Three U.S. senators have launched an investigation into whether tech giants, driven by soaring AI energy demands, are raising residential power bills. Separately, Amazon released a white paper Tuesday stating that its data centers are not the problem, and that in some regions it actually pays more than required for energy use.

The Democratic senators sent letters to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and three data center firms, according to the New York Times. The lawmakers raised concerns that energy demand driven by artificial intelligence was forcing utilities to deploy new power plants and upgrade the grid — with local ratepayers helping foot the bill.

“We write in light of alarming reports that tech companies are passing on the costs of building and operating their data centers to ordinary Americans as A.I. data centers’ energy usage has caused residential electricity bills to skyrocket in nearby communities,” the senators said, according to the Times.

Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut issued the letters.

Amazon offered a much different take in an analysis that examined the potential benefits, costs and risks that large energy loads created by data centers have on electric utilities.

The Amazon-funded study found that in some locations, the power bills currently being paid by the company more than cover the utility impacts. A typical 100 megawatt data center was estimated to pay an additional $3.4 million beyond the costs associated with its electricity use, which also include a utility’s infrastructure upgrades, deployment of new energy generation, operations and maintenance.

Utilities can use that surplus “to reduce rates for other ratepayers, but how this potential benefit is realized will differ across jurisdictions,” the study stated.

The assessment examined Amazon data center campuses in Oregon, California and Mississippi and was performed by E3, an independent economic consulting firm.

The white paper said the benefit to the utilities and other customers should continue into 2030, but noted that utilities will need to adjust their rates in the future to ensure that ratepayers are not subsidizing tech operations.

“To continue to prevent cross-subsidization, utilities must keep pace and leverage the full range of tools available to them to mitigate these risks…” the document states.

The rapid growth of the sector is central to the debate. A Department of Energy report projected that data center energy use, which was more than 4% of U.S. electricity consumption in 2023, could triple by 2028. This forecast is fueled by tech giants’ expanding investment: Microsoft and Amazon each reported nearly $35 billion in capital expenditures in the third quarter, much of it on data center infrastructure.

The tech giants are also investing globally in new wind and solar power and energy storage, while pursuing more costly power sources including nuclear.

In October, a group of U.S. representatives raised similar concerns to the senators’, asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Edison Electric Institute and the Data Center Coalition for information regarding data center impacts on residential power bills “to help ensure everyday Americans and small businesses aren’t bearing the brunt of data center energy costs.”

Washington representatives Kim Schrier and Adam Smith as well as Oregon Rep. Andrea Salinas were among the 20 lawmakers who made the request.

The investigations come amid a general rise in household expenses, making the allocation of utility costs particularly contentious. Residential electricity costs nationwide are on the rise, according to federal data. Power bills rose more than 7% on average when comparing September rates to a year earlier.

But the causes of the increase are complicated. A study this month in a peer-reviewed journal concluded that multiple factors impact electricity prices, including inflation, fluctuating gas prices and natural disasters such as hurricanes, storms and wildfires.

Washington and 35 other states reached a settlement with Hyundai and Kia in which the automakers will provide restitution to consumers and fixes to millions of eligible vehicles nationwide that lacked industry-standard, anti-theft technology.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown’s office announced details of the settlement Tuesday, in which Hyundai and Kia have agreed to:

• Equip all future vehicles sold in the U.S. with engine immobilizer anti-theft technology;
• Offer free zinc-reinforced ignition cylinder protectors to owners or lessees of eligible vehicles, including vehicles that previously were only eligible for the companies’ software updates;
• Provide up to $4.5 million in restitution to eligible consumers whose cars are damaged by thieves; and
• Pay $4.5 million to the states to defray the costs of the investigation. 

Eligible car owners can receive up $4,500 for a total loss or up to $2,250 for a partial loss, according to compensation details on the settlement website. The claim deadline is March 31, 2027.

An engine immobilizer prevents thieves from starting a vehicle’s engine without the vehicle’s “smart” key, which stores the vehicle’s electronic security code. The lack of the necessary tech on cars resulted in “an epidemic of car thefts and joy riding” across Washington and the country,

“Security is a key piece for families looking to buy a vehicle, but Hyundai and Kia spent years selling people cars that lacked the industry’s standard protections,” Brown said in a statement. “Year after year, consumers have been easily victimized because of the automakers’ failure here.”

In late 2020, teenage boys began posting videos on social media describing how to steal the cars simply by removing a plastic piece under the steering wheel and using a USB cord. Posts with the hashtag “Kia Boys” racked up more than 33 million views on TikTok by September 2022, according to CNBC. The videos included teens engaged in reckless driving of the stolen vehicles.

Despite years of evidence, Hyundai and Kia waited until 2023 to launch a service campaign to update the software on most of the affected vehicles, Brown’s office said. The update was easily bypassed by thieves.

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison filed a similar lawsuit against Kia and Hyundai in January 2023.

“Kia and Hyundai chose to cut corners and cut costs at the expense of their customers and the public. As a result, our police force has had to tackle a huge rise in vehicle theft and related problems with already stretched resources,” Davison said in a statement at the time.

In May 2023, Hyundai and Kia agreed to a consumer class-action lawsuit settlement worth $200 million over rampant thefts of the Korean automakers’ vehicles. The Seattle City Attorney’s Office said at the time that it was a “good first step for consumers” but that the settlement involving individual owners “does not include the litigation brought by the City.”

We reached out to the City Attorney for comment on Tuesday and will update when we hear back.

Under the new multistate settlement, eligible consumers will be notified by the companies that they will have one year from the date of the notice to make an appointment to have the zinc-reinforced ignition cylinder protector installed at their local Hyundai or Kia authorized dealerships. Consumers are urged to schedule the installation of the zinc-reinforce ignition cylinder protector as soon as possible.

Consumers who previously installed the software update on their vehicles (or were scheduled to do so) but nonetheless experienced a theft or attempted theft of their vehicle on or after April 29, 2025, are eligible to file a claim for restitution for certain theft and attempted-theft related expenses.  For more information about eligibility and how to submit a claim visit these sites for Hyundai and Kia.

How many penguins are in this wildlife video? Can you track the orange ball in the cat video? Which teams are playing, and who scored? Give me step-by-step instructions from this cooking video?

Those are examples of queries that can be fielded by Molmo 2, a new family of open-source AI vision models from the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) that can watch, track, analyze and answer questions about videos: describing what’s happening, and pinpointing exactly where and when.

Ai2 cites benchmark tests showing Molmo 2 beating open-source models on short video analysis and tracking, and surpassing closed systems like Google’s Gemini 3 on video tracking, while approaching their performance on other image and video tasks.

In a series of demos for reporters recently at the Ai2 offices in Seattle, researchers showed how Molmo 2 could analyze a variety of short video clips in different ways. 

• In a soccer clip, researchers asked what defensive mistake led to a goal. The model analyzed the sequence and pointed to a failure to clear the ball effectively.
• In a baseball clip, the AI identified the teams (Angels and Mariners), the player who scored (#55), and explained how it knew the home team by reading uniforms and stadium branding.
• Given a cooking video, the model returned a structured recipe with ingredients and step-by-step instructions, including timing pulled from on-screen text.
• Asked to count how many flips a dancer performed, the model didn’t just say “five” — it returned timestamps and pixel coordinates for each one.
• In a tracking demo, the model followed four penguins as they moved around the frame, maintaining a consistent ID for each bird even when they overlapped.
• When asked to “track the car that passes the #13 car in the end,” the model watched an entire racing clip first, understood the query, then went back and identified the correct vehicle. It tracked cars that went in and out of frame.

