Vega Cloud, a Spokane-area tech startup that makes software to help companies manage their cloud spending, has been placed into the hands of a receiver after declaring it could no longer pay its debts.

Among those debts: nearly $830,000 owed to cloud giant Amazon Web Services. 

Vega Cloud, founded in 2018 and based in Liberty Lake, Wash., had raised $12.2 million and reached about $7 million in annual revenue as of 2023, according to PitchBook data. It had also cracked the GeekWire 200 — ranking #181 in the most recent quarterly update of our Pacific Northwest startup index.

What brought Vega Cloud to this point isn’t clear. Responding to our email inquiry this weekend, co-founder and CEO Kris Bliesner said the company is going through a restructuring via receivership, and said he wished he could say more about the situation.

The company had less than $17,000 in the bank when it was placed into receivership Thursday, Jan. 15, in King County Superior Court in Seattle, the filing shows. It employed about 35 people as of earlier this month, down from about 65 two years ago, according to LinkedIn. 

Receivership is a state-level process often used as an alternative to bankruptcy. In this case, Vega Cloud executed what’s known as an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, which puts a neutral party in charge of the company, pauses creditor collections, and places decisions about asset sales and payments under court supervision.

Sometimes those assets sell mostly intact, allowing new investors to give a business another try. But at this point, it’s not yet clear what will happen to the company’s employees or product.

Past ambitions for an IPO

In a March 2024 interview for GeekWire’s special series on Spokane, Bliesner described Vega Cloud’s trajectory in optimistic terms, saying the company was planning a $20 million to $30 million funding round and eyeing the public markets.

“We’re trying to push the envelope at Vega to maybe do the IPO route,” Bliesner said at the time. “We think that’s a viable thing for us.”

Vega Cloud operates in the sector known as FinOps, short for financial operations, helping companies get a handle on their cloud spending by bringing together finance and technical teams to track costs and avoid waste.

This is becoming more and more important as businesses pour money into cloud computing, often without realizing how much they’re spending on unused resources. Vega Cloud focused specifically on helping mid-sized companies manage spending across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, using automated tools to spot problems and recommend fixes. 

In the tight-knit Spokane tech community, Vega Cloud has been seen as a startup with the potential to make it big. We took note of the company in 2022, when it raised $9 million.

Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias, a longtime fixture in Pacific Northwest enterprise tech, invested in Vega Cloud shortly after moving from Seattle to Spokane during the pandemic. He told us in early 2024 that it would probably be one of his most successful investments. 

Tobias said Bliesner was exactly the kind of founder he looks for: someone with deep experience in a market who had tried to solve something one way, realized it wasn’t going to scale, and came up with a better solution.

“He took a new approach to an old problem,” Tobias said at the time. 

Bliesner previously co-founded cloud migration startup 2nd Watch, which raised about $56 million before selling a majority interest to Singapore-based investor ST Telemedia.

Financial details from the filing

Vega Cloud’s court filings give an inside look at the privately held business.

First, the company had real customers and revenue. The filings list contracts with companies including Paramount, Hearst, Deloitte, Molina Healthcare, John Wiley & Sons, and Cal Poly, among others. It lists roughly $264,000 in accounts receivable.

The largest secured creditor is Sun Mountain Private Credit Fund I, owed $3.5 million. That debt is backed by Vega Cloud’s intellectual property — its software, patents, trademarks, and domain names. Any proceeds from a sale of those assets would go first to that lender.

In addition to the roughly $830,000 owed to AWS, the court records show convertible promissory notes totaling about $2.5 million that were issued to investors throughout 2025.

The records list current and former employees who are owed unpaid commissions, bonuses, and expense reimbursements, with some bonus obligations dating back to 2023. The company also owes payroll and withholding taxes to the IRS and multiple state tax agencies.

Bliesner is the largest shareholder at about 30%. Other significant investors include Album Ventures (10%), Cowles Company (3%), Rudeen & Company (3%), Kick-Start III and IV (combined 4%), Tacoma Venture Fund (1.5%), and Pitbull Ventures (1%). 

The shareholder list also includes Voyager Capital, Alliance of Angels, Incisive Ventures, and Morning Star Foundation, along with dozens of individual investors.

Under court supervision, the receiver can now take possession of Vega Cloud’s assets and records, secure its bank accounts and data, evaluate and sell assets such as intellectual property, collect remaining receivables, and distribute proceeds to creditors in priority order.

The filings do not include a timeline for asset sales or any plan for the business to continue operating. Those details typically emerge later through receiver reports.

