— T-Mobile appointed Jon Freier as its new chief operating officer. He succeeds Srini Gopalan, who was named CEO of the Bellevue, Wash., telecom giant in a surprise move that took effect last month.

Freier joins the C-suite from his previous position as president of the T-Mobile Consumer Group, a title he has held since 2021. But he has been with the company for much longer: Freier began his professional career at Western Wireless in 1994 when he was 19 years old. That business became T-Mobile after Germany’s Deutsche Telekom took over as majority shareholder in 2001.

The company disclosed Freier’s promotion in a filing. T-Mobile has undergone additional leadership reshuffling in recent months, expanding the role of its chief technologist and marking the departure of its chief communications and corporate responsibility officer and its business group president.

— Alex Berezhnyy is now chief technology officer for RentSpree, a Seattle company that supports the rental application and screening process, and helps manage lease documents and payments.

Berezhnyy was previously at the real estate platform Redfin for more than a decade, leaving the role of vice president of engineering. Prior to that, he was at Amazon where he served in a variety of software development manager roles in retail systems and Kindle education.

“[Berezhnyy] brings deep technical expertise, a track record of building strong teams, and a bold vision for how AI will shape the future of renting,” RentSpree posted on LinkedIn.

— Paige Johnson has left her role as Microsoft’s vice president of Education. She is relaunching EdCatalyst Group, an Oregon-based consulting business that she previously ran for nearly three years that supports companies, nonprofits and public organizations in using AI to expand their impact.

“My years at Microsoft were an extraordinary chapter. I learned so much about how AI is reshaping industries — from education and media to public sector and financial services,” Johnson said on LinkedIn.

Earlier in her career, Johnson was with Intel for nearly two decades, creating and scaling a professional development program that trained millions of teachers worldwide.

— James Newell is chief financial officer of WayTrade, a commodity trading company focused on renewable fuels including sustainable aviation fuel.

Newell, who will work remotely from Seattle, was previously a general partner with Voyager Capital, an investor in early stage companies in the Pacific Northwest.

“I found the perfect opportunity to make a meaningful impact at a company that itself makes a meaningful impact, and I get to do so alongside incredible people,” Newell said on LinkedIn.

— After 15 years with Amazon Web Services, Julien Ellie has resigned from his job as senior principal engineer. Ellie praised his colleagues who helped shape cloud computing, but said the company he joined and what AWS has become are no longer the same.

“From where I sit, process has taken precedence over customers, and rules have replaced high judgment. The culture has shifted from high trust to low trust, and from impact-driven to ‘who you know.’ That doesn’t align with the builder mindset that brought me here,” Ellie said on LinkedIn.

Prior to Amazon, Ellie was at Microsoft for nearly a decade.

— Jonathan Assayag has left his Sunnyvale, Calif., role with Amazon where he served as general manager and director of the company’s smart eyewear program. During more than nine years at the tech giant, Assayag worked on products including Echo Frames and Smart Delivery Glasses.

“These were true zero-to-one efforts that pushed ambient computing, Voice AI, and AI-assisted workflows into new territory. They challenged me both as a builder and a leader, sharpening how I think, make decisions, and drive impact,” he said on LinkedIn.

Assayag also thanked his team members and company leaders. He did not share his next move.

— Gravyty, a Seattle-based company that facilitates alumni donations and higher ed student engagement, named Lisa Haubenstock as its new chief customer officer. Haubenstock joins Gravyty from shipping logistics company Truckstop, and has held roles at Amazon and the education company Everfi.

“Gravyty presents an opportunity to tie together so much of my previous experience with a truly dedicated global team working to build something great,” Haubenstock said on LinkedIn.

— Bobby Franzo is now CEO of WatchMeGrow, a Lacey, Wash.-based company that provides cameras and live video streaming in the childcare, pet-care and senior-care spaces. He succeeds John Lewison, who led the company for 24 years and is now a board member and advisor.

Franzo is the founder of PB&J TV (Peanut Butter and Jelly TV), a streaming service that merged with WatchMeGrow earlier this year.

“What started as an idea to give families peace of mind has evolved into a company shaping how technology supports safety and quality during the most important years of a child’s development,” Lewison said on LinkedIn. He added that Franzo “is exactly what the company needs at this moment, and I’m thrilled he’s at the helm.”

— CreateMe, a California-based clothing manufacturer using robotic assembly lines, announced two leadership changes:

• Nick Chope, who is located in Portland, Ore., has been promoted to chief engineer and head of manufacturing. Chope has worked in robotics and automation at Microsoft, Apple, his own firm and elsewhere.
• Seattle’s Natasha Chand is now executive advisor, having previously worked as the global CEO of Amazon Softlines Private Label, which includes clothes, footwear and accessories.

— Lauren Weinberg is now a board advisor at Adora, a Seattle-based marketing technology startup that emerged from stealth in October. Her past roles include leadership positions at Peleton Interactive, Square, Yahoo and elsewhere.

Bananas, blackberries, limes and more — Amazon’s same-day delivery of perishable grocery items has expanded across the U.S. to more than 2,300 cities and towns, the company announced Wednesday.

Amazon launched the expanded offering earlier this year, allowing customers to integrate items such as fresh produce, seafood, milk and more into their regular shopping orders of electronics, books, clothes, and household essentials.

And customers have responded.

Fresh groceries now make up nine of the top 10 most-ordered same-day items, according to Amazon, with a 12-pack of toilet paper rounding out the bunch.

Analysts say Amazon’s rapid expansion of same-day delivery for fresh groceries marks a meaningful escalation in its long-term push into perishable food — a category where it has historically lagged.

The company’s scale and logistics reach allow it to serve both small towns and large metro areas without relying on third-party platforms, according to Wedbush, which noted in a report Wednesday that the expansion ramps up competitive pressure on Instacart, whose business relies heavily on grocery delivery subscriptions.

Analysts also say the stronger grocery offering makes Amazon Prime’s $139 annual membership more attractive, while weakening the value of Instacart+, which recently scaled back key subscriber benefits. Amazon is also increasingly competing with the grocery efforts of Uber Eats and DoorDash, according to Wedbush.

In most areas, the same-day deliveries are free for Amazon Prime members for orders that cost more than $25. If the purchase is below that amount, the cost is $2.99. For shoppers without a Prime membership, the delivery tacks on a $12.99 fee.

Since this summer, Amazon has expanded the fresh grocery selection available for same-day delivery by more than 30%, including offerings from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Grocery, the company’s new private brand, which now includes over 1,000 items, with most priced under $5.

Amazon is also seeing a shift in shopping patterns as customers who add fresh groceries to their orders shop about twice as often as those who don’t.

GeekWire tested the same-day service in June, placing a late-night order that arrived in the morning and included apples, cucumbers, and blueberries alongside non-perishable items.

Amazon says it plans to expand same-day perishable grocery delivery to more cities and towns in 2026.

The expansion of same-day perishable delivery comes as Amazon is also testing a new ultra-fast option called Amazon Now, which promises delivery in 30 minutes or less. GeekWire tested this service earlier this month, and received a frozen pizza, hummus, bread and more in 23 minutes, from order click to delivery drop-off in Seattle.

Amazon has for years been expanding and experimenting in the grocery space. In 2007, it started offering grocery deliveries in Seattle through Amazon Fresh, then offered Amazon Fresh grocery pick-up sites and eventually started opening Amazon Fresh grocery stores beginning in 2020. It acquired Whole Foods Market in 2017.

Microsoft has released one of its most detailed looks yet at how people use Copilot — and the results suggest the AI assistant plays different roles depending on time of day and the device.

In a new preprint titled “It’s About Time: The Copilot Usage Report 2025,” Microsoft AI researchers analyzed 37.5 million de-identified Copilot conversations between January and September of this year. Enterprise and school accounts were excluded, and machine classifiers labeled each chat by topic and “intent,” such as searching for information, getting advice, or creating content.