Big year for Ai2

Molmo 2, announced Tuesday morning, caps a year of major milestones for the Seattle-based nonprofit, which has developed a loyal following in business and scientific circles by building fully open AI systems. Its approach contrasts sharply with the closed or partially open approaches of industry giants like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

Founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Ai2 this year landed $152 million from the NSF and Nvidia, partnered on an AI cancer research initiative led by Seattle’s Fred Hutch, and released Olmo 3, a text model rivaling Meta, DeepSeek and others.

Ai2 has seen more than 21 million downloads of its models this year and nearly 3 billion queries across its systems, said Ali Farhadi, the Ai2 CEO, during the media briefing last week at the institute’s new headquarters on the northern shore of Seattle’s Lake Union. 

As a nonprofit, Ai2 isn’t trying to compete commercially with the tech giants — it’s aiming to advance the state of the art and make those advances freely available.

The institute has released open models for text (OLMo), images (the original Molmo), and now video — building toward what he described as a unified model that reasons across all modalities.

“We’re basically building models that are competitive with the best things out there,” Farhadi said — but in a completely open manner, for a succession of different media and situations.

In addition to Molmo 2, Ai2 on Monday released Bolmo, an experimental text model that processes language at the character level rather than in word fragments — a technical shift that improves handling of spelling, rare words, and multilingual text.

Expanding into video analysis

With the newly released Molmo 2, the focus is video. To be clear: the model analyzes video, it doesn’t generate video — think understanding footage rather than creating it.

The original Molmo, released last September, could analyze static images with precision rivaling closed-source competitors. It introduced a “pointing” capability that let it identify specific objects within a frame. Molmo 2 brings that same approach to video and multi-image understanding.

The concept isn’t new. Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and Meta’s Perception LM can all process video. But in line with Ai2’s broader mission as a nonprofit institute, Molmo 2 is fully open, with its model weights, training code, and training data all publicly released.

That’s different from “open weight” models that release the final product but not the original recipe, and a stark contrast to closed systems from Google, OpenAI and others.

The distinction is not just an academic principle. Ai2’s approach means developers can trace a model’s behavior back to its training data, customize it for specific uses, and avoid being locked into a vendor’s ecosystem.

Ai2 also emphasizes efficiency. For example, Meta’s Perception LM was trained on 72.5 million videos. Molmo 2 used about 9 million, relying on high-quality human annotations.

The result, Ai2 claims, is a smaller, more efficient model that outperforms their own much larger model from last year, and comes close to matching commercial systems from Google and OpenAI, while being simple enough to run on a single machine.

When the original Molmo introduced its pointing capability last year — allowing the model to identify specific objects in an image — competing models quickly adopted the feature.

“We know they adopted our data because they perform exactly as well as we do,” said Ranjay Krishna, who leads Ai2’s computer vision team. Krishna is also a University of Washington assistant professor, and several of his graduate students also work on the project.

Farhadi frames the competitive dynamic differently than most in the industry.

“If you do real open source, I would actually change the word competition to collaboration,” he said. “Because there is no need to compete. Everything is out there. You don’t need to reverse engineer. You don’t need to rebuild it. Just grab it, build on top of it, do the next thing. And we love it when people do that.”

A work in progress

At the same time, Molmo 2 has some clear constraints. The tracking capability — following objects across frames — currently tops out at about 10 items. Ask it to track a crowd or a busy highway, and the model can’t keep up.

“This is a very, very new capability, and it’s one that’s so experimental that we’re starting out very small,” Krishna said. “There’s no technological limit to this, it just requires more data, more examples of really crowded scenes.”

Long-form video also remains a challenge. The model performs well on short clips, but analyzing longer footage requires compute that Ai2 isn’t yet willing to spend. In the playground launching alongside Molmo 2, uploaded videos are limited to 15 seconds.

And unlike some commercial systems, Molmo 2 doesn’t process live video streams. It analyzes recordings after the fact. Krishna said the team is exploring streaming capabilities for applications like robotics, where a model would need to respond to observations in real time, but that work is still early.

“There are methods that people have come up with in terms of processing videos over time, streaming videos,” Krishna said. “Those are directions we’re looking into next.”

Molmo 2 is available starting today on Hugging Face and Ai2’s playground.

Don’t take your eyes off the road to read new research from the University of Washington.

In partnership with Toyota Research Institute, UW researchers are exploring how modern touch screens in cars affect driving now that dashboard knobs and buttons are increasingly a thing of the past. The results could help auto manufacturers design safer, more responsive screens and in-car interfaces.

The team’s study, which was presented this fall at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Busan, Korea, adds to what we already know about the dangers of distracted driving when it comes to phone use.

Participants driving a vehicle simulator and interacting with a touch screen (see video above) were given memory tests that mimic the mental effort demanded by traffic conditions and other distractions, the UW reported. Sensors tracked their gaze, finger movements, pupil diameter and electrodermal activity.

While driving, participants had to touch specific targets on a 12-inch touch screen, similar to how they would interact with apps and widgets. They did this while completing three levels of an “N-back task,” a memory test in which the participants hear a series of numbers, 2.5 seconds apart, and have to repeat specific digits. 

Researchers found that when people try to multitask behind the wheel, their driving and their ability to use a touch screen both suffer. The simulator car drifted in its lane, and speed and accuracy using the screen declined while driving.

“Touch screens are widespread today in automobile dashboards, so it is vital to understand how interacting with touch screens affects drivers and driving,” said co-senior author Jacob O. Wobbrock, a UW professor in the Information School. “Our research is some of the first that scientifically examines this issue, suggesting ways for making these interfaces safer and more effective.”

Popular Mechanics wrote about the mental bandwidth and finger precision that many modern infotainment screens require in cars.

Based on the UW/Toyota findings, researchers suggest future in-car touch screen systems might use simple sensors in the car — eye tracking, or touch sensors on the steering wheel — to monitor drivers’ attention and cognitive load. Based on these readings, the car’s system might adjust the touch screen’s interface to make important controls more prominent and safer to access.

This story originally appeared on Real Estate News.

Could Google crush the “portal wars” once and for all?

A key Google partner is starting to display home listing details directly in search results, prompting some industry experts and analysts to question what impact the feature could have on the traffic — and financials — of major portal players like Zillow, Realtor.com and others.

A ‘controlled experiment’: In some markets, Google’s data partner HouseCanary and its IDX site ComeHome are beginning to experiment with placing home listings at the top of Google search results, complete with basic details, price, images and a “Request a tour” button. According to HouseCanary, the company is licensed in all 50 states and in Washington, D.C., as a full-service brokerage. 

Real estate consultant and analyst Mike DelPrete was the first to report on the pilot listing initiative. 

HouseCanary offered some insight into the “controlled experiment” via an announcement on LinkedIn this week, suggesting that the company and Google “are innovating” and “pushing into new territory” with the effort.

“Before this test started, we contacted and notified every MLS in the regions included. We are working with those MLSs directly and we have active, ongoing communication with them throughout the test. If an MLS has questions or concerns, we address them directly and promptly,” the announcement reads. 

