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.”

“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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scale of the GigaTIME project is giant:

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

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

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

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

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

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

— 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.

Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are raising the alarm over the deadly impacts of international funding cuts in global health. Slashed budgets are projected to reverse decades of progress, causing the number of children dying before their fifth birthday to rise for the first time this century. An estimated 4.8 million children are expected to die this year, an increase of 200,000 deaths compared to last year.

“That is something that we hope never to report on, but it is a sad fact. And there are many causes, but clearly one of the key causes has been significant cuts in international development assistance from a number of high-income countries,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, in a briefing with media this week.

Suzman specifically called out the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Germany for “making significant cuts” to their support. Internationally, funding plunged 26.9% below last year’s levels, according to the philanthropy.

The Gates Foundation today released its annual Goalkeepers Report, which tracks progress on measures including poverty, hunger, access to clean water and energy, environmental benchmarks and other metrics.

The Seattle-based foundation worked with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to model the effects of reduced assistance. The researchers found that if the cuts to aid persist or worsen, an additional 12 million to 16 million children could die over the next 20 years.

While offering dire projections, the document aims to be a call to action for governments and philanthropists large and small.

“This report is a roadmap to progress,” Gates writes, “where smart spending meets innovation at scale.”

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder calls out some specific areas that could yield the most benefit, including primary healthcare, routine immunizations, the development of improved vaccines and new uses of data.

Modeling in the report predicts that by 2045, better vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and pneumonia could save 3.4 million children, while new malaria tools could save an additional 5.7 million kids. Shots of lenacapavir could successfully prevent and treat HIV.

The foundation calls attention to the life-saving benefits of vaccinations as the U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to undercut public support of vaccines.

With the backdrop of reduced federal funding for global humanitarian causes and backpedaling on vaccinations, Gates earlier this year announced plans to give away $200 billion — including nearly all of his wealth — over the next two decades through the Gates Foundation.

The Seattle-based organization, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, will sunset its operations on Dec. 31, 2045. The philanthropy is the world’s largest and has already disbursed $100 billion since its founding.

“If we do more with less now — and get back to a world where there’s more resources to devote to children’s health — then in 20 years, we’ll be able to tell a different kind of story,” Gates writes in the report. “The story of how we helped more kids survive childbirth, and childhood.”

David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington is announcing two major leaps in the field of AI-powered protein design. The first is a souped-up version of its existing RFdiffusion2 tool that can now design enzymes with performance nearly on par with those found in nature. The second is the release of a new, general-purpose version of its model, named RFdiffusion3, which the researchers are calling their most powerful and versatile protein engineering technology to date.

Last year, Baker received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in protein science, which includes a deep-learning model called RFdiffusion. The tool allows scientists to design novel proteins that have never existed. These machine-made proteins hold immense promise, from developing medicines for previously untreatable diseases to solving knotty environmental challenges.

Baker leads the UW’s Institute for Protein Design, which released the first version of the core technology in 2023, followed by RFdiffusion2 earlier this year. The second model was fine-tuned for creating enzymes — proteins that orchestrate the transformation of molecules and dramatically speed up chemical reactions.

The latest accomplishments are being shared today in publications in the leading scientific journals Nature and Nature Methods, as well as a preprint last month on bioRxiv.

A better model for enzyme construction

In the improved version of RFdiffusion2, the researchers took a more hands-off approach to guiding the technology, giving it a specific enzymatic task to perform but not specifying other features. Or as the team described it in a press release, the tool produces “blueprints for physical nanomachines that must obey the laws of chemistry and physics to function.”

“You basically let the model have all this space to explore and … you really allow it to search a really wide space and come up with great, great solutions,” said Seth Woodbury, a graduate student in Baker’s lab and author on both papers publishing today.

In addition to UW scientists, researchers from MIT and Switzerland’s ETH Zurich contributed to the work.

The new approach is remarkable for quickly generating higher-performing enzymes. In a test of the tool, it was able to solve 41 out of 41 difficult enzyme design challenges, compared to only 16 for the previous version.

“When we designed enzymes, they’re always an order of magnitude worse than native enzymes that evolution has taken billions of years to find,” said Rohith Krishna, a postdoctoral fellow and lead developer of RFdiffusion2. “This is one of the first times that we’re not one of the best enzymes ever, but we’re in the ballpark of native enzymes.”

The researchers successfully used the model to create proteins calls metallohydrolases, which accelerate difficult reactions using a precisely positioned metal ion and an activated water molecule. The engineered enzymes could have important applications, including the destruction of pollutants.

The promise of rapidly designed catalytic enzymes could unleash wide-ranging applications, Baker said.

“The first problem we really tackled with AI, it was largely therapeutics, making binders to drug targets,” he said. “But now with catalysis, it really opens up sustainability.”

The researchers are also working with the Gates Foundation to figure out lower-cost ways to build what are known as small molecule drugs, which interact with proteins and enzymes inside cells, often by blocking or enhancing their function to effect biological processes.

The most powerful model to date

While RFdiffusion2 is fine-tuned to make enzymes, the Institute for Protein Design researchers were also eager to build a tool with wide-ranging functionality. RFdiffusion3 is that new AI model. It can create proteins that interact with virtually every type of molecule found in cells, including the ability to bind DNA, other proteins and small molecules, in addition to enzyme-related functions.

“We really are excited about building more and more complex systems, so we didn’t want to have bespoke models for each application. We wanted to be able to combine everything into one foundational model,” said Krishna, a lead developer of RFdiffusion3.