The top-line finding: on desktop computers, Copilot usage centers on work and technical questions during business hours. On mobile, it’s about health — all day, every day.

“Health and Fitness” paired with information-seeking was the single most common topic-intent combination for mobile users, and stayed in the top spot every hour of the day across the nine-month window. The paper suggests this shows how people increasingly treat Copilot on their phones as a private advisor for personal questions, not just a search tool.

On PCs, “Work and Career” overtakes “Technology” as the top topic between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., mirroring a traditional office schedule. Other work-related topics such as science and education also rise during the day and fade overnight.

“The contrast between the desktop’s professional utility and the mobile device’s intimate consultation suggests that users are engaging with a single system in two ways: a colleague at their desk and a confidant in their pocket,” Microsoft wrote in the study.

Compared with January, the September data from Microsoft’s study shows fewer programming conversations and more activity around culture and history — a sign, the researchers say, that usage has broadened beyond early technical adopters into more mainstream, non-developer use cases.

Usage reports from OpenAI and Anthropic found similar consumer patterns, with many people using ChatGPT and Claude for practical guidance, information, and writing help in their personal lives. Microsoft’s new Copilot study adds a sharper twist: on desktops, AI looks like a co-worker; on phones, it looks a lot more like a health and life adviser.

In a companion blog post, Microsoft said the study shows how Copilot “is way more than a tool: it’s a vital companion for life’s big and small moments.”

The study highlights a rise in advice-seeking, particularly around personal topics. This suggests people are turning to AI not just to offload tasks but to help make decisions — which could raise the stakes for model builders around accuracy, trust and accountability.

Microsoft’s research team included Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman as a co-author. Each conversation was automatically stripped of personally identifiable information and no human reviewers saw the underlying chats, according to the paper.

The ticket clock is ticking ahead of Thursday’s GeekWire Gala. Don’t miss out on the Seattle tech community’s biggest holiday party — grab a last-minute ticket now!

The Gala is a great chance to make our annual holiday event a celebration for you, your friends and co-workers.

The festive night includes food, drinks, karaoke, games, and plenty of surprise moments. Party alongside the region’s top innovators and entrepreneurs.

It all takes place at Showbox SoDo at 1700 1st Ave S., not far from T-Mobile Park. The event from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. is 21+ and all attendees must have valid ID to enter. Dress to impress, bust out your holiday flare, or just keep it geek chic.

In addition to the party atmosphere, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners will once again use the Gala to recognize the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. Catch up on our profiles of the six honorees:

• Anindya Roy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Lila Biologics
• Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can
• Brian Pinkard, co-founder and CTO at Aquagga
• Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems
• Kiana Ehsani, co-founder and CEO of Vercept
• Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky

Big thanks to the GeekWire Gala title sponsor, First Tech Federal Credit Union; gold sponsors Greater Seattle Partners, Pilot, and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, IDA Ireland, Microsoft for Startups, gone.com, and Regence.

Strong software engineers who combine their foundational skills with fluency in rapidly emerging AI tools are more valuable than ever. And while AI boosts overall productivity by 34% on average, its widening the gap between top engineers and those considered weaker.

Those are among the findings from Karat, the Seattle-based technical talent evaluation startup, which released its new “AI Workforce Transformation” report on Wednesday, detailing how artificial intelligence tools are changing the way software is developed and what types of workers are most impacted by the technology.

The findings come from Karat’s survey of 400 engineering leaders across the U.S., India, and China. And the report coincides with the release of Karat NextGen, an AI-enabled talent evaluation solution designed to evaluate software engineers in an era of increased human and AI collaboration.

Among the report highlights:

• 73% of leaders now believe a strong engineer is worth at least 3x their total compensation.
• 59% of leaders say weak engineers deliver net zero or negative value in the AI era.
• The top AI use cases for day-to-day work are code generation (83%), and testing, QA, and code review (61%).
• Agentic AI/autonomous engineering agents are highlighted by the majority of leaders as having the highest return on investment.
• Despite cost pressure, 85% of leaders expect engineering headcounts to stay flat or increase over the next three years, signaling that AI isn’t leading to massive job cuts in the near term.
• China is outpacing the U.S. and India in AI adoption and readiness.

Tech companies and workers are still adjusting to the shifting landscape of an AI-fueled industry that has traditionally relied on coders to help build and maintain the backbone of digital platforms.

When Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees from its global workforce in October, among the 2,303 impacted Washington state workers, mostly in Seattle and Bellevue, more than 600 were software development engineers.

That trend mirrored layoffs at Microsoft earlier this year, as companies reassess their engineering needs amid the rise of AI-driven coding tools. 

At Amazon’s re:Invent event last week in Las Vegas, AWS executive Colleen Aubrey went beyond discussing how human employees will leverage AI tools, and said instead that it’s time to consider agentic teammates “as essential as the people sitting right next to you.”

According to Karat’s report, beyond foundational skills such as problem-solving, communication, and product sense, engineers need to be assessed for new AI-native abilities, including familiarity with agentic AI; using AI for coding; integrating 3rd-party AI APIs; prompt engineering; and evaluating and mitigating AI-related risks.

Karat’s report found that nearly 70% of engineering leaders plan to strengthen their AI capabilities through strategic hiring. Yet, almost two-thirds of companies still prohibit AI use in interviews, and less than 30% are updating assessments and training interviewers to identify AI-ready talent.

The startup’s NextGen talent evaluation platform features a human + AI interview format where candidates tackle complex, multi-file projects with an integrated AI assistant while collaborating live with Karat’s expert interview engineers, who probe reasoning, trade-offs, and judgment in real time to reveal genuine engineering ability.

Sagnik Nandy, CTO at DocuSign, a Karat customer, said in a news release that while AI is transforming engineering, “the real breakthroughs happen when human judgment and AI capabilities work together” and a way to measure that combination reliably is what’s been missing.

“A human-led, AI-native interview is exactly the kind of solution organizations need to understand who can truly excel in this new model of development,” Nandy said.

Founded in 2014 by Mo Bhende and Jeff Spector, Karat became one of Seattle’s highest-valued startups after it raised $110 million in a Series C round in 2021, which brought its total valuation at the time to $1.1 billion. Total funding to date is $151.6 million.

Karat currently ranks No. 15 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top startups in the Pacific Northwest.

Two human rights proposals at Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting drew support from more than a quarter of voting shares — far more than any other outside proposals this year.

The results, disclosed Monday in a regulatory filing, come amid broader scrutiny of the company’s business dealings in geopolitical hotspots. The proposals followed a summer of criticism and protests over the use of Microsoft technology by the Israeli military. 

The filing shows the vote totals for six outside shareholder proposals that were considered at the Dec. 5 meeting. Microsoft had announced shortly after the meeting that shareholders rejected all outside proposals, but the numbers had not previously been disclosed.

According to the filing, two proposals received outsized support: 

• Proposal 8, filed by an individual shareholder, called for a report on Microsoft’s data center expansion in Saudi Arabia and nations with similar human rights records. It asked the company to evaluate the risk that its technology could be used for state surveillance or repression, and received more than 27% support.
• Proposal 9, seeking an assessment of Microsoft’s human rights due diligence efforts, won more than 26% of votes. The measure called for Microsoft to assess the effectiveness of its processes in preventing customer misuse of its AI and cloud products in ways that violate human rights or international humanitarian law.

Proposal 9 had received support from proxy advisor Institutional Shareholder Services — a rare endorsement for a first-time filing. Proxy advisor Glass Lewis recommended against it.

The measure attracted 58 co-filers and sparked opposing campaigns. JLens, an investment advisor affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League, said Proposal 9 was aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which pressures companies to cut ties with Israel. Ekō, an advocacy group that backed the proposal, said the vote demonstrated growing concerns about Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli military.