“The goal is simple: improve how consumers discover listings while staying aligned with the rules and expectations of the MLS community. We are excited about what we are building with Google, and we are equally committed to doing it the right way with the MLSs and other stakeholders. We will continue to communicate directly with the MLSs involved and respond quickly to any concerns.”

Impacts of previous search shifts: The move to incorporate home listing information into Google comes over a year after the search giant started integrating AI summaries directly into the top of search results. A July Pew Research Center study found that web users were less likely to click into other pages — such as news media and other outlets that had long depended on traffic as a metric for determining revenue — since Google incorporated AI summaries.

Some major mainstream news sites have seen traffic drop upwards of 30-40% year-over-year partially thanks to AI summaries, NPR reported in July. 

What analysts are saying: There may already be concern about what kind of impact home listing summaries on Google pages could have on the top portals. As the leader in home search, Zillow would be the site with the most to lose. At the time of publishing this story, Zillow’s share price has dropped more than 8% since the opening bell on Dec. 15. 

But some analysts say the concerns may be exaggerated.

“While we don’t expect a direct near-term impact on Zillow’s business, given that most of Zillow’s traffic is direct (e.g., Zillow.com, StreetEasy.com, mobile apps) and Google’s new product is currently limited to select markets and mobile browsers, we view this development as a long-term risk for real estate portals like Zillow,” Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng wrote in a recent note to clients, CNBC reports.

Piper Sandler called the concerns “overblown,” and analysts with Oppenheimer and Wells Fargo also appeared to be less concerned about immediate impacts on Zillow’s traffic and revenue. Instead, they suggest that the experiment may simply present a new opportunity for Google to generate more revenue.

Wells Fargo analyst Alec Brondolo sees “Zillow, Homes.com, Realtor.com, etc. bidding for home listing ad units rather than Google attempting to monetize directly with an ad product sold to agents,” CNBC reported. 

In a blog post, Victor Lund, managing partner of real estate consulting firm WAV Group, highlighted some issues with the pilot and suggested it could overstep existing norms and standards with the IDX protocol. 

“IDX was never designed to allow listings to be turned into paid media inventory on global ad networks. If this practice stands, it redefines IDX from a display-based cooperation agreement into an advertising license, something neither MLSs nor brokers have agreed to,” Lund wrote.

Real Estate News has reached out to HouseCanary for more details on the scope and scale of the experiment and to Zillow for comment on the new Google feature.

Amazon filed a new notice with Washington state Monday morning signaling that it’s cutting 84 jobs, but the individual separations are part of the regular course of business, unrelated to the 14,000 corporate layoffs it announced globally in October.

The company said each of its businesses regularly reviews its organizational structure and may make adjustments as a result. It’s a routine process, the company said, not tied to broader workforce actions.

The notice stems from a new state law that requires employers to disclose all terminations occurring within 90 days of a prior notice under the state’s new “mini” version of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, known as the WARN Act.

“We’ve informed a relatively small number of employees that their roles will be eliminated as the result of individual business decisions,” said Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser. “We don’t make decisions like this lightly,” he added, noting that the company is providing affected employees with 90 days of full pay and benefits, transitional health coverage, and job placement services.

According to the filing, the separations are scheduled to occur between Feb. 2 and Feb. 23, 2026, across more than 30 Seattle and Bellevue office locations, plus six remote workers based in Washington. They include software development engineers, program managers, recruiters, HR specialists, and UX designers, ranging from entry-level to directors and principals.

Amazon noted in the filing that employees were notified starting in early November and received at least 89 days’ advance notice, exceeding the 60-day minimum required under the law. Those who find internal transfers before their separation date won’t be laid off.

Separately, the company said in October that it was cutting 14,000 corporate jobs globally as part of CEO Andy Jassy’s push to reduce bureaucracy and operate more efficiently. That earlier round included more than 2,300 layoffs in Washington state, according to a filing at the time.

Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti signaled additional cuts could continue into 2026. Reuters has reported the total could ultimately reach 30,000 — which would surpass the 27,000 positions eliminated in 2023 and mark the largest overall layoff in company history. 

Washington state is part of a newly filed lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging the legality of a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas that allow highly-skilled individuals to work temporarily in the U.S.

Attorneys general from 20 states claim the U.S. Department of Homeland Security set the fee at an arbitrary amount that does not reflect the agency’s costs, and that the fee was enacted without going through a required notice-and-comment process.

The visa is meant to recruit employees from abroad who have specialized expertise not found in sufficient numbers in the U.S. workforce.

Seattle-based Amazon has roughly 19,100 employees working under H-1B visas nationwide. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., nationally employs more than 6,200 H-1B visa holders. Washington’s public universities and agencies have nearly 500 H-1B visa holders on their payrolls, according to federal data and state analysis.

Employers are responsible for paying H-1B fees, which used to run between $960 and $7,595, said Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown’s office. Raising the fees, the state warned, will result in empty university labs and science discoveries “will be made somewhere else.”

“These institutions will lose their competitive edge, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and medical fields,” said a press release from Brown’s office.

In announcing the increased fee in September, the Trump administration said the visa was being abused by employers to supplant Americans with “lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

“The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security,” said a White House memo addressing restrictions of nonimmigrant workers.

Priyanka Kulkarni, CEO of the immigration tech startup Casium, said the H1-B workers are not low paid, noting that the median salary for the visa holders was about $120,000 last year.

“Engineers, scientists, healthcare specialists, and educators recruited from abroad often fill critical gaps that enable companies and institutions to grow, invest, and create jobs locally,” she added via email.

The Trump administration has specifically called out high-tech companies’ use of the program, saying they “have prominently manipulated the H-1B system, significantly harming American workers in computer-related fields.”

Xiao Wang, CEO of the startup Boundless Immigration, noted that while tech giants are targeted for criticism, the visa also allows for doctors, nurses and researchers to work in the U.S. — echoing some of the concerns raised by Washington’s attorney general.

“Adding a $100K fee for all foreign talent trying to enter Washington to work in these fields would all but eliminate this pathway for anyone outside of the most valuable companies in the world and would leave the state with a significant shortage of important roles,” Wang said by email.

He added that putting a nurse and an AI engineer in the same visa category highlights an overdue need for immigration reform.

Wang called on Americans to demand that Congress “pass new immigration regulations to stay competitive as a country.”

Steve Clayton has emerged as a retro renegade at Microsoft, seeking to show that print books and magazines still matter in the digital age. Now he’s turning the page on his own career.

Clayton, most recently Microsoft’s vice president of communications strategy, announced Monday morning that he’s leaving the Redmond company after 28 years to become Cisco’s chief communications officer, starting next month, reporting to CEO Chuck Robbins.

“In some ways, it feels like a full-circle moment: my career began with the rise of the internet and the early web — and Cisco was foundational to that story,” he wrote on LinkedIn, noting that AI makes infrastructure and security all the more critical.

He leaves behind two passion projects: 8080 Books, a Microsoft publishing imprint focused on thought leadership titles, and Signal, a Microsoft print magazine for business leaders. He said via email that both will continue after his exit. He’s currently in the U.K. wrapping up the third edition of Signal. 

Clayton joined Microsoft in 1997 as a systems engineer in the U.K., working with commercial customers including BP, Shell, and Unilever. He held a series of technical and strategy roles before moving to Seattle in 2010 to become “chief storyteller,” a position he held for 11 years.

