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Does everyone in Seattle hate AI?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on this topic? Continue the discussion on LinkedIn.

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

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Fintech startup SecureSave, a 2020 spinout of Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs, has been acquired by Wisconsin-based HSA Bank.

SecureSave helps employers offer a financial wellness benefit to workers beyond their paycheck in the form of an emergency savings account (ESA). HSA Bank is a division of Webster Bank and Webster Financial Corp. and is one of the nation’s leaders in healthcare savings and spending accounts.

Terms of the deal, completed Thursday, were not disclosed.

SecureSave employs 23 people full time, most of whom are in the Seattle area, and will continue to operate its current platform and serve its clients.

The startup was co-founded by CEO Devin Miller, CTO Bassam Saliba, and TV personality and best-selling author Suze Orman.

Miller previously led Balance Financial, a Seattle-area startup acquired by Blucora’s TaxAct subsidiary in 2013. He later joined Guidant Financial as executive vice president and later president. Saliba is another longtime entrepreneur who sold Avado to WebMD in 2013 and was a board member/acting CTO at Balance Financial alongside Miller.

SecureSave raised about $28 million to date, with venture backing from PSL, Seachange and IA Ventures, and three banks — Truist, Stearns and Webster.

Miller, who is based in Spokane, Wash., said SecureSave has supported more than 60,000 active emergency savings account holders who have saved more than $100 million to date.

Miller said the company had a strong year of growth and that interest in the category can be evidenced by legislation proposed this week in Congress. U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Todd Young (R-IN) introduced the Emergency Savings Enhancement Act, aimed at helping American workers and families save for unexpected expenses without having to tap into their retirement accounts.

In a post on LinkedIn, Miller wrote about how the HSA deal came together and why it will be “a massive leap forward for ESAs.”

Miller pitched SecureSave during the 2022 season of GeekWire’s “Elevator Pitch” series.

On season one of Build Mode: Product, Meet Market, we explore what it really takes to get your product into the hands of customers. 

— Jordan Arnold is the new director of the Washington State Broadband Office within the Department of Commerce, effective Jan. 2.

Under the Biden administration, Arnold served as a senior policy advisor on the Infrastructure Implementation Team within the Office of the Chief of Staff. Her work focused on helping lead the $65 billion broadband portfolio, which included implementation of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program and other initiatives.

“Jordan has a deep understanding of what it takes to help communities succeed in a digital world,” said Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn in statement. “Her background working at the highest policy levels in the Biden White House will help power Washington forward in our efforts to connect everyone to the internet.”

— Rebecca Lovell has taken the role of interim president and CEO of Greater Seattle Partners (GSP), a regional public-private economic development organization. She has served as chief operating officer of the group for nearly three years.

Lovell’s past roles include CEO of Denali Founder Consulting, executive director of Madrona Venture Group’s Create33, and Seattle’s interim director of Economic Development.

“Rebecca has been a key leader in our organization’s success, and we are delighted to see her at the helm of GSP. She energizes the community, the GSP team and our investors,” said Shane Jones, chair of GSP’s board of directors and a senior vice president at Alaska Airlines, in a statement.

Lovell is succeeding Brian Surratt, who took the presidency in 2022 and was recently appointed deputy mayor of the City of Seattle by Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson.

“We deeply appreciate Brian’s service, commitment and transformational leadership and are excited to see him in this strategic role with the City of Seattle,” Jones said.

Prior to Greater Seattle Partners, Surratt led a community development group, was VP at Alexandria Real Estate and spent 13 years with Seattle’s Economic Development agency, including as director.

— Jason Barnwell, a former Microsoft legal executive, is now chief legal officer for Agiloft, a California company providing software that helps businesses manage their contracts and legal agreements.

“Jason knows how to unlock the potential of legal teams, harness AI and data, and make contracting a true driver of business value,” said Agiloft CEO Eric Laughlin in a statement.

Barnwell was with the tech giant for more 15 years in a variety of legal roles. He left the position of general manager and associate general counsel for Monetization and Business Planning. Barnwell will remain in the Seattle area. On LinkedIn, he thanked his Microsoft colleagues for their support and leadership opportunities, noting that he remains “a cheerleader for Microsoft and its people.”

— Elena Winters has joined Brazil’s Elea Data Centers as vice president of international business. Seattle-based Winters was previously at Meta for more than eight years in infrastructure organization roles focused on data center and site selection. She will remain in Washington, leading Elea’s U.S. and international expansion strategy.

“Now, I’m stepping into a new challenge — gaining experience on the other side of the business, partnering closely with hyperscalers (not working for them!) to help accelerate the growth of AI infrastructure in LATAM,” Winters said on LinkedIn.

— Seattle startup Aarden AI named Michael Gleason as its staff data scientist. The company recently came out of stealth and offers an AI platform that helps landowners research and navigate deals with developers eager to build data centers, clean energy installations, housing and other uses. Gleason most recently worked as a geospatial data scientist at a national laboratory.

Editor’s note: Story updated to include interim CEO for Rebecca Lovell’s new title.

Seattle-based startup Otto announced the wide release Thursday of its AI-powered travel assistant — Otto the Agent — in a bid to bring a concierge-level experience and personalization to business travelers.

The platform has been in closed beta for nine months. GeekWire first reported about its stealthy operations in August 2024.

Founded by longtime travel industry veterans, Otto was incubated and spun out of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Labs, the former startup studio associated with Madrona.

