs on those who remain.

“It creates a hierarchy of fear. Everyone becomes a potential target. Everyone knows someone who was let go despite stellar performance,” he wrote. “The message is clear: no one is safe.”

If you’re building an early-stage startup and trying to raise venture capital dollars to fuel your big ideas — focus on solving a specific problem, make sure you have strong conviction, and think hard about distribution in the age of AI.

Those were some tips shared during a recent Seattle AI Week panel discussion I moderated with Kellan Carter, founding general partner at Bellevue, Wash.-based firm Fuse, and Rohan D’Souza, CEO and co-founder at Seattle-based healthcare benefits startup Avante.

The pair know each other well. Fuse led Avante’s $10 million seed round in late 2023, before the company was generating meaningful revenue.

Carter initially met D’Souza several years earlier. “There’s so much trust that had been built,” Carter said, reflecting the importance of relationship-building between founders and VCs.

The title of the panel discussion, hosted by Seattle VC firm Ascend, was “The New Series A Landscape” — a nod to shifting expectations in the AI boom.

The median Series A round in Q1 of this year was $7.9 million, according to Carta. But there were also nine companies that raised more than $200 million for their Series A rounds in Q3, according to CB Insights.

“The variance for Series A is wider than ever,” Carter said.

For those companies raising massive Series A rounds, Carter said it’s about “unfair insight” that creates conviction and opens doors to capital.

“The insight is so clear it’s getting investors excited to cut that big of a check — because the prize is so big right now,” Carter said.

Venture funding has increased to a 3-year high, largely thanks to AI, which accounted for 51% of all funding and 22% of deals in Q3, CB Insights reported.

Carter joked that AI is “always in the pitch now — even if it’s not AI.” For Fuse, assessing a pitch is about determining the best way to solve a customer’s problem — with or without AI.

Carter said investors lean toward founders who have domain knowledge and understand a first- or second-priority customer problem better than anyone else. “They have insight that’s going to give them credibility in a customer conversation,” he said.

And in a world where AI is shifting how software is sold, Carter said he’s looking for a clear distribution advantage. “Product won’t win,” he said. “Distribution will win.”

He added: “We love founders that have the domain experience, that have the insight, and they can get us super excited about a distribution strategy that’s a little more clever or unique in an AI world.”

When it comes to talking about AI during a pitch, the conversation will differ depending on whether you’re talking to a customer or investor, according to D’Souza.

He said customers may have “FOMO” when it comes to AI — fear of missing out — but they probably actually have “FOMU”: fear of messing up. D’Souza said it’s the founder’s job to help customers understand that it’s about “unlocking a whole new way of productivity.”

For investors, D’Souza said it’s important to show how AI improves margins — for example, by speeding up customer acquisition and onboarding.

Avante officially launched earlier this year as it scales its software product that aims to help companies decrease HR administration workload and reduce overall benefits program costs.

As he thinks about raising a Series A round of funding, D’Souza said one advantage of bringing in fresh cash is that it acts as a signal to enterprise buyers — some who may be wary of an early stage, 20-person startup tucked away in the Pacific Northwest.

“There’s a little bit of that perception of, what will happen if these guys go away?” he said. “So as a founder, I’m like, OK, should we really aggressively start to pursue more money on the balance sheet? To send a clear message out that, we’ve got a lot more gas in the tank, even though we didn’t necessarily need it.”

As for competitors, D’Souza said founders should focus less on similar startups and more on incumbents. “What are they doing to unlock a feature set? And how do you get there much faster?” he said.

Carter noted that Fuse stays clear of companies that might directly compete with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, or Anthropic.

“If we think that there is an inkling that they’re going to release a product and the next thing you know, everyone is competing against free or bundling — that’s a problem,” he said.

D’Souza, a former product chief at healthcare automation company Olive AI, stressed the importance of transparency with investors.

“Be very clear about your timelines,” he said. “If you need three months or six months to really build out the core of your product, be extremely transparent about it.”