That put Microsoft ahead of the curve on a trend now sweeping corporate America: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “storyteller” job postings on LinkedIn have doubled in the past year.

As chief storyteller, Clayton led a team of 40 responsible for building technology demonstrations for CEO Satya Nadella, helping shape Microsoft’s AI communications strategy, running the corporate intranet, and overseeing social media and broader culture-focused campaigns.

In 2021, Clayton moved into a senior public affairs leadership role. During that period, he was involved in companywide efforts related to issues including AI policy and the Microsoft–Activision deal, before transitioning to his current communications strategy role in 2023.

In his latest position, Clayton has focused on using AI to transform how Microsoft runs its communications operations, reporting to Chief Communications Officer Frank Shaw.

They may not have been arriving to “buy a fat pig,” but Lime riders definitely headed “to market, to market” in 2025, making Seattle’s Pike Place Market the No. 1 end location for trips in North America this year.

According to Lime’s “2025 Ride Replay,” released Monday, electric scooter and bike-share riders took 9.7 million trips in Seattle — a 61% jump from 2024’s total.

Areas around the Market proved to be a popular spot to end trips for residents and tourists alike. Other highlights included:

• The highest Lime ridership month in Seattle was August, with more than 1.3 million rides. 
• The single highest ridership day was Sept. 27, with just under 60,000 trips.
• In May, Seattle was the first city in the world to launch the new LimeGlider. More than 1.8 million trips have been recorded since then.

Lime, along with Bird, is part of the City of Seattle’s e-bike and scooter-share micromobility program that allows people to rent the devices for short trips.

The Seattle Department of Transportation said this fall that it is adding more than 200 new bike and scooter “corrals” downtown and in other parts of the city to encourage proper parking and alleviate sidewalk clutter.

Lime offers its Ride Replay experience as a recap for users’ year of riding. This year’s theme is celestial, and riders who opted in to receive Lime emails will get their “ride-dentity” based on how, when and where they moved in 2025. Riders who explored multiple cities may find they’re an “Expert Explorer,” while loyal locals might earn the title of “Local Legend.”

San Francisco-based Lime is privately owned. The company took over the Jump bike-share business and was backed by a $170 million investment round led by Uber, Alphabet, Bain Capital and GV in 2020.

[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series and 2026 event, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the people, companies, and ideas behind the rise of AI agents.]

Imagine telling your AI assistant that you need a new winter jacket. It already knows your style preferences and budget from previous purchases. The AI searches across dozens of retailers, analyzes reviews, checks for sales, and comes back with a list of ranked options.

You pick one you like. The AI asks if you want to wait until the price drops. A week later, there’s a sale. The AI completes the purchase, applies loyalty points, selects the fastest free shipping option, and sends you a confirmation. Your jacket shows up within days.

This is the promise of “agentic commerce” — AI systems that research, compare, and even buy on your behalf. Tech giants, startups, and retailers are all racing to build it. McKinsey projects the market could reach $1 trillion in the U.S. alone by 2030.

For the latest installment in our Agents of Transformation series, we interviewed startup founders, consumer brand marketing leaders, industry analysts, and others to better understand how agentic commerce could change the way we shop — now, in the future, or maybe not much at all.

Some key takeaways from our reporting:

• Agentic commerce could happen within a retailer’s “owned environments,” such as a website or app. Or it could be in a third-party platform, such as ChatGPT or Gemini.
• There is a lot of hype around agentic commerce, but today’s tools look more like fancy search than truly autonomous shopping.
• New behind-the-scenes technology infrastructure is emerging to let AI agents talk to retail sites, payments services, and login systems.
• Amazon sits at the center of the shift, simultaneously defending its ad-driven marketplace from outside agents and testing its own AI features.
• Brands are rethinking everything from how their sites show up in search to how their homepages are laid out.
• There are new security concerns as agents roam the open web and can be tricked by bad actors. Nearly 80% of financial institution leaders surveyed by Accenture expect that fraud will increase due to agentic commerce.

Major players are making moves.

• OpenAI just released a shopping research experience and announced a partnership with Walmart to let customers complete purchases within ChatGPT.
• Google rolled out agentic checkout options last month.
• Perplexity partnered with PayPal just before Black Friday.

Adobe reported that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites jumped 670% year-over-year on Cyber Monday.

But it’s still early days. For ChatGPT, referrals to e-commerce apps represented only 0.82% of all sessions over Thanksgiving weekend. In a recent OpenAI study of about 1.1 million ChatGPT conversations, 2.1% of activity was classified as “Purchasable Products.”

There’s still a big gap between the pitch and what these tools can actually do today. Practical use cases remain limited.

“I am shocked at the promises versus reality,” said Emily Pfeiffer, a principal analyst and digital business expert with Forrester.

Still, the builders we spoke with see the current moment as the beginning of a fundamental shift.

“I think this is much bigger than even the invention of the online store,” said Jonathan Arena, co-founder of e-commerce AI startup New Generation.

Bots meet the buy button

McKinsey outlines three main ways agentic commerce could work:

• Agent-to-site (an AI assistant interacting directly with a retailer’s site)
• Agent-to-agent (a shopper’s agent working with a seller’s agent to complete a purchase)
• Brokered agent-to-site (an intermediary platform routing requests between agents and retailer sites)

Today’s reality is closer to a fancy search than full autonomy. AI chatbots can suggest products, but completing a purchase still typically requires clicking through to a retailer’s site. A handful of retailers have experimented with checkout-in-chat, but Pfeiffer said some polished demos don’t actually work in the real world.

“The experiences that are out there today, in my opinion, are extremely premature,” she said.

There’s also a broader debate about whether AI shopping assistants are solving a problem that doesn’t exist for specific purchase categories. For fashion, gifts, home decor — things where discovery is part of the value — many consumers may not want an agent to shortcut that process.

Agentic commerce could work best for low-consideration, commodity purchases — like household staples and replenishment items.

The concept becomes more complex outside of a brand’s own site or app, in AI search tools where an agent might eventually handle the entire shopping process without a user ever opening a retailer’s website. Pfeiffer believes this is where truly autonomous commerce is most likely to show up, though probably in specific situations rather than as a full replacement for browsing.

But she said any substantial shifts will take time. “If we get there, it’s not soon,” Pfeiffer said.

Teaching the internet to talk to AI

Agentic commerce isn’t possible without the right infrastructure. E-commerce websites were designed for humans typing keywords into a browser — not AI agents that need to read pages and place orders on their own.

New tools are starting to fill that gap.

• Anthropic has released the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardizes how AI agents share context across tools and platforms.
• Google launched the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) in September, providing a framework for agents to make verifiable purchases.
• OpenAI, working with Stripe, has developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) for completing transactions within ChatGPT.

For retailers, this patchwork can be confusing and expensive, especially as there’s no guarantee which protocol will become dominant.

“Each protocol is a burden for the merchant,” said Kumar Senthil, founder of Firmly, a Seattle-area startup building software that hides some of this complexity. His company, which recently partnered with Perplexity, lets merchants connect to multiple protocols through a single interface.

Firmly is trying to solve a basic problem: merchants can’t afford to integrate with every AI platform, but they also don’t want to miss out on any of them.

Senthil, who previously built Samsung’s e-commerce platform, said online retailers need to have “microstores” everywhere. Their traditional websites, he predicts, will go dark.

“The stores are going to be distributed across the internet,” he said.

