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.

The work reflects growing Seattle-area efforts to integrate complex health datasets using AI to facilitate advances in health and 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.

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Nov. 30, 2025.

Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter.

Most popular stories on GeekWire

Bill Gates-backed Modern Hydrogen lays off most of its employees after decade-long pursuit of clean energy

After 10 years, clean energy startup Modern Hydrogen has laid off most of its employees due to funding changes and is undergoing a “broader restructuring effort.” … Read More

Bill Gates’ TerraPower gets NRC green light for safety in construction of its first nuclear plant

The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America. … Read More

UW Nobel winner’s lab releases most powerful protein design tool yet

David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington is announcing two major leaps in the field of AI-powered protein design. … Read More

The hot new thing at AWS re:Invent has nothing to do with AI

At AWS re:Invent, the biggest cheers weren’t for AI but for savings. … Read More

Amazon tests new ‘Amazon Now’ 30-minute delivery service in Seattle and Philadelphia

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. … Read More

Washington state lawmaker says proposed payroll tax could benefit large tech companies

A newly proposed payroll tax would add new costs for large businesses in Washington state. … Read More

Viral rant on why ‘everyone in Seattle hates AI’ strikes a nerve, sparks debate over city’s tech vibe

Does everyone in Seattle hate AI? That’s one of the surprising topics to arise this week in response to a spicy blog post penned by a former Microsoft engineer. … Read More

AI roleplay startup Yoodli raises $40M, reports 900% revenue growth

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. … Read More

Seattle biotech startup Curi Bio lands $10M to expand its R&D support for drug discovery

Seattle biotech startup Curi Bio today announced $10 million in new funding. … Read More

Microsoft shareholders invoke Orwell and Copilot as Nadella cites ‘generational moment’

Microsoft’s shareholder meeting Friday morning highlighted a sharp divide: executives promoting a “planet-scale” AI future while investors voiced concerns about censorship, bias, privacy, and geopolitical entanglements. … Read More

Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the University of Washington who analyzed the speculation over the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS.

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public, focused on 3I/ATLAS to track how social-media influencers use over-the-top speculation to fill in information gaps.

“I’ve written previously on how expert opinions can fuel conspiracy theorizing through elite-driven rumoring and amplification,” Bayar explained in an email to GeekWire. “My academic interest in philosophy, epistemology and the politics of conspiracy theories, plus a personal interest in space-related conspiracy theories, led me to look more closely at 3I/ATLAS.”

His analysis, published this week, is titled “Alien of the Gaps: How 3I/ATLAS Was Turned into a Spaceship Online.” The title takes inspiration from a concept known as “God of the Gaps,” which traces how thinkers through the ages explained phenomena they couldn’t fully understand by appealing to the influence of higher powers.

In ancient Greece, those higher powers might have been the gods on Mount Olympus. Bayar argues that a similar process exists today: “Where natural explanations feel incomplete, we substitute a different higher agency, not Zeus this time, but extraterrestrials,” he writes.

Such questions came into the spotlight when 3I/ATLAS was spotted in July. The object’s trajectory suggested that it was only the third known celestial interloper coming into the solar system from far beyond. Even after astronomers built up evidence to classify it as a comet, 3I/ATLAS exhibited enough anomalous behavior to sustain speculation about alien technology.

Exactly how was that speculation sustained? A key figure is Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Years before 3I/ATLAS was found, Loeb and a colleague raised the possibility that a previously sighted interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

Loeb hit upon the alien-technology theme repeatedly in follow-up research papers and a book published in 2023. This year’s discovery of 3I/ATLAS gave a fresh boost to his speculative musings. To track how such musings influenced online discussions about 3I/ATLAS, Bayar used a media analytics platform called Brandwatch to analyze roughly 700,000 posts about the comet that were published on the X social-media channel between July 1 and Nov. 21.

“Almost 280,000 of the 700,000 posts invoke aliens or ET technology — about 40% of the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X,” Bayar writes. About 130,000 posts reference Loeb by name or by his status as a Harvard scientist. More than 82,000 posts explicitly pair his name with the alien-technology hypothesis.

“To be fair, at times, Avi Loeb states that 3I/ATLAS is most likely a natural interstellar comet,” Bayar says. “But he then spends far more time walking through its supposed ‘anomalies’ and entertaining the alien-technology hypothesis. For most audiences, the volume and emphasis of that speculation effectively buries the initial caveat and recenters the story around the alien frame rather than the natural-comet explanation.”