D’Souza said Avante deliberately planned no recurring revenue for 2024, ran an early adopter program that wasn’t free, then came out of stealth in April 2025 and converted pilots into multi-year deals. “We created a little bit of scarcity and FOMO around this concept of an early adopter program,” he said.

D’Souza also advised his fellow founders to “focus on the one core thing that you do 100X better.”

There’s a quantum paradox in Washington.

The state has strong ingredients for a quantum technology hub: powerful giants like Microsoft and Amazon, a hardware leader in IonQ, and world-class research at UW and PNNL. Yet it may be falling behind states like Illinois, Montana, and Colorado that are pushing forward on quantum.

Washington needs more speed and a better strategy to help bolster the region’s quantum ecosystem, according to panelists who spoke this week in Seattle at a Tech Alliance event focused on quantum technologies, which aim to solve complex problems and power new innovations faster than traditional computers.

Rep. Stephanie Barnard, a Republican who represents the 8th Legislative District in Eastern Washington, expressed a desire to inject $100 million as a way “to get quantum going where it needs to be.”

“It takes courage. It takes dynamic leadership,” Barnard said. “It takes a political will to recognize the needs of this state.”

But financial woes pose a roadblock with the state facing revenue declines. Beau Perschbacher, policy advisor for Gov. Bob Ferguson, offered a reality check.

“Big new significant investments at this time [are] going to be very hard,” he said, while suggesting the state focus on coordination and workforce strategy in the short-term.

“We don’t have to make a huge capital investment — but you can still really advance the cause,” he said.

Other states are charging ahead. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently earmarked $500 million for a quantum campus near Chicago. States including Montana, Maryland, Colorado are moving forward on strategy and workforce investment.

Barnard suggested that Washington might need to stop subsidizing established industries to fund emerging ones. She pointed to the hundreds of millions the state has invested in solar incentives.

“If you subsidized quantum $300 million over the next 10 years, think of where you would be,” she said. “So we need to maybe shift priorities.”

Washington state had budget language for a quantum strategy in 2025, but it was vetoed due to fiscal constraints, with the Department of Commerce directed to pursue partnerships and policy recommendations.

Quantum researchers will “go to where the funding is and where the environment favors success,” said University of Washington professor Charles Marcus, who serves as director of Northwest Quantum Nexus, a public-private coalition supporting the growth of the state’s quantum ecosystem.

Marcus called on companies to support a dedicated master’s program to churn out graduates ready to work immediately.

“The master’s program is what industry needs regionally,” said Marcus, “It needs a small number of PhDs, but it needs a large number of masters.”

Marcus described the quantum race as one “in which, if you’re standing still, you’re going backwards.”

Momentum has been building to help boost Washington’s position in quantum. In 2023, regional tech leaders said Washington had a chance to create a “Quantum Valley” modeled after Silicon Valley. 

Laura Ruderman, CEO of Tech Alliance who moderated the panel discussion this week, suggested that the near-term prescription isn’t to build a new initiative but rather scaling what already exists. “We need to fund NQN,” she said, referencing the Northwest Quantum Nexus, which was founded in 2019 by UW, Microsoft, and PNNL.

Margaret Arakawa, CMO of quantum giant IonQ, which recently opened the first dedicated quantum computer manufacturing facility in the U.S. near Seattle, said Washington’s leaders need to show up publicly and enlist private funding partners. She said states that are winning have governors who make quantum a visible priority and then bring industry in to co-invest.

“Please let it happen now, and don’t wait,” Arakawa urged.

Seattle founders are trying to improve space communication, hiring, restaurant marketing, jewelry sustainability, and finding a great bottle of wine.

We’re back with the latest Startup Radar, our regular spotlight on up-and-coming, early stage Seattle-area startups.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — and a pitch assessment from GPT-powered “Mean VC,” which we prompt to offer both positive and critical feedback.

