Mark Griffith — Amazon employee No. 1,037 and the third hire for what would become Fulfillment by Amazon — is retiring after more than two decades with the Seattle-area tech giant.

Griffith spent most of his career at FBA, which handles shipping, customer service, and returns for third-party businesses. He was director of software engineering for FBA and then for Amazon payments. His final role was director of seller fulfillment services.

Griffith penned a lengthy reflection on Substack in which he shares his career journey, what he learned from working at the company, and pithy personal and professional advice.

“I have given my ALL to Amazon for 8 hours+ a day for a long time – but I’ve never given it everything – that is too dangerous – I don’t live to work – I work to live. I work hard; I try to work empathetically and smart and help others – but I am ready to let others carry on,” Griffith said.

— DigitalOcean named Vinay Kumar as chief product and technology officer of the infrastructure-as-a-service company. Kumar, based in Seattle, was previously with Oracle for more than 11 years, leaving the role of senior vice president of cloud engineering.

Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean, highlighted Kumar’s experience building cloud and AI platforms at scale, his “tremendous product strategy acumen” and his understanding of the “operational rigor required for mission-critical workloads.”

— Chris Hundley has joined Seattle RFID tech company Impinj as executive VP of enterprise solutions.

“Impinj has built an incredible foundation as the market leader in RAIN RFID, with strong momentum helping businesses wirelessly connect billions of items across use cases including loss prevention, shipment verification, and asset management,” Hundley said on LinkedIn.

Hundley is the founder and former CEO of the marketing automation startup Siftrock, which was acquired by Drift in 2018. He was also chief technology officer and president of AudioEye, which aimed to make digital technology inclusive for people with disabilities.

— Lindsay Bayne is now senior director of advocacy at UiPath, a New York-based company that helps businesses automate repetitive, complex tasks.

Bayne was previously at Microsoft for more than a decade, leaving the role of director of the Growth Innovation and Strategy Team.

“I’m honored to join and partner with this incredibly talented team, advocate for our incredible customers, and help showcase the real-world impact of automation and AI,” Bayne said on LinkedIn.

— Christin Camacho is now head of go-to-market for BuildQ, an AI platform for clean energy development and due diligence. Camacho joins the company following nearly seven years at LevelTen Energy, a Seattle-based clean energy marketplace, where she served as vice president of marketing. She previously worked at Redfin.

“BuildQ’s AI accelerates every stage of development for large wind, solar, and storage projects. Ultimately, that means more clean energy projects get built, faster, and that’s a mission I’ve dedicated my career to,” Camacho said via email.

In her new role, Camacho will work with Maryssa Barron, a former LevelTen colleague and founder and CEO of BuildQ.

— Lowell Bander, founding general manager of Seattle’s 9Zero, is changing roles at the climate tech entrepreneurial hub. Bander is taking the title of ecosystem advisor as the organization looks for a new leader. Bander is also an advisor on Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s transportation and environment transition team.

— Nate Frazier is now community liaison for the Oregon AI Accelerator. The Portland organization aims to coordinate the state’s entrepreneurial groups, investors and universities to foster AI innovation.

— The Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology has named the first cohort for its SeaBridge Fellowship, a research training program. In March, the effort received a $10 million grant from the Washington Research Foundation. The scientists will receive two years of financial support plus funding for career development, mentorship training and networking. They include:

• Changho Chun, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of Washington’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine who is doing research that could aid in treating ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
• Ian Linde, a postdoc in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center studying the conditions under which gene mutations lead to breast cancer tumors.
• Abigail Nagle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology investigating communications between connective tissue and heart muscle tissue.
• Stephanie Sansbury, a postdoc in the UW Department of Biochemistry and Institute for Protein Design researching processes around engineered protein nanoparticles in pursuit of therapeutics.
• Zachary Stevenson, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences studying synthetic cellular circuits to broaden the scope of cell programming.
• Julie Trolle, a postdoc in the UW Department of Genome Sciences aiming to engineer cancer-fighting T cells that express multiple genes, thereby improving their ability to kill tumor cells.
• Arata Wakimoto, a postdoc in the UW Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology investigating embryonic development as relates to congenital spine and neural tube disorders.
• Rachel Wellington, a postdoc in Translational Science and Therapeutics Division of Fred Hutch researching cellular recording technologies in the differentiation of stem cells.

Less than a year after layoffs and a public plea by its CEO for new investments, General Fusion on Thursday announced a $1 billion SPAC agreement to take the fusion energy company public.

Vancouver, B.C.-based General Fusion plans to merge with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III in a transaction that could close by the middle of this year, making it one of the first fusion companies to go public. It expects to be listed on the Nasdaq and trade under the ticker GFUZ. 

“We are completely focused on the future,” Megan Wilson, chief strategy officer for General Fusion, told GeekWire. “The path of any innovative company is not always linear.”

General Fusion is part of the race to produce abundant, clean energy by smashing together light atoms — replicating the reactions that power the sun and stars. The pursuit has become increasingly urgent as artificial intelligence and increased electrification of the economy drives up demand for climate friendly power.

Funding for fusion

Wilson said they explored various funding options, including a traditional IPO, but appreciated Spring Valley’s experience and track record in helping create 17 publicly traded companies to date. Spring Valley previously used a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) to bring NuScale Power, a fission startup, public in 2021.

The deal with General Fusion includes $230 million from the SPAC’s trust, presuming no redemptions, as well as a $100 million private investment in public equity, or PIPE.

The 115-person company previously raised a total of $400 million from investors, industry partners and government grants.

General Fusion’s merger news comes a month after fusion rival TAE Technologies announced its own agreement to go public.

“It’s really great to have competition in the market, and we think that that transaction is just another signal that the public markets are ready for fusion,” Wilson said.

California-based TAE has a $6 billion planned merger with Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded parent company of the social media platform Truth Social. With the merger and new funding, TAE said that it’s aiming to site and begin building a utility-scale fusion plant this year.

Pursuing scientific milestones

Despite the massive investments flowing into the sector, none of the companies have demonstrated the ability to produce excess energy from fusion reactions. But they’re all reporting progress toward that goal, with TAE and Washington’s Helion Energy working on commercial facilities.

General Fusion, which launched in 2002, is currently operating its Lawson Machine 26, a magnetized targeted fusion demonstration device that’s about half the size of its planned commercial‑scale machine.

The new financial support will fund initiatives to hit essential scientific milestones with the device by the middle of 2028. That includes reaching 100 million degrees Celsius — a target it had earlier set for last year — and achieving the conditions needed to create fusion reactions that produce excess energy.

General Fusion hopes to be able to deploy a commercial fusion machine by around 2035.

“This transaction with Spring Valley positions us with the capital we need to be able to continue operating the Lawson Machine 26 as we pursue really transformative technical milestones that will ultimately put us on a path to the first-of-a-kind plant,” Wilson said.

A three-person clean energy team in Seattle is chasing China in pursuit of an increasingly popular alternative to traditional lithium-ion batteries. Emerald Battery Labs, a startup working out of the University of Washington, recently raised just under $1.1 million in a pre-seed round to continue scaling its sodium-ion battery technology.

The burgeoning energy storage option avoids the use of lithium, which is highly sought, difficult to extract and has limited U.S. production. Sodium, by comparison, is much cheaper and comes from the same element that’s in table salt. The sodium-ion batteries also last longer and present fewer fire concerns.

Battery demand is rising rapidly as these systems pair with renewable, intermittent sources like sun and wind; enhance hydro dam capacity; provide backup power for data centers; power drones and defense devices; and work with EV charging stations to reduce grid strain during peak demand.

“As battery chemistries evolve, as technology evolves, people are going to find new ways to use energy storage technology,” said David Bell, Emerald’s co-founder and chief product officer.

Growing interest

A recent Sightline Climate survey of investors and entrepreneurs in climate tech selected sodium-ion batteries as a top-pick for a 2026 breakthrough technology, coming in just behind the use of AI for clean tech materials discovery.

But there’s already a clear leader in the space.

“China, with its powerful EV industry, has led the early push” into sodium-powered batteries, according to MIT Technology Review.

Chinese auto and battery makers Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., or CATL, and BYD are in hot pursuit of the technology, MIT reports. CATL claims to have a sodium-ion battery line operating at scale, while BYD is building its own massive production facility.

U.S. competitors include Peak Energy, Nanode Battery Technologies and Unigrid.

While this alternative chemistry offers numerous benefits, there’s an important trade off: it’s less energy dense — meaning sodium-ion batteries need to be larger than competing technologies to deliver the same amount of power.

Emerald’s path forward

Emerald is operating out of the UW’s CoMotion Labs and using the university’s Clean Energy Testbeds for fabrication work. The startup is scaling production and looking for partners to pilot test its products.

It plans to hire additional employees in the coming year. Emerald’s investors include Seattle-based E8, a network of angel investors that backs clean-tech companies; E8 members who directly invested; and an undisclosed family venture office.

Emerald’s founders bring deep battery experience:

• Bell led product management and customer programs at Group14, which is manufacturing next generation silicon-anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, and worked at Ionic Materials.
• Kjell Schroder, CEO and chief technologist, held leadership roles at Form Energy, Ionic and EnPower.
• Aric Stocks, chief operating officer, is a trained materials engineer and former global business development leader at Group14.