Today the team is publicly releasing the code for the new machine learning tool.

“We’re really excited to see what everyone else builds on it,” Krishna said.

And while the steady stream of model upgrades, breakthroughs and publications in top-notch journals seems to continue unabated from the Institute for Protein Design, there are plenty of behind-the-scenes stumbles, Baker said.

“It all sounds beautiful and simple at the end when it’s done,” he said. “But along the way, there’s always the moments when it seems like it won’t work.”

But the researchers keep at it, and so far at least, they keep finding a path forward. And the institute continues minting new graduates and further training postdocs who go on to launch companies or establish their own academic labs.

“I don’t surf, but I sort of feel like we’re riding a wave and it’s just fun,” Baker said. “I mean, it’s so many, so many problems are getting solved. And yeah, it’s really exhilarating, honestly.”

The Nature paper, titled “Computational design of metallohydrolases,” was authored by Donghyo Kim, Seth Woodbury, Woody Ahern, Doug Tischer, Alex Kang, Emily Joyce, Asim Bera, Nikita Hanikel, Saman Salike, Rohith Krishna, Jason Yim, Samuel Pellock, Anna Lauko, Indrek Kalvet, Donald Hilvert and David Baker.

The Nature Methods paper, titled “Atom-level enzyme active site scaffolding using RFdiffusion2,” was authored by Woody Ahern, Jason Yim, Doug Tischer, Saman Salike, Seth Woodbury, Donghyo Kim, Indrek Kalvet, Yakov Kipnis, Brian Coventry, Han Raut Altae-Tran, Magnus Bauer, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola, Rohith Krishna and David Baker.

Modern Hydrogen — a clean energy startup with technology that at one time seemed to delight Bill Gates and attracted his investment — has now laid off most of its employees and left contractors and vendors anxious about unpaid invoices.

The Seattle-area company has not publicly offered an explanation for the downsizing or said how many workers were impacted. In a recent email to business partners, officials referenced recent funding changes and said it was undergoing a “broader restructuring effort.”

Modern Hydrogen raised $125 million since launching a decade ago. It developed a device for cracking natural gas molecules, producing hydrogen as a climate friendly fuel and a material known as solid carbon that has a variety of industrial uses, including as a key ingredient in asphalt.

Gates explored that application during a visit to Modern Hydrogen last year. The Microsoft co-founder grabbed a wheelbarrow and shovel to fill a parking lot pothole with the carbon-trapping asphalt.

The layoffs hit as the company was preparing to finish its first commercial unit for a customer in Texas and had performed two successful pilot projects with utilities in Portland, Ore., and Miami.

In January, Modern Hydrogen announced a memorandum of understanding with Puget Sound Energy, a major Seattle-area utility, to collaborate in identifying industrial customers interested in the clean hydrogen technology. That was expected to include steel and cement makers and pulp-and-paper manufacturers that use processes requiring ultra-high temperatures that could be met by hydrogen.

Given that the company had seemingly solved the new technology’s technical hurdles and was building commercial momentum, employees and business partners were surprised by the layoffs.

“A lot of folks were rooting for us,” Michael Jung, Modern Hydrogen’s former government affairs and public policy lead, told GeekWire. “I think we would have solved some key problems in the energy transition.”

On Oct. 30, Amir Moftakhar, Modern Hydrogen’s chief financial officer, sent an email to some of its subcontractors and vendors disclosing the change of course.

“We wanted to inform you that, due to recent changes in our funding situation and a significant reduction in company operations, we must terminate our engagement with you effective 10/30/2025,” stated the email, which was shared with GeekWire by one of its recipients.

“This decision is part of a broader restructuring effort which is being developed and does not reflect on your work,” Moftakhar continued. “We want to sincerely thank you for the professionalism, dedication, and quality you’ve shown throughout our collaboration and for your understanding.”

It is unclear if the company is closing entirely, what will happen with the machinery and technology, and if some component of the effort will continue in a different form.

GeekWire reached out to Modern Hydrogen CEO Tony Pan for an official comment and will update the story if he responds. We contacted a Gates’ representative for a comment as well.

One subcontractor, who asked not to be named, said that until the email went out, “things were cooking along” in their collaboration with Modern Hydrogen. Now the company is anxious about if and when it will get paid for outstanding invoices that total tens of thousands of dollars.

Modern Hydrogen got its start in 2015 at Intellectual Ventures, an innovation hub created by former Microsoft researcher Nathan Myhrvold with backing from Gates. The startup, which was originally called Modern Electron, initially focused on devices that paired with home furnaces and hot water tanks to capture the appliances’ wasted heat and turn it into electricity.

In 2023 it pivoted to focus on hydrogen and changed its name. The company’s most recent round was $25 million raised a year ago. It had approximately 80 employees at the time, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data. Modern Hydrogen co-founder and former CTO Max Mankin left the company in January.

Gates has in the past been an enthusiastic supporter of hydrogen fuel. In June 2022, he posted a Gates Notes touting the so-called “Swiss Army knife” of clean energy given its versatile applications. He was a prominent investor in the company, whose other backers included NextEra Energy, one of the world’s largest utilities; Miura; National Grid Partners; IRONGREY; Starlight Ventures; Valo Ventures and Metaplanet.

Hydrogen saw a surge of interest during the Biden administration, which created hydrogen hubs around the U.S. to bolster the technology. That support has been curtailed under the Trump administration, which canceled funding for hubs in the Pacific Northwest and California, while the remaining five hubs appear to be at risk of losing support.