In September, Microsoft cut off an Israeli military intelligence unit’s access to some Azure services after finding evidence supporting a Guardian report in August that the technology was being used for surveillance of Palestinian civilians.

Microsoft’s board recommended shareholders vote against all six outside proposals at the Dec. 5 annual meeting. Here’s how the other four proposals fared: 

• Proposals 5 and 6, focused on censorship risks from European security partnerships and AI content moderation, drew less than 1% support.
• Proposal 7, which asked for more transparency and oversight on how Microsoft uses customer data to train and operate its AI systems, topped 13% support.
• Proposal 10, calling for a report on climate and transition risks tied to AI and machine‑learning tools used by oil and gas companies, received 8.75%.

See Microsoft’s proxy statement and our earlier coverage for more information.

Tech-related job postings remain stuck well below pre-pandemic levels in Seattle, according to a new hiring trends report from Indeed.

The site uses a measure called the Indeed Job Postings Index, which treats Feb. 1, 2020 as the “normal” baseline of 100. Numbers below 100 mean fewer job postings than before the pandemic.

In Seattle, the index for Software Development was 32 as of Nov. 27, 2025 — meaning postings are about two-thirds lower than the pre-COVID benchmark. Data & Analytics is even lower at 29.

Those numbers haven’t moved much over the past two years. Software Development was 31 in late 2023 and Data & Analytics was 38, for example.

Nationally, tech job postings are almost a third lower compared to early 2020, according to Indeed.

Seattle is seeing a more concentrated pullback in tech-related hiring. It makes for an unfamiliar economic environment in the Emerald City, which has seen its tech industry surge for much of the past decade, including a hiring spree early in the pandemic.

A report from CBRE in 2021 showed that the Seattle region added more than 48,000 tech jobs from 2016 to 2020, an increase of more than 35% — growing at a faster rate than any other large U.S. tech market for that time period. Amazon was growing exponentially, Microsoft had a massive revival, and the startup scene was producing multiple billion-dollar companies.

It’s a different climate now, just as the artificial intelligence era gets going amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty.

Microsoft and Amazon had substantial layoffs this year, though both are still hiring in select areas as they invest heavily in AI infrastructure. Some startups, once so-called “unicorns,” have also shed staff due to financial trouble.

The tech slowdown in Seattle got the national spotlight in September, when The Wall Street Journal detailed the broader fallout from widespread layoffs, including decreased retail spending in tech-heavy districts and record-high office vacancies.

The latest trends may help explain why some job seekers, including longtime leaders, are having trouble landing tech gigs in Seattle.

The tech industry accounts for a whopping 30% of the economy in the Seattle region, according to a report from CompTIA. That ranks second in the U.S. behind San Jose. Tech also accounts for more than 12% of the overall workforce in the Seattle area.

Workers in the “computer and mathematicals” occupation category in the Seattle area had the highest median earnings in 2024 by a wide margin ($163,609), according to the Seattle Times.

Other hiring trends in Seattle and nationally

As of late 2025, only seven of 45 sectors in the Seattle area were above 100, per the Indeed Job Postings Index — and all of them were in healthcare. Two years earlier, 22 sectors were still above 100, showing a much broader economy with stronger hiring demand. Overall, Seattle had a 35% decline in job postings from February 2020 to October 2025, Axios reported.

The weakest Seattle sectors right now include Data & Analytics, Software Development, Project Management, Human Resources, and Media and Communications.

Some of the largest declines over the past two years came in non-tech areas such as Driving, Pharmacy, Cleaning and Sanitation, Civil Engineering, and Childcare — though Indeed notes that Pharmacy and Civil Engineering still remain relatively high compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Indeed said in nearly every state, the highest job posting levels are found in smaller and mid-sized regions, rather than big cities.

“Employment in many of the largest MSAs tends to be skewed towards tech, business, and professional services, which are seeing lower levels of job postings,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Smaller MSAs, however, tend to have heavier employment shares in sectors, including manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, and healthcare, which generally have job postings that remain near or higher than pre-COVID norms.”

Indeed said the most probable outcome for next year’s labor market is an extension of the current “low-hire, low-fire” environment. It noted that large coastal metro areas with slower population growth and more exposure to tech and professional services “are likely to face tougher conditions.”

Microsoft is pouring $17.5 billion into India — its largest investment in Asia — to boost the country’s AI infrastructure and diffusion, the company announced Tuesday.

The funding, planned over four years between 2026 and 2029, comes after an earlier $3 billion commitment announced earlier this year.

Microsoft’s aim is to help advance India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, skilling and ongoing operations. The tech giant said the partnership will help India make the leap from “digital public infrastructure to AI public infrastructure in the coming decade,” toward “a future that is more equitable and uniquely Indian in its scale and impact.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is in the country this month as part of a multi-city “India AI” tour. He met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Tuesday and will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday: “Leading in the New Age of AI.”

The investment will target three primary areas:

• Scale: A key priority is building hyperscale infrastructure to enable AI adoption in India. Microsoft said significant progress is being made at the India South Central cloud region, based in Hyderabad, that is set to go live in mid-2026. Microsoft will also continue to expand its three existing operational data center regions in Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune.     
• Skills: Microsoft is doubling its January commitment to equip 20 million Indians with essential AI skills by 2030. The company said it has already trained 5.6 million people since January, and its programs have helped more than 125,000 people gain work or entrepreneurial opportunities.  
• Sovereignty: Microsoft is introducing Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud for Indian customers, designed to give Indian organizations more control over data, compliance, and operational sovereignty. In security terms, these offerings will address data residency, regulatory compliance, governance, and operational isolation.

Microsoft also announced that 310 million informal workers in India will benefit from advanced AI capabilities being integrated into two key digital public platforms of the Ministry of Labour and Employment — e-Shram and the National Career Service.

Microsoft employs 22,000 people across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurugram, Noida and other cities, representing numerous company business lines.

Elsewhere on Tuesday, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced new commitments to Canada, adding $5.4 billion over the next two years to its continued investment in building out digital and AI infrastructure in the country.

Smith highlighted many of the same goals the company outlined for India, including boosting skills training and digital sovereignty in Canada.

Define the problem. Describe the solution. Note the value proposition. Highlight leadership bios. Call out your customers. Show growth metrics. Set the long-term vision.

This is the pitch from Seattle startup Yoodli — and it seems to be working well.

The company, which sells software that helps users practice important conversations, last week announced a $40 million round, just eight months after raising a separate $13.7 million round in May. Its valuation has about tripled since then to around $300 million.

Yoodli shared its latest pitch deck with GeekWire. The 11-slide presentation has the core elements of a solid deck. It’s straight forward and simple — quick problem-framing and a clear mission statement that sets up the rest of the story.

In a startup era where seemingly every pitch mentions AI, Yoodli’s framing of the technology stands out: “Other AI is replacing jobs; Yoodli uses AI to help humans be their best and take control of their career.”

The deck also reflects Yoodli’s shift from consumer to enterprise. Yoodli got its start in 2021 at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle with a consumer-focused offering targeted at practicing public speaking. It has since turned its focus to the enterprise market, working with companies such as SAP, Google, Snowflake, and Korn Ferry to help employees practice their sales pitches and feedback sessions.

Looking ahead, Yoodli 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,” co-founder and CEO Varun Puri wrote on LinkedIn. “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 scalable tools to upskill workers in communication, leadership, and customer engagement.

Yoodli has grown revenue around 900% in the past year. Its headcount has tripled to more than 40 people, including several new C-suite additions.

WestBridge Capital led the latest round, which included previous investors Neotribe and Madrona.