All that feeds into a broader online ecosystem that Bayar calls the “mystery economy.”

“Our information systems reward the production of mystery and speculation,” he writes. “That reward is amplified by a ready-made ecosystem of websites, content creators across platforms who produce, spread and amplify speculative takes. Those creators need a steady supply of ‘new’ material, and Loeb’s ever-growing list of anomalies, even when indirectly refuted by organizations like NASA, feeds that need for sustained mystery and endlessly recyclable content.”

In case you’re curious about the anomalies, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, who focuses on studies of extrasolar planets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, ticks through Loeb’s list (and offers explanations that don’t involve aliens) in a blog post that was published last month.

But the point behind Bayar’s research has more to do with social-media dynamics than with planetary science. The insights gained from studying the “Alien of the Gaps” could well be applied to other spheres of conspiratorial theorizing, ranging from vaccine denialism to the search for a Jan. 6 pipe-bomb suspect.

Bayar had to limit his statistical analysis to posts about 3I/ATLAS on X, but he saw signs that information was flowing between different online platforms. “One of the most frequently appearing terms in the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X is ‘@YouTube,’ suggesting that many X accounts are reacting to or sharing YouTube videos,” he told GeekWire.

“Because of data-access constraints, we can’t confidently identify a single ‘nexus’ of spread,” Bayar said. “What we can say is that the conversation on X is both widely distributed and largely contained within alien-adjacent communities: Total volume is still under a million posts, which suggests it hasn’t broken out into a truly mass-viral story beyond the UFO/UAP crowd.”

That could change, however. 3I/ATLAS is due to make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19, which means there’ll be further opportunities for astronomical imagery — and for speculative online buzz.

Thanks to Julien De Winter for permission to republish a Nov. 25 image of 3I/ATLAS that was captured by Victor Sabet and De Winter using a Starfront Observatories telescope in Texas.

LAS VEGAS — Speaking this week on the Amazon Web Services re:Invent stage, AWS executive Colleen Aubrey delivered a prediction that doubled as a wake-up call for companies still thinking of AI as just another tool.

“I believe that over the next few years, agentic teammates can be essential to every team — as essential as the people sitting right next to you,” Aubrey said during the Wednesday keynote. “They will fundamentally transform how companies build and deliver for their customers.”

But what does that look like in practice? On her own team, for example, Aubrey says she challenged groups that once had 50 people taking nine months to deliver a new product to do the same with 10 people working for three months.

Meanwhile, non-engineers such as finance analysts are building working prototypes using AI tools, contributing code in Amazon’s Kiro agentic development tool alongside engineers, and feeding those prototypes into Amazon’s famous PR/FAQ planning process on weekly cycles.

Those are some of the details that Aubrey shared when we sat down with her after the keynote at the GeekWire Studios booth in the re:Invent expo hall to dig into the themes from her talk. Aubrey is senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, overseeing the company’s push into business applications for call centers, supply chains, and other sectors.

Continue reading for takeaways from the conversation, watch the video below, and listen to the conversation starting in the second segment of this week’s GeekWire Podcast.

The ‘teammate’ mental model changes everything. Aubrey draws a clear line between single-purpose AI tools that do one thing well and the agentic teammates she sees emerging — systems that take responsibility for whole objectives, and require a different kind of management. 

“I think people will increasingly be managers of AI,” she said. “The days of having to do the individual keystrokes ourselves, I think, are fast fading. And in fact, everyone is going to be a manager now. You have to think about prioritization, delegation, and auditing. What’s the quality of our feedback, providing coaching. What are the guardrails?”

Amazon Connect crosses $1 billion. AWS’s call center platform reached $1 billion in annual revenue on a run rate basis, with Aubrey noting it has accelerated year-over-year growth for two consecutive years. 

This week at re:Invent, the team announced 29 new capabilities across four areas: Nova Sonic voice interaction that Aubrey says is “very close to being indistinguishable” from human conversation; agents that complete tasks on behalf of customers; clickstream intelligence for product recommendations; and observability tools for inspecting AI reasoning. 

One interesting detail: Aubrey said she’s often surprised by Nova Sonic’s sophistication and empathy in complex conversations — and equally surprised when it fails at basic tasks like spelling an address correctly. 

“There’s still work to do to really polish that,” she said.

