Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Plenty of startup founders and product builders envision what they’re making as something that will simplify processes or improve workflow for customers. Kiana Ehsani sees her creation as a means to spending more time outdoors.

Certainly there’s much more to it than that, but when Ehsani — the co-founder and CEO of Seattle AI startup Vercept — is running an ultramarathon, climbing up a mountain or skiing down one, she can’t help but consider how her technology makes it all the more enjoyable.

“I’m just the happiest when I’m in nature, when I’m not behind my computer, letting my mind be present in the moment, listening to the steps of my foot on the trail, or on snow or ice,” Ehsani said.

It’s what motivated her and her colleagues at Vercept to build Vy, an AI product that “sees” and understands computer screens like a human would. It records a user performing tasks across different software or websites — and then autonomously runs the same workflow from a natural language command.

The idea is to use AI to automate repetitive tasks, like entering data, producing video content, organizing invoices, and more. And Ehsani said Vy makes it so not everyone needs to know how to work so many specialized software programs.

“I don’t want to become skilled in every single dimension that exists out there,” she said. “The more time you’re not spending on repetitive work that is not using your brain power, then the more time you have to be creative.”

Ehsani’s goal is to be able to send emails or check code and Slack messages when she’s somewhere in nature without good internet service. Vy handles the tasks on its own and reports back about what it completed.

“I am most creative when I’m on a hike,” she said. “If I could just have that more often, to be able to have that creative mind, flowing and producing more, and I didn’t have to be stuck behind the desk, then the world would be my playground.”

‘Repeatedly transformed herself’

Ehsani’s journey to AI innovator and Seattle startup founder started in Iran, where she lived until she graduated from Sharif University. She ranked 64th in the country’s University Entrance Exam.

“I was a geek,” she said. “I was publishing papers as an undergrad, and I would go and give talks at conferences internationally, and I was so proud of what I was doing.”

She came to the U.S. in 2015 to get her Master’s and PhD in computer science at the University of Washington.

“Within the first year I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of possibility in AI and I want to get more involved,'” Ehsani said.

After internships at Google and Meta, she joined Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) where she spent four years, overseeing the Ai2 robotics and embodied artificial intelligence teams as a senior researcher.

At the end of 2024, Ehsani launched Vercept alongside Oren Etzioni, the longtime AI specialist and UW professor who was founding CEO of Ai2. They were joined by Matt Deitke, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick.

Etzioni said that while some people are “all heart” — good people with high emotional intelligence — or “all brain” — smart, sharp and cerebral — it’s rare to find someone who is both. Ehsani, who he called brilliant, dedicated and intuitive, is that person.

“One uncommon thing about Kiana is how she has repeatedly transformed herself,” Etzioni said via email. “From a brilliant theoretician in Iran to a creative and award-winning vision and robotics researcher at UW and Ai2, to kick-ass founder and CEO now. And the best is yet to come!”

Competing with fewer resources

Ehsani remembers being frustrated and bored by the challenges that AI was being tasked to solve, such as simple image classification, just 10 years ago. She wanted to solve real problems and show that AI could interact with the real world.

That mindset drove her interest in computer vision and robotics research. But again, she grew frustrated by the slow pace of hardware development and decided she wanted to work with AI models and virtual robots that take actions on behalf of a user.

Growing up in Iran she had become accustomed to limited resources. Working in academia and then in research for a nonprofit, she again had to think outside the box and find ways to compete against big AI labs.

She still embraces a scrappy startup mentality as Vercept competes against OpenAI (Operator), Google (Project Mariner), Amazon (Nova Act), and others with tools that automate tasks across browsers and apps, fueled by advances in generative AI.

“That’s the mindset that made me grow more, and that’s why at Vercept we are training models a lot more efficiently and less resource-heavy than anyone out there,” she said. “We love being scrappy and proving that you don’t need billions and trillions of dollars to make AI work.”