“Yoodli is becoming the natural way organizations help people learn and build the skills that drive revenue, strengthen customer relationships, and influence culture,” Madrona wrote in a blog post.

Check out the full deck below.

Yoodli Pitch Deck — December 2025 by GeekWire

Casera, a new healthcare technology startup in Seattle, is spinning out of Pioneer Square Labs with a unique approach to hospital operations: using “agentic AI” to automate the work of case managers and speed up patient flow.

The company is tackling a thorny problem in healthcare: unnecessary length of stay driven by operational friction. Delays in communication, payer authorization and discharge planning can add time to a patient’s stay — and thousands of dollars in expenses for hospitals each day, according to Casera.

The company’s software is built for case managers, who coordinate the operational steps required to move patients safely through the system.

Casera describes its product as a “Case Manager Digital Agent” that operates inside communication channels, watching for context and then triggering next steps — for example, following up on a pending prior authorization or making sure all tasks for a complex discharge have owners and due dates.

Casera’s system plugs into existing collaboration and communication tools, and helps identify “what needs to happen, who needs to be involved, and helps ensure it gets done,” according to CEO Neeraj Singh Bhavani, who previously started patient-flow startup Tagnos (acquired by Sonitor).

Bhavani sees the company’s main competition in vendors that have traditionally focused on patient flow and hospital capacity management, including Qventus, LeanTaaS and TeleTracking. But he said Casera is attacking a different layer of the problem by focusing on “getting things done versus telling what to do.”

“Not trying to be another legacy dashboard and analytics player,” he told GeekWire.

Casera is working with a design partners across major health systems in three states. It has not generated revenue.

Casera’s other co-founder is CTO Alex Levin, who previously started revenue intelligence company MD Clarity (acquired by private equity). A third early leader, Jhayne Pana, was previously an assistant nurse manager with MultiCare Health.

The company has raised $1 million from PSL and has less than ten employees. PSL previously spun out Kevala, a healthcare staffing software company that was acquired earlier this year.

“Tackling patient flow with automation is a massive opportunity, and a very good use case for multiple agentic applications,” T.A. McCann, managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, said in a statement. “It’s an area we know well and in addition to the clear market need, the opportunity to work with two, recently-exited founders was a huge bonus.”

Pacific Northwest tech and cancer researchers are publicly releasing an AI tool that can perform sophisticated tumor analysis in a fraction of the time and cost of existing methods, potentially making cutting-edge cancer insights available to far more patients.

The GigaTIME model uses artificial intelligence to virtually generate detailed immune system data from standard pathology slides — analysis that would normally require days of lab work and thousands of dollars per sample.

The breakthrough could accelerate the shift toward precision medicine, where treatments are tailored to each patient’s specific cancer biology, said Hoifung Poon, general manager of Microsoft Research’s Real-World Evidence program.

Traditional pathology slides show tumor and immune cells but offer limited insights into whether a patient’s immune system is actively fighting cancer. A more sophisticated technique called multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) analysis peers closely into the tumor’s microenvironment, adding information about whether immune cells are working based on which proteins are present.

But mIF analysis “just for one sample, could easily take days and cost thousands of dollars,” Poon said, severely limiting its use in routine care.

GigaTIME bypasses that bottleneck by generating the information virtually by simply analyzing standard pathology slides.

“GigaTIME is about unlocking insights that were previously out of reach,” said Dr. Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics and a medical director at the Providence Cancer Institute.

The project brings together researchers from Microsoft; Providence facilities in Renton, Wash., and Portland; and the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. They’re publishing a peer-reviewed study today in the journal Cell and releasing the tool online for free on Hugging Face, GitHub and Microsoft Foundry.

Last year the three institutions released GigaPath, a model for diagnosing cancer.

The initiatives are part of the Seattle-area’s growing efforts to integrate complex health datasets using AI to facilitate advances in medicine. The Allen Institute last month released the Brain Knowledge Platform for neuroscience research, while biotech startup Synthesize Bio has built tools for designing experiments and predicting their outcomes using publicly available data. And the Fred Hutch Cancer Center helped produce a privacy-protecting, data-sharing model through the Cancer AI Alliance.

The scale of the GigaTIME project is giant:

• Researchers trained the model on a Providence dataset of 40 million cells, pairing pathology slides with mIF data examining 21 different proteins.
• They applied GigaTIME to samples from 14,256 cancer patients across 51 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics in the Providence system.
• The work produced a virtual population of approximately 300,000 mIF images that cover 24 cancer types and 306 cancer subtypes.

Poon has even bigger ambitions that include blending together data gleaned from cell and biopsy samples plus CT radiology reports, MRIs and other diagnostics to create a more holistic picture of a patient. These advanced models could potentially offer predictions about how a disease might progress or respond to treatment.

The new tools could one day help curb the massive costs and time associated with clinical trials by providing better insights for selecting drug candidates and designing studies.

The goal is making advanced cancer care both more effective and more widely accessible.

“I’m personally biased, but I think there can’t be a more exciting time than right now,” Poon said, pointing to the convergence of AI capabilities and digital medical records as “two really powerful forces.”

Authors of the paper “Multimodal AI generates virtual population for tumor microenvironment modeling” are Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Chanwoo Kim, Cliff Wong, Peniel Argaw, Racheli Ben Shimol, Angela Crabtree, Kevin Matlock, Alexandra Q. Bartlett, Jaspreet Bagga, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Tristan Naumann, Bernard A. Fox, Bill Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang and Hoifung Poon.

BELLEVUE, Wash. — The students in Mr. Yavorski’s 5th grade computer science class at Ardmore Elementary School didn’t recognize their guest instructor Monday morning. Most of them had been watching the Disney Channel, not The Daily Show, during his years as host.

Trevor Noah prefers it that way. 

“Kids don’t know me at all, which I love — it’s my favorite thing ever,” he explained afterward. “They aren’t responding to me because of celebrity, and I’m not responding to them from a position of celebrity. It’s just us in a room.”

It was a good starting point to learn about AI together. Noah was at Ardmore for Code.org’s Hour of AI. The comedian, author and podcast host is Microsoft’s “Chief Questions Officer,” and he had a lot of questions for the kids. 

“Why did the ‘random’ algorithm work at the beginning but not at the end?” he asked toward the close of the session, after he and the students had spent nearly an hour programming in “Bug Arena,” a game where digital bugs compete to cover the most territory with paint. 

Noah wasn’t testing them. He genuinely wanted to know.

“Because it’s random,” one student explained. “Random can work a lot of times, but later on, when the puzzles get more difficult, you gotta use your techniques.”

After more back-and-forth, thinking through the problem aloud with the class, Noah nodded: “I feel like you’re on to something.”

That’s how it went for much of Noah’s guest appearance at Ardmore Elementary for the Hour of AI, arranged by Microsoft as part of national Computer Science Education Week. 

“We are all kids in the age of AI,” Noah said later. “This isn’t the kind of situation where adults have a leg up. I would argue most adults in the world are behind kids when it comes to AI.”

Noah has been experimenting with AI on his own, spending hours building agents and automated systems. For his stand-up comedy, for example, he’s been working on tools to transcribe his sets, keep everything in a central archive, and make it searchable.

But his first love is video games. He told the class he’s been playing Grand Theft Auto since it was top-down, not first-person, and rattled off his credentials in Minecraft and Elden Ring.

“I could probably beat all of you in any game,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it, but it’s true.”

When one student mentioned Madden NFL, Noah conceded, “You’ll beat me in Madden.”

His interest in technology, he told the students, grew out of his interest in games. “Sometimes you play a game and you think, it should be like this. I want to make my own games.”

The classroom dynamic fit Noah’s approach. He wasn’t there to lecture; he was there to explore alongside the kids, and to get them thinking about how AI actually works.

From coding to computer science

The event, formerly known as the Hour of Code, has introduced more than 1 billion students in more than 180 countries to computer science since its inception more than a decade ago.