Jigar Thakkar is now vice president of Amazon Quick Suite, a platform that uses agentic AI to automate business workflows, research and data access. Amazon launched the tool in October 2025.

Thakkar is returning to Seattle after more than seven years at New York-based financial services firm MSCI, where he worked as chief technology officer and head of engineering.

Before MSCI, Thakkar spent nearly two decades at Microsoft where he was the founding engineering leader of Microsoft Teams and held the title of corporate VP. He joined the tech giant in 1999 as a software developer on the Microsoft Money team.

“I’m excited about Jigar’s customer-centric approach and ability to scale transformative products, his passion for agent technology, and his experience building platforms that serve millions of users,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of agentic AI at AWS, in announcing the news.

— Sara Vaezy joined healthcare consulting firm Chartis as chief product and technology officer. Vaezy previously spent nearly a decade at Providence, where she was chief transformation officer with the Renton, Wash.-based multi-state healthcare provider.

This is Vaezy’s second stint at Chartis — she previously worked at the Chicago-based company from 2010 to 2015.

“We viscerally know the healthcare system is broken and needs to change. Clinicians are overburdened, patient care isn’t always well coordinated or affordable, and costs continue to increase unsustainably,” Vaezy wrote on LinkedIn. “This is an opportunity to help Chartis navigate a landscape that’s rapidly changing and actually do something about it, along with clients.”

Vaezy is also a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health.

— After raising $60 million last year, legal-tech startup Supio has named two new executives:

• Niki Hall is now chief marketing officer, joining the Seattle-based company from Five9, a startup that helps brands connect with customers. She was previously CMO at the French startup Contentsquare. 

• Kelli Dragovich, who has worked in HR for more than two decades, has taken the role of chief people officer. Dragovich was mostly recently CPO at Pendo and has served in leadership at companies including Google, GitHub, Yahoo, Intuit, Quizlet and others.

— Chronus named Ankur Ahlowalia as CEO of the Seattle-based mentoring software platform.

“I’m delighted to lead a company that has pioneered mentoring software and is now leveraging artificial intelligence to make mentorship more accessible, personalized, and impactful for all employees,” Ahlowalia said in statement.

Ahlowalia joins Chronus from the Dallas-based software company Korbyt, which he led for more than five years.

— Variant Bio has appointed Dr. Craig Basson as chief medical officer and president of research and development. The Seattle-based drug discovery company is working with genetically diverse populations globally to develop new therapies.

“Craig’s career uniquely spans deep human genetics, rigorous clinical science, and successful drug development at scale,” said Andrew Farnum, Variant’s CEO. “His leadership and experience translating genetic insights into medicines will be instrumental as we move our programs into the clinic.”

Basson has worked for more than 25 years biotech and academia. He joins Variant from Bitterroot Bio, which is focused on using immunotherapy to treat cardiovascular disease. Other past roles include leadership at Boston Pharmaceuticals and Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and instructional roles at Harvard Medical School and Weill Cornell Medical College.

— Longtime Seattle-area tech leader Larry Colagiovanni is now leading AI product innovation at outdoor gear retailer REI. Colagiovanni’s career has included multiple stints at Microsoft, most recently as lead of product vision and strategy for Microsoft Shopping where he launched the company’s first conversational shopping assistant.

Other past roles include partner at Madrona Venture Labs, C-suite roles at Limeade, and leadership titles at eBay and Decide.

Colagiovanni said on LinkedIn that the role “brings together my passion for the outdoors with my belief in human-centered AI that supports better discovery, decision-making, and experiences.”

— Diego Oppenheimer is now an executive fellow with the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The serial entrepreneur founded Algorithmia, which was acquired by DataRobot.

“Couldn’t be more excited to continue helping to build companies, invest in founders, and now helping shape the next generation of AI-native entrepreneurs,” he said on LinkedIn.

— Smarsh, a Portland, Ore., company that helps customers manage their business communications to identify regulatory and reputational risks, announced multiple leadership changes:

• Ian Goodkind is now chief financial officer after previously working as CFO of Jamf where he successfully led the organization through its 2020 initial public offering.
• Kamesh Tumsi is chief product officer, joining from HealthEquity where he was senior VP and head of product.
• Goutam Nadella, former CPO at Smarsh, is now the chief strategy officer.

— Northwest Quantum Nexus (NQN), a group supporting quantum research and innovation across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, named three leaders serving in a volunteer-capacity to spearhead its transition from an informal partnership into a formalized organization:

• Joseph Williams is executive director, having served as an NQN co-founder and co-chair. Williams was previously the interim director of the Washington State Broadband Office within the Department of Commerce. Williams has held various leadership positions for government agencies.
• Charles Marcus, a University of Washington physics professor who holds the Boeing Johnson Endowed Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, will serve as NQN chief scientist.
• Arry Yu is now NQN’s director of external affairs. Yu co-founded the Cascadia Blockchain Council, established the U.S. Blockchain Coalition, and was on the board of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA).

— Sarah Clifthorne is now interim director of the Washington State Department of Commerce as a permanent leader is being sought. Gov. Bob Ferguson appointed Clifthorne to the role following the recent resignation of Joe Nguyễn.

Clifthorne has served as deputy director at Commerce since February 2025 and was previously a policy director with the Washington State Senate. She has also worked in union leadership.

— Rachel Fukaya is now vice president of marketing at Textio, the Seattle startup that helps companies write job listings and other communications. Fukaya has been with Textio for more the two years and previously worked at multiple public relations companies. She was formerly VP of PR at Walker Sands.

— Stephen Delano is now principal software engineer at Seattle’s Yoodli, an AI roleplay startup recently landed a $40 million investment.

Delano joins Yoodli after five years at Tomo, a digital mortgage startup launched by former Zillow executives, where he was a founding engineer.

He previously spent more than a decade at Chef, a Seattle-based automation technology company that was acquired in 2020 for $220 million.

— Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is replacing Seattle City Light CEO and general manager Dawn Lindell. The new mayor has selected Dennis McLerran, the former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head for the Pacific Northwest region, for the role pending confirmation by the Seattle City Council. Lindell served as CEO for two years.

Wilson on Wednesday announced additional leadership changes within the City of Seattle with the selection of these acting directors:

• Quynh Pham at the Department of Neighborhoods
• Amy Nguyen at the Office of Arts and Culture
• Beto Yarce at the Office of Economic Development
• Lylianna Allala at the Office of Sustainability and the Environment
  

— Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for the real estate platform Redfin, joined the board of governors of Center for Land Economics. The education and research organization promotes equitable land and property assessments.

— WestRiver Group announced that Craig Lange has joined the Seattle-based firm as managing director and lead of the Disruptive Growth Fund. Lange spent more than three decades with the heavy machinery company Caterpillar.

As farmers grapple with extreme weather, supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, Washington state is betting that artificial intelligence could help secure the future of agriculture.

A new initiative called Growing with AI will bring together the state’s tech giants and diverse farming community to tackle the industry’s most pressing challenges. Supporters say this is the perfect place to launch such an effort: uniting the region’s robust agricultural economy with hundreds of different high-value crops in Eastern Washington, with its world-class tech and AI companies on the western side of the state.

“Our farmers are dealing with so many different external forces, mostly beyond their control,” said Melanie Roberts, executive director of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. “So what if Washington can get ahead of this and be intentional about how we use AI in agriculture?”

The initiative, led by the publicly funded Academy of Sciences, kicked off earlier this month with the first of six free informational webinars. The next session is Jan. 23. The effort will culminate in April with an invitation-only workshop where past participants will strategize action items.

There are already a number of AI-driven, ag tech companies based in Washington, including Carbon Robotics, which manufactures autonomous farming machines that zap weeds with lasers. Carbon is based in Seattle but also runs a manufacturing facility on the other side of the state in Richland, Wash.

While geography might separate the state’s tech and ag communities, Carbon CEO and founder Paul Mikesell said the two are natural collaborators.

“Farmers and technologists see the world in similar ways,” Mikesell said. “We can get things done. We tackle problems head on, put in a lot of hard work …. So in a lot of ways, farmers act a lot like engineers because they’re trying to design solutions.”

To be successful in this space, he emphasized the importance of genuinely partnering with farmers to learn their specific challenges rather than coming in with predetermined solutions. Mikesell said entrepreneurs need to develop their technology in the literal field to see firsthand how it performs.

Ananth Kalyanaraman, a computer science professor at Washington State University and expert in ag tech applications, highlighted several potential AI applications:

• weather and climate data analysis and modeling to provide guidance on planting and harvesting schedules and selection of which varietals to use;
• insights into the amount and timing of irrigation, fertilizing and pest control;
• robotics to support tree pruning and crop harvesting;
• automated devices like those provided by Carbon Robotics to remove weeds, damaging insects and rocks.

This is the first time the Academy of Sciences, which educates public leaders on scientific matters, has created a series focused on one issue and incorporated a call to action.

Kalyanaraman noted that federal support of AI in the ag sector has been limited, particularly given the importance of building a more robust food-supply system. Farming hasn’t been made a priority compared to other areas, he added, but the need is urgent and Washington can help lead.

