— 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.

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.