The change in focus is a recognition that the ground has shifted. In an era when AI can write code, the idea isn’t just to teach kids to program. It’s to help them understand what the technology is doing behind the scenes, including the fact that it can make mistakes. 

“We want the kids to get a real understanding of how AI doesn’t necessarily ‘know.’ It’s always guessing and using probabilities to make its best judgments,” explained Hadi Partovi, the Code.org CEO, who joined Noah as a special guest teacher for the Ardmore class.

Also leading the class Monday was Jacqueline Russell, a Microsoft product manager focused on computer science education. She led the volunteer mobilization, training 300 Microsoft employees who’ve been dispatched to classrooms across Western Washington this week. It dovetails with the company’s broader Elevate Washington initiative for AI education and training in the state.

For the Bellevue School District, the event was also a chance to bring attention to how it funds technology in schools. Local levies account for 24% of the district’s budget, and voters will decide in February whether to renew a four-year technology and capital projects levy that fills the gap for classroom technology, devices for students, and STEM programs.

‘Computer science is for everybody’

For Ardmore Principal Yusra Obaid, the visit reinforced a broader message. “Computer science is for everybody,” she said. “You don’t have to be a specific person or look a certain way.”

Before leading the class, Noah met in the Ardmore library with a group of Bellevue School District teachers — who were much more firmly in the Comedy Central demographic. They were grappling with questions of their own, including how best to use AI to engage with kids, and whether AI would undermine the fundamental components of education.

Noah did more listening than talking, taking in what the teachers had to say. 

“There is a valid concern from teachers in and around whether or not AI will erase what we consider learning to be,” he said afterward. But he saw it as a reason to engage, not retreat. “A good teacher is somebody who continues to ask themselves questions, doesn’t assume that they know, and then themselves tries to keep on learning.”

He said he hoped the kids (and everyone else) would walk away from the experience Monday with an “unbridled curiosity” about what’s next. “Keep being curious, keep having fun with it,” he said, “and keep enjoying the fact that you don’t know.”

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Jay Graber, CEO of the Bluesky social network, moved to Seattle during the pandemic, attracted to the region in part by the trademark gray skies, ironically. She doesn’t feel bad about staying inside and reading, writing or working on drizzly winter days.

But she also loves the outdoors. Her proudest Pacific Northwest moment: finding a matsutake mushroom under a fir tree, a species so prized that locations are treated like trade secrets.

Graber, in other words, is someone who values extraordinary things and the environments that allow them to thrive. This comes through in the tech ecosystem she oversees.

Most social networks today are walled gardens, where one company runs the servers, owns the data, and sets the rules. The AT Protocol (which Graber pronounces “at”) is an open technical standard for social media that Bluesky’s team built as the foundation for its network. Bluesky is just one app on top of it, and in theory you could move your posts and followers to another app or server with different moderation or algorithms without losing your social graph.

“The hope is that whatever happens with Bluesky — however big it makes itself — the protocol is something we hope to endure a really long time,” Graber said in a recent interview, “because it becomes foundational to not just Bluesky but a lot of apps and a lot of use cases.”

However big it makes itself. The phrase stands out in a world of tech startup leaders intent on scaling their creations toward billion-dollar exits through force of will. 

Graber instead sees Bluesky as “a collective organism,” brought to life by users, grounded in the decentralized protocol like soil on the forest floor. “I did not anticipate what Bluesky became when I started this, and so that very much makes it feel like it’s something that’s growing, that I’m overseeing, but also has a life of its own,” she said. 

Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing partner of Avalanche, an early investor in Bluesky, first met Graber in 2022 at a small gathering of technologists, investors, and academics. What struck her: Graber was the only one in the room focused on building, not just talking. While others discussed big ideas, Graber was working through the details of how to make them real.

Later, after Bluesky’s launch, Donnelly attended a meetup in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Graber stayed for hours, meeting with early users, gathering feedback, and listening. 

Donnelly calls Graber “incredibly low-ego for being so young and successful.” At the same time, she isn’t afraid to be provocative, like when she wore a shirt that read, “Mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”) at SXSW in 2025 — styled exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”) shirt from a Meta event.

“You can just tell immediately that she’s never going to give up. If Bluesky failed, she’d probably build something similar again.” That’s the definition of “life’s work,” Donnelly said: everything Graber has done to date has led her to this point. 

Finding her own way

Graber was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a math teacher father and a mother who had emigrated from China. Graber’s given first name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. It’s a pure coincidence, given that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would later choose the name Bluesky as a project inside the social network long before Graber was involved. 

Her mom chose the name to symbolize freedom and boundless possibility, reflecting opportunities that she didn’t have growing up in China. 

Those themes emerged early for Graber. Around age five, she resisted her mother’s structured attempts to teach her to read, running around the backyard instead. Her dad took a different approach: he brought her to the library and asked what interested her. She discovered Robin Hood, and read every version the library had, from children’s books to arcane Old English editions. The story captivated her: renegades pushing back against centralized authority.

As she continued to read, she was drawn to stories of scientific discovery, and eventually to writers who imagined new ways society could work, such as Ursula K. Le Guin.

Later, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology, and Society, an interdisciplinary major that let her explore technology from a humanistic perspective while taking computer science classes. 

After graduating in 2013, she worked as a digital rights activist, moved to San Francisco, enrolled in coding bootcamp, and worked at a blockchain startup. Later she found her way to a cryptocurrency mining operation in a former ammunition factory in rural Washington state — what she calls her “cocoon period” — where she spent long hours studying code in isolation. 

She went on to work at a privacy-focused cryptocurrency company, founded an event planning startup called Happening, and kept searching for the right environment for her own ambitions.

Origins of Bluesky

Then, in December 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund a project to develop an open, decentralized protocol for social media. He called it Bluesky. 

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

Graber saw the thread and felt the pull. 

As detailed in an April 2025 New Yorker story, Dorsey’s team had set up a group chat to explore the idea. Graber joined and noticed the conversation was scattered — people would pop in, make suggestions, and disappear. No broader vision was coalescing. 

Graber started doing the work: gathering research, writing an overview of existing decentralized protocols, trying to provide some signal amid the noise.

By early 2021, Dorsey and then-Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal were interviewing candidates to lead the project. Graber stood out in part because she didn’t just tell them what they wanted to hear. She accepted, on one condition: Bluesky would be legally independent from Twitter.

It was a prescient demand. That November, Dorsey resigned as Twitter’s CEO. The following spring, Elon Musk began buying up shares. By October 2022, he owned the company, and promptly cut ties with Bluesky, canceling a $13 million service agreement.

Graber was on her own. But that was the point. 

“You can’t build a decentralized protocol that lots of parties are going to adopt if it’s very much owned and within one of the existing players,” she told Forbes in 2023.

‘High agency, low ego’

Today, Bluesky has more than 40 million users and a team of around 30 employees. The company has no official headquarters — fitting for a decentralized social network — though Graber and several employees work out of a co-working space in Seattle.

The platform is still far smaller than X, which reports more than 500 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, which has around 300 million. Mastodon, another decentralized alternative, has about 10 million registered users. But Bluesky has grown steadily, and its open protocol gives it a different ambition — not just a destination, but the infrastructure on which others build.

Graber runs the company with what she calls a “high agency, low ego” philosophy.

“Everyone on the team exercises a lot of agency in how they do their job, and what they think the right direction is,” she said. “They try to pick up stuff that needs to be done whether or not it’s in their job description — that’s the low ego part.” 

Overall, she said, this has made for a very effective small team, although she acknowledges the trade-off: “Sometimes people have strong opinions and wander off in their own directions.” So getting people back in alignment, she said, is a big part of her job.