The ROI question gets a “yes and no.” Asked whether companies are seeing the business value to justify AI agent investments, Aubrey offered a nuanced response. “I observe companies to struggle to realize the business impact,” she said. But she said the value often shows up as eliminating bottlenecks — clearing backlogs, erasing technical debt, accelerating security patching — rather than immediate revenue gains. 

“I’m not going to see the impact on my P&L today,” she said, “but if I fast forward a year, I’m going to have a product in market where real customers are using and getting real value, and we’re learning and iterating where I might not have even been halfway there in the past.” 

Her advice for companies still hesitating: “If you don’t start today, that’s a one way door decision… I think you have to start the journey today. I would suggest people get focused, they get moving, because if you don’t, I think that becomes existential.”

Trust requires observability. Aubrey says companies won’t get full value from AI teammates if they can’t see how they’re reasoning. 

“If you don’t trust an AI teammate, then you’re never going to realize the full benefit,” she said. “You’re not going to give them the hard tasks, you’re not going to invest in their development.” 

The solution is treating AI inspection the same way you’d manage a human colleague: understand why it took an action, audit the quality, and iterate. 

“You can refine your knowledge bases. You can refine your workflows. You can refine your guardrails, and then confidently keep iterating… the same way we do with each other. We keep iterating, we keep learning, and we keep getting better,” she said.

Product updates: Beyond Connect, Aubrey offered updates on other parts of her portfolio of Amazon’s applied AI solutions. 

• Just Walk Out, Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology, deployed more than 150 new stores in 2025 and should accelerate next year.
• AWS Supply Chain, meanwhile, is getting a reset. “I’m going to declare that a pivot,” she said, with a Q1 announcement coming around agentic decision-making for supply and demand planning.
• Also coming in Q1: a life sciences product focused on antibody discovery, currently in beta. 

She teased “a few other new investment areas” expected to come in early 2026.

Amazon is experimenting again. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into our scoop on Amazon Now, the company’s new ultrafast delivery service. Plus, we recap the GeekWire team’s ride in a Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip during Amazon Web Services re:Invent.

In our featured interview from the expo hall, AWS Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey discusses Amazon’s push into applied AI, why the company sees AI agents as “teammates,” and how her team is rethinking product development in the age of agentic coding.

RELATED STORIES

• Stars on the ceiling, Cher on the speakers: Our first ride in Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi
• We tested ‘Amazon Now’ in Seattle — and got our delivery in 23 minutes
• The AWS CEO thought Amazon needed a million developers, until AI changed his mind

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

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

Looking for a dose of festive cheer this holiday season? 

You might just find it in an unexpected corner of Seattle, where the spirits of the tech past linger. 

The former headquarters of PayScale, the compensation data company that once called the historic Palmer Building in SoDo home, has been completely transformed into a winter wonderland that includes a family-friendly daytime experience called Kringle’s Inventionasium and an adults-only evening Elf Bar pop-up.

It’s an unusual metamorphosis of a fancy high-tech office space, one that received recognition at the 2017 GeekWire Awards as one of the region’s Geekiest Office Spaces. But time moves on, and so has PayScale.

The 22-year-old software company — which in 2019 was valued at $325 million after a private equity infusion — moved its headquarters to Boston in March. The Puget Sound Business Journal reported the news earlier this week.

Now, where software geeks once wrote code and executives debated corporate strategy, elves and Santas reign. 

It’s all the magical dream of LIT Immersive founders Jason DeLeo and Jen Matthews, two theater geeks with a flair for immersive experiences. They took control of a portion of the former PayScale space about 18 months ago, and since then have created a wide array of themed experiences across the 18,000 square feet of space directly west of Lumen Field. 

The transformation from corporate office to immersive playground was made possible by the fact that the tech company had virtually abandoned the space, leaving most of the infrastructure — not to mention TVs, power cords and other gear — intact. 

“Almost everything is still here from (PayScale),” DeLeo said. “The microwaves are still the microwaves that they used. Their dishwashers. They had a kegerator, we have the kegerator … it’s all here.”

This allowed DeLeo and Matthews to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on the buildout of the space. The former PayScale sports bar — a highlight of the former office space — was easily repurposed (which DeLeo and Matthews happily open on game days for fans of the Seahawks and Mariners). The second floor break rooms are now used as a green room for the actors who perform in the various shows. 

“We knew that PayScale was here, and that’s what turned us onto the space because it was fully networked,” said DeLeo. 