Just this week, Vercept launched a newly built version of Vy that works on both Windows and MacOS. Ehsani said the app is more robust and Vercept’s benchmark results have improved drastically.

The startup has grown to a team of 12 and in June raised a $16 million seed round. In July, Ehsani lost Deitke, one of her co-founders, who was lured by Meta to join its newly formed Superintelligence Lab.

Deitke called Ehsani “an incredible leader and visionary” whose strong background in robotics makes her extremely well suited for working at the frontier of computer use, which he said is really just robotics without many of the challenges of the physical world.

“Working with her is infectious and inspiring,” Deitke said. “She has an incredible work ethic and is constantly energized and comes up with amazing ideas while brainstorming that only become obvious to the rest of us after a while.”

But he said more than anything, Ehsani’s a “tremendous person” who leaves a lasting mark with her kindness and ambition.

“She’s truly an exceptional person,” Deitke said.

Several weeks ago, Ehsani was challenging herself in nature yet again, this time with a 50k ultramarathon that featured 8,000 feet of elevation gain.

Freezing, thirsty, and dragging herself up a hill, she likened the race to running a startup, writing on LinkedIn about how despite everything going wrong and plans changing last minute, she still had to stay flexible and believe she’d make it, even when others seemed ahead.

“That’s the story of my life,” she told GeekWire. “I live that every day.”

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

BOTHELL, Wash. — Before he became the CEO of Portal Space Systems, Jeff Thornburg worked for two of the world’s most innovative space-minded billionaires. Now he’s working on an idea those billionaires never thought to pursue: building a spacecraft powered by the heat of focused sunlight.

Thornburg and his teammates are aiming to make Bothell-based Portal the first commercial venture to capitalize on solar thermal propulsion, a technology studied decades ago by NASA and the U.S. Air Force. The concept involves sending a propellant through a heat exchanger, where the heat gathered up from sunlight causes it to expand and produce thrust, like steam whistling out of a teakettle.

The technology is more fuel-efficient than traditional chemical propulsion — and faster-acting than solar electric propulsion, which uses solar arrays to turn sunlight into electricity to power an ion drive. Solar thermal propulsion nicely fills a niche between those two methods to move a spacecraft between orbits. But neither NASA nor the Air Force followed up on the concept.

“They didn’t abandon it for technical reasons,” Thornburg said. At the time, it just didn’t make economic or strategic sense to take the concept any further.

What’s changed?

“Lower launch costs, coupled with additive manufacturing, are the major unlocks to bring the tech to life, and make it affordable and in line with commercial development,” Thornburg said.

Thornburg argues that it’s the right time for Portal’s spacecraft to fill a gap in America’s national security posture on the high frontier. “There was no imperative for rapid movement on orbit in the 1990s,” he said. “Only recently have the threats from our adversaries highlighted the weaknesses in current electric propulsion systems, in that they have so little thrust and can’t enable rapid mobility.”

Portal’s vision has attracted interest — and financial support — from investors and potential customers. Since its founding in 2021, the startup has raised more than $20 million in venture capital. In 2024, Portal won a commitment for $45 million in public-private funding from SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force. And next year, Portal is due to demonstrate its hardware for the first time in orbit.

So, how did Thornburg hit upon the idea of turning a decades-old idea into reality?

The path to propulsion

Thornburg, who’s now 52 years old, has focused on making things fly for most of his career. It all started when he was a college student in Missouri in the early 1990s, earning his aerospace engineering degree with an ROTC scholarship from the Air Force. He recalled a conversation he had with an instructor who was an old F-4 fighter pilot.

“With my nearsightedness, I was out of the game from a pilot standpoint,” Thornburg said. “But he said, ‘Thornburg, if you can’t fly the planes, go be as close to them as you can.'”

Thornburg signed up for a program that fast-tracked him into an aircraft maintenance role. He traveled around the world with KC-135 cargo planes, supporting missions that included the NATO-led air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. During his time as a flight commander and aircraft maintenance officer at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, “I had a couple of hundred enlisted people who worked hard to keep me out of trouble,” he said.