Windows helped launch the PC era. Now, Microsoft wants to launch the age of AI agents.

The post Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Embed AI Agents Deep Into Windows appeared first on TechRepublic.

Windows helped launch the PC era. Now, Microsoft wants to launch the age of AI agents.

The post Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Embed AI Agents Deep Into Windows appeared first on TechRepublic.

[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series and March 24, 2026 event, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the people, companies, and ideas behind AI agents.]

It was “like bringing a Porsche into a world of Model Ts.” 

That’s what Microsoft said in its 1990 annual report about the shift from MS-DOS to Windows. But the bigger breakthrough for the company wasn’t the graphical interface. It was Windows’ ability to serve as a platform for applications made by others.

Windows 3.0, released that year, made third-party software easier to find and launch, and offered developers a clear bargain: build to Microsoft’s specs, and your software would become a first-class citizen on the computers that were arriving “on every desk and in every home,” as the company’s original mission statement put it. 

Thirty-five years later, AI feels less like a car and more like a rocket ship. But Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off.

A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced earlier this month as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what’s known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps.

The long-term promise for Windows users is autonomous assistants that operate on their behalf, directly on their machines. Beyond routine tasks like assembling a PDF or organizing files, agents could monitor email and calendars to resolve scheduling conflicts, or scan documents across multiple apps to pull together a briefing for an upcoming meeting.

Achieving that level of autonomy requires more than just a clever interface. It will take deep, persistent memory that operates more like the human brain.

“We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. “This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world.”

Elements of this are already emerging elsewhere.

• Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude offer desktop-style agents through browsers and native apps, with extensions that can read pages, fill forms, and take limited actions on a user’s behalf.
• Amazon is developing “frontier agents” aimed at automating business processes in the cloud. 
• Startups like Seattle-based Vercept are building standalone agentic apps that coordinate work across tools. 

But Microsoft’s Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription.

The risks posed by PC agents

The parallels to the past only go so far. Traditional PC applications ran in their own windows, worked with their own files, and didn’t touch the rest of the system for the most part.

“Agents are going to need to be able to scratchpad their work,” Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said recently on the South Park Commons Minus 1 podcast, explaining that agents will need to retain a history of user interactions and tap into the necessary context to solve problems.

Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user’s behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company.

Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent’s instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation.

To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access.

The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to “understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer” before turning them on.

A different competitive landscape

Even if Microsoft executes perfectly, the landscape is different now. In the early 1990s, Windows became dominant because developers flocked to the platform, which attracted more users, which attracted more developers. It was a virtuous cycle, and Microsoft was at the heart of it.

But Windows isn’t the center of the computing world anymore. Smartphones, browsers, and cloud platforms have fragmented the landscape in ways that didn’t exist back then. Microsoft missed the mobile era almost entirely, and the PC is now one screen among many.

In the enterprise, Microsoft has better footing. Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a growing ecosystem of business-focused agents give the company a strong position, competing against Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others for cloud-based AI agents and services.

Agent Launchers is a different bet — an attempt to make Windows the home for agents that serve individual users on their own machines. That’s a harder sell when the PC is competing with phones, browsers, and cloud apps for people’s attention. Microsoft can build the platform, but it can’t guarantee that developers will show up the way they did 35 years ago.

And unlike in the 1990s, Microsoft can’t count on users to embrace what it’s building. There’s a growing sentiment that these AI capabilities are being pushed into Windows not because users want them, but because Microsoft needs to justify its massive AI investments. 

In October, for example, Microsoft announced new features including “Hey Copilot” voice activation, a redesigned taskbar with Copilot built in, and the expansion of “Copilot Actions” agentic capabilities beyond the browser to the PC itself. 

“They’re thinking about revenue first and foremost,” longtime tech journalist and Microsoft observer Ed Bott said on the GeekWire Podcast at the time. The more users rely on these AI features, he explained, the easier it becomes for the company to upsell them on premium services.

There is a business reality driving all of this. In Microsoft’s most recent fiscal year, Windows and Devices generated $17.3 billion in revenue — essentially flat for the past three years. 

That’s less than Gaming ($23.5 billion) and LinkedIn ($17.8 billion), and a fraction of the $98 billion in revenue from Azure and cloud services or the nearly $88 billion from Microsoft 365 commercial.

By comparison, in fiscal 1995, five years after the launch of Windows 3.0, Microsoft’s platforms group (which included MS-DOS and Windows) represented about 40% of its total revenue of $5.9 billion. Windows was the growth engine for the company.