“We should be able to provide an exemplar to the rest of the nation,” Kalyanaraman said, “in terms of how to most effectively and responsibly embrace AI into a complex, decision-driven system like agriculture.”

Satish Thomas, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft who spent two decades at the Redmond tech giant, is taking a new job at Google.

“I’m joining during what feels like one of the most consequential moments in tech history — right in the heart of the AI era,” Thomas wrote on LinkedIn. He did not specify what role he’s taking at Google.

Thomas said Microsoft “shaped me in ways I never imaged.” He began his two-decade run at the company as an intern. “I’m deeply grateful to the amazing people and teams I’ve had the privilege to work with,” he said. “Leaving isn’t easy — but some opportunities are so special and unique that you just have to go for them.”

Thomas spent the past six years as a corporate vice president at Microsoft, where he led strategy, product management, and engineering execution for Microsoft Cloud for Industry. He previously held leadership roles in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource.

— Raji Rajagopalan has a new role at Microsoft: GitHub’s vice president of engineering.

Rajagopalan has been with the tech giant for more than 20 years, joining the company as a software engineer. She’s leaving the Microsoft Foundry Team for the new role.

“My goal is to help GitHub continue to be the place loved by devs, where innovation happens and human-agent workflows thrive, as we move into this new era of AI-driven development,” Rajagopalan said on LinkedIn.

— Katie Bardaro is senior VP of customer experience at Avante, a Seattle startup building software to help companies decrease HR administration workload and reduce overall benefits program costs. It also offers an AI assistant designed to provide benefits guidance to employees.

“What drew me here is the opportunity to work at the intersection of data, AI, and total rewards, all while helping companies and employees navigate one of the most complex (and impactful) parts of the employee experience: benefits,” Bardaro said on LinkedIn.

Bardaro was previously chief customer officer at Syndio, a company that analyzes workplace pay equity issues and provides strategies for fixing disparities. Prior to that she was at Payscale for more than a decade.

— Vivek Sharma is leaving Stripe for a cryptic new venture focused on “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”

Sharma, who has held executive roles at Microsoft and Meta, didn’t provide further details about the stealthy startup in a LinkedIn post, but did name his collaborators:

• Tore Hanssen, who was a founding engineer at Statsig, the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup acquired in September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
• Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist at Meta’s Seattle office, clocking nearly 11 years with the company before going to Atlassian early last year.
• Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as a Facebook director of engineering, based in Seattle. He was most recently at Stripe.

“More details coming soon,” Sharma said of the startup. “But if you want to be an early adopter or just want to chat, please reach out!”

— Jeff Carr is now CEO of Atana, a startup building workplace training content that incorporates behavior-based learning and development. Carr joined the Bellevue company in August as president. He succeeds Atana co-founder and former CEO John Hansen, who will remain as executive chair.

In announcing the news, Hansen said that Carr “aligned with Atana’s vision immediately and has been instrumental in bringing us into new opportunities and new strategic relationships in a very short period of time.”

Carr has held multiple CEO roles in the past, including leadership of workforce training company Inkling and at the HR company PeopleFluent.

Atana originally launched in 1993. Hansen, a startup veteran and longtime lecturer at the University of Washington, acquired the business in 2016 and oversaw the expansion of new learning content.

— Longtime Microsoft gaming leader Larry Hyrb shared on LinkedIn that he was laid off from Unity after 18 months on the job.

Hyrb, known by his longtime handle “Major Nelson,” left Microsoft in 2023 after more than two decades in corporate communications, promoting the launches of games and other products. He was the host of one of the company’s earliest podcasts, Major Nelson Radio, which later became Xbox Podcast.

At Unity, a San Francisco-based gaming company, Hyrb worked with the Community and Advocacy Team, supporting connections among creators, developers and gamers.

— Serial tech entrepreneur Jay Bartot is now a technical advisor and chief technologist for TheFounderVC, a Seattle-based venture capital firm that launched in 2024.

Bartot is also co-founder and CTO of the software startup AirSignal, an affiliate professor at the UW, and a startup mentor at Creative Destruction Lab.

Bartot said on LinkedIn that he looks forward to working with the TheFounderVC team “to help exceptional early-stage founders build the next generation of great Vertical AI companies and products.”

— Auger, a startup building logistics and supply chain software, named Tucker Reimer as principal of supply chain innovation. Reimer joins the Bellevue startup from the Johnsonville sausage company where he served as vice president of global planning and analytics.

Dave Clark, the former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO and Flexport CEO, launched Auger in 2024 with $100 million in Series A funding.

— Lucas Dickey joined Stripe as a product builder focused on Stripe Atlas, a tool that helps entrepreneurs incorporate their business.

Dickey said on LinkedIn that he has used Atlas four times to start his own companies and aligns with Stripe’s goal of “making the administrative layer a breeze — and helping new companies start strong from day one.”

His startups include Deepcast, a podcast platform, and Fernish, a decor-focused business that was acquired.

Seattle-area startup Included announced Wednesday that it has been acquired by Phenom, a global human resources company based in Pennsylvania. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Included launched five years ago in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the widespread move by companies nationwide to better support racial and ethnic diversity throughout their operations. The startup initially focused its data analytics on DEI-related efforts, but expanded to support employee retention and engagement, faster hiring timelines, and managing performance evaluations.

Raghu Gollamudi, Included’s co-founder and CEO, called the acquisition “a major accelerator for our vision.”

“By integrating Included into Phenom’s Applied AI platform, we’ll bring more Native AI and Agentic AI into people analytics — so teams can move from static dashboards to insights that are timely, actionable, and embedded in how work actually happens,” Gollamudi said on LinkedIn.

Included has less than 15 employees, according to LinkedIn data. Jennifer Lyons, spokesperson for Phenom, said via email that “a majority of Included employees have become Phenom employees.”

She added that Included will not continue as a standalone brand. “Phenom has a successful history of natively integrating acquisitions into our broader Applied AI platform,” she said. “This approach helps existing customers of both companies succeed.”

Included was created by a trio of co-founders:

• Gollamudi, who won Startup CEO of the Year at the 2022 GeekWire Awards, previously co-founded privacy tech startup Integris Software, which sold to OneTrust in 2020. Earlier in his career, he was a principal development lead at Microsoft for nine years.
• Chandan Golla, the company’s chief product and customer officer, was vice president of products at Integris and worked at eBay for more than a decade.
• Laura Close, the startup’s chief business development officer, previously worked in career consulting and in support of labor organizations. Close is now CEO of Close Cohen, a job search and executive coaching firm.

Included raised $7.3 million from investors that include FlyingFish, SignalFire, Ascend, Trilogy Equity Partners and Alumni Ventures.

While Phenom would not provide details on the deal, Lyons said, “Investors are pleased.”

Editor’s note: Story updated Jan. 15 to correct the funding total and include comments from Phenom regarding the status of former Included employees, Included’s integration and investor response.

While artificial intelligence is generating all the buzz, it was Washington state’s climate tech and healthcare innovation that got shoutouts during Gov. Bob Ferguson’s State of the State address on Tuesday.

The speech largely focused on this winter’s epic flooding in Western Washington, the affordability and housing crisis, transportation infrastructure needs and Ferguson’s support for a “millionaire’s tax” targeting the state’s wealthiest residents.

The traditional tech sector — which accounts for roughly 22% of the state economy — was largely absent from the governor’s address. But he did call out groundbreaking innovation happening across Washington.

Ferguson praised Helion Energy’s efforts to build what could become the first commercial fusion reactor — a world-changing accomplishment, provided the device works as planned. Helion, based in Everett, Wash., broke ground on the Orion facility last summer and aims to get the Eastern Washington plant operating by 2028. Microsoft agreed to buy energy from the plant if Helion is successful in harnessing fusion power.

The governor also called out last week’s official launch of the Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator, an effort to support R&D and build out a marketplace for low-carbon aviation fuels. The event, which was held north of Seattle, brought together Boeing, Amazon, Alaska Airlines and others.

In his speech, Ferguson framed the initiative as “an opportunity for our state to, once again, set an example and set the pace for clean energy investment.”

And he gave a nod to the University of Washington, Fred Hutch Cancer Center and the Allen Institute as “part of a globally recognized ecosystem working on next generation drug discovery and treatments.” The Seattle area is a hub for academics and startups developing AI-driven therapies, with many building on innovations from the UW lab of Nobel Laureate David Baker.

“These are just a few of the reasons why the state of our state is strong, but I am clear eyed,” said Ferguson, who is navigating a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall. “I’m clear eyed about the areas where we must do better, and my first proposed budget is laser focused on those improvements to keep our growth going.”

OCOchem, a clean tech startup turning carbon dioxide into industrial chemicals, has raised $2.15 million and continues signing new partnerships — despite a cooling regulatory environment for sustainability and a decline in climate tech investing.

The Richland, Wash., company’s technology takes water and captured industrial carbon dioxide and runs it through proprietary electrolyzer cells to produce formic acid and formate compounds. This family of chemicals can be converted into clean-burning hydrogen fuel, serve as ingredients for other valuable chemicals, or be used as a relatively safe acid in critical mineral recovery.