The Air Force is where he earned his master’s degree in aerospace engineering. “My adviser had a friend that worked at the Air Force Research Lab,” Thornburg recalled. “He called him and said, ‘The Air Force is about to send this guy to do something with airplanes, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to be disappointed if he can’t come out and work on rocket engines.'”

Sure enough, Thornburg was soon working on rocket propulsion development, including a project to create what’s known as a full-flow staged combustion cycle engine. “We made what people thought was not possible possible with that program,” Thornburg said.

In 2004, Thornburg left the Air Force to work on rocket propulsion systems at Exquadrum, Aerojet and NASA. Then, in 2011, he took a phone call from SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk. “We talked for about an hour, hour and a half on the phone — and he said, ‘I’ve got a project I want to talk to you about,'” Thornburg said.

That project led to the development of SpaceX’s methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine, which leveraged the technology that Thornburg helped pioneer at the Air Force. “That was a wild ride, because that felt like about 15 or 20 years of experience in a five-year time period,” he recalled.

After five years at SpaceX, Thornburg needed to wind down. He decided to do some consulting at his home base in Huntsville, Alabama, also known as Rocket City. “About six months in, I’m like, I need a real job again,” he said. “And some friends of mine introduced me to, ultimately, Paul Allen. Paul called me and said, ‘Can you come out to my Seattle office?'”

The Microsoft co-founder and software billionaire enlisted Thornburg to become the head of rocket propulsion development for Stratolaunch, Allen’s space venture. Thornburg led the effort to create a liquid rocket engine known as the PGA — which stood for “Paul G. Allen.”

Unfortunately, Allen passed away in 2018, just one month after the engine was unveiled. Under new ownership, Stratolaunch pivoted to hypersonic testing, and the PGA project fell by the wayside. Once again, Thornburg and his family hunkered down in Huntsville.

Building a business

“I decided to start my first space company after Paul died,” Thornburg said. “I focused on hydrogen propulsion technology and solutions, kind of like what we were working on for Paul.”

That first company, Interstellar Technologies, started working on projects for NASA, Northrop Grumman and a couple of other customers. Then the pandemic hit. “The investors that were about to provide funding disappeared,” Thornburg said. “NASA went home, Northrop Grumman went home. And so I had to find my small team other jobs.”

Just as Thornburg was about to resign himself to riding out the pandemic in Alabama, Amazon’s recruiters called. They asked him to move to Seattle to run engineering and manufacturing for Project Kuiper, the satellite internet project that’s now known as Amazon Leo. “That’s ultimately what got us moved to Seattle,” Thornburg said.

His yearlong stint at Amazon was long enough to establish the process for building Project Kuiper’s two prototypes and the production-grade satellites that came after them. Then he took on engineering management roles at Agility Robotics and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

That’s when Portal Space Systems took shape.

To be fair, the seeds for Portal were planted back in 2016, just weeks after Thornburg left SpaceX. “Lawrence Livermore Lab had called and said, ‘We’re doing a seminar on the future of propulsion. Would you like to come be a speaker?'” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, what do you want me to talk about?’ They said, ‘We want you to tell us what the future of propulsion looks like.’ Oh my gosh, no pressure on that!”

As he did the research for his talk, he came across the idea of putting a nuclear reactor on a spacecraft, and using the concentrated heat from that reactor to blast a propellant through a thruster. The concept, known as nuclear thermal propulsion, seemed like a stretch — but then Thornburg had an uncommon thought.

“Can you concentrate solar energy to heat a thrust chamber and do the same thing?” Thornburg said. “You can. It’s not quite as effective as a nuclear reactor, for obvious reasons, but it’s all the same pieces. … Now I don’t have to wait on a low-cost, low-weight, space-rated nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist yet.”