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

Aetheon

Founded: 2025

The business: Job-matching platform designed to map real world capabilities to work opportunities. Its software translates lived experiences — such as military service, caregiving, or community work — into market-ready skills. Aetheon is partnering with organizations including the World Economic Forum and Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program to pilot its skills intelligence system. The startup has raised $550,000.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Marie Gill was an exec at Executive Networks, Concertus, and Modifi. She also leads the Green Apron Alliance of Starbucks alumni. Co-founders include Gina Jeneroux, a 37-year veteran of BMO Financial Group, and longtime entrepreneur and product leader Mark Wayman.

Mean VC: “You’ve got real partners and credible operators, but in a saturated ‘skills’ space you need to show exactly where you win (segment, data, or workflow) and hard proof that pilots convert into sizable, repeatable contracts.”

Constellation

Founded: 2025

The business: Space communication software that helps satellite operators avoid losing valuable mission data by predicting when a ground connection is about to fail. Its system spots the problem early and automatically reroutes data through a better path. Constellation is testing its technology with defense and industrial partners.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Kamran Majid is a former software engineer at SpaceX and Xplore. Other co-founders include Raaid Kabir, a former engineer with Prudential Financial and Blue Origin; Omeed Tehrani, a software engineer at Capital One; and Laith Altarabishi, also a software engineer at Capital One.

Mean VC: “The problem and team both look strong, yet unless you can prove fast integration, real willingness to pay, and expansion inside operators, this risks being treated as a clever reliability feature rather than a standalone company.”

Feedia

Founded: 2025

The business: AI-powered marketing manager to help small, independent restaurant owners automate their digital marketing, cut costs, and save time. The startup aims to empower immigrant restaurant owners often underserved due to language barriers. Feedia has 15 pilot users and plans to begin paid subscription trials next quarter.

Leadership: CEO Deyi (Robert) Zhu is a Seattle restaurateur who co-owns the fast-casual chain Master Bing. He previously worked in business development leadership roles at SprintiQ and Beejern. Co-founder Dexuan Zhu is a senior engineer at Sea Group in Singapore.

Mean VC: “Founder-market fit is excellent and the immigrant focus is compelling, but without clear, quantified impact on revenue or hours saved and a very narrow core use case, you’ll blend into the noise of generic “AI for SMB marketing” tools.”

Redyoos

Founded: 2024

The business: Circular jewelry recycling system that recovers precious metals from pre-owned jewelry and returns them to the supply chain. The company partners with groups like Goodwill, Armoire, Starbucks, Dress for Success, and Phoenix Tailings, and is developing an AI-powered product for jewelry appraisal. Redyoos is bootstrapped and generating revenue.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Cleo Escarez was chief operating officer at Boma Silver Jewelry and a former brand manager at Starbucks.

Mean VC: “The circular jewelry angle and partnerships are promising, but your entire story hinges on whether you can beat existing recycling channels on unit economics and make the AI appraisal tool essential rather than decorative.”

Theodora

Founded: 2022

The business: Provides casual wine drinkers with personalized recommendations guided by answers about their taste and budget. Theodora suggests a bottle based on what’s available in a nearby store. The company is bootstrapped and just launched its iOS app this week.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Jess Thevenoz was a former data analyst at Flockjay, Hellosaurus, and CDC Group.

Mean VC: “The consumer problem is relatable and your store-based recommendations are logical, but you still need to prove sticky repeat usage and a path to monetizing retailer or brand value so you don’t become just another short-lived wine app.”

Reports emerged Wednesday that the White House is preparing an executive order directing federal agencies to challenge or block state-level AI regulations.

Seattle entrepreneur Joe Braidwood sees the news as a major opportunity.

Braidwood is CEO and co-founder of Glacis, a new startup backed by the AI2 Incubator that is building software to help companies prove that their AI safety measures are executed as intended. Glacis creates tamper-proof “receipts” for every AI decision, allowing companies to prove their safety systems actually ran.

“Think of it as a flight recorder for enterprise AI,” Braidwood said.

Braidwood said the potential White House order to block state AI laws transforms Glacis from a startup just getting off the ground into “infrastructure necessity.” In an environment where the Justice Department would sue states that pass AI rules, a neutral, platform-agnostic trust layer could become increasingly relevant.