The startup is making progress thanks to the abundance of its feedstock and the versatility of formate, said CEO and co-founder Todd Brix. As OCOchem scales up operations, “we’re opening up new vistas” as customers discover the company’s sustainable, affordable solutions for producing chemicals and clean fuels.

With the new funding, the company has now raised $11.2 million from investors and $8.3 million in government grants.

Initiatives underway include:

• An agreement announced in December with the German company b.fab, which feeds formate to microorganisms such as bacteria that biosynthesize proteins, amino acids and other commercially useful compounds.
• A partnership with ADM (Archer-Daniels-Midland) to build a commercial pilot plant at the chemical giant’s Illinois facility, where ADM operates the world’s largest bioethanol refinery. The refinery produces carbon dioxide as a bioproduct of the fermentation process, which will be turned into formate and used in other product lines.
• Fine-tuning processes at its 40,000-square-foot facility in Richland that was commissioned in May. The plant produced and shipped a metric ton of a formate compound for use as a deicing agent by a New York-based customer.

While the Trump administration has rolled back many climate and environmental policies, one recent change helped level the playing field for carbon reuse efforts like OCOchem’s.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act retained the tax credit for carbon capture and increased the credit for processes that reuse carbon in industrial applications, raising it from $60 per ton to $85 — matching the credit provided when carbon is permanently sequestered.

Brix launched OCOchem in 2017 after a nearly two-decade career at Microsoft. The 17-person team includes Chief Technologist Arun Agarwal, who previously spent 12 years in R&D focused on renewable chemicals, energy, oil and gas.

The company faces competition in turning carbon dioxide into formate — particularly in the European Union, which is publicly investing in the technology, as well as at labs operated by Toyota.

But Brix said he’s ready to face his rivals. His company has “built the largest CO2 electrolyzer, worked fast to do that, and is operating at the highest performance today,” Brix said. “And so it’s a little bit of a race, but it’s a good race.”

— Jon Pollock is now chief product officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners.

Pollock joins Acumatica from childcare management software company Procare Solutions, where he was CPO and general manager of Procare’s ChildPlus division. He previously held leadership roles with Worldpay, Asurion, Dell, Polaroid and others.

“Jon has the experience, vision, and strong track record of leading dynamic teams to execute our product strategy and empower the people who use our software every day,” John Case, CEO of Acumatica, said in a statement.

Case succeeds Ali Jani, who was with the company for 16 years. Early in his career, Jani co-founded a PC manufacturing startup and a company providing software for business management operations.

— Mo Malakoutian is now the mayor of the City of Bellevue. Malakoutian joined the Bellevue City Council in 2023, was elected by his colleagues to serve as deputy mayor beginning in 2024, and was chosen as mayor this month.

Malakoutian previously worked at Amazon for more than eight years, leaving the role of senior manager of learning and development in October. He is currently the executive director of the University of Washington’s Consulting and Business Development Center with the Foster School of Business.

Malakoutian replaces Lynne Robinson, who was mayor since 2020. She remains on the Bellevue City Council.

City councilmember Dave Hamilton was appointed deputy mayor of Bellevue.

— Software engineering leader David Bettis is leaving Amazon after two decades. Bettis was most recently with Amazon Web Services, including roles focused on the company’s telehealth initiative. Earlier in his career, Bettis worked on the company’s Halo product, Amazon Go’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology, Kindle and other initiatives.

Bettis said on LinkedIn that he stayed at Amazon for so long because of the opportunity to work on emerging businesses, which provided “new and exciting opportunities, while staying under the same roof.”

More recently he had “explored a couple paths internally, but nothing sparked the same excitement I’d felt in previous roles. That’s when I realized it was time for a bigger change.”

The engineer added that he’ll spend most of this year deciding what full-time role comes next — maybe a smaller company, teaching, something entrepreneurial — and that he’ll be staying in Seattle.

— In another Amazon departure, Steven Hatch has resigned from his role as head of engineering with AWS Bedrock. Hatch, based in New York City, has been with Amazon for nearly 18 years, working in areas including with Audible, Amazon Prime delivery experience, computer vision and most recently in AI.

Hatch said on LinkedIn that he’s “closing a chapter that changed how I think, lead, and build. I’m proud of my achievements. But the real story was about the people, the learning, and the craft.”

Hatch did not disclose his next move, but said there would be “more soon.”

— Warren McNeel left T-Mobile after more then 25 years with the Bellevue-based telecom juggernaut. McNeel has been in the wireless sector for three decades, and most recently served as T-Mobile’s senior vice president of information technology.

McNeel said on LinkedIn that he wanted to spend time with his family “and begin thinking about the next chapter of my professional journey.”

“I’ve had the privilege of leading some of the best technology and product teams in the industry,” he added. “I couldn’t be more proud of the innovations, technology transformations, and results these teams delivered.”

— Seattle-based Gates Foundation appointed Sri Mulyani  Indrawati to its governing board. Indrawati was Indonesia’s first female minister of finance and the former managing director and chief operating officer of the World Bank.

“She adds fresh perspective for the board as it guides the foundation’s direction over the next 20 years,” said CEO Mark Suzman.

The Gates Foundation announced two additional leadership changes:

• Hari Menon is now president of the organization’s Global Growth and Opportunity Division. Menon has been with the foundation for nearly 20 years.
• Ankur Vora is president of the newly-created Africa and India Offices Division as well as retaining his role as chief strategy officer.

— Reverb, a Seattle-based HR consulting and leadership development firm, is officially expanding into the Colorado market with the hiring of Renee Fischer. Fischer, who resides in Denver, is a business development and human resources consultant.

— Sabah Öney joined the board of directors of Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center. Öney is the president and CEO of Dispatch Bio, a Bay Area startup that is developing a treatment for solid tumors. He is also a co-founder of the protein design company Vilya.

— Seattle-based Cascadia Capital, an investment bank serving clients globally, promoted Kerri Hagen to managing director within the its Financial Sponsors Group. Hagen has been with the firm for more than three years.

— Seattle software engineering startup FlintLab named Diwakar as its head of engineering. Diwakar, who was previously based in India, joins from the semiconductor company AMD. Past employers include Ericsson, RSA Security and others.

FlintLab launched in 2024 and describes itself as an “AI-powered infrastructure platform as a service” company. Co-founders Krishna Seerapu and Jinesh M.D previously held roles at Amazon and elsewhere.

— Life Science Washington announced four new members of its board of directors:

• Arden Yang, vice president of Innovation at the Allen Institute
• LisaMarie Curda, a partner focused on audit and assurance with Deloitte
• Jie D’Elia, CEO of the bio-pharmaceutical company SystImmune
• Chris Holt, vice president of cell therapy external manufacturing with Bristol Myers Squibb

— Amazon’s Uwem Ukpong has a new title, moving from vice president of Global Services to VP of AWS Industries.

Ukpong has been with the tech giant for more than four years, joining from energy technology company Baker Hughes.

Ukpong’s resume is dominated by a 22-year stretch at Schlumberger, a Houston-based software and internet company that has offices internationally.

— Alicia Teel is now acting director of the City of Seattle’s Office of Economic Development. She was previously deputy director of the department, which supports small businesses and economic growth.

Teel began her career at the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce where she worked for more than 15 years.

At the Office of Economic Development, “[o]ur talented team is dedicated to leading projects and making investments that open up access to economic opportunities across our city, reduce the racial wealth gap, and encourage innovation and growth,” Teel said in a statement.

In announcing the appointment, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson thanked former director Markham McIntyre “for his leadership supporting small business recovery after the pandemic.”

McIntyre was in the role for four years. He also previously held leadership positions with the Chamber of Commerce, leaving the title of executive VP.

— Manik Gupta is leaving his role as corporate VP of Microsoft Teams.

“With Teams, I had the opportunity to combine my consumer DNA with learning the scale and complexity of the enterprise. The lessons, playbooks, and friendships I’ve gained will stay with me always,” Gupta said on LinkedIn.

Gupta, who is based in California, joined Microsoft in 2021. He said he’s exploring career options in AI, adding that “I’m convinced that the hardest and most interesting work in AI now lies in turning powerful models into products people can rely on every day.”

— ESS appointed Drew Buckley as CEO of the Oregon-based, long-duration energy storage company. Buckley joined the battery company in August as leader of its investor relations and capital market strategy. He previously spent 17 years as a technology-focused partner at the financial services firm William Blair.

“Drew brings an incredible track record of success, with the experience and industry relationships necessary to lead ESS to its next stage, manufacturing and delivery of our first Energy Base projects, and broader commercialization expected to commence this year,” said Harry Quarls, ESS board chairman.

ESS also named Kate Suhadolnik as chief financial officer from her current role as interim CFO. Suhadolnik has been with the publicly-traded company for more than four years.

Eric Dresselhuys resigned as ESS CEO in February and Kelly Goodman, who had been vice president of legal, became the interim chief executive. Goodman is now chief strategy officer and general counsel.

— Savanna Thompson is chief business operations officer role at fusion company Helion Energy after serving as VP of people & workplace Operations. She has been with the Everett, Wash., business for more than three years.

“As we move from building fusion machines to deploying fusion power plants, this role reflects the importance of scaling our teams, systems, and infrastructure that support our ambitious goals,” said Helion CEO David Kirtley in announcing the promotion.

Thompson joined Helion from 98point6, a Seattle telehealth company.

— Jackie Ostlie has returned to Microsoft, taking the role of director of AI initiatives in Microsoft Learning.

“I am incredibly grateful to Rachel Richardson for the opportunity and am excited to be back with some of the world’s smartest, kindest, most supportive humans in tech,” Ostlie said on LinkedIn.

Ostlie rejoins the company after a leadership role at Google Cloud Learning. Her career has included positions with multiple Seattle-area organizations including Veeam Software, Expedia and the nonprofit World Vision.

— After recently landing a $40 million investment, Seattle AI roleplay startup Yoodli appointed two new leaders.

• Emma Day is principal recruiter at Yoodli, leaving a comparable role at Seattle-based tech hiring platform Karat. “Yoodli has the rare and beautiful combination of an incredible mission — to help people communicate with confidence, a world-class team and a TON of growth ahead,” Day said on LinkedIn.
• Grayson Hay is principal software engineer, building on similar past roles at CodeSee, Tableau Software and Microsoft. Hay’s varied career also includes cinematography and bungee fitness instructor.

— Seattle cryptocurrency company Coinme named Hazen Baron as its general counsel. Baron is based in Arkansas and past employers include Walmart, fintech company Stronghold, and others.

Late last month Coinme announced an agreement with Washington state regulators to pause a temporary cease-and-desist order, clearing the way for the company to resume operations in the state.

— Jason Cavness, a Seattle-based U.S. market development partner for TechBank, is now a fellow with Earth Venture Capital, a Vietnam-based firm investing in climate tech internationally.

— The Microsoft Alumni Network, which represents more than 290,000 former Microsoft employees, has expanded its board of trustees, appointing eight new members:

• Declan Bradshaw, a 22-year employee based in Dublin and Redmond, Wash., who led Xbox’s European launch.
• George Durham, a leader of community engagement, global Technology for Good programs, and other roles after joining in 2004.
• Erendira Gonzalez, who over three decades led multicultural teams and launched the first Microsoft Technology Center in Latin America.
• Bill Kirst, who served as the director of change for Commercial Systems & Business Intelligence.
• Laura Luethe, who leads strategic content and communications as Microsoft HR’s director of communications.
• Somanna Palacanda, a 23-year employee who leads International Social Impact for Microsoft Elevate.
• Michelle September, who spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft and worked in account management, industry leadership, among other roles.
• Andrew Winnemore, VP of Microsoft for HR People Operations.

In addition, Larry Hryb, a longtime Xbox leader, was named vice chair of the Microsoft Alumni Network board.

TerraPower, a Bill Gates-backed next-gen nuclear company, on Friday announced a deal with Meta to build up to eight small modular reactors in the U.S. with the first two coming online as soon as 2032.

Tech companies have been aggressively pursuing new clean energy solutions as they race to build power-hungry data centers that support burgeoning AI services.

TerraPower’s deal with Meta will provide the tech giant with up to 2.8 gigawatts of energy using its Natrium nuclear technology. The facilities include an energy storage system, which can provide shorter-term bursts of power that bring the total output to 4 gigawatts.

The contract with the Bellevue, Wash.-based company marks Meta’s largest single nuclear deal to date.

“To successfully address growing energy demand, we must deploy gigawatts of advanced nuclear energy in the 2030s. This agreement with Meta is designed to support the rapid deployment of our Natrium technology that provides the reliable, flexible, and carbon-free power our country needs,” Chris Levesque, TerraPower president and CEO, said in a statement.

The news is an endorsement of TerraPower’s approach, said Andrew Richards, the company’s vice president of government affairs, in a GeekWire interview. The company landed the deal after participating in Meta’s request for proposal.

“They chose us out of all other advanced reactor developers and said they have strong confidence in our technology,” Richards said.

Meta and Terrapower “are looking all over the country,” to select a location for the first facility containing the dual reactors, he added.. If all are eight are ultimately constructed, the reactors should be operational by 2035.

Meta’s broader nuclear play

Meta’s announcement includes additional partnerships with Vistra and Oklo:

• Vistra operates the Perry and Davis-Besse plants in Ohio and the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania. The arrangement will extend the lifespan of these reactors and increase their energy production. Meta will purchase more than 2.1 gigawatts of electricity from the facilities.
• Oklo is a Sam Altman-backed company developing small modular reactors with a project being built in Pike County, Ohio. The reactors are expected to begin operating as soon as 2030 and contribute up to 1.2 gigawatts to the grid.

Meta in June signed a deal with Constellation that supports the relicensing and extends the operations of its nuclear plant in Illinois.

“Our agreements with Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo, and Constellation make Meta one of the most significant corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in American history,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, in a statement.

The tech sector has faced growing criticism over how its demand for power affects utility customers and the environment. Last month, three Democratic senators launched an investigation into Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and three data center companies, examining whether their energy consumption is driving up residential electricity bills.

Meta addressed these concerns in announcing the new partnerships.

“This work builds on our ongoing collaboration with electric utility companies and power providers to plan for and meet our energy needs years in advance of our data centers becoming operational. We pay the full costs for energy used by our data centers so consumers don’t bear these expenses, and we support the broader grid through our energy agreements,” the company stated.

Amazon and Microsoft are likewise pursuing nuclear energy.

• Amazon is partnering with X-energy and others to build a nuclear facility in Richland, Wash., near the state’s only operational nuclear plant.
• In 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to restart a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island — a facility made infamous by a partial meltdown in 1979.

TerraPower’s progress

TerraPower is currently building its first commercial reactor in Kemmerer, Wyo., and plans to start splitting atoms by 2030. The reactor is located near a retiring coal plant.

In December, the company said it completed a key regulatory milestone, passing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for its permit. Additional permitting hurdles remain, but the Terra Power hopes to be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-gen reactor in the U.S.

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. Its Natrium reactor includes technology from TerraPower and GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy.

In June TerraPower disclosed $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.

MUKILTEO, Wash. — Pacific Northwest leaders on Thursday celebrated the official launch of the Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator, an initiative that aspires to establish the region as a leader in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

“We have all the pieces in place to ensure this once-in-a-generation economic opportunity is realized, and this accelerator will make that happen,” said Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.

SAF is widely viewed as the most promising, scalable solution for cutting carbon emissions from aviation. The fuel is typically made from plant-based sources and can be blended with conventional fossil fuels used to power aircraft. But it costs twice as much or more than existing fuels, and the industry has struggled to take off in the U.S. or internationally despite sustainability pledges by airlines and others.

The new accelerator hopes to close that price gap, create a SAF marketplace and boost fuel production. It’s kicking off with $10 million in state funding and a $10 million philanthropic gift.

Guy Palumbo, Amazon’s director of public policy, said the company is a SAF customer, buying 3.7 million gallons of the fuel in 2024 to make a small dent in the carbon impact of its air cargo transportation. And it would buy much more, he added, but the fuel isn’t available.

“This is a systems issue that no one company can solve,” Palumbo said. “You’ve got great companies up here in this room right now that are ready to use this fuel, but we have to make it available.”

The event highlighted the initiative’s public-private partnership by featuring speakers that also included Washington State Department of Commerce Director Joe Nguyen, Washington State University President Elizabeth Cantwell, county and state elected officials, leaders from Alaska Airlines, Boeing, SkyNRG and others.

The accelerator has a multi-pronged strategy that includes:

• Providing R&D resources for startups and other fuel manufacturers, including equipment and expertise.
• Promoting SAF-friendly policies.
• Helping facilitate funding for SAF producers, including purchase agreements with SAF customers.
• Developing feedstock supply chains for the fuel, which can include waste from agriculture and logging, algae, cooking oils, animal fats and manure.
• Supporting infrastructure development for transporting and blending low-carbon fuels with traditional aviation fuels to create SAF.

Establishing the sector is a Herculean task, but supporters argue this region is well-positioned for a SAF hub, citing its status as Boeing’s original home, its robust aviation industry, the availability of feedstocks, its strong environmental policies, and other strengths.

Despite years of work by organizations in Washington and around the globe, SAF comprises less than 1% of the aviation fuel in use today. And geopolitics — most recently including President Trump’s plans to begin cranking up oil production in Venezuela — continue to complicate progress.

“This is going to be a tremendous challenge. It’s going to be hard,” said Sen. Marko Liias of Mulkilteo. But, he added, “we know the rest of the world is going all in on SAF and this is the fuel of the future. There’s no better place than Washington state to catalyze the production of sustainable aviation fuel at scale.”

The need is pressing. Aviation’s impact on carbon emissions is growing as flights serving passenger travel and air cargo increase. There are companies developing sustainable aircraft, such as those powered by batteries and hydrogen fuel cells, but that technology will take decades to scale and its applications are uncertain. SAF, on the other hand, can be used in existing aircraft.