Thornburg mulled over the idea for years. “I was thinking about Portal, and I was starting the beginnings of Portal in 2021, but I still had to pay the bills,” he said. For a couple of years, he worked during the day at Agility Robotics and Commonwealth Fusion — and spent nights and weekends laying the groundwork for the startup.

“When Portal could really start to stand on its own, as we started to win over the Defense Department, that’s when I made the switch with all of my time focused on what was going on in Portal,” Thornburg said. In April 2024, the startup emerged from stealth and announced it had received more than $3 million in funding from the Defense Department and the Space Force.

The road ahead

Portal’s flagship vehicle is called Supernova. It’s a rapid-transorbital, multi-mission vehicle that should be capable of moving itself and its payloads from one orbit to another — even from low Earth orbit to geostationary Earth orbit, more than 20,000 miles higher up. And it should be able to do that within hours or a day, rather than the weeks or months that are typically required.

The spacecraft itself will be about the size of a restaurant refrigerator. To concentrate sunlight on its heat exchanger and thruster system, Supernova will use sheets of reflective material that can unfold to a width of roughly 55 feet. Ammonia will serve as the propellant. The 3D-printed heat exchanger thruster, dubbed Flare, was successfully tested earlier this year.

Next year’s orbital demonstration will involve putting an instrument package known as Mini-Nova, which is about the size of a tissue box, on a satellite platform that’s due for launch on a SpaceX rideshare mission. The demonstration is meant to validate Supernova’s system design.

In late 2026, Portal plans to send up a free-flying spacecraft called Starburst, which will be equipped with thrusters powered by an electrothermal heating system. Starburst won’t be as powerful as Supernova, but it will provide Portal’s customers with an early option for rapid maneuverability in orbit. If next year’s test goes well, Starburst is expected to start taking on customer missions in 2027.

2027 is also the year when Supernova is scheduled to make its debut. All of the development work for Supernova and Starburst will be taking place at Portal’s 8,000-square-foot lab and 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Bothell.

Throughout Portal’s formative years, Thornburg has worked with fellow members of the “small team” he assembled at Interstellar Technologies. Both of Portal’s other co-founders — chief operating officer Ian Vorbach and engineering vice president Prashaanth Ravindran — crossed paths with Thornburg at Interstellar, and at Stratolaunch before that.

Vorbach, whose background includes startup experience as well as engineering experience, said Portal’s business model has been fine-tuned to make sure it addresses the needs of its target market. He and Thornburg identified the U.S. military’s need for tactical responsiveness in space as the top priority.

“What happens a lot in the space industry is that you have incredibly technical, talented people who have a technology that provides some very unique performance, and then they build it, and it turns out that performance isn’t needed,” Vorbach said. “There’s got to be a reason to bring that innovation to market.”

Vorbach is grateful for Thornburg’s leadership. “We work very long hours, but I think Jeff does a great job of making sure people know that they’re valued,” he said. “I appreciate that, and I think it’s why we, fortunately, are able to hire great talent from the places he’s come from, whether it’s SpaceX or Kuiper.”

Ravindran, who worked at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture before taking a founder’s role at Portal, agreed with that assessment. “It’s always amazing to have someone like Jeff out there, because he’s come up the engineering road to realize our pain points as well, and he doesn’t try to hold us to unfair standards,” he said. “That way, we are not set up for failure.”

Stan Shull, a space industry analyst at Bellevue, Wash.-based Alliance Velocity, gives Portal high marks. “In space terms, a highly maneuverable satellite is said to have high delta-V,” he told GeekWire in an email. “Portal, as a company, feels high delta-V too.”

Thornburg’s experience and expertise are big factors behind Portal’s rapid progress, Shull said. “He’s very knowledgeable about national security issues and is a straight shooter about the growing threat environment in orbit,” he said. “It’s no surprise the Space Force is among the many customers interested in what the company is up to.”