And on Oct. 28, Gates posted a memo on his personal blog that dampened his earlier excitement around climate efforts.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Editor’s note: Information added Dec. 4 to provide detail on the hydrogen hubs.

Seattle biotech startup Curi Bio, which enables the screening of new drugs using cells and 3D tissue models derived from human cells, announced $10 million in new funding.

Curi Bio’s customers include large biopharmaceutical and biotech companies such Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, UCB, Novartis and others. Its Series B round was led by Seoul-based DreamCIS, which supports biopharma R&D through extensive research services.

“We are thrilled to partner with DreamCIS, who shares our conviction that drug discovery urgently needs more human-relevant data at the preclinical stage,” said Michael Cho, Curi Bio’s chief strategy officer, in a statement. “The vast majority of new drugs fail in human clinical trials because preclinical animal and 2D cell models have failed to be good predictors of human outcomes.”

Curi Bio’s platform integrates bioengineered tissues created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with data collection and analysis. The additional funding will expedite its development of new platforms for cardiac, skeletal muscle, metabolic, smooth muscle and neuromuscular diseases, the company said.

The Seattle area is a hub of life science and biotech companies, including numerous efforts focused on AI-assisted research. Researchers have emphasized the need to test computer-generated drug candidates in the lab to verify their capabilities and impacts.

“Curi Bio’s unique integration of cells, systems, and data is a paradigm shift for preclinical drug discovery,” said Jeounghee Yoo, CEO of DreamCIS. “We were incredibly impressed by the company’s innovative platforms and their ability to generate functional data from 3D human tissues at scale.”

Curi Bio has raised $20 million from investors and $12 million from federal grants.

The company spun out of the University of Washington a decade ago as NanoSurface Biomedical. In April, Curi Bio celebrated the opening of its new 13,942-square-foot headquarters and research facility on the Seattle waterfront.

Nuclear power company TerraPower has passed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for a permit to build a reactor in Wyoming. The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America.

TerraPower’s Natrium design pairs a small modular reactor (SMR) with an integrated thermal battery. The SMR generates 345 megawatts of continuous electrical power. The thermal battery, which stores excess heat in molten salt, allows the system to surge its output to 500 megawatts for more than five hours, generating enough energy to power 400,000 homes at maximum capacity.

“Today is a momentous occasion for TerraPower, our project partners and the Natrium design,” said company CEO Chris Levesque in a statement issued Monday. The favorable assessment “reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

The company launched in 2006 and is building on technology used in an experimental breeder reactor in Idaho that operated for nearly 30 years before shutting down.

TerraPower set a goal of producing power at the Kemmerer, Wyo., site by 2030. The reactor is located near a retiring coal plant.

There is tremendous renewed interest in nuclear as tech giants and data center operators scramble for new energy sources to power AI operations. Microsoft, Amazon and others have invested in a combination of existing nuclear plants that can be restarted and construction of new facilities. The Trump administration has pledged to expedite permitting.

“We’ve finished our technical work on the Kemmerer review a month ahead of our already accelerated schedule, as we aim to make licensing decisions for new, advanced reactors in no more than 18 months,” said Jeremy Groom, acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

“We thank TerraPower for promptly addressing the agency’s questions to ensure safety and enable the NRC to efficiently process the application,” he added in a statement.

The NRC said there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing a construction permit for the reactor. TerraPower last year broke ground in Wyoming on non-nuclear components of the facility.

In June the company announced $650 million in new funding from Gates, who helped start TerraPower, as well as the venture arm of chip giant NVIDIA. It previously raised more than $1 billion, including investments from Gates as well as South Korea-based SK Inc. and SK Innovation, according to PitchBook. TerraPower has additionally been awarded roughly $2 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy.

There are still additional permitting hurdles to complete:

• In the coming weeks, the NRC staff will provide a safety evaluation and final environmental impact statement to the Commission for the final phase of the licensing.
• The Commission then determines whether the staff’s review supports the findings required to issue the permit, and votes on whether to direct the staff to issue the permit.
• If the NRC issues the permit, TerraPower will need to submit an operating license application for approval.

In an unusual act of philanthropy, an anonymous donor has committed more than $50 million to the University of Washington to support the little-known field of medical laboratory science. The funds will be distributed over the next half-century.

UW leaders called the gift “transformational,” noting it’s the largest gift they’re aware of for this particular specialty.

The donation will immediately impact the current class of 35 students in the Medical Laboratory Science Undergraduate Program by covering their tuition costs — waiving about $9,000 per student — during the two quarters of clinical rotations in their senior year.

When the students learned the news at an event Monday at the UW’s Seattle campus, many began to cry.

Students who graduate with a four-year degree in medical laboratory sciences are essential, behind-the-scenes healthcare workers. They collect biological samples, process the material, help interpret the results, and provide necessary data for individual patients and public health institutions.

Dr. Geoff Baird, chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at UW Medicine, praised the program for training these healthcare professionals.

“No one really ever pays attention to the glue that holds the whole thing together,” Baird said of their critical role.

Dr. Tim Dellit, UW Medicine CEO and the dean of the School of Medicine Tim Dellit, echoed the sentiment in sharing news of the gift with the students. “In many ways, you are the unsung heroes,” he said. “You work behind the scenes that allow all of the healthcare machinery to continue to work.”

The field, however, is facing a challenge. Despite its importance, the workforce is aging, and there aren’t enough students graduating with the needed expertise, said Baird. The new gift is designed to help address that shortage by expanding the two-year medical laboratory sciences program from the current 70 students to 100 over the next decade.

Graduates earn a four-year bachelor’s degree and professional certifications, ready for employment at clinics and hospitals.

The university didn’t share details about the donor, except to say that he is a Washington resident and a big fan of the longtime, local burger franchise, Dick’s Drive-In. To celebrate the news, he requested that the students were served burgers at the announcement.

For the students, the financial relief felt profound.

Senior Lily Koplowitz-Fleming was grateful that she won’t have to juggle an additional job on top of the nine-hours, five-days a week that’s required by the clinical rotation. Instead, she’ll be able to focus on the training for her future career, which she said is a meaningful blend of “skills-based and knowledge-based” work.

Another senior, Keila Uchimura, also said she enrolled in the program because she “really likes being able to see the direct impact you make.”

While medical lab scientists typically work in the background, their roles became more noticeable during the pandemic as people rushed to get tested and waited anxiously for results.

Baird praised the donor and his gift in an earlier GeekWire interview.

“The morality, the righteousness of it — it’s just really impressive that someone was able to find that generosity,” he said. “And we’re all in the state of Washington forever indebted — not just the students.”

— Expedia Group appointed Xavier Amatriain as its first chief artificial intelligence officer and data officer. He joins the Seattle-based travel giant from Google where he served as vice president of product in AI and Compute Enablement. Other past employers include Quora, LinkedIn and Netflix.

“[Amatriain’s] deep expertise in building large-scale AI platforms will help redefine how people experience travel,” Expedia CTO Ramana Thumu said in a statement. “Expedia Group operates at a scale few can match, and we invest deeply in our talent, giving technologists the space to learn, experiment, and push the boundaries of what AI can do.”

Amatriain, based in San Jose, Calif., has mapped a diverse career path — he’s been a university professor in Spain, a healthcare startup co-founder, a researcher, and an engineering leader.

— Textio co-founder and former CEO Kieran Snyder returned to Microsoft as vice president of AI transformation.

“My goal in this new role is to help Microsoft be the best living case study of effective, human AI transformation in the world,” Snyder said on LinkedIn.

Snyder began her tech career at Microsoft in 2004, working on the Bing search engine and Windows. In 2014, she launched Textio, which claims to be the first-to-market venture using AI for HR functions. The company’s software helps organizations recruit, hire and retain inclusive teams.

Over the past two years, Snyder ran a business called “nerd processor,” which offered research and leadership coaching, and served as chief scientist emeritus at Textio, where she is now on the board of directors.

— Ross Tennenbaum is leaving his role as president of Avalara for a new role with an unnamed public company, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Tennenbaum joined the tax software giant in 2019 and was previously CFO. He worked at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse before joining Avalara, which relocated its headquarters from Seattle to North Carolina following its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2022. It filed to go public, again, earlier this year.

— After more than 12 years at T-Mobile, Janice Kapner is leaving the telecommunications giant. Kapner was chief communications and corporate responsibility officer and executive VP at the Bellevue, Wash., company where she led a team of more than 160 employees.

“From Magenta sneakers and confetti cannons to competitive stunts, big bets, and a front-line team that made the brand burst off the page and into the world — these are moments I’ll never forget,” Kapner said on LinkedIn. “They shaped me as much as I helped shape them.”

Prior to T-Mobile, Kapner was at Microsoft for more than a decade.

— Former Microsoft and Amazon leader Vinita Ananth is now senior director of product for the cloud company Nebius. Ananth, based in the Seattle area, has been working since July on stealth-mode startups HelpViber and FulcrumAX. Ananth called the decision to leave these ventures “difficult and emotional.”

“I’m thrilled that my co-founder will continue driving both HelpViber and FulcrumAX forward, with a strategic focus on customer traction, platform maturity, and meaningful funding milestones over the coming year,” she said on LinkedIn, adding that she’ll continue in advisor and co-founder roles.

— PayPal appointed Bo English-Wiczling as VP of global developer relations. English-Wiczling, based in Seattle, joins from Oracle, where she worked for nearly nine years in leadership roles in database product management and developer relations. Previous employers include Amazon and Best Buy.

“After an incredible journey working alongside talented engineers, community leaders, and innovation-minded partners, this new role feels like the perfect next step,” English-Wiczling said on LinkedIn. “I’ll be working at the intersection of PayPal’s global payments platform and developer ecosystems — helping build, grow, and energize the communities and relationships that power our future.”

— Jaimin Gandhi joined Seattle-based AI roleplay startup Yoodli as a product leader. Gandhi’s past roles include leadership positions at Nerdy, Binance, Uber, DocuSign, Microsoft and others.

Over the past year, Gandhi built FourPoint.AI, a tool that helps job seekers improve their communications. While he won’t be adding new features to FourPoint, “I am opening it up for free,” Gandhi said on LinkedIn. “If it helps someone land their next opportunity the way it helped me find mine, that is a meaningful way to pay it forward.”

— Kapil Hetamsaria is now chief business officer of Neo4j, a data analysis, graph intelligence platform. Hetamsaria joins from C3 AI, where he served as a vice president, and was previously co-founder and CEO of Viddl App, a Bellevue-based short-video platform.

— Dave Rosenbaum is leaving his role as senior publications manager at Seattle-based pet sitting company Rover to join Airbnb.

“I have always been a firm believer in the transformative power of travel — discovering new places, trying new foods, and having new experiences,” Rosenbaum wrote on LinkedIn. “Airbnb’s mission is central to this belief that the world offers limitless possibilities.”

Rosenbaum is also a deputy mayor and city council member for Mercer Island, a city east of Seattle, and previously served in legislative roles for members of Congress.

— Ambika Singh, founder and CEO of online clothing rental company Armoire, joined the board of trustees for the Seattle Metro Chamber.

— Pete Fewing, associate athletic director at Seattle University and longtime Sounders FC broadcaster, joined the board of directors for Starfire Sports. The organization provides coding classes, drone summer camps, and other free, after-school sports programming for underprivileged kids in South Seattle.

The University of Washington is powering up its vision for a brighter, more sustainable future with a newly completed solar canopy installed in a sprawling parking lot north of Husky Stadium.

The 84-kilowatt solar array is paired with Level 2 EV charging that can accommodate 20 vehicles simultaneously. The $3.7 million project includes electrical infrastructure to support the future installation of panels capable of nearly 30 times more power generation — up to 2.5 megawatts. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 2,000 homes.

The solar canopy is a pilot project supporting the UW’s goals to cut its carbon footprint, said Mark Huppert, interim director of UW Transportation Services.

“Located on the site of the former Montlake landfill, the pilot demonstrates how the land can be put to work to achieve more sustainable outcomes,” Huppert said via email.

Project partners include Sea Con as the general contractor and Prime Electric as the electrical contractor. The canopy system was fabricated by Trinity Structures, which has since rebranded as Trinity Energy.

The installation is connected to electrical grids powering the City of Seattle and the UW’s campus. The ability to generate energy onsite can curb the university’s reliance on the utility grid while reducing the impacts of power outages and fluctuating electricity costs.

“Generating solar power from a parking lot may sound modest, but the strategic value is enormous,” said Darin Leonard, president of Trinity Energy, in a statement.

The idea for the project grew out of a collaboration between the student organization UW Solar; Anne Eskridge, the retired director of UW Transportation Services; and Jan Whittington, director of the UW’s Urban Infrastructure Lab.

The university is currently drafting its 2050 Sustainability Action Plan, which includes the long-term expansion of the parking lot solar canopies.

The UW Solar students “will continue to support the efforts to achieve the vision of a complete build-out,” Huppert said.

The project was funded by UW Transportation Services, Seattle City Light and Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act, administered through the Washington State Department of Commerce’s electric vehicle charging program.

Editor’s note: Story updated to provide additional information on project partners.

When Ambika Singh, the CEO and founder of the online clothing rental company Armoire, began exploring AI applications, she had to thread the needle between embracing cutting-edge tech and deploying it mindfully.

The Seattle startup has always been “a very human-powered business,” Singh said, with a strong sustainability mission to curb clothing waste through rentals. Consequently, employees were anxious about turning tasks over to bots and troubled by the environmental impacts of data centers and AI computing — despite its potential to remove tedium and boost the company’s finances.

In Armoire’s first big AI splash, the company recently launched a virtual stylist to support customers in their search for the perfect tops, pants, jackets and dresses.

The AI initiative is just the latest challenge Singh has navigated since founding Armoire nearly a decade ago. The company survived the pandemic, pivoting from professional attire to leisure wear during lockdowns, before returning to its roots as in-office mandates took effect. She has responded to an evolving customer base, louder calls for resort and après ski outfits, and demand for an in-person storefront for trying on clothes.

Now, the business is weathering the current economic uncertainties driven by layoffs, fluctuating tariffs and rising prices. But while these conditions could raise expenses for Armoire, they are expected to bolster its customer base as clothing rentals become a cost-saving strategy to maintain professional and personal wardrobes.

“Renting your closet is another way to maintain the lifestyle that you want under different budgetary constraints,” Singh said.

‘No chatbot energy here’

The new Armoire AI app helps customers quickly find curated recommendations in a sea of apparel. The assistant asserts itself quietly with a prompt woven into the display of blouses and pants, asking what it can help find. Once a user clicks on it, the tech suggests items to search for and also allows for user-generated questions.

The app takes a few seconds to cross-reference the customer’s preferences — based on past rentals and items she’s liked or voted down — with clothes currently in stock and ready to ship. The AI provides chipper dialogue and refines selections based on feedback.

In pitching the tech, the company said the AI “talks to you just like a real stylist would (no chatbot energy here) and helps you discover the best pieces for your style in seconds — no scrolling required.”

Shopping assistants fueled by generative AI are proving an increasingly popular trend for online retailers, including Amazon’s recent introduction of Rufus to dig up product recommendations. The chatty tech is also showing up on sites like Redfin and Zillow to aid in home searches.

Armoire is developing additional AI technologies, such as a tool to help standardize clothing descriptions across different brands. It might sound trivial, but companies can have significantly different definitions for sleeve length, for example, whether short, long, capped or three-quarter.

The startup has worked to distinguish itself from larger competitors by offering consultations with stylists via phone and email, and Singh said this human touch will remain a core feature. And the AI, of course, isn’t perfect. In our own test, the assistant landed on a solid blazer suggestion but went on to pair it with an absurdly frilly blouse that a human stylist would not have picked.

And some components of the business simply can’t be automated. Armoire has a brick-and-mortar space south of Seattle’s downtown for trying on clothes. It regularly hosts in-person events for networking and fashion shows, including a collection of up-cycled athletic wear from former pro-soccer player Lu Barnes and an annual South Asian fashion event.

Trending upward

Armoire’s multi-faceted approach to clothing rentals and connecting to customers has found success, albeit with some snags along the way.

The startup has raised $12 million from investors, including a $3.5 million round in 2021 that included backing from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani and others. Armoire reached break-even this quarter, a first for the business.

While the pandemic shrank Armoire’s payroll from more than 60 workers down to 25, it has since rebounded to 100 employees. Last April, the company won Workplace of the Year at the annual GeekWire Awards.

The online clothing rental market is worth an estimated $2.6 billion worldwide, according to October data from Future Market Insights Inc., and it’s expected to grow to $6.4 billion over the decade, with China, India and the U.S. leading the expansion. The sector could benefit as cash-strapped customers look to rentals and secondhand.

“Services that can offer consumers the opportunity to keep their wardrobes fresh on an ongoing basis are really benefiting,” Sky Canaves, an analyst at market research firm eMarketer, said in a recent NPR story about online rentals.

Armoire remains a smaller operation than competitors such as Rent-the-Runway and Nuuly, which is part of a conglomerate including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People. Her customer base is thousands, Singh said, but not hundreds of thousands.

The success of the bigger outlets are useful as they demonstrate that the model works, she said. “Rental continues to grow and so we’re benefiting from that.”

Verizon is laying off approximately 165 employees in Washington state, including analysts, engineers and retail workers.

The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end Jan. 23.

“Verizon is consolidating and restructuring its operations to maximize the utilization of company facilities and resources,” Eboni Gregoire, Verizon’s director of HR operations, said in a WARN letter.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that New York-based Verizon was planning to cut 15,000 workers, primarily through layoffs. That includes shifting about 200 of its stores into franchised outlets, which removes employees from the telecom’s payroll.

The WARN letter states that five facilities — in Redmond, Renton, Woodinville, Spokane and Bellingham are “being divested to an agent” and will no longer be operated by Verizon. It was unclear if the sites would close or become a franchise.

Approximately 22 of the workers being laid off are based at a corporate office in Bellevue, Wash., that Verizon took over from rival T-Mobile last year. T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue, sublet 32,682 square feet of space to Verizon at 90 North, a building located at 3255 160th Ave. SE., the Puget Sound Business Journal previously reported.

The layoffs come as Verizon lost 7,000 phone subscribers in the most recent quarter, while AT&T and T-Mobile have been adding customers, WSJ reported. On Thursday, T-Mobile announced a “Switching Made Easy” initiative launching next month to help Verizon and AT&T customers switch to T-Mobile in as little as 15 minutes.

Editor’s note: The number of workers impacted by the layoffs was off by three in the original story and was corrected Nov. 25.

— Andrea Chartock is now the head of Washington’s Office of Economic Development and Competitiveness, a division of the state Department of Commerce.

Chartock spent more than 21 years with international development company DAI, working on United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiatives in countries including Liberia and Moldova. Her most recent efforts focused on economic growth in Ukraine before USAID was defunded this year.

Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn said that Chartock “has the experience and dedication needed to elevate our existing business community and foster growth in innovative ways.”

The department earlier this year scaled back a key economic development program amid the state budget crunch. The department currently manages more than $8 billion across 485 programs, Nguyễn said in April.

— Julie Brill, Microsoft’s former chief privacy officer, has joined the board of directors of the enterprise software company Ethyca.

“Ethyca’s approach puts privacy, security, and policy at the heart of enterprise data infrastructure. I’m excited to help guide the company as it works with global organizations to scale AI responsibly,” Brill said in a statement.

Brill left Microsoft in July after more than eight years. Her title included corporate vice president for Global Privacy, Safety, and Regulatory Affairs. Brill is also serving as an expert in residence at Harvard University. She previously shared plans to open a consultancy this fall.

— Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella named Rolf Harms, a corporate vice president at the tech giant, as an advisor on AI economics to work with the company’s top leaders. Business Insider obtained a November memo from Nadella to Microsoft executives announcing Harms’ expanded role.

Harms has been with Microsoft for nearly two decades and penned a foundational whitepaper in 2010 addressing the economics of cloud computing.

“We need to rapidly rethink the new economics of AI across the company — just as we once did with the cloud,” Nadella wrote, according to BI. “This platform shift is all about building a new AI factory and family of Copilots and agents that drive diffusion and usage across the full stack.”

— Seattle Reign FC and Seattle Sounders FC announced Sean Coury as chief financial officer. Coury joins the soccer clubs from Bezos Academy, where he served as CFO of the educational nonprofit launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He previously worked in financial roles at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Apptio, where he helped the Bellevue, Wash., company go public.

The Reign and the Sounders last month hired Ro Vega as chief marketing officer.

— Francois Ajenstat is leaving his position as chief product officer at the software company Amplitude. Ajenstat was previously CPO at Seattle’s Tableau Software, where he spent 13 years, followed by a brief run at Salesforce that ended in 2023. Earlier in his career, Ajenstat was with Microsoft for a decade, holding titles including technical evangelist, product manager and senor director of environmental sustainability.

— The University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) has multiple leadership changes.

UW biochemistry professor Neil King is now IPD’s deputy director as Lance Stewart, former interim executive director, retires from the organization. King was previously an associate professor at IPD, and Nobel Laureate David Baker will stay in his role as director.

“When I joined the IPD in 2013, it was clear that helping to build the IPD would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute and observe firsthand the development of a whole new industry based on computationally designed proteins,” Stewart said on LinkedIn.

The IPD made three additional hires:

• Jenny Cronin is now director of translational research, joining IPD from AI2 Incubator, a Seattle-based startup organization. Cronin is also a venture partner with Pack Ventures, a fund that backs startups with UW connections.
• Roseanne Hampton Reich is assistant director of administration. Her past roles include positions at lululemon, UW’s Division of Nephrology, Seattle Children’s and others.
• Justin English is director of strategic development, previously working as an assistant professor at the University of Utah. English holds a PhD in pharmacology. 