She describes her leadership style as collaborative rather than top-down. “I try to cultivate people’s strengths on the team and bring together a synthesis of that,” she said.

Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board in the early years, is no longer involved. Ultimately, he and Graber saw things differently: Dorsey wanted Bluesky to be more purist about decentralization. Graber wanted to “catch the moment” and bring people into something accessible, even if it was somewhat centralized at the start.

Embed from Getty Images

“When we disagreed, he ended up just going his own way, as opposed to trying to force me to do a thing,” she said. Based on her experience, Graber said, Dorsey would hold his position and disagree, but not use his power to mandate a specific direction. 

Mike Masnick, the TechDirt founder and writer whose essay “Protocols, Not Platforms” helped inspire the project, now holds Dorsey’s board seat.

Graber describes herself as a “pragmatic idealist.” Pure idealists, she said, pursue visions that can’t work in the real world. Pure pragmatists never produce meaningful change. The key is holding both: a vision of how things could be, and the practical steps to get there.

The implications of AI

Graber sees the same dynamics playing out with artificial intelligence. The question, she said, isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s who controls it.

“If AI ends up controlled by only one company whose goal is power or profit maximization, I think we can anticipate that will lead to bad outcomes for a lot of people,” she said. On the other hand, if AI tools are widely available and open source, “you have this broader experimentation” — with all the chaos that entails, but also the potential for solutions that serve users rather than platforms.

She imagines a future where people might bring their own AI agents to a social network, the way Bluesky already lets users choose their own algorithms and moderation services.

“Maybe you can even run this at home in your closet,” she said. “Then you have your own AI agent that protects your own privacy, doing things for you — that’s a human empowering technology that’s working in your interest, not in the interest of a company that does not have your welfare at heart.”

She thinks a lot about historical trajectories. The printing press, she noted, ushered in a period of chaos — new technology disrupting society — followed by the construction of new institutions that made use of widespread literacy, such as universities, academic journals, and peer review.

“We’re in another period of chaos around new technologies,” she said. “We have to build new institutions that make use of everyone having access to the internet.”

The AT Protocol, in her view, could be something like that. Bluesky the company might rise or fall, narrow into a niche, or lose relevance with a new generation. But if the protocol takes hold, it becomes the foundation for something larger than any single app or company.

“If the protocol becomes widely adopted, that’s a huge success,” she said. “If people rethink how social works, and Bluesky becomes the origin point for social media to change, that’s a success.”

However big it makes itself.

Months after raising $59 million in venture capital to commercialize its miniaturized 3D sensors, Redmond, Wash.-based Lumotive is going global.

The company says it has opened offices in Oman and Taiwan to help bring its products to market — and has added two senior tech industry leaders to its management team.

“These milestones mark a pivotal moment for Lumotive as we move from innovation to large-scale commercialization,” Lumotive CEO Sam Heidari said today in a news release.

Founded in 2017, Lumotive is one of several startups that were spun off from Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures to take advantage of an innovation known as metamaterials. The technology makes it possible for signals to be “steered” electronically without moving parts.

Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface platform, also known as LCM, can steer laser light to capture a 3D rendering of its surroundings, using a device that’s smaller than a credit card. Such laser-based location sensing is known generically as lidar (an acronym that stands for “light detection and ranging”)

The company’s backers include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates‘ investment fund as well as Samsung Ventures, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Silicon Valley’s MetaVC and Oman’s ITHCA Group.

When Lumotive was founded, the spotlight was on the technology’s use in lidar systems for self-driving cars. Since then, lidar sensing has turned up in a wider array of devices, ranging from robots to smartphones.

“To be honest, even though we have had good engagements in automotive, our primary focus has been robotics,” Heidari told GeekWire. Lumotive has announced deals to provide its 3D sensor systems to three robotics companies: Hokuyo Automatic in Japan, Namuga in South Korea, and E-Photonics in Saudi Arabia. More deals are in the works.

To address anticipated demand, Lumotive has added Oman and Taiwan to a list of corporate locales that includes its Redmond HQ and branch offices in San Jose, Calif.; and Vancouver, B.C.

Lumotive’s Center of Excellence in Muscat, Oman, provides dedicated customer engineering and program management resources for Middle East and European markets. The Taiwan office beefs up Lumotive’s manufacturing operations, sales and field application capabilities near key partners in Asia.

Heidari said Lumotive has expanded its workforce by 50% over the past year. The current tally has risen to nearly 80 employees worldwide, roughly half of whom are based in Redmond.

That expansion is driven by two factors. “One is that as more customers come up, we need to build the infrastructure to be able to support them and help them through their designs,” Heidari said. “The second thing is that we’re actually looking at new areas of design, to augment our product and increase our market presence.”

Heidari highlighted two hires: Lumotive’s executive vice president of global business, Tristan Joo, brings more than two decades of experience in optical semiconductors at companies including Ofilm, Polight and ams OSRAM. Hassan Moussa, vice president of customer engineering and general manager of Lumotive Oman, previously led Valeo’s lidar program and has more than 20 years of experience in automotive sensing systems.

Lumotive has also expanded its distribution network and its partner ecosystem. In today’s news release, Joo said the new offices and partnerships will give Lumotive “the reach, capital and scalability to lead this next phase of global adoption — from robotics and automation to automotive and smart infrastructure.”

Moussa said Lumotive is redefining how 3D sensors are built, “shifting 3D sensing from niche lidar systems to a broader ecosystem where anyone can build it, just like cameras.”

When the bulk of this year’s Series B round was announced in February, The Wall Street Journal noted that Lumotive was bucking a trend that favored investment in artificial intelligence over non-AI technologies. Months later, Heidari acknowledges that getting investors excited about 3D sensing hasn’t always been easy.

“Coming up with something that is not AI today — sometimes you just don’t get the audience, even though what we are doing obviously is going to benefit the AI revolution,” he said. “AI is like a brain, right? Your brain without your senses is very limited. You need the eyes and the ears to absorb the physical world in order to utilize your brain.”

Looking more broadly, Heidari sees opportunities for optical semiconductors in the data centers that are powering the AI revolution.

“In data centers, there are switches that connect different racks of CPUs or GPUs, and these switches today are very power-hungry and very expensive,” Heidari said. “There are initiatives in the industry to simplify them by keeping them all in the optical domain, versus a hybrid of optical and electronic types of switches. So we are planning to be active in that market as well.”

In the meantime, the semiconductor industry is taking notice. Electronic Product Design & Test, a British journal focusing on electronics design, put Lumotive on its list of the year’s top startups last month. And just last week, the Global Semiconductor Alliance gave Lumotive its “Startup to Watch” award.

“We had Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, and many other brand names in the semiconductor space in the room,” Heidari said. “It was attended by 1,700 people, all executives and managers of semiconductor companies, and we were honored to receive the award for the best startup.”

Veteran tech operators with ties to Seattle are launching a new investment firm aimed at what they see as two of the biggest opportunities in today’s economy: AI and cyber intelligence.

VQ Capital is a “thesis-driven, AI-native investment platform” that partners with multibillion-dollar family offices. The firm is headquartered in New York but co-founder Brian Lent plans to build a hub in the Seattle region, where he was an early Amazon leader and later started Medio, a predictive analytics startup acquired by Nokia in 2014.

Lent is teaming up on VQ Capital with longtime colleague John Kim. They first worked together when Lent recruited Kim to join Medio. Kim later went on to become a product exec at Expedia, Vrbo, and PayPal.

Other managing partners include Yotam Avrahami, a former partner at New Vista Capital and Deloitte, and Praveen Hirsave, a former Expedia and Babylon exec who also spent nearly 15 years at IBM.

VQ Capital says it will concentrate on two main themes:

• “Golden Dome” for cyber intelligence — funding technology that unifies isolated cybersecurity tools.
• AI transformation of consumer companies — helping marketing-led brands rebuild customer acquisition, marketing, supply chain, fulfillment and core operations into “compounding, AI-native systems.”