What will Portal be up to next? Looking long-term, Thornburg is intrigued by the quantum frontier. “I think there are some very interesting things happening in our understanding of quantum physics that will have propulsion applications, that won’t look like propulsion as we know it right now,” he said. “If we could fold spacetime in clever ways … there’s been plenty of writing about that.”

But when he takes a more realistic look at what could happen in his lifetime, Thornburg can’t stop thinking about nuclear propulsion. “Our Supernova spacecraft will have a version that will leverage a nuclear reactor at some point. That was always the going-in position,” he said.

The way Thornburg sees it, the nuclear option will revolutionize spacecraft — and expand humanity’s reach on the final frontier while we figure out how to fold spacetime.

“Nuclear thermal will get us further into the solar system, and this Earth-moon-Mars becomes our backyard,” he said. “But, you know, for my 12-year-old version of myself, that’s not enough.”

Early bird tickets for the GeekWire Gala are going fast, and today is your last chance to secure discounted pricing for our annual holiday extravaganza.

The Gala is the Seattle tech community’s biggest holiday celebration, and it takes place Dec. 11 at Showbox SoDo.

The festive night includes food, drinks, karaoke, games, and plenty of surprise moments. Bring your whole team and make our holiday party your holiday party alongside the region’s top innovators and entrepreneurs.

In addition to the party atmosphere, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners will once again use the Gala to recognize the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. We’ve profiled three of these individuals so far — Anindya Roy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Lila Biologics; and Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can; and Brian Pinkard, co-founder and CTO at Aquagga. We’ll publish profiles of other honorees in the coming weeks.

Showbox SoDo is located at 1700 1st Ave S., not far from T-Mobile Park. The event from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. is 21+ and all attendees must have valid ID to enter. Dress to impress, bust our your holiday flare, or just keep it geek chic.

Big thanks to the GeekWire Gala title sponsor, First Tech Federal Credit Union; gold sponsors Greater Seattle Partners and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, and Regence.

Sponsorships include brand exposure, VIP access, and a front-row seat to the celebration. For sponsorship and group ticket sales, contact us at events@geekwire.com.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Brian Pinkard spent six months “flipping rocks,” as he describes it, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

The rock-flipping was purposeful work: Pinkard was clearing obstructions and building trails for AmeriCorps, spending every night in a tent.

“I loved it. It was great. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to do something that mattered, that made a difference in the world,” he said. When the program ended, he was inspired to direct his impact to a larger environmental challenge.

His passion to do good, paired with an engineer’s drive for problem solving, led him to a doctoral degree from the University of Washington and then to launching Aquagga, a startup that’s destroying PFAS — a toxic class of pollutants known as “forever chemicals.”

“Brian has been very laser focused on his mission,” said Igor Novosselov, Pinkard’s PhD advisor and research professor at the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “He’s not a typical scientist who would just go and write a bunch of papers. He’s going after impact where it matters.”

But a few steps before PFAS, Pinkard was focused on nerve gas in the Middle East.

‘Nobody knows how to treat this stuff‘

When Pinkard joined Novosselov’s lab, it had U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop an in-the-field, mobile strategy for treating barrels of abandoned chemical weapons in the Syrian desert. The previous solution was to truck the barrels to the Mediterranean Sea, load them on a boat and incinerate the material.

“If you’re the guy who’s got to transport a nerve agent,” Pinkard noted, “it’s not a very good job.”

Within five years, the lab came up with a workable solution, but the need was no longer urgent and DoD shelved its application of the technology, though Novosselov continued to work on it.

Pinkard appreciated the tremendous power of the strategy for treating dangerous materials and wondered if there was another use case. Then as he was preparing to finish his PhD in June 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, derailing his plans to apply for a university postdoctoral fellowship as no one was hiring.

So he made a pivot to entrepreneurship — a role he had never considered.

Pinkard teamed up with engineer and tech innovator Nigel Sharp to explore the potential for using the tech, called supercritical water oxidation, to treat sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants, but they realized the market wasn’t viable.

There was, however, buzz about PFAS.