“The goal here is to mimic or create as good or better an experience than the best ever executive assistant, to help you book your business travel,” said founder and CEO Michael Gulmann, who spent nearly a decade at Expedia Group in various leadership roles, and also worked at business travel management giant Egencia.

Steve Singh, managing director at Madrona who co-founded business expense software giant Concur, is executive chairman of Otto.

Otto is built to learn and understand an individual’s travel habits — airline and hotel preferences, seat choices, loyalty programs, and even nuanced needs like finding rooms that avoid train noise or finding hotels with rooftop bars. Gulmann said Otto uses that knowledge to instantly surface the best flights and hotels without the the typical endless-scroll experience.

And unlike general-purpose AI tools that send users to external booking sites, Otto handles the entire transaction end-to-end, from booking to cancellations to rebooking and credit management, all within the same interface.

Otto can also connect to a traveler’s calendar and proactively detect upcoming trips and suggest itineraries before the traveler asks.

Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz Worldwide and former COO of Uber, called Otto “a glimpse into the future,” saying that after using it for several months it knows his business travel preferences “and has simplified the shop and book process down to just a couple of minutes.” Harford is an investor in Otto.

Beyond flights and hotels, a clear next step in Otto’s development will be the addition of car rentals and dinner reservations — things an executive assistant “back home would be helping with when you’re on the road,” Gulmann said.

“The reality is, most people don’t have an EA,” he added. “A little bit of the genesis of the company was, I was fortunate enough to have an EA at Expedia for a long time, once I got to a certain level, and it was amazing.”

Otto is available for free to individual business travelers as well as small and mid-sized businesses for the next 12 months. The startup makes money on commissions. Through a partnership with travel management company Direct Travel, Otto is also launching upcoming pilot programs with two companies Gulmann could not yet name.

The company is competing with other startups, as well as incumbents that are developing their own AI-fueled tools.

Direct Travel, which was acquired by Madrona and others in April 2024, invested in Otto’s seed round.

Singh is also executive chairman at Direct Travel. Since departing Concur a few years after its $8.3 billion acquisition to SAP in 2014, Singh became executive chairman at Spotnana, a travel-as-a-service technology platform; at Center, a corporate card and expense management platform; and Troop, a group meetings and events company.

Gulmann said innovating around travel again was the “last thing he thought he’d get back into” but a lot has changed since Expedia and others came along to displace human travel agents in the 1990s. Otto is like going back to the personalization aspect of travel agents but with the tech twist added in.

“It’s insanely faster to develop and to build the product,” he said. “We’re doing it with, including myself, a 10-person team. So, not tiny, but nowhere near the developer and engineer horsepower that Expedia or Booking.com have. But yet, I think we’re going a lot faster than they are now.”

Related:

• The new AI executive assistants: Smarter, faster, still not as good as the real thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Govstream.ai, a Seattle-area startup building AI-native permitting tools for local governments, raised $3.6 million in funding, the company announced Thursday.

The seed round was led by Menlo Park, Calif.-based 47th Street Partners, with participation from Nellore Capital of Palo Alto, Calif., Seattle-based Ascend, and angel investors including Socrata founder Kevin Merritt and First Due co-founder and CEO Andreas Huber.

Govstream.ai’s platform sits on top of the systems cities already use and acts as a conversational “copilot” for permit techs, planners, and reviewers. The company says the technology answers questions, checks documents, compares plan sets, and helps move applications through review faster.

The first public deployment is with the City of Bellevue, where Govstream.ai’s smart assistant has been helping Development Services staff with internal permitting and zoning questions since this summer.

“Cities are under intense pressure to add housing, support small businesses, and keep development sustainable, all while working inside permitting systems that were never really rethought for this moment,” said Safouen Rabah, founder and CEO of Govstream.ai.

In Washington, for example, state projections show that roughly 1.1 million additional homes will be needed by 2044 to keep up with population growth, and about 650,000 of those will need to be affordable for low-income households.

Rabah said permitting has been digitized in pieces but not truly modernized end to end. AI can reason over hundreds of pages of plans and regulations and surface what matters.

“That’s how cities move more homes and critical infrastructure from ‘submitted’ to ‘approved’ without burning people out on either side of the counter,” Rabah said. “Every month of delay we eliminate reduces costs of a new housing unit by about $5,000 on average and makes more projects economically pencil out.”

In July, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order intended to speed the permitting process for housing and small businesses in the city, using AI software from Boston- and Chicago-based CivCheck to aid permit applicants and city reviewers. Other cities, including Los Angeles, Austin and Honolulu are using AI to improve their processes.

In Bellevue, Govstream.ai is targeting and seeing signs of results including:

• A roughly 30% reduction in the burden of routine inquiries, including fewer “Where do I start?” and “Do I need a permit for this?” calls and emails.
• Up to 50% fewer re-submittals by catching missing or incorrect items before an application is formally filed.
• Up to 2X faster starts to first review on many project types, because reviewers start with context instead of a 200-page PDF.

Beyond Bellevue, the startup is gearing up to deploy in additional U.S. cities. Rabah declined to share financial metrics, but said revenue is growing as Govstream.ai converts design partners into production deployments.

A veteran of government-tech companies including Socrata and Tyler Technologies, Rabah started Govstream.ai in July 2024. The company currently employs five people and the new funding will fuel growth to 10 to 12 people over the next 12 months with the addition of engineering and AI roles in the Seattle area.

Govstream was previously featured in GeekWire’s Startup Radar series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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