— Julie Van Ullen is now president and chief revenue officer for iSpot, a Bellevue, Wash., company that measures the impact of advertising campaigns on TV and video streaming. Van Ullen serves on the board of directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group. She joins iSpot from Rakuten Rewards, a leading e-commerce loyalty company.

“Julie is a dynamic leader with a proven track record of building high-growth teams and fostering trusted relationships with customers across the media and advertising ecosystem,” iSpot founder and CEO Sean Muller said in a statement.

iSpot ranks No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top privately held startups in the Pacific Northwest.

— MoxiWorks named Ashley Fidler as chief product officer of the Seattle-based real estate platform. Fidler joins the company from Pure Property Management and was a Microsoft program manager earlier in her career.

“Ashley brings an incredible depth of experience in building category-defining platforms that marry cutting-edge AI with real-world business impact,” said Michael Messig, MoxiWorks’ CTO, in a statement.

MoxiWorks last month appointed a new chief marketer, and in May sold its back-office accounting product in order to focus on sales and marketing.

— Seattle Sounders FC and Seattle Reign FC hired Ro Vega as chief marketing officer for the two soccer clubs. Vega has worked in brand management for nearly two decades, including positions with Beats by Dr. Dre and Nike, where he focused on soccer products in North America. He joins the Seattle teams from The Trade Desk, a digital advertising company.

— F5 CEO and President François Locoh-Donou is taking the additional role of chair of the board of directors in March 2026. The company shared the news in an SEC filing. Locoh-Donou is succeeding Alan Higginson, who disclosed in August that he is retiring after nearly 30 years as an F5 board member and 20 years as board chair.

— Trupanion, the longtime Seattle-based pet insurance provider, named Bradley Powell as a member of its board of directors. Powell was previously chief financial officer of the global logistics company Expeditors International of Washington. He was also CFO of Eden Bioscience, a publicly traded biotech company.

— Gurobi Optimization, a Beaverton, Ore.-based company offering mathematical problem solving technology, named Oliver Bastert as chief technology officer. Bastert, who will work remotely from Munich, Germany, joins the company from the analytics and credit-scoring company FICO where he was vice president of product management.

— Bill Platt, former leader of Amazon Web Services’ agentic AI division, joined San Francisco-based Alchemy as chief operating officer. Platt’s mandate is “to weave AI agents deeply into blockchain infrastructure,” according to the company. Platt was with AWS for nearly 12 years over two stints, most recently based in the Boston area.

— Seattle Metro Chamber named Mara Samudrala as director of communications and marketing for the region’s leading business association. Samudrala comes to the role from the Greater Phoenix Chamber.

— Halley Knigge has done a Seattle co-op swap. The former communications and inclusion lead for REI Co-op is now VP of communications at BECU, a financial cooperative. Her past experience includes a media leadership role at Alaska Airlines.

— Casium, a Seattle-based immigration tech startup, named Kaustubh (Kaust) Yadav as product designer. Yadav has experience in creative direction, copywriting and product design, working on campaigns for companies and brands including Amazon, AmEx, BMW, Citi and Pepsi.

Seattle startup Casium, which uses artificial intelligence to streamline the work visa application process, raised $5 million in seed funding.

The round was led by San Francisco-based Maverick Ventures, with participation from Seattle’s AI2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Venture Partners, and Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext, now part of Thomson Reuters.

Casium, spun out of AI2 Incubator in April 2024, is led by founder and CEO Priyanka Kulkarni, a former Microsoft scientist and entrepreneur-in-residence at AI2 Incubator who wanted to fix a problem that she herself experienced while applying for an EB-1 visa.

“Casium started from frustration, from my own experience with a process that was confusing, opaque, and full of endless back and forth,” Kulkarni wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “What began as a personal pain point became a mission to build something better. Today, that mission has grown into a solution helping global talent and the companies that hire them move forward faster with transparency and expert-led precision at every step.”

Applying for work visas requires applicants and employers to make their case to the U.S. government for why the individual is deserving of the opportunity, citing education, work experience and other factors.

The process and paperwork can be time-consuming even with the help of an outside law firm, and Kulkarni’s goal was to shrink the timeline from months down to days.

The Casium platform uses algorithms to first assess the best route for an applicant, which could be a temporary work visa or seeking permanent residency. The startup uses AI to autonomously gather information for an application and prepare the document. Casium works with immigration attorneys to guide the process and represent the visa applicants.

Casium offers initial assessments for free and charges a flat fee for filings based on visa type and case complexity, Business Insider reported. Kulkarni said the company is also developing a subscription model to give employers more options for ongoing support.

The startup, which employs nine people, says it is already working with employers from early stage startups to Series F companies and has assisted hundreds of candidates through visa assessments, compliance reviews, and actual filings, and maintains what it calls “an exceptionally high approval rate.”

“Every filing and every approval is a reminder of why this work matters,” Kulkarni said in calling out Casium’s customers on LinkedIn.

The spotlight on work visas ratcheted up last month when President Donald Trump announced an executive order outlining a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, which allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” such as software engineering, data science, and other STEM fields.

Casium said more than 442,000 workers compete for just 85,000 H-1B visa slots annually. The high-stakes process underscores the company’s potential appeal.

Other companies are working to improve the legal immigration experience — including fellow Seattle startup Boundless Immigration, which spun out of Pioneer Square Labs in 2017 and helps immigrants connect with lawyers and file applications for spousal visas and U.S. citizenship. Boundless has raised more than $43 million and is one of the largest consumer-focused family immigration companies.

Previously: ‘I really want to fix this’: Microsoft vet launches Seattle startup to transform work visa applications