“Everybody was talking about PFAS,” he said, and if anyone could figure out how to destroy the chemicals, it would be a breakthrough. That realization became his lightbulb moment.

Destroying PFAS

PFAS is a family of chemicals that for decades have been added to firefighting foams, food packaging, carpets and fabrics, water-repellent clothing and non-stick pans. The resilient chemicals are great at deflecting water, stains and grease — but they escape from products and now contaminate drinking water across the nation and are even in mothers’ breast milk.

PFAS are still in use, while researchers and regulators are increasingly concerned by their serious health impacts.

Pinkard and Sharp launched Aquagga in 2019 in Tacoma, Wash., and were soon joined by co-founder Chris Woodruff. The team kept the idea of modular treatment units but shifted to a related but different chemistry (hydrothermal alkaline treatment) for destroying PFAS, securing a patent for the approach from the Colorado School of Mines.

“Brian has been a great partner from the beginning,” said Timothy Strathmann, a Colorado School of Mines professor. “Unlike many entrepreneurs I’ve interacted with, he is also deeply interested in understanding the limitations and technical challenges associated with the technology. He’s keenly aware that the long-term success of Aquagga will only be achieved by addressing the critical barriers to deployment.”

Aquagga’s devices annihilates PFAS under super hot, high pressure conditions made caustic and corrosive through the addition of lye.

The company has done nine field demonstrations of its technology, including a project at an airport in Alaska, a DoD-funded project in North Carolina involving firefighting foams, and a wastewater demo with the City of Tacoma. It’s now close to signing its first long-term commercial deployment, Pinkard said, “which will be a huge milestone for us.”

“It’s really cool to see how much PFAS we’ve destroyed … even in our short journey,” Pinkard said. “And to think about where it could go, what it could enable at scale. So [I’m] very optimistic about Aquagga’s future. I’m very optimistic about the impact we could create, the lives we could save.”

The holiday party season is about to ramp up and you won’t want to miss the tech community’s biggest celebration — the GeekWire Gala. Early bird ticket prices for the event end this Thursday so make sure you grab yours now!

The annual gala, Dec. 11 in Seattle, is a great chance to make our holiday party your holiday party. Come solo, bring a date, or bring your whole team from work for a festive night of food, drinks, karaoke, games, and surprise moments alongside the region’s top innovators and entrepreneurs.

The party will run from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Showbox SoDo, at 1700 1st Ave S., not far from T-Mobile Park. Dress to impress or keep it geek chic — just don’t miss the fun.

In addition to the party atmosphere, GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners will once again use the Gala to recognize the region’s “Uncommon Thinkers,” the groundbreaking innovators who are changing the way we work, live and play. We’ve profiled two of these individuals so far — Anindya Roy, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Lila Biologics; and Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can — and we’ll publish profiles of other honorees in the coming weeks.

Showbox SoDo is located at 1700 1st Ave S., not far from T-Mobile Park. The event is 21+ and all attendees must have valid ID to enter.

Big thanks to the GeekWire Gala title sponsor, First Tech Federal Credit Union; gold sponsors Greater Seattle Partners and Astound Business Solutions; and silver sponsors MeeBoss, Tito’s, The Baldwin Group, Wilson Sonsini, ALLtech, and Regence.

Sponsorships include brand exposure, VIP access, and a front-row seat to the celebration. For sponsorship and group ticket sales, contact us at events@geekwire.com.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

When a Tin Can rings at Chet Kittleson‘s house, the co-founder and CEO of the startup that makes the WiFi-enabled landline phone goes through a range of emotions.

As a parent, he’s excited that his kids are connected and that his device gives them agency, with the ring representing the idea that some friend, or their grandma, has decided to call them. And he’s satisfied that he doesn’t have to do anything to enable the connection — the phone rings, two kids discuss a playdate. It’s super convenient.

“And as a founder every ring is a reminder that I think we have product-market fit,” Kittleson added.