Windows is unlikely to play that kind of outsized role again. But AI integration is the company’s best bet to return the OS to growth. Whether that ultimately looks like a restored Porsche or a rocket ship on the launchpad probably doesn’t matter as much as keeping it out of the junkyard.

LAS VEGAS — Speaking this week on the Amazon Web Services re:Invent stage, AWS executive Colleen Aubrey delivered a prediction that doubled as a wake-up call for companies still thinking of AI as just another tool.

“I believe that over the next few years, agentic teammates can be essential to every team — as essential as the people sitting right next to you,” Aubrey said during the Wednesday keynote. “They will fundamentally transform how companies build and deliver for their customers.”

But what does that look like in practice? On her own team, for example, Aubrey says she challenged groups that once had 50 people taking nine months to deliver a new product to do the same with 10 people working for three months.

Meanwhile, non-engineers such as finance analysts are building working prototypes using AI tools, contributing code in Amazon’s Kiro agentic development tool alongside engineers, and feeding those prototypes into Amazon’s famous PR/FAQ planning process on weekly cycles.

Those are some of the details that Aubrey shared when we sat down with her after the keynote at the GeekWire Studios booth in the re:Invent expo hall to dig into the themes from her talk. Aubrey is senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, overseeing the company’s push into business applications for call centers, supply chains, and other sectors.

Continue reading for takeaways from the conversation, watch the video below, and listen to the conversation starting in the second segment of this week’s GeekWire Podcast.

The ‘teammate’ mental model changes everything. Aubrey draws a clear line between single-purpose AI tools that do one thing well and the agentic teammates she sees emerging — systems that take responsibility for whole objectives, and require a different kind of management. 

“I think people will increasingly be managers of AI,” she said. “The days of having to do the individual keystrokes ourselves, I think, are fast fading. And in fact, everyone is going to be a manager now. You have to think about prioritization, delegation, and auditing. What’s the quality of our feedback, providing coaching. What are the guardrails?”

Amazon Connect crosses $1 billion. AWS’s call center platform reached $1 billion in annual revenue on a run rate basis, with Aubrey noting it has accelerated year-over-year growth for two consecutive years. 

This week at re:Invent, the team announced 29 new capabilities across four areas: Nova Sonic voice interaction that Aubrey says is “very close to being indistinguishable” from human conversation; agents that complete tasks on behalf of customers; clickstream intelligence for product recommendations; and observability tools for inspecting AI reasoning. 

One interesting detail: Aubrey said she’s often surprised by Nova Sonic’s sophistication and empathy in complex conversations — and equally surprised when it fails at basic tasks like spelling an address correctly. 

“There’s still work to do to really polish that,” she said.

The ROI question gets a “yes and no.” Asked whether companies are seeing the business value to justify AI agent investments, Aubrey offered a nuanced response. “I observe companies to struggle to realize the business impact,” she said. But she said the value often shows up as eliminating bottlenecks — clearing backlogs, erasing technical debt, accelerating security patching — rather than immediate revenue gains. 

“I’m not going to see the impact on my P&L today,” she said, “but if I fast forward a year, I’m going to have a product in market where real customers are using and getting real value, and we’re learning and iterating where I might not have even been halfway there in the past.” 

Her advice for companies still hesitating: “If you don’t start today, that’s a one way door decision… I think you have to start the journey today. I would suggest people get focused, they get moving, because if you don’t, I think that becomes existential.”

Trust requires observability. Aubrey says companies won’t get full value from AI teammates if they can’t see how they’re reasoning. 

“If you don’t trust an AI teammate, then you’re never going to realize the full benefit,” she said. “You’re not going to give them the hard tasks, you’re not going to invest in their development.” 

The solution is treating AI inspection the same way you’d manage a human colleague: understand why it took an action, audit the quality, and iterate. 

“You can refine your knowledge bases. You can refine your workflows. You can refine your guardrails, and then confidently keep iterating… the same way we do with each other. We keep iterating, we keep learning, and we keep getting better,” she said.

Product updates: Beyond Connect, Aubrey offered updates on other parts of her portfolio of Amazon’s applied AI solutions. 

• Just Walk Out, Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology, deployed more than 150 new stores in 2025 and should accelerate next year.
• AWS Supply Chain, meanwhile, is getting a reset. “I’m going to declare that a pivot,” she said, with a Q1 announcement coming around agentic decision-making for supply and demand planning.
• Also coming in Q1: a life sciences product focused on antibody discovery, currently in beta. 

She teased “a few other new investment areas” expected to come in early 2026.