But AI assistants need to draw on data from somewhere — which means a brand’s homepage could still serve an important purpose, even if the act of purchasing gets dispersed.

Brands like Brooks Running are refocusing their sites to make them easy for AI systems to read and understand. “We’re continuing to emphasize crawling, indexing, and ranking technical SEO opportunities through the lens of AI,” said Ryan Ngo, vice president of North America marketing and e-commerce at the Seattle-based company.

Beyond making a website “AI-ready,” Arena said brands should let shoppers ask questions about their products in plain language, using built-in AI chat on their own sites. “People are going to be frustrated that your website can’t answer them,” he said.

In Pfeiffer’s view, the bigger strategic risk lies in places brands don’t control — AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT or Gemini that could become powerful new gateways for finding and buying products. In that world, brands face the same decisions they once confronted with Amazon: what to share in each place people might shop, what to keep exclusive, and how to protect pricing and sensitive data.

What happens to Amazon?

Amazon helped shape modern online shopping when the Seattle-based giant started selling books on the internet more than three decades ago. The company is now a giant in online retail, and it’s staring at another potential shift with the rise of agentic commerce.

Amazon is in a tricky spot. The company captures roughly 40% of U.S. e-commerce spending and has a fast-growing advertising business that brings in around $70 billion a year — revenue that depends on humans browsing and clicking.

In November, Amazon sued Perplexity to stop the startup from using its AI browser agent to make purchases on its marketplace, citing computer fraud laws and security risks, along with a “significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience it provides.” Amazon has maintained what Bloomberg described as “a walled garden” that doesn’t allow autonomous shopping on its site.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas called the lawsuit “a bully tactic” and argued consumers should be free to use whatever AI assistant they prefer.

“Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers,” Srinivas wrote. “But Amazon doesn’t care. They’re more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged on a recent earnings call that agentic commerce “has a chance to be really good for e-commerce” and said that he expects the company to partner with third-party agents over time. But he also said agents “aren’t very good” at personalization and often display incorrect pricing and delivery estimates.

“So we’ve got to find a way to make the customer experience better and have the right exchange value,” Jassy said. 

Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, now has more than 250 million active customers. Amazon says that customers using the assistant during a shopping trip are 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

The company has also been testing a “Buy For Me” feature that lets customers purchase products from other brands’ sites, from inside Amazon’s mobile shopping app.

Senthil, the Firmly CEO, sees Amazon as potentially vulnerable. He questioned whether Amazon’s delivery speed advantage — long considered a competitive moat — will matter as much in a world where consumers place less emphasis on faster shipping times.

The rise of third-party AI agents, such as Perplexity’s Comet browser, could also weaken Amazon’s grip on customers. E-commerce journalist Jason Del Rey noted that if agents own the relationship and steer shoppers across sites, Amazon risks looking more like fulfillment infrastructure. That raises a long-term question, he said — if agents sit between shoppers and stores, who ends up capturing most of the value?

But others don’t expect AI tools to displace Amazon for now.

“It is highly unlikely that ChatGPT will be a dominant shopping cart mainly because e-commerce isn’t a problem that needs fixed,” said Sucharita Kodali, a retail industry analyst with Forrester. “It’s perfectly easy to buy on Amazon as hundreds of millions of people around the world already do every year.”

Kodali added: “It’s unclear what value ChatGPT is bringing to retailers, other than dis-intermediating Google.”

Last month Google unveiled a suite of AI shopping features powered by Gemini, including “agentic checkout,” which lets users set rules such as maximum spend or product specifications. It’s also building the infrastructure layer with AP2.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is positioning itself to help retailers and brands adapt to agentic commerce, whether building assistants into their websites or surfacing their offerings in third-party chatbots.

“We prioritize robust frameworks, open standards, and trust infrastructure so intelligent agents can operate reliably and securely throughout the commerce ecosystem,” said Kathleen Mitford, corporate vice president of global industry at Microsoft, responding to questions via email.

When AI knows you’re going on vacation

Finding the perfect winter coat based on your personal preferences may be just the start when it comes to AI assistants knowing what to purchase for you.

“Imagine an agent recognizing that the bathing suit you’re buying isn’t just another item, but part of preparing for an upcoming vacation and tailoring recommendations accordingly,” Mitford said.

That example would require consumers to offer up more personal data such as calendars and budget information. But it could enable a better experience, according to Arena.

“We’re talking about a brand being able to personalize experiences to all of their customers across the internet — not only on a first-party website that they own,” he said.

John Larson, who helped launch business messaging company Zipwhip (acquired by Twilio), said conversational commerce is evolving toward two-way interactions, enabling retailers to have more effective interactions with customers.

“We do believe that real conversational commerce leveraging agentic AI is absolutely the future,” said Larson, now an investor in Seattle startup Ambassador. “You’re getting your needs met, and you’re having a conversation.”

Lorrin Pascoe, CMO at Vancouver, B.C.-based footwear retailer Vessi, said he believes AI agents will become an important way to reach customers. “For us, it’s really realizing that this isn’t a gimmick,” he said. “It is something that is foundational in changing behaviors.”

Vessi began in 2018 as an online-only footwear company. This month, it’s opening its first U.S. store in Bellevue, Wash. — reversing the course that brick-and-mortar retailers took when e-commerce pushed them online. It’s a reminder that retail rarely follows a predictable path, and in the same way, there’s no telling where agentic commerce will ultimately land.

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space and California-based Impulse Space say they’ve successfully demonstrated an in-space satellite rendezvous during a mission that handed over control of an Impulse Mira spacecraft to Starfish’s guidance and navigation system.

The demonstration was code-named Remora, in honor of a fish that attaches itself to other marine animals. Operation Remora was added to Mira’s agenda for Impulse Space’s LEO Express 2 mission, which was launched in January. Impulse and Starfish waited until the Mira spacecraft completed its primary satellite deployment tasks for LEO Express 2. Then they spent several weeks monitoring the maneuvers for Remora.

“About a month ago, we concluded the major steps here,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire. “Since then, we’ve been getting data down and understanding the full story. And the full story is incredible.”

Remora was kept under wraps until today, primarily because both companies wanted to make sure that the demonstration actually worked as planned. “There was never a guarantee that there would be an outcome here,” Bennett explained. “And so what we wanted to do is talk about it when there was something to talk about.”

Bennett said the demonstration showed that Starfish’s software suite for guidance, navigation and control could be used on a different company’s satellite to make an autonomous approach to another spacecraft in orbit.

“Remora became definitely a first for us, in terms of being able to allow a whole new vehicle platform to autonomously do this full mission, all the way in and through,” he said. “Basically, we had no operator commands necessary for the vehicle to fly itself all the way down to 1,200 meters, take a bunch of pictures and then autonomously egress back out to further distances.”

Before launch, the LEO Express 2 Mira was equipped with a peripheral flight computer that was loaded with Starfish’s Cetacean and Cephalopod software. During the Remora mission, that Mira spacecraft used Starfish’s guidance system and a single lightweight camera system supplied by TRL11 to close in on a different Mira that had been used for Impulse Space’s LEO Express 1 mission.

As the distance decreased from about 100 kilometers (62 miles) to roughly 1,200 meters (three-quarters of a mile), Starfish’s software processed the camera imagery to generate estimates of relative position. Then it computed optimal orbital trajectories and commanded Mira’s thrusters to fire accordingly.