It’s been a whirlwind year for Kittleson and co-founders Graeme Davies and Max Blumen. All veterans of onetime Seattle real estate startup Far Homes, they released the colorful Tin Can phones in an analog bid to help kids connect with one another and avoid getting addicted to a world of screens, texting and apps.

The startup raised $3.5 million in September and blew through its first two batches of products. There are Tin Cans in all 50 states and across Canada.

“I think, effectively, we’ve gone viral,” Kittleson said. “I’m so grateful that this is the hit, that it worked. They always say, ‘You’ve got to be willing to run into a burning building for the thing that you’re working on.’ And, man, would I run into a burning building for this.”

Ben Gilbert, co-founder of Tin Can-backer Pioneer Square Labs, worked with Kittleson back in 2013 on a ride-sharing startup idea called Red Ride. He called Kittleson one of a kind.

“Honestly, when he pitched me on the idea of a landline in 2025, I had to hold my tongue at first,” Gilbert said via email. “But clearly, he figured out something that a LOT of parents were extremely ready for and excited about.”

Gilbert said Tin Can is a passion project that Kittleson would be doing whether there was a business there or not.

“We’re all better off in a world where Chet and the team are building Tin Can for our kids!” he said.

‘There’s a reason I built this company’

Kittleson grew up on the tail end of the landline generation. He got his first Nokia “brick” cellphone when he was 17 or 18. Before that, his house was fully landline.

“It was everything,” he said. “My dad left when I was four. It’s the only way that I talked to my dad.”

In the small town of La Conner, Wash., north of Seattle, he would call around to friends until someone answered. If he left the house, he’d call his mom from a friend’s to say he made it there. By middle school he can remember calling a specific girl, asking her dad if she was home, and then getting lost in a 30-minute conversation.

“We ended up chatting almost like pen pals. I feel like we never acknowledged it in school,” Kittleson said. “That was exciting. I experienced the entire range of landline kid life.”

A father of three now, Kittleson didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to pull the plug and go full Luddite on a household that was already accustomed to devices and distraction.

He and his wife have long been rooted in the belief that there are better ways to grow up and more meaningful ways to spend time together as a family than heads-down on a screen.

“There’s a reason I built this company,” Kittleson said. “I embrace it. It’s so aligned with who I want to be. This has given me a real opportunity to think about every element of my life and how I use technology, and I think a lot about how I connect with people.”

His kids, the oldest of which is 10, have never owned their own device of any kind. The family does not do screens at restaurants. A plane ride is a chance to play cribbage. A movie during a long car ride is a luxury.

“It’s very important for my kids to learn how to be bored, and that shows up in lots of different places,” Kittleson said.

A mission to believe in

Tin Can was born during a time of increasing cultural backlash toward the behavioral and health effects of screen time and social media on children. Much has been said on the topic of being modern-day parents and kids, and Kittleson references Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” and free-range kids advocate Lenore Skenazy.

It can seem like a heavy responsibility to try to build a piece of hardware that will suddenly right that societal ship, but Kittleson doesn’t see it that way.

“All these people — researchers, writers, etc., have done an amazing job paving the way for a Tin Can to exist,” Kittleson said. “Our point of view is life is still really good. You just have to make choices, and we’re trying to provide a new choice that might remind you of an old choice.”

And Kittleson and Tin Can are by no means anti-tech. He said he still geeks out on a lot of different types of technology. His excitement comes from trying to figure out how to use tech to reinforce human connection, rather than tech being such an insular thing.

Kittleson expects Tin Can to expand beyond its flagship landline product in the future and broaden its scope outside of “retro-nostalgia vibes.”

“I think there will probably be a combination of us building new things that we think can help, and maybe there are other things that we’ve lost that we can sort of revitalize,” he said.

Kittleson said he’s never experienced a more mission-driven team and company than what he’s helped assemble, and PSL Managing Director Vivek Ladsariya, who sits on Tin Can’s board, said that mindset starts at the top.