Glacis’ origins are rooted in regulatory complexity.

Braidwood, a longtime tech marketing leader, recently shuttered Yara, his year-old startup that aimed to use AI to improve mental wellness. He cited Illinois regulations that made AI therapy “effectively uninsurable.”

In a LinkedIn post that has since gone viral, Braidwood explained the decision to close Yara and open-source a set of safety prompts he had developed.

He wrote that Yara closed after he realized AI became “dangerous” when interacting with people facing deep trauma or suicidal ideation — not just inadequate. The experience, he said, showed “where the boundaries need to be,” and demonstrated how startups working in high-risk AI categories face unmanageable liability and regulatory pressure.

After the post, regulators, clinicians, engineers, founders and insurance executives reached out — many pointing the same problem: when AI systems make decisions, no one can independently verify whether safety policies actually fired.

That clarity became the seed for Glacis.

Every time an AI model answers a question or takes an action, Glacis creates a signed record showing the input, the safety checks that ran, and the final decision. The record can’t be altered and takes less than 50 milliseconds to generate. Regulators and insurers can verify these receipts without seeing any personal data, and Braidwood said insurers believe this could finally make it possible to insure AI systems that can prove they followed the rules.

Braidwood co-founded Glacis with Dr. Jennifer Shannon, a psychiatrist and adjunct professor at the University of Washington.

The company is currently in private beta with digital health customers, including nVoq, and is targeting healthcare, fintech, and insurance sectors. It’s also part of Cloudflare’s Launchpad program.

Braidwood was previously chief strategy officer of Vektor Medical. He also co-founded social TV platform Scener and was chief marketing officer at SwiftKey.

Shannon has been a psychiatrist for nearly two decades. She was also a medical director at Cognoa and serves on the AI Resource Committee for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks announced Wednesday it will acquire Chronosphere in a deal valued at $3.35 billion.

Founded in 2019, Chronosphere sells observability software that helps engineering teams spot problems quickly and keep cloud applications running. Palo Alto Networks said the acquisition will help it meet the massive data demands created by modern AI workloads.

Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao and CTO Rob Skillington first met in the Seattle area at Microsoft, where they worked on migrating Office to the cloud-based Office 365 format. They both later joined Uber’s engineering teams. 

The company describes itself as a “distributed team” with major hubs in New York City, Seattle, and Vilnius. Mao is based in the Seattle region, along with several Chronosphere employees. The team, including Mao and Skillington, will join Palo Alto once the acquisition closes. Chronosphere has more than 250 employees.

On the company’s earnings call with analysts Wednesday, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora described Chronosphere as “one of the fastest-growing software companies in history.” It counts two of the “premier LLMs” as customers.

Arora said existing observability tools were not built for the AI era and that full observability has become cost prohibitive for many organizations. Chronosphere, he said, can deliver observability at one-third the cost of other leading solutions.

He added that Chronosphere has “changed the observability model” with its combination of open source and architectural techniques.

When Palo Alto evaluated observability and data-pipeline vendors, Arora said the team was struck by Chronosphere’s engineering chops. “Generally, engineers have too much pride to tell you that somebody else is good,” he said. “But our team came back and said, ‘these guys are the best engineers we’ve run into.'”

Chronosphere reports more than $160 million in annual recurring revenue, growing at triple-digit rates, according to Palo Alto.

Chronosphere will remain “largely standalone” after the deal closes next year. “They are basically a bunch of really smart engineers and forward-deployed engineers, as well as a few salespeople,” Arora said. “So, we’re going to give them some support by introducing the right customers in very targeted fashion.”

The company’s investors include General Atlantic; Greylock Partners; Lux Capital; Addition; Founders Fund; Spark Capital; and Glynn Capital.

“When Rob Skillington and I started Chronosphere six years ago, we set out to build a next-generation observability platform capable of handling the most complex cloud native workloads,” Mao wrote on LinkedIn. “Today, we are the observability leader trusted by the world’s top AI and digital-native innovators.”