Starfish is working on an in-house spacecraft called Otter that will be capable of approaching and docking with other objects in orbit to conduct inspections, perform orbital servicing or get rid of space debris. Bennett said the success of the Remora mission could open up new market opportunities that don’t depend on Otter.

“What we’re trying to show is that you don’t have to design a vehicle just for RPO [rendezvous and proximity operations] and docking,” Bennett said. “You can design the vehicle for the core mission that it needs to do in addition to that. … What we’re trying to do is remove this high barrier to having RPO and docking be a mainstay in our industry.”

Eric Romo, president and chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said Remora was a plus for his company as well.

“Our Mira spacecraft uses high-thrust chemical propulsion, and what that means is, we’re typically pretty good at moving really quickly between two points in space,” he told GeekWire. But Romo said some potential customers have wondered whether Mira’s high-thrust system had the precision and accuracy that would be required when operating near another spacecraft.

For those customers, the Remora mission showed that there’s no trade-off between speed and accuracy, and that Mira “has the commandability and the controllability you need to do this type of proximity operation,” Romo said.

Bennett and Romo both said their companies would look at future opportunities for collaboration. “For us, the path forward is to pull it away from just a pure demonstration mission to a truly day-to-day capability that we rely on and build on,” Bennett said. “We’re very fortunate that Impulse was our partner up to this point, and I think there are plenty of opportunities for us to be partners going forward.”

In the meantime, both companies are busy with other projects. Starfish Space is in the midst of an Otter Pup 2 test mission that was launched in June — and the company has its first three full-scale Otter missions lined up for NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the SES satellite company (which acquired Intelsat) in the 2026-2027 time frame.

Impulse Space’s third Mira spacecraft was launched last month to deploy and host payloads for the LEO Express 3 mission. Looking ahead, Impulse is pursuing a partnership with Anduril to conduct a high-precision rendezvous and proximity operations mission in geosynchronous Earth orbit in 2026. And looking even further ahead, the company has laid out a roadmap for sending medium-sized payloads to the moon.

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 Dec. 7, 2025.

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Most popular stories on GeekWire

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At the GeekWire Gala this week, we spent time talking backstage with five of this year’s Uncommon Thinkers — the inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs who were selected in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners for their work transforming industries and the world. 

You can hear the full conversations on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. As I mentioned at the end, I came away with an unexpected sense of optimism. 

Jeff Thornburg of Portal Space Systems spent years building rocket engines for Elon Musk at SpaceX and Paul Allen at Stratolaunch. Now he and his team are reviving a NASA concept from decades ago: spacecraft propelled by focused sunlight.

When I asked what the world will look like “if Portal succeeds,” he made a classic entrepreneurial pivot: “When we’re successful,” he said, “we become the backbone of Earth-Moon logistics.” 

From there, he said, it’s about protecting orbits for commerce, supporting human presence on the moon, and eventually pushing out to Jupiter’s moons.

[Read the profile.] 

Anindya Roy of Lila Biologics is using AI to design proteins from scratch — molecules that have never existed in nature — to fight cancer. He trained in David Baker’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UW, so he saw the before and after of machine learning’s impact on the field.

Before: success rates below 1%, ordering hundreds of thousands of designs to find one that worked. Now: 5-20% success rates, ordering a few hundred designs to find a drug candidate. 

“If you told me a couple of years ago that we can design an antibody from a computer, I would not believe you,” he said.

[Read the profile.]

Jay Graber of Bluesky runs the decentralized social network that has  become a leading alternative to X. But while most tech CEOs build moats, she and her team are building a protocol designed to help users leave. 

She talks about Bluesky and the underlying AT Protocol as a “collective organism,” and describes her role as guiding and stewarding the ecosystem rather than controlling it.

The industry and the world would be better off, she says, if leaders would think about their role “more as guides and stewards, rather than just dictators or emperors as they like to style themselves.”

[Read the profile.]

Kiana Ehsani of Vercept came to Seattle from Iran for her PhD, spent four years at the Allen Institute for AI, and is now competing with OpenAI and Google in the AI agent space with a fraction of their resources.

The ultimate vision is to help people move beyond mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen, letting them interact with computers the way they’d talk to a coworker.

AI agents are still early, she cautions. “Think of ChatGPT three years ago. Don’t think of it today.” Her advice for getting started with AI agents: “Start small, start with simple tasks that you don’t want to do, and then slowly build on top of it to see the magic.”

[Read the profile.]

Brian Pinkard of Aquagga is tackling forever chemicals, the PFAS compounds that have spread through our water, food chain, and bloodstreams. The industry standard is to filter them out and then landfill or incinerate the waste, approaches that don’t truly solve the problem and can simply move it elsewhere.

Aquagga uses technology originally designed to destroy chemical weapons to break PFAS down into inert salts under extreme heat and pressure. Pinkard didn’t believe it was possible until he saw the data. “I’m a skeptic, I’m cynical, I’m a scientist,” he said. “I wanted to see proof.”

His bigger vision is to transform hazardous waste processing entirely. Today, huge volumes of wastewater are trucked to incinerators and burned — which he calls “thermodynamic insanity.”

[Read the profile.]

We’ll speak on a future episode with our sixth honoree, Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, the startup making WiFi-enabled landline phones to help kids connect without screens.

Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

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

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

Plenty of people wear their heart on their sleeve. Yerjasn (Jason) Ait wore his resume on his chest.

Smartly taking advantage of an event attended by more than 750 members of Seattle’s tech community, Ait showed up at the GeekWire Gala Thursday night sporting a white T-shirt with his resume printed on the front.

For those who missed the fine print, a larger notice across his back read, “Internship Wanted. CV’s on the front.”

During a time of mass layoffs and a tough labor market, when many tech job seekers are having an unusually difficult time landing their next gig, Ait’s fashion choice was a prime example of reading the room — or having it read him.

“I was wondering how I can stand out in a crowd, because I’m an international student, my English is not perfect, and I’m still learning a lot of things,” Ait told GeekWire.

He grew up in Kazakhstan in the city of Almaty and moved to the U.S. a year and half ago to get his Master’s in Communication at the University of Washington.

“It was a big dream when I was a kid to study abroad, especially in the best university,” he said.

Ait is due to graduate in June, and, like the T-shirt says, he’s looking for an internship or early career role that would utilize his skills in people management, product development, problem solving, and more.

The T-shirt definitely got people’s attention at the Gala, where Ait said 25 or 30 attendees tapped him on the shoulder to compliment his idea or extend a business card. It was only his second time attending an event of that kind, and there was some fear to overcome.

“I was so scared to speak with people who are very successful — they’re professionals, experts — and it was like imposter syndrome at the beginning,” he said. “Somehow I overcame this fear and just started talking with people. And that’s fun.”

Ait was especially frazzled because he was still getting the T-shirt printed two hours before the event, and a QR code linking to his digital resume was supposed to be part of the design but didn’t make it. Then he had to sit in Seattle traffic getting south to the Showbox SoDo.

The struggle to find work is a real one for people who have far fewer obstacles to overcome than some of the ones Ait has faced. Indeed recently reported on how tech-related job postings remain stuck well below pre-pandemic levels in Seattle. Macroeconomic headwinds and a climate of change in the artificial intelligence era add to increased uncertainty.