Investors might ask during fundraising how artificial intelligence is going to be baked into Tin Can, and Ladsariya said Kittleson would tell them there’s going to be no AI, that that’s not the point of the company.

“He’s doing Tin Can because he cares about the mission more than anything else,” Ladsariya said. “The level of conviction he brings — it’s contagious. People he hires, customers, investors are just drawn to him, because he’s so mission-driven. To me, that is really, truly special.”

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Before he launched a venture-backed biotech startup, prior even to landing a research role in one of the world’s premier academic labs, Anindya Roy arrived in the U.S. with two suitcases and $2,000 in the bank.

Roy grew up in rural India in a home that lacked electricity and running water during his childhood. A passion for science fueled his ambitions, leading him to earn degrees at the University of Calcutta and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.

Then he made the bold leap in 2008 to pursue his PhD at Arizona State University, which led to a postdoctoral fellowship with David Baker, a University of Washington professor who last year won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In 2023, Roy co-founded Seattle-based Lila Biologics, which uses the AI-powered protein design technology developed in the Baker lab to pursue cutting-edge medical therapies.

“Anindya is a brilliant and determined scientist and innovator who has made key contributions across diverse areas of science,” Baker said, “and is charting a most exciting path forward with Lila.”

Dr. Sheila Gujrathi, a biotech executive and chair of Lila’s board of directors, described Roy as “a thoughtful and creative problem-solver who approaches each challenge with genuine humility. He stands out not just for his innovative thinking, but also for his sincere kindness and integrity.”

Unlocking potential

In the lab at ASU, Roy focused on protein engineering for sustainable energy resources, but he was eager to apply those skills to medicine. He sent an email to Baker who invited him for an interview and tour of his protein creation lab, which delivered a kid-in-a-candy-shop kind of experience.

“That was the most exciting thing because it was such an amazingly diverse set of computational protein design problems, aiming to solve so many different kinds of things,” Roy recalled.

He jumped at the postdoc opportunity, joining the lab that is part of the UW’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD). There he began exploring the groundbreaking tools for creating proteins from scratch, ultimately pursuing a molecule that showed promise in cancer care and the treatment of fibrotic diseases that form scar tissue in various organs.

Roy eventually entered the IPD’s Translational Investigator Research Program, which gives entrepreneurial scientists the support and training to begin commercializing their discoveries. Two years ago, he and Jake Kraft, a fellow IPD postdoc, licensed the molecule they worked on at the UW and launched Lila.

While Roy has found success in his research, scientific inquiry can be slow-going and frustrating. To unwind he turns to intense weight training and goes to live shows — he caught Lady Gaga this summer and loves house music. Roy also whips up French pastries and tortes worthy of “The Great British Bake Off.”

And sometimes he reflects on the unlikely journey that led him to launching his own company.

“Whenever I get kind of discouraged or depressed about things, I look back at my career trajectory and how far I’ve come,” Roy said. “That does give me a lot of strength.”

The power of science

His startup is also making confidence-boosting progress. Lila has raised $10 million from investors and released two AI-powered platforms for creating therapeutic proteins. One is focused on targeted radiotherapy, generating proteins that precisely bind to tumors and carry radioactive isotopes that zap cancerous cells. The other platform is used to build long-acting injectable drugs that slowly release medicine over weeks or months.

In September, the seven-person startup announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to develop therapies for treating solid tumors.

Roy is grateful for U.S. support of the basic research that underpins the work being done at universities, institutions and companies nationwide. He’s also worried about federal funding cuts being pursued by the current administration that threaten America’s leadership in scientific innovation.

Because while he has been doing de novo protein design for more than a decade, Roy is still amazed by what the technology can do and how fast it’s evolving.

“This is almost like science fiction,” Roy said. “Years ago, you never imagined what we are doing right now. You are designing molecules in the computer, and you are putting them in actual living systems, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. It is pure science fiction.”