Earlier this year Palo Alto Networks also acquired Protect AI, a Seattle startup that helps companies monitor machine learning systems.

Amazon is testing an unusual new twist on its returns network: self-serve kiosks inside Goodwill thrift stores, starting with 21 locations across the Seattle region.

It’s a new way for Amazon customers to drop off packages and the latest step in the company’s push to expand its return network beyond the Seattle tech giant’s own brick-and-mortar locations (Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go).

The Amazon kiosks will be available at all Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington stores. Some are already active, and the remainder will be operational by the end of the month.

We noticed Goodwill as a return option earlier this week while trying to return an item on Amazon.com, and tested a kiosk inside the Goodwill store in Redmond, Wash.

A sign at the entrance notifies customers of the new drop-off option, but the next step wasn’t immediately obvious. After heading toward the cashiers, I spotted the kiosk adjacent to the registers and across from a display of holiday items for sale.

The experience is familiar if you’ve used Amazon’s self-serve kiosks: scan a QR code sent by Amazon, wrap the product in provided plastic bag (a shipping box isn’t needed), attach the printed label, open the hatch, and drop the item in the bin. There is no cost to the customer.

One unique aspect: a 20% off coupon appeared on the screen after I completed the return. The kiosk also asked two questions: “Are you normally a Goodwill shopper?” and “Are you making a purchase today?” with multiple choice spending options.

Equipped with my coupon, I wandered around and came across some fun Microsoft shirts — not too surprising given the store’s proximity to the company’s Redmond headquarters campus.

Amazon has established similar partnerships with third-party retailers for several years, including Kohl’s and Staples, giving customers more places to return items without having to package them. The strategy helps Amazon reduce return-processing costs while expanding its physical presence without acquiring new real estate.

“We continue to improve our seamless returns experience and offer more convenient drop-off locations,” Amazon said in a statement.

For partners, the kiosks help increase foot traffic.

“When customers visit our stores to return packages, they also have the chance to donate or shop,” said Alyssa Grigg, senior director of marketing and communications for Evergreen Goodwill. She added that the partnership is particularly useful for customers in more rural areas who may have fewer return options.

Amazon says four out of five customers in the U.S. have a return drop-off point within five miles of their home. The company offers free returns on most items delivered in the U.S.

Online retailers continue to grapple with the rising costs of returns. The average return rate for online purchases was 16.9% in 2024, according to a report from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns. Total returns were projected to reach $890 billion in 2024. Some companies have started charging a small fee for returns.

AI won’t replace real estate agents completely. But it will accelerate how they do their work.

That’s part of the bet behind Seattle startup Desk, which has raised $800,000 to help real estate agents offload contract administration to AI.

The company’s lead investor is Martin Tobias of Incisive Ventures. PSL’s Geoff Entress and Flyhomes CEO Tushar Garg also invested.

Desk acts as an AI transaction coordinator, taking over administrative tasks such as tracking contract deadlines, drafting paperwork, and prepping signing packets. CEO and co-founder Gideon Sylvan said the tool combines “encyclopedic knowledge” of contracts with the tacit know-how of active local agents.

“Every agent wants to avoid paperwork, but most agents would rather do the work themselves than wait three hours for their assistant to handle it,” Sylvan said.

More than 500 agents in the Seattle area are using the software, including two board members of Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Desk said it is processing 100+ closed transactions per month, with inaccuracies on fewer than 0.2% of deals.

Desk, founded earlier this year, is also targeting brokerages to help them maintain transaction records.

Sylvan said the February release of Claude 3.7 was a breakthrough, transforming how accurately AI can read and interpret real estate contracts — including edge cases like handwritten signatures and custom conditions. “Suddenly complex contract assistance went from ‘this will be possible one day’ to ‘this is truly better-than-human,'” he noted.

While some companies are trying to replace real estate agents, Sylvan said that it’s more likely that AI becomes the “execution layer.”

“Being an agent is a contact sport filled with 10-second phone calls and short texts,” he said. “Deals come together when two agents trust each other. But the paperwork? I could care less if an AI put the paperwork together. That’s just inevitable.”

Sylvan and co-founder Stewart Renehan previously launched Lotside, a startup billed as “Zillow for house flippers.” That company didn’t quite take off but still has 20,000 monthly users, Sylvan said.

Sylvan also built a U.S. brokerage, while Renehan led data science at a PushSpring, a marketing tech startup acquired by T-Mobile in 2019.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Icertis has acquired Y Combinator grad Dioptra to accelerate its push toward AI-driven contract automation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

• Dioptra adds tools for automated playbook creation, risk reviews, and redlining — capabilities aimed at speeding contract negotiations and reducing legal workloads.
• Dioptra previously partnered with Icertis. The company, based in New York City, graduated from Y Combinator in 2022. Five employees, including Dioptra’s founders, will join Icertis’ product and engineering organization.
• Icertis, which has more than 2,100 employees worldwide and 100+ in the Seattle area, provides contract intelligence software used by more than one-third of the Fortune 100. The company named Anand Subbaraman as its new CEO earlier this year.

UJET, a San Francisco-based company that sells AI-powered contact center technology, has acquired Spiral, a Seattle startup that helps businesses analyze customer conversations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Spiral will operate as “Spiral by UJET,” continuing to support its customers as a standalone offering while also integrating into UJET’s cloud contact center platform.

Founded in 2018 by former Amazon engineers Elena Zhizhimontova and Andrew DiLosa, Spiral uses AI to automatically detect and categorize issues raised across phone calls, chats, emails, surveys and social media. The technology is designed to help companies uncover product and support problems. Customers include Owlet, Whitepages and Turo.

“UJET’s acquisition of Spiral will provide businesses with a unified view of all customer conversations for more proactive, personalized service,” UJET CEO Vasili Triant said in a statement.

Spiral previously raised nearly $7 million from investors including Trilogy Equity Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Techstars, Alumni Ventures Group, Ensemble, and the Alexa Fund. The startup has less than 10 employees — all will join UJET, including Zhizhimontova, now vice president of applied AI. The company competes in a growing category of startups applying AI to customer feedback.

A new Seattle-based startup called Peasy has raised a $2 million pre-seed round to challenge the status quo for independent consumer-goods brands — and it’s doing it by giving software away for free.

The company, founded this year by former Shelf Engine execs Ryan Conti and Bryan Mitchiner, has built an operating system that centralizes inventory and operations for independent food, beverage, and beauty companies that traditionally have relied on spreadsheets. 

The company said it’s helping brands reduce manual data entry by around 60%. The software can also forecast low stock, new manufacturing needs, and changes in demand.

Conti and Mitchiner met at Shelf Engine, the Seattle startup that helped grocers optimize ordering and was acquired earlier this year. Mitchiner also previously founded and sold a CPG brand, Mustard & Co.

Peasy’s most unusual strategic element is its pricing: the core inventory management software is completely free.

The decision to forgo a traditional subscription fee came from a simple realization: “We’re competing with spreadsheets… and spreadsheets are free,” the company noted in a recent post.

Peasy plans to monetize by charging standard payment processing fees on transactions that run through the system, such as payments to suppliers and invoices to customers. This creates a “harmonic business model,” according to Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op, which co-led the round with Bread and Butter Ventures.

“It’s not a business built around software that you pay for — it’s mutually aligned outcomes where both the customer and the vendor share in the upside as they scale,” Ginzburg said.

Peasy’s unique pricing model comes amid growing discussion among tech leaders about how companies will pay for software in the age of AI. Some argue that AI-native businesses are shifting away from traditional seat-based subscription fees toward consumption- or outcome-based pricing.

Conti described the company’s fundraising journey in a LinkedIn post: “Free is a hell of a wedge.”

Peasy is working with eight design partners, including Seattle ice cream company Frankie & Jo’s, and has another 30 brands on its waitlist.

Founders’ Co-op previously invested Row Zero, another Seattle startup rethinking spreadsheets. Ginzburg said the firm is “obsessed with businesses that compete with spreadsheets.”