“We believe the biggest winners of this era will be built by small, extraordinary teams capable of out-maneuvering incumbent giants,” Kim said in a statement.

The firm argues that the old pattern of gradual, Moore’s Law-style progress has given way to what it calls an “era of compounding change,” driven by hardware advances, new AI models and large-scale data.

VQ Capital also departs from the standard venture fund structure. Instead of raising a large, long-lived fund up front, the firm works with family office partners on a deal-by-deal basis. The firm describes its approach as a hybrid of private equity discipline and venture-style investing.

Avrahami, a veteran of the Israeli Special Forces, initially started the firm as YA6. He later partnered with Kim and Lent to re-launch as an AI-focused investment platform — what is now known as VQ Capital.

After Nokia acquired Medio, Lent worked at HERE Technologies for two years before launching real estate tech startup Plunk, which closed in 2024. His most recent gig was with Auger, a well-funded logistics startup in Bellevue led by former Amazon exec Dave Clark. Lent was chief analytics and data officer, and departed after seven months to help launch YA6, which evolved into VQ Capital.

Internet Backyard, a new startup building billing software for data centers and GPU providers, announced a $4.5 million pre-seed round led by Basis Set Ventures.

The two-month-old company describes itself as a “financial infrastructure layer for the AI compute economy,” aiming to automate the entire order-to-cash process and replace the spreadsheets and manual handoffs that sit between sales, operations and finance.

The company’s first product, called gnomos, is a full-stack platform that helps data center operators and their customers track and charge for GPU and infrastructure usage.

The startup plans to generate revenue by taking a small percentage of the invoice income it helps recover, plus fees on routed payment flow and data licensing. It has a longer-term goal of becoming a data aggregation layer for industry benchmarks and performance metrics.

Other backers include Crucible Capital, Maple VC, Operator Collective, Seattle-based Breakers, and angels including Jay Adelson (Equinix founder), D-Wave founder Geordie Rose (founder of D-Wave and Sanctuary AI) and Ian Crosby (founder of Bench Accounting).

The 5-person company is led by CEO Mai Trinh, a former technical project manager at Sanctuary AI, and CTO Gabriel Ravacci, a recent engineering grad who worked on next-generation AI accelerators at AMD. The startup got off the ground in Vancouver B.C. but is relocating to San Francisco.

Founder Institute, the global business incubator and pre-seed startup accelerator, is getting up and running again in Seattle.

Tech veteran Aniket Naravanekar, co-founder and CEO of Skillsheet, is one of the program directors working to rekindle the effort. Naravanekar previously led product at Seattle startups avante and CHEQ, and spent more than 11 years at Microsoft.

He’s joined by Nicole Doyle, founder and CEO of Aspir; Jewel Atuel, a technical program manager at Averro; and Angie Parker, executive director of the Alliance of Angels.

“I think the Seattle ecosystem has such a large amount of talent that it deserves more opportunities for aspiring founders to turn their ideas into a real business,” Naravanekar told GeekWire. “I’ve been going through this process as a founder myself and I want to provide more options to those that are still on the fence or want to build but not sure how.”

Founded in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2009, Founder Institute operates across across six continents and more than 200 cities, and has had more than 8,100 graduates, according to its website.

Naravanekar believes a lack of community and leadership derailed Founder Institute’s in-person efforts in Seattle and applicants were directed to remote/virtual cohorts starting around 2021.

“We’re now bringing back the local community — local mentors, local partners, sponsors, investors and in-person meetups and events,” he said.

Naravanekar said Founder Institute is using a new approach in which the Seattle leadership team is empowered to run things instead of being treated as a “satellite.”

“We’re still using the same FI tooling and branding but have a lot more leeway in decision making to suit the unique needs of the Seattle ecosystem,” he said.

The first cohort in Seattle begins in March. An open house on Dec. 12 at AI House in Seattle will serve as an official launch event and will feature two panels: “Building in Seattle” and “Scaling & Leverage.” Panelists include Evan Poncelot of Venture Black; Loti founder Luke Arrigoni; AI2 Incubator’s Jacob Colker; Nick Hughes of Founders Live; Taylor Black of Microsoft AI Ventures; Brooks Lindsay of Light Legal; Sarah Studer of the University of Washington’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship; and moderator Louis Newkirk of Venture Black and Founders Live.

Levi Reed, a former managing director at Seattle Founder Institute, is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Startup425, a non-profit funded by six Seattle-area city governments, which announced a new accelerator last year. The 15-week program is modeled after the Founder Institute curriculum.

Pallavi Wahi‘s latest career move is both a professional leap and a personal bookend.

Wahi, a veteran lawyer and business community leader, came to Seattle 25 years ago as an immigrant with no local network. She built a career and civic presence, and is now helping bring a nationally prominent firm deeper into the city’s legal and innovation ecosystem.

Wahi recently joined Arnold & Porter to launch its Seattle office and lead strategic growth on the West Coast, following a long tenure at K&L Gates, where she was a managing partner.

Arnold & Porter signed a lease in downtown’s U.S. Bank Center and wants to add at least 60 lawyers in Seattle within two years. Planting a flag in the Pacific Northwest is squarely aimed at the region’s innovation economy — and the rising regulatory complexity around it.

“Arnold and Porter has a very deep regulatory bench, and that is really what makes them so much of a differentiator in the market,” Wahi said. The firm’s specialties span healthcare, technology, manufacturing, cross-border trade, FDA and antitrust work — areas where she said corporate clients increasingly need strategic and practical guidance as rules evolve.

The view on AI

Arnold & Porter says it’s using generative AI for document review, legal research, collaboration, litigation prep, transactional diligence, and regulatory review. The firm uses tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude Enterprise, and ChatGPT Enterprise alongside in-house models.

Wahi described the firm as “very open to accepting and moving forward with new technology,” including pilots that use AI tools to support client work.

But she also draws a clear boundary for the legal profession: while AI can help lawyers, it can’t replace them.

“We have to be careful that it doesn’t substitute for actual legal work,” Wahi said. “You should not be filing briefs or doing anything which is generated by AI. You are the author — and the minute you forget that … is when trouble comes.”

Bullish on Seattle

The city, Wahi said, has become more welcoming, entrepreneurial and dynamic over the past quarter-century, and remains “an incredible incubator of change.”

“There’s an energy here,” Wahi said. “There’s a fabric of electricity.”

She added: “This city makes you bigger than you are. I truly believe that the reason for the success of many in this city is because of Seattle.”

Wahi has spent much of her legal career arguing cases and advising companies. Her other job has been to push Seattle’s business community to look beyond its own walls. She has done so by example, plugging into the boards of the Seattle Chamber, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle Rep, the King County Bar Foundation and more. She even participated in a dance competition to raise money for Plymouth Housing.

Her message to other leaders in Seattle is straightforward: participation matters.

“As a lawyer, I do believe I have a role to be a community leader, to really try and show up in ways that can help,” she said. “We need to show up for more than doing our jobs. We need to show up for each other in ways that make sense to ourselves.”

Scowtt, a Seattle-based startup that wants to reshape how advertisers optimize paid campaigns, raised $12 million in Series A funding round led by New York venture firm Inspired Capital.

Founded in 2024, Scowtt helps companies analyze their first-party CRM data to predict who is most likely to convert and how valuable they’ll be. Then it sends those predictions to ad platforms as enhanced signals to help boost return on ad spend and conversions without requiring marketers to change their existing tools, the company said.

Founder and CEO Eduardo Indacochea told GeekWire that the 10-person startup has $3.2 million in annual recurring revenue.