“I had everything in my home country. I had a nice job, nice house. It was a great comfort zone,” Ait said. “But I challenged myself to be here in a new country with a total new environment, new language, new people. And sometimes I felt kind of insecure, unsure what I’m doing. But right now, I can see I’m on the right direction. Maybe someday I’ll find my dream job.”

The morning after the Gala, Ait wrote a post on LinkedIn about some of the insights he gained from wearing the shirt. He offered it up as a “small playbook for international students” who are also looking for work or an internship.

Among what he learned: “Go to more events like this. It’s a muscle. You train it. Each time, I get better — more confident, more sharp, more clear.”

Kevin Leneway, a veteran engineering leader at the Pioneer Square Labs startup incubator in Seattle, is joining OpenAI as a solutions architect on the company’s startups team.

Leneway, a longtime member of the Seattle tech community, has led engineering efforts at PSL since 2017. Before that, he co-founded presentation software startup Haiku Deck in 2010 and was a developer evangelist at Microsoft for five years.

In a LinkedIn post, Leneway said he’ll remain in Seattle and continue his work with local startups. “I’ll find out more details about the specifics of the role soon, but my personal goal is to make a tighter connection between OpenAI and the Seattle startup ecosystem,” he said.

The hire reflects OpenAI’s growing presence in the Seattle region. The AI giant opened an office in Bellevue, Wash., in 2024, and acquired product development platform Statsig for $1.1 billion earlier this year.

— Madrona hired Eric Wong as director of portfolio growth. Wong joins the Seattle venture firm after marketing leadership stints at Symend, Jirav, Prompt.io, Conga, Tier 3, Docusign, and other companies.

In his new role, Wong will help Madrona’s portfolio companies with their go-to-market strategies. “I have had many opportunities in my career, but I can sincerely say, this is the one I am most excited about,” he said on LinkedIn.

— Seattle healthcare tech startup CueZen added Dr. Ramesh Rajentheran as CFO and head of Asia. Rajentheran has more than two decades of experience at the intersection of healthcare and finance. He co-founded MiyaHealth and Hisential, and is an operating partner at TVM Capital Healthcare.

CueZen, which sells software designed to boost personalized healthcare programs, raised $5 million earlier this year.

The halls have officially been tech’d.

Humans and robots rubbed shoulders and partied Thursday night at the 2025 GeekWire Gala as our annual holiday extravaganza drew more than 750 members of Seattle’s tech community to the Showbox SoDo.

The geeky event — presented by title sponsor First Tech Federal Credit Union — featured games, karaoke, dancing, food, drink, networking and plenty of good times.

• A Selfiebot roamed the floor capturing images of attendees and two Portraitbots drew quick caricatures.
• Robots raced at another station while people also had their pictures snapped in a robot photo booth.
• There was an espresso martini printer, specially printed macaroon cookies, a candy bar, a walking oyster bar and much more.

For the third year, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners once again recognized the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. The honorees included: 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; and Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky.

Special thanks to our 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, Prime Team Partners, and Regence.

Go here to see photos from the The Social Production’s robotic roaming photo booth, sponsored by Pilot.

Thanks again to everyone for making our party your party. Happy holidays!

Keep scrolling for more photos from the 2025 GeekWire Gala:

“All this started with a really hot summer day in ’21,” said Chris Muench, sitting in a small conference room at Hyviva, his startup based in Redmond, Wash.

The Pacific Northwest was being scorched in a heat dome and Muench’s power went out at his home in nearby Duvall. The experience led him to purchase solar panels, but he also wanted to capture the excess power that was generated when the sun was shining its brightest, socking it away for when it wasn’t.

That led Muench and his wife, Sanja, to launch Hyviva in 2023. While many companies use the excess solar power to charge traditional batteries that hold the energy, this startup is harnessing the surplus power to turn water into hydrogen and storing that. The hydrogen is then turned back into energy via fuel cells when the electricity is needed.

This month, the business is shipping its first devices to customers.

Hyviva is initially targeting residential solar installations, a potentially ripe market as long-standing policies allowing homeowners to sell their unneeded solar power back to utilities are being phased out in many places. That excess power can total 20% or more of a household’s daily energy generation, according to a solar trade group.

“That’s the catalyst for storage,” said Paul Owen, chief marketing officer. “You’ve got this opportunity that’s going to waste right now.”

Stored solar power can also reduce a home’s reliance on utility-provided electricity — which is getting more expensive — and keep the lights on and fridge running during power outages.

A hydrogen storage solution

Hyviva’s device is a little narrower than a standard refrigerator, built from stacked units with a shiny black casing. Here’s how it works:

• Water plumbed into the system goes into an electrolyzer that splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The excess energy from the solar panels essentially powers the electrolyzer.
• The hydrogen flows into slender, stainless steel tanks containing a metal that binds the gas, forming a metal hydride that stores the hydrogen.
• When power is needed, the metal hydride is heated, releasing the hydrogen that flows into fuel cells that convert it to electricity.
• All of the electrical and plumbing hardware are integrated into the structure of the unit, so installation requires little skilled labor.
• Because of their modularity, the systems are easy to expand to increase storage capacity.

“Every module can be plugged into another module without the need of a hydrogen expert,” Chris Muench said. “Just ‘Lego brick’ them together, and then you decide how much power draw do you want, how much storage do you want, how much hydrogen you want to generate.”

The Hyviva technology connects to an existing solar system’s inverter, which manages electricity flow. The startup’s software then optimizes the flow of energy into the home, balancing inputs from the grid, solar panels and the storage device.

The five-person company is promoting its technology online and was at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas last January. Hyviva’s initial customers are in Europe and the first units are being built in Germany. The startup can also do manufacturing in Redmond for U.S. customers.

Costs and competition

Hyviva’s biggest U.S. rival is the Tesla Powerwall system that uses conventional lithium-ion batteries to hold power. The company reported $7.4 billion in revenue last year from energy generation, and that number has continued to climb.

Hyviva touts its product’s competitive features across performance, safety and longevity. The startup’s basic system holds more power — 33.6 kilowatt hours to Tesla’s 13.5 kWh. While blazes are uncommon, lithium ion batteries pose a fire risk that’s greater than the hydrogen present in a Hyviva device for short periods. And conventional batteries lose capacity over time, while the metal hydride retains its hydrogen storage capabilities for decades.

The startup, however, faces big hurdles when it comes to costs.

Tesla’s Powerwall 3 costs roughly $15,000, including the system and installation costs, while a Hyviva unit is priced at about $40,000.

But when it comes to scaling the storage capacity, the cost advantage flips as it’s cheaper and easier to add hydrogen storage to the Hyviva system. So a 90-kilowatt hour setup is about $50,000 for the startup, while the company estimates a comparable Tesla system would cost $82,000 installed.

To put the capacity in perspective, a U.S. single-family household consumes around 80 kilowatt hours of power per day on average. The cost benefits of the larger deployments continue amplifying for commercial- and industrial-scale applications, the company said.

The broader picture

As power demand keeps expanding globally, experts estimate that $1.2 trillion worth of battery energy storage will be needed through 2034. That escalating need is reflected in pockets of growth in the sector, including a Texas startup called Base Power that leases batteries to homeowners and recently announced $1 billion in new funding. And energy storage is being paired with data centers to reduce their power grid impacts, including at an Oregon campus that’s installing 31 megawatts of batteries.

At the same time, Hyviva and others face political headwinds at the federal level as the current administration pushes policies and budgets that hobble renewable energy companies and deployments.

