The $6 billion planned merger between Trump Media & Technology Group and California’s TAE Technologies has sent a shock wave through the fusion industry — and is drawing skepticism from competitors in the Pacific Northwest’s fusion hub.

The partnership aims to site and begin building what it calls the world’s first utility-scale fusion plant next year, with Trump Media committing $300 million in near-term funding.

Physicists for decades have pursued fusion energy, a nearly limitless source of carbon-free power produced by smashing together light atoms in conditions hotter than the sun. So far, no one has demonstrated a fusion technology that’s financially viable for putting electricity on the grid, and some experts believe the field is still many years from that goal.

TAE, however, claimed on Thursday that it has cracked the riddle.

“We have the science solved,” Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE, told The New York Times. TAE has the engineering ready, he said, but has lacked sufficient capital despite raising $1.3 billion from investors.

President Trump is the largest shareholder of Trump Media, the publicly traded parent company of the social media platform Truth Social. His stake — reportedly worth more than $1 billion — is held in a trust managed by his eldest son

Trump Media’s value spiked nearly 50% following news of the merger, which would make TAE one of the first fusion companies to go public.

Washington competitors push back

TAE’s claims triggered pushback in Washington state, home to several fusion companies racing to commercialize the technology.

Helion Energy in July broke ground on what it says will be the first fusion plant to put power on the grid starting in 2028. Pragav Jain, Helion’s chief financial officer, welcomed the merger news while reasserting the company’s head start.

“This is a positive signal for the industry as a whole,” Jain said via email. “The world needs fusion and we’re seeing strong support both from customers and investors, so it’s not surprising to see deals like this.”

Everett-based Helion has raised more than $1 billion and is actively constructing Orion, its planned commercial facility in Eastern Washington. “We’re leading the way to make fusion a reality,” Jain added.

Zap Energy, a fusion company located down the road from Helion, didn’t provide an official comment on the deal when contacted by GeekWire. But spokesperson Andy Freeberg challenged the assertion that anyone has mastered fusion.

“The science has come a long way over several decades of work and is mature enough to build ventures around, that’s very exciting,” Freeberg said on LinkedIn. “But even a superficial knowledge of the state of the technology will show you it’s far from ‘solved’ and statements like this from someone who obviously knows better are completely disingenuous.”

Zap has $330 million from investors and notched scientific milestones, but has been more cautious in setting its own near-time deadlines for commercialized fusion.

Robin Langtry, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Avalanche Energy, which is building smaller-scale fusion devices, praised the deal.

TAE has made “some significant breakthroughs recently” that fusion proponents “should celebrate,” Langtry said via email. He added that the substantial funding needed for fusion infrastructure is tough to raise through venture capital or a traditional IPO.

“In that context a merger with a public company that in principle already has the deep pockets to raise the necessary funds makes a lot of sense,” Langtry added.

RELATED STORIES:

• Helion gives behind-the-scenes tour of secretive 60-foot fusion prototype as it races to deployment
• Inside Zap: Fusion pioneer tries to build ‘a star in a jar’ to unlock abundant clean energy
• Meet the key players in the Pacific Northwest’s fusion energy hub

— Nintex CEO Amit Mathradas announced that he’s leaving to take the helm of Five9 beginning on Feb. 2. Mathradas has led Nintex, a Bellevue, Wash.-based workflow automation company, for nearly three years. His previous roles include chief operating officer at Avalara, general manager at PayPal, and a 14-year run at Dell.

Five9 is a California-based software company specializing in AI-powered customer experience solutions.

“It is an honor to join such a dynamic company that I have long admired as being at the cutting edge of AI-driven CX,” Mathradas said on LinkedIn.

— Starting Jan. 1, Zoë Stemm-Calderon will take the role of executive director at the Raikes Foundation, where she has worked for a decade. She is transitioning from her current position as senior director of Youth Serving Systems.

During her tenure, Stemm-Calderon has managed yearly investments of $20 million directed toward initiatives focused on K-12 and higher education, along with youth homelessness programs.

Jeff and Tricia Raikes are the co-founders of the foundation, which launched in 2002. Jeff Raikes was at Microsoft for close to three decades and served as CEO of the Gates Foundation for more than five years. Tricia Raikes is co-founder of Giving Compass.

— Emily Heffter is now senior director of thought leadership and research for Workday, a finance and HR software company with offices in Seattle. Heffter joins the company from Qualtrics, where she was vice president of global communications. She was previously Zillow Group’s director of corporate communications.

“I’m joining Workday’s amazing communications team to help tell one of the most dynamic stories in the business world: the future of work.” Heffter said on LinkedIn. That includes “how people, technology, and leadership are evolving together — and helping business leaders see around the corner.”

— Seattle’s Lance Ludman has joined SurveyMonkey as its new chief financial officer. Ludman was most recently CFO at the social impact company Benevity. He also served as CFO at DreamBox Learning, a Bellevue, Wash.-based edtech company that was acquired in 2023.

SurveyMonkey CEO Eric Johnson praised Ludman’s “unique leadership style,” adding in a statement that “he maintains a persistent curiosity and business-partnership mindset.”

— Seattle-area rocket company Stoke Space appointed Matt White to its board of directors. White is executive vice president and CFO for Linde and serves on the board as a representative for Industrious Ventures.

— Laurent Boinot, Microsoft’s head of power and utilities in the Americas, has joined the board of LF Energy, an open-source foundation supporting energy deployment.

— Vivek Ladsariya, general partner and managing director at Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs, joined the board of Seattle startup Tin Can, makers of a Wi-Fi-enabled landline-style phone for kids.

— Washington Research Foundation named Joe Albe as the new manager of grants and venture research at the organization, which helps universities and other nonprofits in the state commercialize and license their technologies. Albe recently earned his doctorate degree in immunology from the University of Washington.

The foundation also announced its 2026 postdoctoral fellows:

• Stefany Cruz, a software engineer working at the UW on agentic Al technologies.
• Winston Dredge, who joins the UW to research the impact of genetic variation on early human development.
• Nastacia Goodwin, a neuroscientist who will study the impacts of climate change on bee behavior at the UW.
• Kunal Lodaya, a chemist coming to the UW to work on high-capacity redox flow batteries.
• Allyson Martin, an entomologist joining WSU to study pollinators in orchard settings.
• Jongbeom Park, a molecular biologist studying the effect of developmental and environmental variations on mammalian newborns at the UW.
• Zoe Rand, who joins the UW and NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center to study harmful algal bloom detection and management.
• Nathaniel Ritz, a neuroscientist joining the Institute for Systems Biology to investigate host-microbe communication.
• Jonas Wilhelm, a biochemist coming to the UW’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) to create catalysts for greenhouse-gas removal.
• Marcus Wong, who joins the UW to study immune responses to malaria and other infectious diseases.
• Chuanyun Xu, a biologist joining the IPD to design proteins for cellular sensing and control.
• Lu Yu, a biochemist using DNA nanotechnology to advance targeted cancer therapy at the UW.

A Seattle-area startup called Pauling.AI is harnessing artificial intelligence to automate the early steps that lead to the discovery of new drugs. The technology can complete tasks in a matter of weeks that previously required three to six months, said founder and CEO Javier Tordable.

Using AI to accelerate research timelines could ultimately spark an exponential increase in new treatments, proponents say.

“The dream of a lot of people in the field would be that, at some point, we’ll go from 30 or 40 new drugs approved every year to 300 or 400,” Tordable said, “and cure all sorts of diseases.”

Tordable launched his company in 2024 after a 16-year tenure at Google, most recently as the technical director of the company’s healthcare and life sciences initiatives. While he doesn’t have expertise in biology or chemistry, Tordable said he’s skilled at building tech tools that can perform complex tasks — such as those required to create new pharmaceuticals.

The startup operates on a “scientist-as-a-service” model, allowing researchers to outsource early steps in the drug discovery process to AI. The platform performs computational chemistry work, engineering drug candidates and modeling how they might interact with molecules and inhibitors within a cell.

The result is a curated list of small-molecule compounds that scientists can then move into a physical laboratory for testing as therapeutics. In the future, the startup would like to produce more complex compounds as drug candidates, such as antibodies.

To accomplish all of this, Pauling is building automation tools that engage with existing large language models and databases from numerous sources.

The startup has six employees who work remotely. Its leadership includes Chief Scientific Officer Oleksandr Savytskyi, a computational biologist who worked in academia in Ukraine and did research at the Mayo Clinic.

Pauling has secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Flex Capital and angel investors. It currently serves less than a dozen customers, including several high-profile academic institutions, Tordable said.

The company joins a burgeoning field of AI-biotech ventures, with numerous Pacific Northwest startups: Variational AI in Vancouver, B.C.; Seattle-based Potato and Synthesize Bio; and Xaira Therapeutics, which is based in San Francisco and has labs in Seattle. Additionally, FutureHouse is a California nonprofit in this sphere.

Ultimately, Tordable hopes that by shrinking the time and cost of drug development, it will become economically feasible to tackle rare diseases that are typically not served by big pharma, providing overlooked patients with treatments and cures.

“The nice thing of working in this field is that we’re not necessarily doing it just for economic returns,” Tordable said. “There’s also an enormous benefit to humanity.”

In a remarkable pivot, Athira Pharma is shifting its primary focus from Alzheimer’s to oncology following a multi-year period marked by clinical failures and leadership turnover.

The Bothell, Wash.-based company announced today that it has licensed a Phase 3 breast cancer drug from Sermonix Pharmaceuticals, supported by $90 million in funding from a group of healthcare investment firms. It could land an additional $146 million if the research yields promising results.

Athira will simultaneously continue researching ATH-1105, its own drug candidate for treating ALS.

Athira President and CEO Mark Litton called the development “exciting and transformative news.”

“By securing rights to this late-stage program — while also advancing pATH-1105 for ALS — we are building a pipeline that we believe has the potential to change lives and create enduring value,” Litton said on LinkedIn. “We are honored to have the backing of some of the most respected biotechnology funds in the industry.”

Following the deal announcement, the company’s stock rose 70% to $7 per share.

Athira has been through a tumultuous few years:

• Its Alzheimer’s disease drug candidate, called fosgonimeton, stumbled and then failed a Phase 2/3 trial last year.
• That sank Athira’s stock price and triggered a layoff of 49 employees, or about 70% of its workforce in September 2024.
• In 2021, Athira CEO and President Leen Kawas resigned after it was confirmed she had altered images in scientific papers from her graduate studies that helped form the company’s foundation.

Details on the deal

Under today’s deal, Athira secures an exclusive license to develop and commercialize the breast cancer therapeutic for nations outside of Asia and select Middle Eastern countries. The drug, called lasofoxifene, is currently in a clinical trial that has enrolled over half of its target patient population, with initial results expected in mid-2027.

The agreement provides Sermonix with 5.5 million shares of Athira’s stock. The Seattle company has also committed to paying Sermonix up to $100 million plus limited royalties if certain commercial targets are reached.

Three lead investors are backing the research: New York’s Commodore Capital, biotech hedge fund Perceptive Advisors, and California-based TCGX. Additional participants are ADAR1, Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, Kalehua Capital, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Spruce Street Capital and 9vc.

Athira raised $90 million by selling stock and warrants to investors, extending its cash runway into 2028. If investors choose to exercise those warrants in the future, the company could receive up to an additional $146 million to fund its clinical programs.

“We’re proud to support this evolution and excited by the opportunity to deliver meaningful impact for patients and shareholders alike,” said Joseph Edelman, founder and CEO of Perceptive Advisors, in a statement.

Regarding its own ALS drug candidate, Athira this year successfully completed Phase 1 safety trials, and plans to start Phase 2 trials early next year.

What happens if you let teens craft the rules that dictate their use of phones at school? You get policy ideas with a nuanced, holistic perspective that rival those being officially issued by the adults in leadership.

The University of Washington’s Youth Advisory Board, a group of approximately 20 teens from Seattle-area schools, recently published its first memo tackling this contentious issue. The memo weighs the pros and cons of phone bans and offers recommendations on how schools should draft and communicate their policies.

“The whole point of the memo was to bring teen experiences into real policy conversations,” said Jaden Hong, a sophomore at Eastlake High School and board participant. “I think it matters that our ideas get into the hands of the principals, district leaders and even state-level decision makers or legislators who are actively shaping phone and tech rules.”

The Youth Advisory Board’s memo was informed by a UW study and questionnaires on the impacts of phone rules at middle and high schools in Washington. The regulations ranged from all-day bans to restrictions during lunch and passing periods. The board’s key suggestions for high school policies include:

• Compromise: Preferred policies allow phone use during breaks between classes and lunch, but not during academic time, as opposed to all-day bans.
• Reframing: Use neutral language around the policy, avoiding polarizing terms like “ban” or “phone free.”
• Inclusion/communication: Input is needed from students, parents and teachers, and should include polls and classroom discussions to get buy-in. Clearly communicate the policies.
• Consistency: Make the rules school-wide and don’t vary them by teacher or class.
• Diverse needs: Students with responsibilities outside of school (like some jobs) or with medical needs require leniency.
• Social engagement: Educators need to foster social engagement during class lessons as well as structured social activities outside of academics.
• Digital wellness: Beyond tech literacy, teens welcome classes on digital wellness and the healthy use of devices.

What the research showed

Lucía Magis-Weinberg, a developmental psychologist and head of the International Adolescent Connection and Technology Laboratory at the UW, conducted the surveys that helped inform the students’ opinions. Roughly 4,400 students, teachers and parents responded to the initial inquiry.

In the answers to questionnaires, teachers emphasized that with limited phone access, there are fewer distractions in the classroom, more social engagement and less bullying. Teens said the restrictions reduced the amount of cheating.

On the downside, teens and parents were concerned that communications were more difficult, such as friends making plans, scheduling with family, or in the case of an emergency. Teens and teachers noted that phones had positive instructional uses and could aid students with specific academic or language challenges.

“As a student, sometimes it’s hard to look outside of yourself,” said Abbie Huang, a board participant who also attends Eastlake. She said that reading teachers’ comments on student engagement and realizing that a lot of students are OK with phone restrictions broadened her opinion.

“It was really cool to see other schools and the way they approached it, and just other people’s perspectives that I didn’t think about before,” she added.

Current policy landscape

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction allows local districts to set their own phone policies. The office reported that 75% of the state’s districts were implementing restrictions — either banning phones during class time or throughout the school day.

Oregon, by contrast, took a statewide approach, prohibiting phone use during school hours in the state’s K-12 public schools.

Seattle Public Schools has not issued a district-wide policy, though at least three public middle schools in the district have banned phones at school, and at least one high school prohibits their use during classes.

UW researchers shared the Youth Advisory Board’s memo at last week’s Washington Educational Research Association conference in Tacoma.

Broader tech concerns: AI and social media

Board participants agreed that student input is equally crucial for other pressing tech issues, including rising teen use of artificial intelligence and chatbots, as well as ongoing concerns about social media’s impact on young people.

“I really want to highlight how important it is to get the youth voice in there,” said Rotem Landesman, a UW graduate student in the Information School helping lead the Youth Advisory Board. Teens need to be represented in drafting policies and guidelines, she added, as tech is being integrated into schools “at such a rapid pace.”

Recent data from the Pew Research Center highlights the challenge:

• Some 64% of U.S. teens report having used an AI chatbot, and 31% do so daily.
• The vast majority of teens are engaging with social media, with 92% using YouTube and 68% on TikTok.

For both AI and social media, experts worry about mental health harms, misinformation, privacy and other concerns — while regulating the technology’s use remains difficult.

Sirjana Kaur, a senior at Redmond High School and board participant, said that her AP literature course forbids the use of AI due to concerns about cheating, requiring students to do all of their writing longhand and in class. The year-end AP test, which potentially provides students with college credits, will be done on a computer.

“There’s definitely a lot of work” to be done around AI regulations, she said. “I think there’s a balance that needs to be struck between avoiding AI, but also not making things even harder for students.”

— Lisa Qian is the first AI Officer for the City of Seattle.

“This strategic leadership position is designed to ensure Seattle harnesses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence while upholding the city’s values and commitment to responsible technology use,” the Seattle Information Technology Department stated on LinkedIn.

Seattle is vying to establish itself as an AI heavyweight, touting the contributions of Amazon and Microsoft, smaller companies and startups, and the University of Washington, among others. In March, the city launched “AI House,” a first-in-the-nation hub designed to bring entrepreneurs, investors, students and community leaders together to propel the field.

Before this role, Qian was at LinkedIn where she served as a senior manager of data science. Past jobs include leadership positions at Seattle logistic company Convoy and at Airbnb.

“As a proud Seattle resident, I’m excited to apply my experience building responsible data science and AI systems toward work that directly benefits our community,” Qian said on LinkedIn.

— Microsoft has recruited a longtime media leader for its AI news product: Julia Beizer, current chief operating officer at Bloomberg Media. Adweek broke the news.

Beizer will report to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, Adweek states, and will work on products including its Copilot Daily news round up and Publisher Content Marketplace, which pays publishers for content that’s used by AI products. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft two years ago, alleging they illegally used the media outlet’s content to train its AI.)

Beizer has been with Bloomberg for eight years, helping drive subscriber growth with a focus on marketing, user experience and customer insights. She previously worked at HuffPost and was with The Washington Post for more than a decade.

— Seattle’s DexCare announced Rakshay Jain as its new chief product officer.

Dexcare’s software platform helps healthcare providers manage their system’s capacity and schedule appointments. The startup launched at Providence, spinning out from the healthcare network’s digital innovation group in 2021.

“What drew me to DexCare is that this team isn’t trying to replace systems already in use, but connect them, and create the navigational intelligence that guides where, when, and how patients access care, no matter where they enter the system,” Jain said in a statement.

Jain joins the company from Innovaccer, a Bay Area company providing software for managing healthcare data. He will work remotely from California.

— Sri Chandrasekar is taking a break after nearly nine years as a managing partner at Point72 Ventures. Chandrasekar, who is based in Bellevue, Wash., appears to have resigned from the board of directors of four startups located across the U.S. and in London, while retaining seats at two others.

“To my Ventures team – It was amazing going to battle with you over the last 9 years. I expect nothing but great things from you in the years to come,” he wrote in LinkedIn. “To our Portfolio companies – Working with you is what made the long nights and the non-stop travel worthwhile. If you need me, you know how to find me!”

Prior to Point72, Chandrasekar was a senior vice president at In-Q-Tel in Menlo Park, Calif.

— Brian Fleming is stepping away from Sucker Punch, the Bellevue, Wash.-based game studio he co-founded 28-years ago. “I’ve decided it’s time to shake up the snow-globe,” he wrote on LinkedIn, adding that he’ll stay at the company — part of PlayStation Studios — through April to assist with the leadership transition. Jason Connell and Adrian Bentley will take over as co-studio heads on Jan. 1.

— Jiphun Satapathy is now chief information security officer for Motive, a San Francisco company providing software tools to make operations safer for construction, field service, energy, trucking and other industries. Satapathy, who is based in the Seattle area, previously worked as CISO for Medallia and has held leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Snowflake and elsewhere.

— Janet Greenlee, director of communications at Allen Family Philanthropies, is retiring from her role. Greenlee has spent her career in marketing and communications. She worked for more than a decade at the philanthropy, which was launched by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and his sister, Jody Allen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington 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.