Multiple SAF companies are already operating in the Pacific Northwest:

• SkyNRG is a Dutch company building a SAF facility in Walla Walla, Wash., and will use renewable natural gas that’s captured at landfills and from dairy waste as a feedstock. On Thursday the company announced it has secured key environmental approvals from the state, and plans to start commercial operations in 2030.
• Montana Renewables is manufacturing approximately 30 million gallons of synthetic paraffinic kerosene, or SPK, each year, which is blended with jet fuel to make SAF. The Montana company employs used cooking oils, animal fat from meat production, and plant oils as its feedstock and plans to dramatically increase production.
• NXTClean Fuels has plans to develop two clean fuels facilities in Oregon. Its flagship site, a $3 billion plant at Port Westward on the Columbia River, is in the final stages of federal permitting and could break ground this year, with operations starting in late 2028 at the earliest.
• Twelve is a California-based company that broke ground in 2023 on a SAF facility called AirPlant One in Moses Lake, Wash., and is currently commissioning its facility. It plans to use liquid ethanol produced in the state as its carbon source.

In the coming months, the Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator is moving temporarily into a commercial space at Everett’s Paine Field airport. Initial funding has been secured to build a new facility, with the hope of completing construction no later than 2029.

The accelerator effort took root two years ago when Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers announced plans for a SAF center and state legislators from the county committed to seek funding for the initiative.

“Washington has been the SAF leader from the beginning,” said SkyNRG executive and former state Sen. Andy Billig. The first commercial test flight using SAF came from a Washington producer and was used on a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747-400 flying from London to Amsterdam in 2008.

Seattle-based Alpenglow Biosciences today announced a partnership with PathNet, a leading U.S. pathology laboratory, to help commercialize use of the startup’s 3D microscope technology in clinical settings. The effort aims to modernize critical diagnostic tests for prostate and bladder cancers.

The company also confirmed $250,000 in new funding from Mike Rice, former CEO of BioLife Solutions and an Alpenglow advisory board member.

Alpenglow, which spun out of the University of Washington in 2018, has developed tools for quickly creating multi-dimensional images from biological tissue samples and accurately analyzing the results.

The technology is already in use in academic research labs and pharmaceutical companies. The move into clinical applications serving patients requires additional rigor.

“People’s lives are depending on it,” CEO and co-founder Dr. Nick Reder said in an interview. “So there’s a lot more regulatory compliance and validation that needs to be done.”

Alpenglow has been collaborating with the international optics pioneer Zeiss to engineer the unique microscope hardware and analytics software needed for clinical use. PathNet will take the technology from that partnership and use it at its Little Rock, Ark., lab to develop and validate tools for cancer diagnoses.

Jason Camilletti, CEO of PathNet, praised Alpenglow’s “revolutionary 3D platform.” The new partnership, he added in a statement, can “modernize genitourinary cancer diagnostics for clinicians and patients across the country.”

Reder launched the company to solve problems he experienced as a medical resident in pathology at the University of Washington.

“I wasted hundreds, no thousand of hours of my time, sifting through the images and trying to make sense of them,” Reder said.

Alpenglow’s AI-trained algorithms, he said, can analyze biological samples “and then predict ‘this is your risk for metastasis,’ or ‘this is the likelihood that you’ll respond to a drug.’ And so it really adds a lot of value to the diagnostic workflow.”

The startup has 22 employees and raised approximately $10 million from investors. It has also received roughly $10 million in grant support.

Last year the company was awarded $2 million in federal funding to create a prostate cancer diagnostic tool alongside CorePlus, a pathology software company. Alpenglow is also part of a multi-institution, five-year project worth up to $21 million that launched as part of the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot. The effort is developing technology for identifying tumor margins during cancer surgeries.

Alpenglow has customers including GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline), InSight Biopharmaceuticals, dermatology companies and others.

The other co-founders are Jonathan Liu, an affiliate professor in the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering; Adam Glaser, now a senior scientist at the Allen Institute; and the UW’s Lawrence True.

Reder is pleased to reach this point of development with the company after so many years of work.

“Actually getting into the clinic this year and then hopefully regulatory approval next year and all these big landmarks, it’s really exciting,” he said. “That was always the goal.”

Seattle startup Avalanche Energy is raising new funding to develop its compact fusion energy devices. A new SEC filing reveals a fresh $14.9 million round.

A company spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire.

Avalanche and dozens of companies around the world are vying for scientific breakthroughs that would allow them to generate electricity from fusion reactions on a commercially viable scale. The sun and stars are the masters of fusion, smashing together light atoms under high-pressure, super hot conditions to produce energy.

Avalanche is pursuing a different strategy than many of its competitors, building desktop-sized energy devices and working multiple angles for revenue generation. That includes:

• Using its fusion machine to produce neutrons for customers in industries such as advanced materials science, semiconductor manufacturing, nuclear power and specialized medical treatments.
• The company has a Pentagon contract from the Defense Innovation Unit to develop technology for space propulsion and power generation.
• Last year, the startup landed a $10 million grant from the state to launch FusionWERX, a commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies in Eastern Washington.

Avalanche had previously raised $50 million from investors that include Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Founders Fund, Toyota Ventures, Azolla Ventures and others.

The fusion industry produced surprising headlines shortly before Christmas with the announcement of a $6 billion planned merger between Trump Media & Technology Group and California fusion company TAE Technologies.

The partnership aims to site and begin building what it calls the world’s first utility-scale fusion plant this year, with Trump Media committing $300 million in near-term funding. President Trump is the largest shareholder of Trump Media, the publicly-traded parent company of the social media platform Truth Social.

Avalanche is part of a fusion hub in the Pacific Northwest that includes two additional Seattle-area companies working to harness fusion power.

• 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.
• Zap Energy expects in the near future to commission its fifth fusion device, allowing it to continue testing and optimizing the different systems required by the technology.

By the time we hit Kelso, it was clear my family’s post-Christmas EV adventure was hitting the skids.

After departing from Seattle, we stopped in Olympia for lunch and a little recharge for our recently purchased 2024 Mach-E — the electric Ford Mustang. But the Level 2 charger found via Google Maps offered a paltry boost and we had 115 miles to our Portland destination.

No problem. We’d make a second stop at a Tesla Supercharger in Kelso, a small city off of Interstate 5 formerly known for logging and smelt fishing. The Mach-E sucked up electrons from the DC fast charger, hitting 80% charge in about 20 minutes.

But when we went to unplug, the third-party adapter that allowed us to charge our non-Tesla EV wouldn’t budge. We were trapped, tethered to the station via a high-powered cable, late on a Saturday afternoon. All-knowing YouTube offered a fix: use a really big pair of pliers called channel locks to force the button to give. My husband went off on foot to a nearby farm supply store seeking the device.

Our 17-year-old daughter, in the meantime, had run out of TikToks and patience. She began wrestling the adapter herself and through a combination of finesse, strength and desperation she disengaged the charger. It was a giddy moment — but a brief reprieve as we continued driving south.

Wintry temperatures and dinner in the brilliantly named Portland suburb of Scappoose left the Mustang battery unnervingly low. More map searching near our hotel led us to a nearly empty parking garage that promised charging on the eighth floor. After circling to the roof we found one broken charger and another being used by a couple in an embrace outside their electric truck, inexplicably kissing in the cold.

The charging mishaps had left us tired, frustrated and anxious — with only ourselves to blame.

Falling in love with an EV

Historically, I’ve been largely indifferent toward cars, owning a series of forgettable Toyotas and Hondas — safe, reliable cars that got me from point A to B with reasonable fuel efficiency. I had wanted to go electric in 2017 when shopping for my previous car, but the Chevy Bolt was underwhelming and Tesla too swanky. A Toyota Prius it was.

Then on a sunny afternoon last October, a driver mounted a steep hill in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, failed to brake at a stop sign, and smashed into my Prius. I was rattled but largely unscathed, and so was the other driver and his passenger. Both cars, however, were totaled.

Their insurance covered the loss and we searched for a replacement. My husband genuinely likes cars and took the lead in shopping with my one condition in mind: it had to be an EV.

We landed on the Mach-E, which startled friends and family alike who knew my milquetoast automotive track record. But despite its relative machismo and flash, the Mustang was the practical choice — good real-world range at about 240 miles, great value, and the roomy interior of a crossover-style vehicle.

One spin behind the wheel and I was smitten. I love the car. It handles nicely. It’s comfortable. The fact it can go from zero to 60 in 4 seconds doesn’t really impact my reality, but pleases me all the same. I size up exhaust-spewing muscle cars next to me at stoplights and imagine smoking them.

When the holidays arrived, I was cruising in my Mach-E and imagined that our Portland trip would be as easy as traveling via gas power.

After all, the EV market share had hit more than 20% in Washington in 2024, and charging stations were cropping up at grocery stores and along highways. I didn’t want to spend the time figuring out which of the many available apps was best for finding charging sites. I didn’t want to download and create accounts with the many charging service providers. I just wanted to tap the accelerator.

But that wasn’t realistic. Energy infrastructure takes time to deploy. For decades after the internal combustion engine reigned supreme, drivers still needed to map out gas stops on lengthy road trips. Things improved for EVs in general when Tesla began opening its Supercharger network to non-Tesla drivers in 2023. (A GeekWire story the year before recounted the headaches faced by an electric Mustang road tripper without that access.)

The EV charging network, however, is still lagging and faces new challenges under the Trump administration, which has imposed policies to remove incentives and slow EV infrastructure deployment.