— Alex Pettit is returning to Oregon to serve as the state’s digital transformation projects director. Pettit has previously held top technology roles for Oregon, Texas and Oklahoma, and was most recently Colorado’s chief technology officer for nearly six years.

“This next chapter allows me to bring hard-won experience from the field and apply it to familiar soil. I’m honored to once again contribute to Oregon’s technology future — helping modernize legacy platforms, evolve our enterprise architecture, and prepare for the demands ahead,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

— Brian Bishop is CEO of Portland, Ore.-based Skip Technology, a startup building long-duration, grid-scale batteries. Bishop takes over for Brennan Gantner, who co-founded the hydrogen bromine battery company seven years ago.

Bishop has more than 30 years of engineering, manufacturing and management experience in a variety of electronics-focused businesses. He was previously with Salt Creek Capital, which acquires and recapitalizes small companies.

— Kelly Goetsch has taken a new title at e-commerce logistics startup Pipe17, moving from chief operating officer to president. The Seattle startup announced a $17.5 million Series A round earlier this year.

Goetsch has also helped lead the creation of the first open standard to unify how commerce systems communicate, including AI-powered selling channels and payments, logistics and fulfillment. The effort was overseen by the nonprofit Commerce Operations Foundation, which released the initial standard this week.

— Tom Mara, executive director of SIFF, has left the nonprofit following the decision not to renew his contract, the Seattle Times reported. Mara previously ran the popular Seattle radio station KEXP, then joined SIFF in 2022.

The following year Mara announced the organization’s purchase of the historic Cinerama, a movie theater previously owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that ceased operations during the pandemic. The acquisition was celebrated by many, but the venue has struggled financially.

University of Washington President Robert Jones wants to expand computer science access for undergraduates and build new public-private partnerships to tackle society’s grand challenges — and he has concrete ideas on how to make that happen.

More than 100 days into his tenure as the UW’s 34th president, Jones is also working to dispel two persistent myths: that it’s nearly impossible to get into the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and that AI is taking everyone’s jobs.

This fall, the Allen School — a top tech program nationally — accepted 37% of the direct applicants from Washington state high schools, though out-of-state admissions is only 4%. “We actually accept many more students than the general public believes,” Jones said in an interview this week with GeekWire.

As to the AI job apocalypse? “That’s an overblown fear,” Jones said. AI is a “critically important tool to have in your tool chest to be more effective in the future.”

Drawing on his experience leading the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Jones wants to give a bigger slice of the UW’s 45,000 undergraduates access to computer science courses — even if they’re in unrelated degree programs.

The idea is modeled on the groundbreaking “CS + X” initiative that he helped expand during his past presidency in Illinois. The program created tech-infused studies in 17 degree programs including advertising, astronomy, economics, music, philosophy and physics.

In Illinois, CS + X launched in crop sciences more than a decade ago because agricultural tech was, and continues to be, one of the fastest growing sectors in the state. Jones himself began his career as a professor in plant physiology and became an international authority in the field.

“AI is just an amazing tool, and we’re doing work here to try to make sure that our students are getting as comprehensive an education as possible,” Jones said. Bolstering a graduate’s knowledge of computer science and artificial intelligence in addition to their focus area makes them “much more employable.”

A $10 million gift announced Tuesday from Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi and his wife, Lisa Simonyi, will help facilitate the integration of AI into education and research across the university through the newly formed AI@UW initiative.

AI@UW, which includes a new Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence position, will help the UW maintain its “strategic advantage” as an AI leader, Jones said. It’s also an example of the sort of public-private collaborations he’d like to foster.

“Radical partnerships”

Jones envisions expanding what he calls “radical partnerships” — building diverse coalitions across geographies, institutions and sectors to tackle problems “that are too big for any one entity to solve alone.”

The collaborations can bring together both expertise and funding. The university faces a difficult financial landscape as Washington state’s revenue forecast continues to weaken, drawing down an already strained budget. Add to that ongoing worries about funding cuts to federal research programs that the UW heavily relies upon.

Jones pointed to the university’s long-running WWAMI program, which serves medical students from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho who earn their degrees at the UW and return to their communities to practice medicine, as a prime example of the radical partnership approach.

“I’ve done about three or four of these over the last 10 years,” he said, “and they’re just amazing ways to bring people together and to think about doing research in a different, in a much more collaborative, much more impactful way than we’ve ever thought about.”

The strategy is particularly suited to AI, quantum computing or other massive technological challenges, he said. Jones was involved in partnerships with the University of Chicago to bolster quantum science research in Illinois and a human biology collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago.

In future collaborations in his new role, Jones is eager to work “seamlessly” with the region’s tech sector, leveraging the fact that the UW helped create an ecosystem that includes giants like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as hundreds of smaller companies.

“Given Dr. Jones’s work creating the quantum park in Chicago, I have no doubt that we will continue to see the UW play an integral role in the growth of the ecosystem,” said Laura Ruderman, CEO of the TechAlliance, who also called the UW “critical” to the state’s innovation economy.

More than 110 UW spinoffs currently operate in the state, according to the university’s CoMotion program, which supports entrepreneurship.

“What we have to do more of is working together to fund and to create the next big idea that’s going to be transformative,” Jones said, “not only for the state of Washington, but for the nation and the world.”