But the startup is attracting interest, said Chief Operations Officer John Traynor. It has funding from an angel investor and reports having dozens of potential customers, with commercial sites and utilities reaching out as well.

“That’s given us the confidence that we’re on the right track,” Traynor said.

Editor’s note: Story updated to elaborate on how the energy storage system works.

Ridwell, the Seattle startup that collects plastic and other hard-to-recycle items from consumers, keeps growing its footprint across the U.S.

The company recently expanded beyond the home pickup bins where it got its start with a new mail-in service that has already attracted about 20,000 users in recent months.

It is also reeling in more investment. A new SEC filing reveals the company has raised $15 million in fresh cash. Ridwell CEO Ryan Metzger declined to comment on the filing.

Metzger, a former director at Madrona and Zulily, told GeekWire that the mail-in service has grown “remarkably,” helping Ridwell extend its reach to 130,000 customers in all 50 states.

Customers can recycle multi-layer plastic such as bags for chips or candy wrappers, as well as plastic film, which includes grocery bags and bubble wrap, by packing it all in a bag provided by Ridwell. They schedule a home pickup through Ridwell’s integration with the U.S. Postal Service and then track their garbage’s recycling journey online.

There’s no monthly subscription like there is with Ridwell bin pickups. Customers pay $30 to start and about $9 for each return, spaced out however often they need the service.

Metzger has been promoting the new offering at nearly 200 community meetups throughout the country. “It’s a great way to get the word out and really build adoption amongst people who are most passionate,” he said.

Ridwell’s traditional pickup service still operates across eight metro areas in seven states: Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota and Texas. Customers pay $20 for that monthly service in which plastics and other add-ons such as Styrofoam or batteries are collected by Ridwell drivers.

Metzger said that as adoption grows in a certain region, that region can be turned into a pickup area, with a Ridwell facility, drivers and other workers. The new funding will facilitate that growth. All of the materials from pickup and mail-in are routed to 10 Ridwell-run processing facilities around the country.

Ridwell, which employs about 250 people, sorts, bales, and ships materials such as multi-layer plastic to a variety of partners, who give the material a second life. For instance, Trex makes composite decking materials; Hydroblox makes water drainage material; and ByFusion makes construction-grade building blocks.

Metzger called the mail-in service’s integration with the Postal Service a unique user experience. Through the Ridwell website, customers can schedule a pickup for a carrier who will grab a bag of recycling during a typical mail drop.

Because the practice of recycling and whether it actually works or makes a difference environmentally has been called into question in recent years, Metzger said it’s important to show customers the journey of their materials.

“We try to do some of what e-commerce has built over decades, and bring that to the reverse side of things,” he said of Ridwell’s package tracking. “So when you give us stuff, you see where it goes, the fact that it actually made it there, and what it gets turned into.”

Metzger launched Ridwell in 2018 after he and his then-7-year-old son were trying to get rid of dead batteries and realized it wasn’t that easy.

During his talks with community members — from Port Townsend, Wash., to Concord, Mass. — Metzger likes to demonstrate the physical result of recycling, showing off a piece of Trex or Hydroblox.

“I can say, ‘Here’s all this stuff that you can put in that bag, and then here’s what it turns into,'” Metzger said. “There is a trust barrier that we’re overcoming, so it’s important to meet people and look at them face to face and show them what happens to it.”

Previously:

• Ridwell starts collecting more difficult types of plastic as recycling startup grows to seven states
• Behind the recycling scenes at Ridwell: Seattle startup growing as fast as piles of plastic and more

Tonight’s the night for the GeekWire Gala, our annual holiday extravaganza in Seattle, featuring food, drinks, music, dancing, karaoke, games and the best chance to network with more than 700 fellow tech community members.

There are still a few last-minute tickets available, so grab one now for yourself or wrangle some co-workers for a festive night on the town. Make our holiday party your holiday party!

For those attending, here’s a rundown of what to expect. If you have questions, please email us at events@geekwire.com. Big thanks to First Tech Federal Credit Union, the GeekWire Gala title sponsor.

When: Thursday, Dec. 11., from 6 to 10 p.m.

Where: Showbox SoDo, 1700 1st Ave S., a few blocks from T-Mobile Park.

Parking: There are several pay lots within a 2-minute walk of the venue. There is also additional parking information here.

Do I need to bring a physical ticket? No. If you are registered, we’ll check your ID at registration, and provide your name badge. 

Is there assigned seating at tables? No. The Gala is an open floor plan and a free-flowing party, with a number of activities. It is not a sit-down dinner, and there are no assigned tables.  

Are tickets still available? Yes. If you have friends or colleagues who’d like to attend, please encourage them to pre-register on the event site here. 

Festivities: The festive night includes food, drinks, DJ, karaoke, custom printed macarons, candy bar, giant LED games, giveaways and more.

Attire: You have the rare license to don cocktail attire in Seattle. Or wear whatever you want. Tuxedos? Sure. Geeky T-shirts? Yep. Even better, break out your fiercest festive fashion. See fashion photos from past GeekWire Galas here. 

Food: The tasty appetizers will be heavy, but it’s not dinner. And drinks will include coffee, beer, signature cocktails and more.

Age limit: The GeekWire Gala is a 21+ event. Attendees must have valid ID to enter.

Social media: The official hashtag of the 2024 GeekWire Gala is #GWGala on X, Facebook, and Instagram.

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. Read our profiles of the six honorees.

Our gold sponsors are Greater Seattle Partners, Pilot, and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors include MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, IDA Ireland, Microsoft for Startups, gone.com, and Regence.

Seattle-based mental health startup Joon Care has been acquired by Handspring Health, a New York-based health tech company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“The acquisition is a major step toward building the most clinically rigorous and digitally engaging platform for youth and family mental healthcare in the country,” said Sahil Choudhry, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Handspring, in a LinkedIn post.

Joon launched in 2019 to provide online care for teens and young adults, pairing digital tools with virtual therapy sessions. The company serves patients 13- to 26-years-old who need help with anxiety, depression, disordered eating, sexual and gender identity, academic problems and other challenges. The course of therapy typically runs 16 weeks. The company’s program emphasizes its use of evidence-based care strategies and patient assessments to track progress.

Joon spun out of Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs (PSL) and raised an initial $3.5 million round in 2020. Two years ago, it announced an additional $6 million investment, which would provide two to three years of operations, CEO Emily Pesce said at the time.

Handspring said in a press release that it would be integrating the companies’ “expert teams,” but did not say if all of Joon’s employees would be retained. The company has roughly 50 employees, based on information on LinkedIn.

GeekWire reached out to Pesce and will update the story if we hear back.

Handspring launched in 2021 and has raised $18.2 million, according to PitchBook. It also provides virtual therapy and online support, serving a slightly larger demographic with patients from 8- to 29-years-old.

Both companies operate multi-state platforms. Joon is licensed to provide care in Washington, Oregon, California, Texas, New York, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Its treatment is covered by 16 insurance companies, according to its website, and includes national giants Aetna and UnitedHealthcare.

Joon also launched a partnership in 2023 with the City of Seattle to provide free care to clients who are referred to the startup through the city’s human services programs. The collaboration appears to be ongoing, and Handspring said it would continue serving families under Joon’s existing contracts with government agencies, as well as treatment covered by insurance companies.

Pesce was a finalist for Startup CEO of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards.