Michael Lucarelli is looking for Seattle food recommendations — after relocating to the city earlier this year and moving his company with him.

RentSpree, which got its start in Los Angeles but is now headquartered in downtown Seattle, has built a profitable business helping landlords and real estate agents screen tenants, collect rent, sign leases, and manage rentals online.

The company, founded in 2016, serves more than 4 million users and is growing without relying heavily on paid advertising, said Lucarelli, CEO and co-founder of RentSpree.

Lucarelli, a former real estate agent, said Seattle stood out because of its concentration of real estate and proptech companies such as Zillow, Redfin, and Opendoor. The company this month hired former Redfin exec Alex Berezhnyy as chief technology officer, further anchoring its presence in the region, where more than half of the executive team is now based. It has more than 30 employees in Seattle.

“Seattle is really great for talent that balances both an aggressive growth perspective, but also building sustainable companies over time,” Lucarelli said.

RentSpree targets “DIY” landlords, typically individuals who own one to four rental units and still rely on paper applications and manual rent collection. The company’s software helps them manage the entire rental process online, from applications and leases to monthly payments.

While landlords and real estate agents are RentSpree’s core users, the company makes most of its money from renters, who pay application fees and small convenience fees for rent payments. That model has helped fuel its payments business, which is now growing about 150% year-over-year and processing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

RentSpree also recently launched a banking-as-a-service offering that lets landlords open bank accounts through the platform, earn interest, and track expenses — pushing the company further into fintech territory.

The company’s real advantage is it’s distribution, Lucarelli said. Instead of relying on digital ads, RentSpree partners with MLS systems, Realtor associations, and real estate software platforms to reach landlords where they already work.

More than 10,000 landlords and agents use RentSpree each month. The company has rolled out new AI features to help streamline filling out forms and listing properties.

“We’re focusing on the important jobs that they’re trying to accomplish, or things that they’re doing already — and how we can make it vastly easier by utilizing AI for them,” Lucarelli said.

The company has raised $28 million to date and employs 135 people across the company in the U.S. and Thailand.

Welcome back to another Startup Radar, where we highlight up-and-coming early stage startups across the Seattle region.

This time we’re spotlighting founders working on digitizing golf scorecards, automating port operations, developing protein sequencing hardware, and tackling e-commerce returns.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — and a pitch assessment from GPT-powered “Mean VC,” which we prompt to offer both positive and critical feedback.

Check out past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies and startup news.

Barkie

Founded: 2025

The business: Sports tech startup aiming to digitize scorecards for golfers. The goal is to preserve the traditional experience on the course while giving golfers advanced analytics after their rounds. Barkie is developing social features within its app and is launching next month.

Leadership: CEO Dane Renkert was a sales leader at Docugami, Komiko, and Ben Kinney Companies. He’s also a competitive golfer who placed 13th at the 2009 World Long Drive Championships. His former Docugami colleague Zubin Wadia is a technical advisor.

Mean VC: “There’s something charming about modern tech wrapped in the polite culture of golf — your timing’s smart, too, with golf booming post-COVID. But digitizing scorecards isn’t exactly a deep moat, and Arccos, Hole19, and 18Birdies already live here. The social angle could be your wedge in, but it needs to be more than ‘Strava for golfers’ if you want retention after the novelty fades.”

Gatein

Founded: 2025

The business: Software to help ports track containers using automation and AI-powered computer vision technology. The company is initially targeting small and medium-sized ports that it says have historically been excluded from being able to automate port operations. Gatein is bootstrapped and recently began working on a site in Europe. 

Leadership: CEO Bernardo Mendez-Arista is a longtime product leader with stints at Amazon, Volley Automation, RRAI, and Yaskawa Motoman. Co-founder and CTO Michael Pivtoraiko also worked at Volley and previously started two logistics tech companies.

Mean VC: “Smart to go after small and mid-size ports — they’re often overlooked, yet desperate for modernization. But port operators move slow, and convincing them to adopt computer vision and AI is more about trust and track record than flashy tech. If you can show real savings and keep integration friction low, you might quietly build a very sticky business.”

Primary Bioscience

Founded: 2023

The business: Early stage biotech startup developing a protein sequencing device. The company is stealthy for now but its website describes the business as a “comprehensive proteomics platform” for multi-biomarker screening. Primary Bioscience graduated from the Creative Destruction Labs’ Vancouver program earlier this year.

Leadership: CEO Stacy Anderson most recently spent three years at Roche as a protein engineering scientist. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mean VC: “Proteomics is white-hot, and if your device can actually accelerate multi-biomarker screening, the upside is massive. But ‘comprehensive platform’ is vague, and stealth mode works better when people already know you’re dangerous. The science background is strong, but the key question is: are you a tool company, a data company, or a pharma play pretending to be a device?”

Return Stack

Founded: 2025

The business: A “reverse logistics” startup that helps online retailers process and restock customer returns. It uses computer vision and AI agents to authenticate, grade, and resell returned items. The startup recently opened its first warehouse in Indianapolis to process returns. 

Leadership: Founder and CEO Mayank Sharma spent more than a decade at Amazon, where he led teams working on last mile logistics and returns. Co-founder Maria Pavlovskaia was an engineering leader at Amazon and Uber. 

Mean VC: “Reverse logistics is messy, costly, and growing — which makes it exactly the kind of boring problem that could be a monster business. Having ex-Amazon leadership is helpful here, but you’ll need to prove your tech handles real-world chaos, not just demo videos. The first warehouse is a good start; now show you can scale ops without your gross margins vanishing into the void.”

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

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

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

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

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

Some key takeaways from our reporting:

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

Major players are making moves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bots meet the buy button

McKinsey outlines three main ways agentic commerce could work:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching the internet to talk to AI

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

New tools are starting to fill that gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens to Amazon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When AI knows you’re going on vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft has released one of its most detailed looks yet at how people use Copilot — and the results suggest the AI assistant plays different roles depending on time of day and the device.

In a new preprint titled “It’s About Time: The Copilot Usage Report 2025,” Microsoft AI researchers analyzed 37.5 million de-identified Copilot conversations between January and September of this year. Enterprise and school accounts were excluded, and machine classifiers labeled each chat by topic and “intent,” such as searching for information, getting advice, or creating content.

The top-line finding: on desktop computers, Copilot usage centers on work and technical questions during business hours. On mobile, it’s about health — all day, every day.

“Health and Fitness” paired with information-seeking was the single most common topic-intent combination for mobile users, and stayed in the top spot every hour of the day across the nine-month window. The paper suggests this shows how people increasingly treat Copilot on their phones as a private advisor for personal questions, not just a search tool.

On PCs, “Work and Career” overtakes “Technology” as the top topic between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., mirroring a traditional office schedule. Other work-related topics such as science and education also rise during the day and fade overnight.

“The contrast between the desktop’s professional utility and the mobile device’s intimate consultation suggests that users are engaging with a single system in two ways: a colleague at their desk and a confidant in their pocket,” Microsoft wrote in the study.

Compared with January, the September data from Microsoft’s study shows fewer programming conversations and more activity around culture and history — a sign, the researchers say, that usage has broadened beyond early technical adopters into more mainstream, non-developer use cases.

Usage reports from OpenAI and Anthropic found similar consumer patterns, with many people using ChatGPT and Claude for practical guidance, information, and writing help in their personal lives. Microsoft’s new Copilot study adds a sharper twist: on desktops, AI looks like a co-worker; on phones, it looks a lot more like a health and life adviser.

In a companion blog post, Microsoft said the study shows how Copilot “is way more than a tool: it’s a vital companion for life’s big and small moments.”

The study highlights a rise in advice-seeking, particularly around personal topics. This suggests people are turning to AI not just to offload tasks but to help make decisions — which could raise the stakes for model builders around accuracy, trust and accountability.

Microsoft’s research team included Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman as a co-author. Each conversation was automatically stripped of personally identifiable information and no human reviewers saw the underlying chats, according to the paper.

Tech-related job postings remain stuck well below pre-pandemic levels in Seattle, according to a new hiring trends report from Indeed.

The site uses a measure called the Indeed Job Postings Index, which treats Feb. 1, 2020 as the “normal” baseline of 100. Numbers below 100 mean fewer job postings than before the pandemic.

In Seattle, the index for Software Development was 32 as of Nov. 27, 2025 — meaning postings are about two-thirds lower than the pre-COVID benchmark. Data & Analytics is even lower at 29.

Those numbers haven’t moved much over the past two years. Software Development was 31 in late 2023 and Data & Analytics was 38, for example.

Nationally, tech job postings are almost a third lower compared to early 2020, according to Indeed.

Seattle is seeing a more concentrated pullback in tech-related hiring. It makes for an unfamiliar economic environment in the Emerald City, which has seen its tech industry surge for much of the past decade, including a hiring spree early in the pandemic.

A report from CBRE in 2021 showed that the Seattle region added more than 48,000 tech jobs from 2016 to 2020, an increase of more than 35% — growing at a faster rate than any other large U.S. tech market for that time period. Amazon was growing exponentially, Microsoft had a massive revival, and the startup scene was producing multiple billion-dollar companies.

It’s a different climate now, just as the artificial intelligence era gets going amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty.

Microsoft and Amazon had substantial layoffs this year, though both are still hiring in select areas as they invest heavily in AI infrastructure. Some startups, once so-called “unicorns,” have also shed staff due to financial trouble.

The tech slowdown in Seattle got the national spotlight in September, when The Wall Street Journal detailed the broader fallout from widespread layoffs, including decreased retail spending in tech-heavy districts and record-high office vacancies.

The latest trends may help explain why some job seekers, including longtime leaders, are having trouble landing tech gigs in Seattle.

The tech industry accounts for a whopping 30% of the economy in the Seattle region, according to a report from CompTIA. That ranks second in the U.S. behind San Jose. Tech also accounts for more than 12% of the overall workforce in the Seattle area.

Workers in the “computer and mathematicals” occupation category in the Seattle area had the highest median earnings in 2024 by a wide margin ($163,609), according to the Seattle Times.

Other hiring trends in Seattle and nationally

As of late 2025, only seven of 45 sectors in the Seattle area were above 100, per the Indeed Job Postings Index — and all of them were in healthcare. Two years earlier, 22 sectors were still above 100, showing a much broader economy with stronger hiring demand. Overall, Seattle had a 35% decline in job postings from February 2020 to October 2025, Axios reported.

The weakest Seattle sectors right now include Data & Analytics, Software Development, Project Management, Human Resources, and Media and Communications.

Some of the largest declines over the past two years came in non-tech areas such as Driving, Pharmacy, Cleaning and Sanitation, Civil Engineering, and Childcare — though Indeed notes that Pharmacy and Civil Engineering still remain relatively high compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Indeed said in nearly every state, the highest job posting levels are found in smaller and mid-sized regions, rather than big cities.

“Employment in many of the largest MSAs tends to be skewed towards tech, business, and professional services, which are seeing lower levels of job postings,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Smaller MSAs, however, tend to have heavier employment shares in sectors, including manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, and healthcare, which generally have job postings that remain near or higher than pre-COVID norms.”

Indeed said the most probable outcome for next year’s labor market is an extension of the current “low-hire, low-fire” environment. It noted that large coastal metro areas with slower population growth and more exposure to tech and professional services “are likely to face tougher conditions.”

Define the problem. Describe the solution. Note the value proposition. Highlight leadership bios. Call out your customers. Show growth metrics. Set the long-term vision.

This is the pitch from Seattle startup Yoodli — and it seems to be working well.

The company, which sells software that helps users practice important conversations, last week announced a $40 million round, just eight months after raising a separate $13.7 million round in May. Its valuation has about tripled since then to around $300 million.

Yoodli shared its latest pitch deck with GeekWire. The 11-slide presentation has the core elements of a solid deck. It’s straight forward and simple — quick problem-framing and a clear mission statement that sets up the rest of the story.

In a startup era where seemingly every pitch mentions AI, Yoodli’s framing of the technology stands out: “Other AI is replacing jobs; Yoodli uses AI to help humans be their best and take control of their career.”

The deck also reflects Yoodli’s shift from consumer to enterprise. Yoodli got its start in 2021 at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle with a consumer-focused offering targeted at practicing public speaking. It has since turned its focus to the enterprise market, working with companies such as SAP, Google, Snowflake, and Korn Ferry to help employees practice their sales pitches and feedback sessions.

Looking ahead, Yoodli said it will use the new funding to expand into what it calls “experiential learning.”

“Experiential learning is the next step of conversation coaching — helping people learn, practice, and apply skills with roleplays at the center of their experience,” co-founder and CEO Varun Puri wrote on LinkedIn. “We’re making learning more fun and actionable for individuals and much more closely tied to ROI for organizations.”

The raise comes amid competition in the AI-powered workforce training market, as employers look for scalable tools to upskill workers in communication, leadership, and customer engagement.

Yoodli has grown revenue around 900% in the past year. Its headcount has tripled to more than 40 people, including several new C-suite additions.

WestBridge Capital led the latest round, which included previous investors Neotribe and Madrona.

“Yoodli is becoming the natural way organizations help people learn and build the skills that drive revenue, strengthen customer relationships, and influence culture,” Madrona wrote in a blog post.

Check out the full deck below.

Yoodli Pitch Deck — December 2025 by GeekWire

Casera, a new healthcare technology startup in Seattle, is spinning out of Pioneer Square Labs with a unique approach to hospital operations: using “agentic AI” to automate the work of case managers and speed up patient flow.

The company is tackling a thorny problem in healthcare: unnecessary length of stay driven by operational friction. Delays in communication, payer authorization and discharge planning can add time to a patient’s stay — and thousands of dollars in expenses for hospitals each day, according to Casera.

The company’s software is built for case managers, who coordinate the operational steps required to move patients safely through the system.

Casera describes its product as a “Case Manager Digital Agent” that operates inside communication channels, watching for context and then triggering next steps — for example, following up on a pending prior authorization or making sure all tasks for a complex discharge have owners and due dates.

Casera’s system plugs into existing collaboration and communication tools, and helps identify “what needs to happen, who needs to be involved, and helps ensure it gets done,” according to CEO Neeraj Singh Bhavani, who previously started patient-flow startup Tagnos (acquired by Sonitor).

Bhavani sees the company’s main competition in vendors that have traditionally focused on patient flow and hospital capacity management, including Qventus, LeanTaaS and TeleTracking. But he said Casera is attacking a different layer of the problem by focusing on “getting things done versus telling what to do.”

“Not trying to be another legacy dashboard and analytics player,” he told GeekWire.

Casera is working with a design partners across major health systems in three states. It has not generated revenue.

Casera’s other co-founder is CTO Alex Levin, who previously started revenue intelligence company MD Clarity (acquired by private equity). A third early leader, Jhayne Pana, was previously an assistant nurse manager with MultiCare Health.

The company has raised $1 million from PSL and has less than ten employees. PSL previously spun out Kevala, a healthcare staffing software company that was acquired earlier this year.

“Tackling patient flow with automation is a massive opportunity, and a very good use case for multiple agentic applications,” T.A. McCann, managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, said in a statement. “It’s an area we know well and in addition to the clear market need, the opportunity to work with two, recently-exited founders was a huge bonus.”

Veteran tech operators with ties to Seattle are launching a new investment firm aimed at what they see as two of the biggest opportunities in today’s economy: AI and cyber intelligence.

VQ Capital is a “thesis-driven, AI-native investment platform” that partners with multibillion-dollar family offices. The firm is headquartered in New York but co-founder Brian Lent plans to build a hub in the Seattle region, where he was an early Amazon leader and later started Medio, a predictive analytics startup acquired by Nokia in 2014.

Lent is teaming up on VQ Capital with longtime colleague John Kim. They first worked together when Lent recruited Kim to join Medio. Kim later went on to become a product exec at Expedia, Vrbo, and PayPal.

Other managing partners include Yotam Avrahami, a former partner at New Vista Capital and Deloitte, and Praveen Hirsave, a former Expedia and Babylon exec who also spent nearly 15 years at IBM.

VQ Capital says it will concentrate on two main themes:

• “Golden Dome” for cyber intelligence — funding technology that unifies isolated cybersecurity tools.
• AI transformation of consumer companies — helping marketing-led brands rebuild customer acquisition, marketing, supply chain, fulfillment and core operations into “compounding, AI-native systems.”

“We believe the biggest winners of this era will be built by small, extraordinary teams capable of out-maneuvering incumbent giants,” Kim said in a statement.

The firm argues that the old pattern of gradual, Moore’s Law-style progress has given way to what it calls an “era of compounding change,” driven by hardware advances, new AI models and large-scale data.

VQ Capital also departs from the standard venture fund structure. Instead of raising a large, long-lived fund up front, the firm works with family office partners on a deal-by-deal basis. The firm describes its approach as a hybrid of private equity discipline and venture-style investing.

Avrahami, a veteran of the Israeli Special Forces, initially started the firm as YA6. He later partnered with Kim and Lent to re-launch as an AI-focused investment platform — what is now known as VQ Capital.

After Nokia acquired Medio, Lent worked at HERE Technologies for two years before launching real estate tech startup Plunk, which closed in 2024. His most recent gig was with Auger, a well-funded logistics startup in Bellevue led by former Amazon exec Dave Clark. Lent was chief analytics and data officer, and departed after seven months to help launch YA6, which evolved into VQ Capital.

Internet Backyard, a new startup building billing software for data centers and GPU providers, announced a $4.5 million pre-seed round led by Basis Set Ventures.

The two-month-old company describes itself as a “financial infrastructure layer for the AI compute economy,” aiming to automate the entire order-to-cash process and replace the spreadsheets and manual handoffs that sit between sales, operations and finance.

The company’s first product, called gnomos, is a full-stack platform that helps data center operators and their customers track and charge for GPU and infrastructure usage.

The startup plans to generate revenue by taking a small percentage of the invoice income it helps recover, plus fees on routed payment flow and data licensing. It has a longer-term goal of becoming a data aggregation layer for industry benchmarks and performance metrics.

Other backers include Crucible Capital, Maple VC, Operator Collective, Seattle-based Breakers, and angels including Jay Adelson (Equinix founder), D-Wave founder Geordie Rose (founder of D-Wave and Sanctuary AI) and Ian Crosby (founder of Bench Accounting).

The 5-person company is led by CEO Mai Trinh, a former technical project manager at Sanctuary AI, and CTO Gabriel Ravacci, a recent engineering grad who worked on next-generation AI accelerators at AMD. The startup got off the ground in Vancouver B.C. but is relocating to San Francisco.

Pallavi Wahi‘s latest career move is both a professional leap and a personal bookend.

Wahi, a veteran lawyer and business community leader, came to Seattle 25 years ago as an immigrant with no local network. She built a career and civic presence, and is now helping bring a nationally prominent firm deeper into the city’s legal and innovation ecosystem.

Wahi recently joined Arnold & Porter to launch its Seattle office and lead strategic growth on the West Coast, following a long tenure at K&L Gates, where she was a managing partner.

Arnold & Porter signed a lease in downtown’s U.S. Bank Center and wants to add at least 60 lawyers in Seattle within two years. Planting a flag in the Pacific Northwest is squarely aimed at the region’s innovation economy — and the rising regulatory complexity around it.

“Arnold and Porter has a very deep regulatory bench, and that is really what makes them so much of a differentiator in the market,” Wahi said. The firm’s specialties span healthcare, technology, manufacturing, cross-border trade, FDA and antitrust work — areas where she said corporate clients increasingly need strategic and practical guidance as rules evolve.

The view on AI

Arnold & Porter says it’s using generative AI for document review, legal research, collaboration, litigation prep, transactional diligence, and regulatory review. The firm uses tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude Enterprise, and ChatGPT Enterprise alongside in-house models.

Wahi described the firm as “very open to accepting and moving forward with new technology,” including pilots that use AI tools to support client work.

But she also draws a clear boundary for the legal profession: while AI can help lawyers, it can’t replace them.

“We have to be careful that it doesn’t substitute for actual legal work,” Wahi said. “You should not be filing briefs or doing anything which is generated by AI. You are the author — and the minute you forget that … is when trouble comes.”

Bullish on Seattle

The city, Wahi said, has become more welcoming, entrepreneurial and dynamic over the past quarter-century, and remains “an incredible incubator of change.”

“There’s an energy here,” Wahi said. “There’s a fabric of electricity.”

She added: “This city makes you bigger than you are. I truly believe that the reason for the success of many in this city is because of Seattle.”

Wahi has spent much of her legal career arguing cases and advising companies. Her other job has been to push Seattle’s business community to look beyond its own walls. She has done so by example, plugging into the boards of the Seattle Chamber, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle Rep, the King County Bar Foundation and more. She even participated in a dance competition to raise money for Plymouth Housing.

Her message to other leaders in Seattle is straightforward: participation matters.

“As a lawyer, I do believe I have a role to be a community leader, to really try and show up in ways that can help,” she said. “We need to show up for more than doing our jobs. We need to show up for each other in ways that make sense to ourselves.”

Scowtt, a Seattle-based startup that wants to reshape how advertisers optimize paid campaigns, raised $12 million in Series A funding round led by New York venture firm Inspired Capital.

Founded in 2024, Scowtt helps companies analyze their first-party CRM data to predict who is most likely to convert and how valuable they’ll be. Then it sends those predictions to ad platforms as enhanced signals to help boost return on ad spend and conversions without requiring marketers to change their existing tools, the company said.

Founder and CEO Eduardo Indacochea told GeekWire that the 10-person startup has $3.2 million in annual recurring revenue.

Scowtt also uses AI to interact with prospects and schedule calls. The company’s longer-term ambition is to grow beyond ad optimization into a broader, AI-driven “operating system for growth” that connects marketing and sales using the intelligence already embedded in a customer’s CRM.

Scowtt is targeting enterprise advertisers that rely on lead generation and other performance-driven models across search and social.

The company’s timing reflects two trends: the industry’s accelerating push toward first-party data as privacy rules tighten, and the rise of AI as the new performance lever in paid media. U.S. internet ad revenue grew nearly 15% in 2024 to $258.6 billion, and more growth is expected in 2025.

Indacochea spent more than 13 years at Microsoft before leadership stints at Google and most recently Meta, where he was a vice president in advertising.

Abhishek Priya, Scowtt’s head of engineering, was director of engineering at Everlaw and is a former engineering manager at Meta. Eric Schwartz, chief revenue officer, was an exec at Scibids Technology and MiQ.

Scowtt was previously featured in GeekWire’s Startup Radar spotlight.

LiveRamp Ventures, Angeles Investors, and Angeles Ventures also invested in the Series A round. Total funding to date is $13 million, including a $1 million pre-seed round last year.

A newly proposed payroll tax would add new costs for large businesses in Washington state. But Rep. Shaun Scott, a Seattle Democrat sponsoring the bill, argues it would protect the basic services that help companies recruit and retain talent.

“People are looking to the state legislature for leadership on protecting the programs that make our state actually a healthy climate to do business in,” Scott told GeekWire this week.

House Bill 2100, pre-filed this week in Olympia, would create the “Well Washington Fund” and levy a 5% payroll expense tax on “large operating companies” for employee wages above a $125,000 threshold. The bill defines a “large operating company” as one with more than 20 employees and more than $5 million in gross receipts or sales, among other criteria. Employers with total employee wages under $7 million in the prior year would be exempt.

Scott is pitching the bill as a state backstop against federal cuts hitting Medicaid, higher education, housing and other programs. He said it would generate more than $2 billion annually and impact the about 4,300 businesses — including Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant Microsoft and telecom behemoth T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue.

Seattle-based companies such as Amazon that already pay the city’s JumpStart payroll tax would be exempt.

Scott said there is a “corollary effect” on corporations from policies that benefit “everyday people.”

“My sense of it is that the public is on our side on this issue,” he said. “They understand that when you have very well-funded higher education, what that means is a well-trained workforce that could seek employment at a place like Microsoft or Amazon — and the company would benefit as a result.”

“When you have people who have very good housing options, that makes Washington that much more of a competitive place to come and do business,” he added.

Business groups are wary of the proposal. Rachel Smith, the new CEO of Washington Roundtable, called it a “tax-first, plan later” idea. She also cited the state’s recent tax increases impacting businesses — passed in part to help address a $16 billion budget shortfall — and broader economic uncertainty.

“If a job is cheaper somewhere else, and a company has an operational environment that allows them to deploy that job somewhere else, of course that’s going to be something they consider,” Smith said in an interview with GeekWire.

Lawmakers tried to pass a similar statewide payroll tax this year, but the bill did not advance. In March, Microsoft President Brad Smith criticized that tax proposal and said it would increase prices for consumers, reduce jobs, and hurt the tech industry.

Microsoft declined to comment on Rep. Scott’s proposal when contacted by GeekWire this week.

Rep. Scott said it’s “disingenuous” that critics raise alarms about companies leaving when the state talks about funding the safety net, but don’t ask similar questions when companies cut jobs on their own. He said the relocation question “does not come up when we see large tech firms investing in artificial intelligence, which is designed to divest from human labor.”

Washington is one of a few states without a personal or corporate income tax. Most state revenue comes from sales, property, and B&O taxes — a system critics say disproportionately burdens lower-income residents.

Gabriella Buono, interim president and CEO at the Seattle Metro Chamber, said that “raising taxes in an affordability crisis will mean higher prices on everyday essentials, fewer job opportunities, and more closures in sectors that are already on the edge.”

“Voters across the political spectrum are clear: they want smart spending, transparency, and results, not new taxes that make it harder to live and work in this state,” Buono said in a statement.

Revenue from the proposed bill would initially go to the state general fund in 2026, then split beginning in 2027, with 51% directed to a dedicated Well Washington fund account and 49% to the general fund. A new oversight and accountability board would guide priorities and report annually. Spending from the account would be limited to higher education, health care — especially Medicaid — cash assistance, and energy and housing programs.

Does everyone in Seattle hate AI?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on this topic? Continue the discussion on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yoodli is on a roll.

The Seattle startup, which sells AI-powered software to help people practice real-world conversations such as sales calls and feedback sessions, announced a $40 million Series B round on Tuesday to fuel growth. WestBridge Capital, a $7 billion global investment firm, led the round.

The fresh funding comes less than a year after the company’s $13.7 million Series A round in May.

Yoodli’s software lets users create personas to simulate conversations with another person or multiple people. The company’s model is trained on effective communication techniques and can be customized depending on an organization’s goals. Customers include SAP, Google, Snowflake, the University of Washington, Korn Ferry, and others.

“At a moment when AI is replacing human jobs, we’re doubling down on a different belief: that AI should help people become the best version of themselves in the conversations that matter most,” co-founder and CEO Varun Puri wrote on LinkedIn.

Yoodli’s revenue has grown around 900% in the past year. Its headcount has tripled to more than 40 people.

Puri told GeekWire earlier this year that Yoodli is like a “batting cage before game time,” or a flight simulator for communication. The idea is to replace passive formats such as slide decks and training videos with interactive practice that builds conversational muscle memory.

The company said it will use the new funding to expand into what it calls “experiential learning.”

“Experiential learning is the next step of conversation coaching — helping people learn, practice, and apply skills with roleplays at the center of their experience,” Puri wrote. “We’re making learning more fun and actionable for individuals and much more closely tied to ROI for organizations.”

The raise comes amid competition in the AI-powered workforce training market, as employers look for tools to upskill workers in communication, leadership, and customer engagement — areas where traditional learning management systems may have limitations.

Puri and Esha Joshi launched Yoodli in 2021 at the AI2 incubator in Seattle. The startup got off the ground with a consumer-focused offering targeted at practicing public speaking.

Neotribe and Madrona also participated in the latest funding round. Total capital raised is nearly $60 million.

— Smartsheet’s C-suite shuffle continues with the hiring of Scott Torrey as chief revenue officer.

Torrey previously led salary data company Payscale as CEO from 2019 to 2021. He spent the past three years as executive chairman at finance software startup Tesorio, and was at Concur for nearly two decades, including six years as chief revenue officer.

His new role marks a reunion of sorts as he teams up again with Concur co-founder Rajeev Singh, who recently became CEO at Smartsheet.

“Smartsheet is on a growth trajectory, and Scott’s leadership will drive our go-to-market success,” Singh said in a press release.

Smartsheet earlier this year hired Pratima Arora as its chief product officer and Ravi Soin as chief information security officer. It also named Cynthia Tee as chief technology officer.

Founded two decades ago, Smartsheet is one of the Seattle region’s iconic tech companies, with a large customer base of major businesses and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It went private earlier this year in a $8.4 billion deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.

Speaking to the company’s annual Engage conference in Seattle last month, Singh said it’s time for Smartsheet to “step out of the shadows” and challenge old perceptions of Smartsheet as simply an online spreadsheet tool. The company recently announced new features as part of its “Intelligent Work Management” platform that combines AI agents, knowledge graphs, and automation. 

— Amar Subramanya, a top AI researcher who joined Microsoft in July as a corporate VP, is changing jobs again and joining Apple as vice president of AI.

Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, the tech giant announced Monday. He’ll lead Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation.

Apple also announced that John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down.

Before joining Microsoft, Subramanya was at Google for more than 16 years, where he helped lead work on Gemini. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2009 and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft for a year in the mid-2000s.

“AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release.

Apple has struggled to catch up with competitors in the AI race and recently delayed a new version of its Siri voice assistant.

— Torben Severson left Amazon after 17 years to take a new role as vice president and head of global business development at OpenAI. Severson held multiple business development leadership roles, most recently as chief of staff to Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.

“Joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Severson said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m drawn to moments of transformation — and it’s rare to be part of something so squarely at the frontier of what’s possible.”

Severson said he was the first person to join “what became Corporate Business Development” at Amazon in 2008. “I’m deeply grateful for the people I’ve learned from and worked alongside,” he wrote. “Amazon shaped how I think, taught me how to navigate complex problems, and gave me the opportunity to build and lead exceptional teams. Through those experiences I learned the value of high judgment, clarity in ambiguity, and building trust through curiosity and rigor.”

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, said last year that it opened an office in Bellevue, Wash. The company recently acquired Bellevue-based startup Statsig.  

Amazon on Monday officially launched Amazon Now, a new ultra-fast service it’s testing in Seattle and Philadelphia that promises delivery in about 30 minutes or less for household essentials and fresh groceries. 

The announcement confirms reporting by GeekWire last week that revealed Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Permit filings showed the company planned to test a new delivery concept using Amazon Flex drivers dispatched from the location at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

In a blog post, Amazon detailed the new service, available inside the existing Amazon shopping app and website. Customers in eligible neighborhoods can look for a “30-Minute Delivery” option in the navigation bar, browse a curated catalog, track orders in real time, and tip their drivers. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

Amazon Now covers a wide range of items that people tend to need quickly — including milk, eggs, fresh produce, toothpaste, cosmetics, pet treats, diapers, paper products, electronics, seasonal items, and over-the-counter medicines, plus snacks like chips and dips.

Amazon did not provide a timeline for expanding Amazon Now to additional markets.

To hit the 30-minute window, Amazon is using smaller, specialized facilities placed close to where customers live and work.

As GeekWire reported last week, permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

By operating its own Amazon Now micro-stores, the company aims to better control inventory, labor, and pickup efficiency as it pushes deeper into “sub-same-day” delivery — a sector where it is competing with quick-commerce and micro-fulfillment players such as GoPuff, DoorDash, and others.

The new stores could also boost Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.

Amazon previously shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery service that relied on Flex drivers picking up small orders from malls and brick-and-mortar retailers, after reports that drivers often left stores with just one or two items.

Washington state is moving to set its own regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in the absence of federal legislation, laying out recommendations for how lawmakers should regulate AI in healthcare, education, policing, workplaces and more.

A new interim report from the Washington state AI Task Force notes that the federal government’s “hands-off approach” to AI has created “a crucial regulatory gap that leaves Washingtonians vulnerable.”

The report lands as the Trump administration pushes a deregulatory national AI policy and briefly considered an executive order to preempt state AI laws before putting the idea on hold after bipartisan pushback, according to Reuters.

The new report published this week notes that AI has “grown more powerful and prevalent than ever before” over the past year, driven by technical advances, the rise of AI agents, and open AI platforms transforming work and daily life.

The report lays out eight recommendations to the Washington state Legislature, including a requirement to improve transparency in AI development — mandating that AI developers publicly disclose the “provenance, quality, quantity and diversity of datasets” used to train models, and explain how training data is processed to mitigate errors and bias. The recommendation includes carve-outs protecting trade secrets.

State lawmakers introduced proposals earlier this year on AI development transparency and disclosure but their bills stalled.

The task force also recommends the creation of a grant program, leveraging public and private money, to support small businesses and startups building AI that serves the public interest — particularly for founders outside the Seattle area and those facing inequitable access to capital.

The report notes that the program would help Washington retain talent and “maintain its relevance as a tech hub.” An earlier bill to create such a program, HB 1833, stalled in the 2025 session.

Other recommendations include:

• Promote responsible AI governance for high-risk systems — defined as those with “potential to significantly impact people’s lives, health, safety, or fundamental rights.”
• Invest in K-12 STEM, higher education AI programs, professional development for teachers, and expanded broadband in rural communities.
• Improve transparency in healthcare prior authorization — requiring that any decision to deny, delay, or modify health services based on medical necessity is made only by qualified clinicians, even when AI tools are used.
• Develop guidelines for AI in the workplace, including a call for employers to disclose when AI is used for employee monitoring, discipline, termination, and promotion.
• Require law enforcement to publicly disclose AI tools they use, including generative AI for report writing, predictive policing systems, license plate readers, and facial recognition.
• Adopt NIST Ethical AI Principles as guiding framework, building on existing state guidance that already relies on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

Most recommendations passed by wide margins, though the law-enforcement transparency proposal drew some dissenting votes from task force members, including a representative from the ACLU.

The interim report does not yet include specific Washington-focused recommendations on generative AI in elections and political ads, AI and intellectual property, or companion chatbots, even as it highlights those issues as areas of growing state activity elsewhere.

Washington is entering the AI policy arena behind some peers that have already put broad frameworks into place, including California and Colorado. Others have targeted specific use cases.

Washington lawmakers introduced multiple AI bills in 2025, but only one passed: HB 1205, which makes it a crime to knowingly distribute a forged digital likeness (deepfake) to defraud, harass, threaten, or intimidate another, or for an unlawful purpose.

The task force report notes that 73 new AI-related laws were enacted in 27 states in 2025 across areas such as child safety, transparency, algorithmic accountability, education, labor, healthcare, public safety, deepfakes, and energy.

Washington’s task force has 19 members spanning tech companies (including Microsoft and Salesforce), labor, civil liberties groups, academia, and state agencies.

The task force, created in 2024, must deliver three reports: a preliminary report released last year, this interim report, and a final report by July 1, 2026.

Read the full interim report below.

Washington state AI task force lays out blueprint for regulation by GeekWire