Scowtt also uses AI to interact with prospects and schedule calls. The company’s longer-term ambition is to grow beyond ad optimization into a broader, AI-driven “operating system for growth” that connects marketing and sales using the intelligence already embedded in a customer’s CRM.

Scowtt is targeting enterprise advertisers that rely on lead generation and other performance-driven models across search and social.

The company’s timing reflects two trends: the industry’s accelerating push toward first-party data as privacy rules tighten, and the rise of AI as the new performance lever in paid media. U.S. internet ad revenue grew nearly 15% in 2024 to $258.6 billion, and more growth is expected in 2025.

Indacochea spent more than 13 years at Microsoft before leadership stints at Google and most recently Meta, where he was a vice president in advertising.

Abhishek Priya, Scowtt’s head of engineering, was director of engineering at Everlaw and is a former engineering manager at Meta. Eric Schwartz, chief revenue officer, was an exec at Scibids Technology and MiQ.

Scowtt was previously featured in GeekWire’s Startup Radar spotlight.

LiveRamp Ventures, Angeles Investors, and Angeles Ventures also invested in the Series A round. Total funding to date is $13 million, including a $1 million pre-seed round last year.

December 7 carries historical weight well beyond the tech world, but for those who covered Microsoft in the ’90s, the date has another resonance. Thirty years ago today, Bill Gates gathered more than 200 journalists and analysts at Seattle Center to declare that the company was going “all-in” on the internet.

As managing editor for Microsoft Magazine at the time, I was there, and I remember it well. Three decades later, I can’t help but see the parallels to Microsoft’s current AI push.

The moves that Microsoft kicked off that day to build internet connectivity into all its products would reverberate throughout the next decade, helping to lay the foundation for the dot-com boom years and arguably the eventual rise of cloud computing.

The release of Internet Explorer 2.0 as a free, bundled browser, the internet-enablement of Microsoft Office, the complete revamping of the still-new MSN online service, Microsoft’s licensing of Java from Sun Microsystems and a focus on how the internet might be used commercially were all pieces of the Microsoft plan unveiled that day.

“The internet is the primary driver of all new work we are doing throughout the product line,” Bill Gates told the assembled technology press in 1995. “We are hard core about the internet.”

Substitute the word “AI” for “internet” and you have a statement that current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella could have made at any moment in the last couple of years.

“Fifty years after our founding, Microsoft is once again at the heart of a generational moment in technology as we find ourselves in the midst of the AI platform shift,” Nadella wrote in his 2025 annual letter to shareholders. “More than any transformation before it, this generation of AI is radically changing every layer of the tech stack, and we are changing with it.”

Whether you are using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform; running a Windows 11 PC, tablet, or laptop; spending time on LinkedIn; or using Microsoft 365, you will find AI baked in.

Comparing then and now, there are insights in both the similarities and the differences, and lessons from Microsoft’s mid-’90s missteps and successes that are still relevant today.

What’s the same?

The challenge of navigating the shift to a new generation of technology in a large, fast-moving company is the biggest similarity between now and 30 years ago.

Microsoft was a lot smaller in 1995, but it was still the dominant force in the software industry of its day. When the company launched Windows 95 in August of 1995, it came with the first versions of both Internet Explorer and MSN. Within four months, it had to ship new, better versions of those products alongside a whole lot of other changes.

The push for speedy change grew out of something the company had been telling its senior leaders for several months prior to the launch of Windows 95: It had to move fast and do more if it was going to catch up in a race that it couldn’t afford to lose.

Gates’ famous “internet tidal wave” memo from May 26, 1995 (which later became an antitrust exhibit) spelled out both the threat and opportunity — calling the internet “the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”

Later in the memo, Gates acknowledged a significant problem: Microsoft would have to explain why publishers and internet users should use MSN instead of just setting up their own website — and he admitted that the company didn’t have a great answer.

Fast forward to March 2023, a few months after Microsoft partner OpenAI launched ChatGPT, when Satya Nadella made the scale of the AI era clear in a speech on the future of work.

“Today is the start of the next step in this journey, with powerful foundation models and capable copilots accessible via the most universal interface: natural language,” Nadella said. “This will radically transform how computers help us think, plan, and act.”

Of course, Microsoft CEOs have learned a lot over the last 30 years, including the importance of not pointing out the company’s shortcomings in memos that could end up being seen by the rest of the world. Nadella offered nothing like Gates’ MSN admission. But his comments about the size of the AI challenge and opportunity were a direct parallel to the urgency that Gates expressed about the internet 30 years ago.

What’s different?

In the world of PC operating systems and software, Microsoft in the 1990s was king — with few competitors that came even close to the kind of market share it enjoyed. It was arguably late in making a bet-the-company pivot to the internet, but doing so from a very strong position.

Thirty years later, amid the rise of artificial intelligence, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic are part of a more complex network of competitors and partners.

Back in 1995, the big competition was perceived as coming from Netscape and other fast-moving internet startups — and Microsoft was the behemoth battling the insurgents.

The New York Times’ headline about the 1995 event summed up the framing: “Microsoft Seeks Internet Market; Netscape Slides.” As The Seattle Times put it, “Microsoft plays hardball — Game plan for the Internet: Crush the competition.” Many others echoed the theme.

I saw that competitive dynamic first-hand at the press event, when by a stroke of luck I ended up sitting beside Bill Gates at lunch. I recall him being a little annoyed by questions about the Java licensing deal with Sun and the broader press interest in the Netscape/Microsoft narrative. He wanted to focus on the broader impact of the day’s announcements.

He stressed, for example, that the licensing by Microsoft of Sun’s Java programming language for use with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser was not really a big deal.

“Java you can recreate trivially,” Gates told me, brushing off the licensing deal as a routine business decision, not much different than many others Microsoft made over the years.

The scale is also drastically different. For example, my January 1996 cover story for Microsoft Magazine quoted Gates explaining how the “150 million users of Windows” would benefit from the internet integration it was undertaking across 20 new products and technologies.

In today’s terms, those numbers look tiny. In a blog post earlier this year, Microsoft executive vice president Yusuf Mehdi said Windows now powers more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices. That doesn’t include Microsoft’s massive cloud computing business, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, Xbox, and its already-significant AI-attributable revenue from Copilot.

The investment gap is more dramatic, even adjusted for inflation. Microsoft poured more than $88 billion into capital expenditures last fiscal year, much of it on AI infrastructure. In 1995, the company’s $220 million deal with NBC to launch MSNBC sounded like a lot of money.

That MSNBC deal, however, highlights another important contrast between the present and the past. In 1995, no one really knew where the internet (and the web) was going to go. Fortunes were made and lost trying to predict which business models would work online.

Tim Bajarin, CEO of the consultancy Creative Strategies and a longtime industry analyst, says Microsoft is better positioned now than it was in 1995. The difference: we already have the underlying architecture for useful AI applications. That wasn’t true with the internet back then.

“We didn’t see the value proposition until we saw the role of applications built on a web-based architecture,” Bajarin said. “That is what is significantly different.”

Lessons for today

Microsoft’s AI push, Bajarin said, will succeed only if it delivers genuine value — implementations that solve real problems and show clear return on investment.

Recent headlines suggest not everyone is convinced. ‘No one asked for this’: Microsoft’s Copilot AI push sparks social media backlash, declared Germany’s PC-WELT magazine. It’s the same question Gates couldn’t answer about MSN in 1995: Why should anyone use this?

Perhaps the biggest lesson on the competition front is that there is no guarantee of longevity or relevance in tech. Only one of the competitors listed in the December 1995 New York Times story is still around – IBM – and it is a vastly different company than it was then.

There is one more lesson, about the cost of success. Microsoft’s aggressive internet push worked — but it also triggered a Department of Justice investigation that lasted from 1998 to 2001. Competing hard is essential. Competing too hard has consequences.

But that’s a story for another decade.