Pro tips for EV newbies

In most ways, I’d found the switch to an EV surprisingly convenient. We’re fortunate to have off-street parking at home, and it’s super satisfying to simply click a Level 1 slow charger into the car and walk away. The device uses a regular outlet in our garage and generally provides the vehicle enough power for work, errands and local day trips.

We drove the Mustang on an overnight trip to Bellingham, Wash., in November and easily found power at clearly marked, city-owned parking spots with free electrons. On a separate outing to hike near the tulip capital of Mount Vernon, I simply plugged in afterwards at an EVgo fast charger near my house to quickly refill.

We were lulled into complacency and unprepared for longer EV travel. After botching Portland, I checked in with Seattle-area experts for charging tips, which left me feeling sheepish for my self-inflicted ignorance.

I got feedback from Matthew Metz, founder of Coltura and CEO of EVQ, a startup supporting EV purchases; Scott Case, founder of the EV data platform Recurrent; and Grace Reamer and Jay Donnaway, who are respectively current and past leaders of the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association, or SEVA.

My takeaways:

• PlugShare is the one-stop source for maps that include information on how many chargers are available at seemingly every possible site at any given moment and include helpful user feedback. We should have turned here first.
• When on a road trip, plan on DC fast charging. Case recommends Tesla as the most numerous and consistently reliable option. Without knowledge of our Kelso fiasco, Donnaway suggested that non-Tesla drivers get an adapter for fast charger plugs and “gain some experience with using it before it’s needed in a tight spot.” 
• Always carry a Level 1 charger for opportunities to use outlets at hotels and retail sites in a pinch.
• Reamer offered battery-saving suggestions, such as following speed limits, slowly accelerating, coasting downhill, drafting behind semi-trucks and using seat heaters in lieu of cabin heat.

EVQ and Recurrent also have their own terrific sources for essential information:

• EVQ/Coltura released EV Chat, a generative AI tool built from a curated library of EV-related information. The chatbot is available for free and found on the Electric For All site and “should be able to answer your questions really well,” Metz said. A quick test proved him right.
• Recurrent has a “great starter resource on charging that everyone should look at when they are just starting out,” Case advised. It covers home and public charging options, charging speeds, costs, diagrams of the different plugs and sockets, and even pointers on public charging etiquette.  

Despite our rookie mistakes, panic and wasted time, we did have a nice trip to Portland (I highly recommend Casa Zoraya for amazing Peruvian food and my body literally aches for a return to Dragontree Spa). To finish the trip and get home to Seattle, we used EVgo fast chargers outside of downtown Portland and in Chehalis, Wash., that worked quickly and without hiccups.

Looking ahead, we’ll undertake our next road trip with a full charge, a better plan and a car I still love.

— Steven Maheshwary, a former generative AI leader at Amazon, is now a go-to-market lead in strategic partnerships at Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude and backed by Amazon.

On LinkedIn, Maheshwary described AI as “a catalyst for significant transformation and a raw energy that must be shaped, guardrailed, and democratized to be genuinely useful.”

“I believe Claude represents a distinct vision of what AI can be: powerful and capable, while remaining safe and aligned with human values,” he added.

Maheshwary was with Amazon for 12 years, most recently as head of growth for AI startups and foundation models on AWS. During his tenure, he also served as former Gov. Jay Inslee’s technology sector lead, working to grow Washington state’s tech and AI economy, and was a Fulbright grantee for the U.S. Department of State.

— Irene Plenefisch, a longtime government affairs leader at Microsoft, is retiring after more than 15 years at the Redmond tech company. Plenefisch, most recently a senior director at Microsoft, previously worked at SonoSite for 12 years.

“I have been proud to represent Microsoft, an important and amazing company, in its home state and around the country,” she wrote on LinkedIn, adding: “I’m not going to lie; the path for channeling all the energy, competitiveness and enthusiasm for being in the middle of it all is not completely clear. But I am confident in my decision.”

— Nikhil Hasija left his role as vice president of engineering at Okta. Hasija joined the security company following its acquisition of Azuqua, a Seattle startup he founded in 2011. Hasija also spent more than four years at Microsoft.

“I’m starting to think about what’s next,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m increasingly drawn to problems centered on leverage, speed, and new ways of working. To everyone who made this journey worthwhile, I’m glad our paths crossed, and I welcome that again.”

— Caitlin Rollman is back at Microsoft as a partner product manager. She was previously at the tech giant for nearly a decade ending in 2020, leaving the role of principal PM manager for the Office platform.

Rollman said on LinkedIn that she got a call from Microsoft and was “offered the opportunity to build something new from the ground up, at a company I respect, with people I adore. I couldn’t say no.”

Rollman left Microsoft to work as senior director of product management for Highspot, a Seattle company that sells enterprise software to help make salespeople more efficient.

Last year she co-founded and was CEO of Talvita, an AI-native human resources management platform.

— Brian Surratt is now officially deputy mayor at the City of Seattle in new Mayor Katie Wilson’s administration.

Surratt spent nearly four years leading Greater Seattle Partners, a public-private sector initiative that seeks to attract investment, companies and jobs to the Seattle region. He also previously led the City of Seattle’s economic development arm and was a vice president at Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

Wilson was sworn in on Friday, becoming the city’s 58th mayor.

“Seattle has shaped my belief in what is possible when public service, community engagement, and economic opportunity come together,” he wrote on LinkedIn last week. “To step back into City Hall at this moment — when our city is focused on restoring trust and building civic pride, tackling our homelessness crisis, expanding housing and economic opportunity, and building a more affordable, inclusive, innovation-driven future — is both humbling and energizing.”

— Dr. Emma Rocheteau has taken the role of clinician scientist at Microsoft AI in London.

“Throughout 2025, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’re at an inflection point where medicine and AI are finally coming together to solve some of healthcare’s toughest challenges,” Rocheteau said on LinkedIn. “To be able to contribute to this is a dream come true for me, and it represents exactly what I’ve been working towards for the past 12 years.”

Rocheteau joins Microsoft from NHS, the United Kingdom’s publicly funded National Heath Service. She was briefly a research intern for Microsoft in 2019 during which she focused on health intelligence.

— Ashlee Drake Berry joined Seattle-based immigration tech company Casium as head of legal. Berry is leaving a role as principal corporate counsel at Microsoft where she focused on legal compliance in the hiring of immigrant and non-immigrant employees globally.

“This role has stretched me, challenged me, and given me the chance to work with some of the most talented and generous colleagues I’ve ever known,” Berry said on LinkedIn.

Berry previously worked on immigration employment issues at Vialto Partners and Envoy Global. Casium spun out of the Seattle-based AI2 Incubator in April 2024.

— Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno is now the communications and marketing lead at Yoodli, a Seattle startup that sells AI-powered software to help people practice real-world conversations such as sales calls and feedback sessions. The company last month announced $40 million in new funding.

Quiamno has been running a public relations consultancy over the past year. She was previously the global diversity, equity and inclusion leader at Amazon’s Prime Video and Amazon Studios for more than three years, ending in January 2025.

Quiamno was co-founder and CEO of Future for Us, an organization promoting professional development for women of color that was acquired.

— Adam Stern, an environmental and clean energy leader, is co-executive director of the Seattle-based electric vehicle nonprofit Coltura. Stern, who resides in San Francisco, joins Janelle London in the shared role.

Former co-executive director Matthew Metz founded Coltura in 2014 to promote EV adoption through research, analysis and policy support. He is transitioning to a full-time role as CEO of EVQ, a public benefit corporation and tech platform that spun out of Coltura to support consumers and organizations in the purchase of EVs.

“While Matthew is stepping away from his day-to-day role at Coltura, his impact will continue to be felt for years to come — in the policies passed, the ideas normalized, and the momentum built toward a cleaner transportation future,” the nonprofit said in announcing the changes.

— Joseph Williams has stepped down from his post as interim director of the Washington State Broadband Office within the Department of Commerce. Williams, who has held leadership positions for government agencies and was with Microsoft for nearly a decade, said on LinkedIn that he’ll be sharing news of his next role later this month.

Jordan Arnold was appointed in December as the permanent Broadband Office lead, effective Jan. 2.

And in case you missed it, Commerce Director Joe Nguyen is leaving his post this month to become the president and CEO of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber. A new Department of Commerce director has not been named.

— Carter Rabasa, an entrepreneur, investor and former employee of multiple Seattle-area tech companies, joined Box as head of developer relations. Rabasa previously held similar roles at IBM, DataStax, and Courier. He was also with Twilio for more than five years.

— Invest in Washington Now, a nonprofit promoting tax reform, shared that Treasure Mackley is resigning as executive director, effective Jan. 9. Mackley was in the role for more than five years, helping pass the state’s capital gains tax. She previously held leadership positions with Planned Parenthood.

— The Washington Technology Industry Association announced five internal promotions, including Nick Ellingson, now vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship.

— Rhizome Research, a Seattle biotech startup, announced that John Proudfoot, a former U.S.-based director in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Boehringer Ingelheim, has joined as a scientific advisor.