The Elf Bar concept was also a stroke of luck. DeLeo and Matthews had already been cooking up a holiday-themed cocktail bar concept called Elf’d Up this year, when they were approached with a licensing deal from the creators of Elf Bar. Pop-up holiday-themed cocktail bars started gaining momentum about a decade ago, with organizations like Miracle now operating dozens of locations internationally, including four spots in Washington state. 

Beyond its festive cocktails, Elf Bar offers a host of activities for 21+ crowd: holiday-themed trivia; karaoke lounge; a snowball fight club; and games. Reservations for three evening time slots are available, and tickets range from $15.50 to $18.50. The Elf Bar is open through Dec. 21, though DeLeo said they may extend the pop-up based on demand. 

The day-time, kid-friendly Kringle’s Inventionasium — inspired by a long-running show in Cleveland, Ohio — has been a hit with families and school groups. Cost of that experience ranges from $24 to $63 per guest, with the daytime shows running through December 24.

Next up for DeLeo and Matthews? With the FIFA World Cup coming to Seattle next summer — including six matches across the street at Lumen Field — they are already planning for the next immersive experience or ways to rent the space to a team, corporate sponsor or broadcast company. 

DeLeo said they are “praying” that Seattle gets some big-name teams during the World Cup draw today. Their holiday wish may have come true, with the U.S. Men’s National Team slated to play Australia — known as the “socceroos” — on Friday, June 19 at Lumen Field.

Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting Friday played out as if on a split screen: executives describing a future where AI cures diseases and secures networks, and shareholder proposals warning of algorithmic bias, political censorship, and complicity in geopolitical conflict.

One shareholder, William Flaig, founder and CEO of Ridgeline Research, quoted two authorities on the topic — George Orwell’s 1984 and Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot — in requesting a report on the risks of AI censorship of religious and political speech.

Flaig invoked Orwell’s dystopian vision of surveillance and thought control, citing the Ministry of Truth that “rewrites history and floods society with propaganda.” He then turned to Copilot, which responded to his query about an AI-driven future by noting that “the risk lies not in AI itself, but in how it’s deployed.”

In a Q&A session during the virtual meeting, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company is “putting the person and the human at the center” of its AI development, with technology that users “can delegate to, they can steer, they can control.”

Nadella said Microsoft has moved beyond abstract principles to “everyday engineering practice,” with safeguards for fairness, transparency, security, and privacy.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, said broader societal decisions, like what age kids should use AI in schools, won’t be made by tech companies. He cited ongoing debates about smartphones in schools nearly 20 years after the iPhone.

“I think quite rightly, people have learned from that experience,” Smith said, drawing a parallel to the rise of AI. “Let’s have these conversations now.”

Microsoft’s board recommended that shareholders vote against all six outside proposals, which covered issues including AI censorship, data privacy, human rights, and climate. Final vote tallies have yet to be released as of publication time, but Microsoft said shareholders turned down all six, based on early voting. 

While the shareholder proposals focused on AI risks, much of the executive commentary focused on the long-term business opportunity. 

Nadella described building a “planet-scale cloud and AI factory” and said Microsoft is taking a “full stack approach,” from infrastructure to AI agents to applications, to capitalize on what he called “a generational moment in technology.”

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood highlighted record results for fiscal year 2025 — more than $281 billion in revenue and $128 billion in operating income — and pointed to roughly $400 billion in committed contracts as validation of the company’s AI investments.

Hood also addressed pre-submitted shareholder questions about the company’s AI spending, pushing back on concerns about a potential bubble. 

“This is demand-driven spending,” she said, noting that margins are stronger at this stage of the AI transition than at a comparable point in Microsoft’s cloud buildout. “Every time we think we’re getting close to meeting demand, demand increases again.”

LAS VEGAS — Our toaster has arrived.

Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi service launched in Las Vegas this fall, and a few members of the hard-working GeekWire Studios crew joined me to try it out for a ride to dinner after a long day at AWS re:Invent. Zoox was nothing short of a hit with our group.

The consensus: it was a smooth, futuristic shuttle ride that felt safe amid the Las Vegas chaos, with per-seat climate control, and customizable music. (Somehow we landed on Cher, but in this vehicle, we felt no need to turn back time.) Most of all, the face-to-face seating made for a fun group experience, rather than a retrofitted car like Waymo. 