Battelle Memorial Institute, the government contractor operating Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is laying off 68 workers based primarily in Washington state.

The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end between Nov. 18 and Dec. 1.

In the WARN letter, Battelle stated that “due to unforeseen business circumstances” the company was not able to provide 60-days notices to impacted workers.

“As a result of funding uncertainties and evolving federal mission priorities, Battelle made great effort to avoid layoffs by reassigning work, reducing work hours and retaining staff on furlough status in the hope that additional funding would be realized,” the letter explained. “However, Battelle determined it is necessary to restructure our workforce and reduce staff in both research and operations.”

Forty-two of the roles are based at PNNL’s main campus in Richland, Wash.; three are located in Seattle; three in Oregon; and 20 are remote.

PNNL is a 60-year-old institution managed by the U.S. Department of Energy and last year employed roughly 6,400 people. The labs perform basic research in areas including energy, chemistry, data analytics and other science and technology fields.

“Battelle and PNNL are grateful for the contributions of each impacted employee and remain committed to delivering on vital missions in science, energy, and national security,” said PNNL spokesperson Dawn Zimmerman, via email.

Battelle told workers this summer that job reductions were coming given uncertainty in the federal budget, the Tri-City Herald reported. In September the company laid off an undisclosed number of PNNL employees and it has reduced medical benefits for retires, according to the Herald.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., reported in February that “a handful” of PNNL employees were let go in the Trump administration’s initial wave of government layoffs. The cuts were driven by efforts including the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was previously led by Elon Musk, and executive orders eliminating work associated with climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion.

According to the WARN filing, affected workers in the latest cuts held titles including national security specialist; software, mechanical, nuclear or systems engineer; cyber security researcher; data scientist; project manager; administrative coordinator and other roles.

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

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Brian Pinkard spent six months “flipping rocks,” as he describes it, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

The rock-flipping was purposeful work: Pinkard was clearing obstructions and building trails for AmeriCorps, spending every night in a tent.

“I loved it. It was great. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to do something that mattered, that made a difference in the world,” he said. When the program ended, he was inspired to direct his impact to a larger environmental challenge.

His passion to do good, paired with an engineer’s drive for problem solving, led him to a doctoral degree from the University of Washington and then to launching Aquagga, a startup that’s destroying PFAS — a toxic class of pollutants known as “forever chemicals.”

“Brian has been very laser focused on his mission,” said Igor Novosselov, Pinkard’s PhD advisor and research professor at the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “He’s not a typical scientist who would just go and write a bunch of papers. He’s going after impact where it matters.”

But a few steps before PFAS, Pinkard was focused on nerve gas in the Middle East.

‘Nobody knows how to treat this stuff‘

When Pinkard joined Novosselov’s lab, it had U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop an in-the-field, mobile strategy for treating barrels of abandoned chemical weapons in the Syrian desert. The previous solution was to truck the barrels to the Mediterranean Sea, load them on a boat and incinerate the material.

“If you’re the guy who’s got to transport a nerve agent,” Pinkard noted, “it’s not a very good job.”

Within five years, the lab came up with a workable solution, but the need was no longer urgent and DoD shelved its application of the technology, though Novosselov continued to work on it.

Pinkard appreciated the tremendous power of the strategy for treating dangerous materials and wondered if there was another use case. Then as he was preparing to finish his PhD in June 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, derailing his plans to apply for a university postdoctoral fellowship as no one was hiring.

So he made a pivot to entrepreneurship — a role he had never considered.

Pinkard teamed up with engineer and tech innovator Nigel Sharp to explore the potential for using the tech, called supercritical water oxidation, to treat sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants, but they realized the market wasn’t viable.

There was, however, buzz about PFAS.

“Everybody was talking about PFAS,” he said, and if anyone could figure out how to destroy the chemicals, it would be a breakthrough. That realization became his lightbulb moment.

Destroying PFAS

PFAS is a family of chemicals that for decades have been added to firefighting foams, food packaging, carpets and fabrics, water-repellent clothing and non-stick pans. The resilient chemicals are great at deflecting water, stains and grease — but they escape from products and now contaminate drinking water across the nation and are even in mothers’ breast milk.

PFAS are still in use, while researchers and regulators are increasingly concerned by their serious health impacts.

Pinkard and Sharp launched Aquagga in 2019 in Tacoma, Wash., and were soon joined by co-founder Chris Woodruff. The team kept the idea of modular treatment units but shifted to a related but different chemistry (hydrothermal alkaline treatment) for destroying PFAS, securing a patent for the approach from the Colorado School of Mines.

“Brian has been a great partner from the beginning,” said Timothy Strathmann, a Colorado School of Mines professor. “Unlike many entrepreneurs I’ve interacted with, he is also deeply interested in understanding the limitations and technical challenges associated with the technology. He’s keenly aware that the long-term success of Aquagga will only be achieved by addressing the critical barriers to deployment.”

Aquagga’s devices annihilates PFAS under super hot, high pressure conditions made caustic and corrosive through the addition of lye.

The company has done nine field demonstrations of its technology, including a project at an airport in Alaska, a DoD-funded project in North Carolina involving firefighting foams, and a wastewater demo with the City of Tacoma. It’s now close to signing its first long-term commercial deployment, Pinkard said, “which will be a huge milestone for us.”

“It’s really cool to see how much PFAS we’ve destroyed … even in our short journey,” Pinkard said. “And to think about where it could go, what it could enable at scale. So [I’m] very optimistic about Aquagga’s future. I’m very optimistic about the impact we could create, the lives we could save.”