Mitera Biosciences is taking a cue from one of nature’s most effective biological tricks: how a mother’s body avoids rejecting a fetus.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based startup is emerging from stealth with $1.75 million in funding and a mission to develop new therapeutics for autoimmune diseases and organ transplant rejection. The company’s approach centers on a specific protein naturally expressed by the placenta during pregnancy.

“Our focus is really going back to nature and the human maternal-fetal relationship,” said Kevin Chow, Mitera’s co-founder, CEO and president. The startup is “trying to leverage what our bodies do naturally to help us with our immuno-tolerance.”

The startup, which uses a Greek word for “mother,” hopes its therapeutics can eventually replace traditional immunosuppressing drugs. Existing medications often hobble a patients’ helpful immune response, leaving them vulnerable to infections and causing toxic side effects over long-term use.

‘Important agent to investigate’

Mitera is working to commercialize intellectual property being exclusively licensed from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

While the startup is keeping the specific protein’s identity under wraps, it confirmed it is produced in the thymus — a gland that’s active in the immune system — and the placenta.

The protein plays a dual role: it bolsters regulatory T (Treg) cells, which protect the body’s own tissues, while dampening effector T (Teff) cells, which lead the attack against perceived invaders.

Given the protein’s role with these essential immune system players, “we felt it would be an important agent to investigate as a potential therapeutic,” Dr. Stanley Jordan, Mitera’s co-founder and chief scientist, said via email.

Mitera’s leadership team

Mitera’s three co-founders are longtime biotech leaders or medical providers.

• Chow is a serial biotech entrepreneur who previously co-founded and led Vitaeris, which worked on a treatment for kidney transplant rejection and was acquired by CSL Behring. Chow also works part time with Incisive Genetics, a startup developing a delivery system for gene therapy treatments.
• Jordan is a 40-year veteran of nephrology and transplant immunology and the medical director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Cedars-Sinai.
• Dr. S. Ananth Karumanchi, co-founder and lead scientific advisor, has been at Cedars-Sinai since 2017 and conducts research in hypertension in pregnancy and cardiovascular disease associated with kidney disease.

Mitera currently has seven employees. It conducts lab work at Cedars-Sinai and Contract Research Organizations (CROs), while its headquarters are in Bellevue.

The startup’s initial funding was led by Cedars-Sinai and provided as a SAFE, or Simple Agreement for Future Equity that allows an investor to receive a stake in the business in the future.

The biology underlying Mitera’s pursuit is “really new,” Chow said. While there’s clear potential for treating transplant patients, the therapy “could be used for so many bigger, broader diseases out there,” he added. “And that’s really exciting.”

Xhuliano Brace quickly realized that venture capitalists weren’t going to write big checks for two under-30 founders pursuing what he describes as a “contrarian” approach to using AI to design new drugs.

So he’s making the bet himself.

After four years of working on AI projects at Amazon, Brace left the tech giant to self-fund his vision. Using personal savings and proceeds from online trading, he invested a six-figure sum into Rhizome Research, a Seattle-based startup developing made-to-order, small drug-like molecules.

After launching last year, the five-employee startup recently came out of stealth. In addition to CEO Brace, who has degrees in math, computer science and economics from the University at Albany, Rhizome’s leadership includes:

• Yiwen Wang, co-founder and chief scientist, who has a PhD in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University.
• Gregory Sinenka, chief technologist, who is a physics PhD and worked at a European research center and Johnson & Johnson.
• John Proudfoot, a former U.S.-based director in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Boehringer Ingelheim, is serving as a scientific advisor.

A different approach to drug discovery

Rather than working from existing molecule-building tools, Rhizome has built its own fine-tuned foundational model, named r1. The technology is a “graph neural network” and was trained on more than 800 million small drug-like molecules.

The approach is different from the popular RoseTTAFold model created by the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, which at its core is based on the amino acids that build proteins.

The r1 model focuses on the atoms and bonds that make up a molecule and its topography. That’s where the graph idea comes in — the atoms are analogous to the points in a graph while the bonds are akin to its connecting lines.

The team aims to provide fragment-based drug discovery, creating small molecules optimized to bind to customer-specified targets. They will ensure each drug candidate can be synthesized efficiently in the lab and is suitable for patent protection.

Rhizome last week released ADAMS, an open-source, automated AI tool that uses natural language instructions for simulating the binding between biological molecules. It also plans to share MolSim, which is a physics-based simulation that uses advanced, free-energy calculations that predict how strongly a small molecule will bind to its target. MolSim won’t be open source.

Vision for a Seattle hub

Rhizome recently established partnerships with wet labs that can validate the real-world performance of the potential drugs it designs, and it’s exploring customer relationships.

Brace is operating out of Foundations, the Seattle-based startup community launched by entrepreneur and investor Aviel Ginzburg. Rhizome’s other employees are working remotely, but the plan is to bring folks to Washington.

“I really want to make Seattle kind of a hub for small molecule drug discovery,” Brace said.

He pointed to the Allen Institute, the Institute for Protein Design and other Seattle-area organizations as key players. The region is also home to a slate of related drug design startups that include Pauling.AI, Synthesize Bio and Xaira Therapeutics, which is based in San Francisco and has labs in Seattle.

Brace said he’s energized by the opportunity to work on a project that could have a meaningful impact on humanity and has no regrets in ponying up his own money for the effort. He’s bullish in general on the use of AI for designing molecules, whether for health care or fields such as materials science and advanced manufacturing.

“This is the most interesting problem space to be in,” Brace said.

SUMNER, Wash. — At Amazon’s Packaging Innovation Lab south of Seattle, boxes are dropped from different heights, jiggled for hours to simulate truck transport, and crushed under weights designed to replicate the pressure of stacked cargo. 

The goal: to ensure that products arrive undamaged — without the benefit of plastics and extra bulky boxes.

The e-commerce giant says it’s working to phase out plastic from the envelopes, bags, boxes and cushioning it uses to ship everything from bobby pins to bicycles. A recent tour of the Sumner facility and an adjacent fulfillment center featured robotic assembly lines making paper bags and trimmed-down boxes to facilitate that transition.

Amazon says it favors paper because there’s better infrastructure in place for customers to easily recycle the material and for it to be turned back into usable items.

“We’re shifting towards all-paper packaging material,” confirmed John Sly, Amazon’s senior lab and field manager at the Sumner site.

An Amazon spokesperson wouldn’t commit to a target date, saying only that the company is working toward the goal and tracking progress in its annual sustainability reports. 

• Amazon said in its most recent report that it reduced its use of single-use plastic delivery packaging by 16.4% globally last year.
• In October 2024, the company announced that it had eliminated the inflated plastic pillows from packages worldwide, replacing them with crunched-up recycled paper for cushioning. 
• More than half of its North American fulfillment centers were weaned off all plastic shipping materials by 2024. As a result, 37% of shipments that year contained single-use plastic delivery packaging — a decrease from 65% the year before.

The shift follows lobbying by the nonprofit Oceana and some Amazon shareholders to reduce plastic use, and as Amazon pursues ambitious net zero climate emissions targets. 

But despite the packaging wins, the bigger picture reveals much harder challenges. Amazon reported a 6% increase in its carbon footprint for last year, driven by data center expansion. And while it’s deploying electric vans for last-mile deliveries, promises of faster shipping are pushing emissions up across the sector, according to new research. In response to the study, Amazon notes that its extensive network of warehouses reduces its impact and emissions per shipment declined from 2019 to last year.

Automating the push towards paper

A key strategy for making packaging more sustainable is incorporating robotics that speed and customize the process.

One solution is an automated system that folds lightweight boxes around individual items. It uses thinner, more sustainable corrugated paper than found in traditional boxes. It’s pliable enough to wrap around products as they move along a conveyor — cutting to size, folding and sealing without requiring added cushioning.

Another technology uses repurposed machines that formerly made plastic bags, swapping in paper. One of the upsides to the solution is fulfillment centers are already built to fit the devices, so the machines just need to be retrofit to handle and seal paper edges instead of plastic.

On a recent morning, Todd Grasser, an Amazon process assistant, was feeding in products for bagging that included a box of probiotic supplements and a Bluey character coloring set.

The device is able to bag up to 500 items an hour, Grasser said, but his fastest speed on the machine is just slightly lower. “Personally, I do about 475,” he said.

The automated packaging solutions are currently limited to single items, which can apply when someone’s order is sourced from different fulfillment centers or if it includes just one product.

The company is also partnering with manufacturers to ship items in their original packaging. That avoids, say, putting a boxed blender inside a bigger box when it doesn’t need additional protection. As part of that initiative, Amazon has worked with Proctor & Gamble to make boxed versions of Tide detergent and Playmobil sets that are offered in brown shipping boxes that can be flipped inside out after delivery to reveal colorful toy photos.

Moving to more sustainable packaging requires testing its properties to ensure that goods arrive to customers undamaged.

The shift means balancing multiple needs, Sly said, that include “prioritizing for protection and minimizing packaging material needed, while also still hitting the delivery speed that we promised.”

The company can move fast in adopting more sustainable packaging and it has in adopting paper bags and paper filler, “but we have to get the right solution,” Amazon spokesperson Saige Kolpack added. “There’s implications down the entire network that we have to consider.”

Editor’s note: Story updated to add a response from Amazon on the new research addressing emissions from faster shipping times.