Zoox, founded in 2014, was acquired by Amazon in 2020 for just over $1 billion, marking the tech giant’s move into autonomous vehicle technology and urban mobility. Zoox operates as an independent subsidiary, based in Foster City, Calif.​​

Unlike competitors that retrofit vehicles, Zoox designed its robotaxi from scratch. It’s a compact, 12-foot-long electric pod, bidirectional, without steering wheel or pedals.

The experience of calling the Zoox vehicle on the app was seamless and quick. The doors opened via a button in the app after the carriage arrived to pick us up at a designated station between Fashion Show Mall and Trump International Hotel. 

Inside, our nighttime ride featured a starfield display on the interior ceiling of the cab, adding to the magical feel, with functional seats comfortable enough for a drive across the city.

A few of us had experienced Waymo in California, so it was natural to make the comparison. One thing I missed was the live virtual road view that Waymo provides, representing surrounding vehicles and roadways, which provides some reassurance.

Emergency human assistance also seemed more accessible in the Waymo vehicles than in the Zoox carriage. And unlike the Waymo Jaguar cars that I’ve taken in San Francisco, the build quality of the Zoox vehicle felt more utilitarian than luxury.

For this current phase of the Vegas rollout, one major downside is the limited service area — just seven fixed spots along the Las Vegas strip, like Resorts World, Luxor, and AREA15, requiring walks between hubs rather than seamless point-to-point hails. It’s more of a novelty for that reason, rather than a reliable form of transportation.

But hey, the rides are free for now, so it’s hard to complain.

And the ability to sit across from each other more than made up for any minor quibbles. (Our group of five split up and took two four-person carriages from Fashion Show Mall to Resorts World.) Compared to the Waymo experience, the Zoox vehicle feels less like sitting in a car and more like sharing a moving living room.

GeekWire Studios host Steph Stricklen was initially skeptical — wondering if Vegas would be the right place for an autonomous vehicle, given the chaotic backdrop and unpredictable traffic patterns on the Strip. But she walked away a believer, giving the ride a “10 out of 10” and saying she never felt unsafe as a passenger. 

“It felt very Disneyland,” said GeekWire Studios host Brian Westbrook, citing the creature comforts such as climate control that seemed to be isolated to each seat. Along with music and other controls, that’s one of the features that can be accessed via small touch-screen displays for each passenger on the interior panel of the vehicle.

GeekWire project manager Jessica Reeves said she almost forgot that there wasn’t a human driving. Despite rapid acceleration at times, the ride was smooth.

“It didn’t feel like I was riding in an autonomous vehicle, maybe it was just the buzz of experiencing this new way of transportation,” Jessica messaged me afterward, reflecting on the experience. “The spaciousness, facing my friends, exploring the different features, it all happened so fast that before I knew it, we were there!”

Holly Grambihler, GeekWire’s chief sales and marketing officer, was impressed with the clean interior and comfortable seats.

“It felt less like a vehicle and more like a mobile karaoke studio with the customized climate control and ability to choose your music — Cher in Vegas, perfect!” Holly said. “It felt safe with our short ride. I don’t think I’d take a Zoox on a freeway yet.”

On that point: Zoox’s purpose-built pod is engineered to reach highway speeds of up to about 75 mph, and the company has tested it at those velocities on closed tracks. In Las Vegas, though, the robotaxis currently stick to surface streets at lower speeds, and Zoox hasn’t yet started mixing into freeway traffic.

The Vegas service launch marked Zoox’s first public robotaxi deployment, offering free rides along a fixed loop on and around the Strip while gathering data for paid trips. Zoox followed with a limited public launch in San Francisco in November.

For Amazon, the technology represents a long-term bet, with the potential to contribute to its logistics operations. It’s not hard to imagine similar vehicles shuttling packages in the future. But for now the focus is on public ridership.

The company has flagged Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Seattle as longer-term potential markets for the robotaxi service as regulations and technology mature. We’ve contacted Zoox for the latest update on its plans.

If our own ride this week was any indication, the company’s biggest challenge may simply be expanding the robotaxi service fast enough for more people to try it.

Editor’s note: GeekWire Studios is the content production arm of GeekWire, creating sponsored videos, podcasts, and other paid projects for a variety of companies and organizations, separate from GeekWire’s independent news coverage. GeekWire Studios had a booth at re:Invent, recording segments with Amazon partners in partnership with AWS. Learn more about GeekWire Studios.