Chris Bee, a tech exec who previously worked at Lessen, Zillow, and Uber, joined AI email startup Superhuman as chief technology officer.

Bee was most recently CTO at Lessen, a property services management startup valued at more than $2 billion last year.

“I can’t be more excited to help build such a beloved product that gives people time back every day,” Bee wrote on LinkedIn.

San Francisco-based Superhuman raised $75 million in 2021 to fuel development of its email app that aims to streamline how people send, receive, and compose emails in clients including Gmail and Outlook. The company is now targeting enterprises.

Bee, who is based in Seattle, was previously a senior director at Zillow Group and a senior engineering manager at Uber.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:

— Tammy Perkins, a longtime HR executive based in Seattle, joined HR software provider ProService as chief people officer. Perkins previously held the same role at HAVI, and spent 13 years at Amazon. She also worked at PMI Worldwide, Fjuri, Appen, and Microsoft.

— Jonathan Klein, co-founder and former CEO of Seattle-based Getty Images, resigned from the company’s board last week. Klein, who helped launch the photo giant in 1995, stepped down as CEO in 2015, and left his chair role in 2018.

— Olly Downs, a longtime Seattle tech leader, was named chief technology and AI officer at Curinos. He joined the New York City-based fintech startup last year. Downs previously held exec roles at BARK, Zulily, and ZIllow Group. He founded and led Amplero, a Seattle marketing startup.

— Larry Hryb, who spent more than 20 years at Microsoft and became the de-facto face of Xbox, joined Unity as director of community at the game development giant.

“At Unity, I see a horizon brimming with potential,” Hryb wrote on LinkedIn. “Unity’s mission of empowering creative and business success of creators around the world across games, apps, and experiences aligns with my lifelong passion for innovation and community building.”

Hryb, also known as Major Nelson, stepped away from Microsoft last year. He was one of the main ambassadors of Xbox and also hosted the Official Xbox Podcast.

— Seattle logistics startup Pipe17 hired Ryan Powell as chief revenue officer. Powell previously worked at Ryder System, Whiplash, and Easyship.

— Chris Green joined the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association as its first president. He was most recently assistant director for the Office of Economic Development and Competitiveness at the Washington state Department of Commerce.

— Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit Latino Founders named Juan Barraza as its new executive director. Barraza joined the organization’s board in 2019. He is currently director of innovation and entrepreneurship at VertueLab.

— Andrew Coté, vice president of strategy and growth at Seattle startup Brinc Drones, joined the Business Executives for National Security, a network of security business leaders based in Washington D.C.

— Karina Martija-Harris, previously a program manager at Washington Maritime Blue, Maritime Blue, joined the National Security Innovation Network as a program management analyst.

In a webinar Tuesday on the future of climate tech, Alan Neuhauser of Axios kicked off the questions by asking what it means to succeed in a burgeoning market where simply surviving is challenging enough. 

Mark Cupta, managing director at Prelude Ventures, said an essential win for a climate tech startup is having sufficient funds to buy enough time to get traction. Capital is flowing into mature sectors, Cupta said, but budding ventures need investments to stay afloat while they grow.

The online event focused on a recent report by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) that explores the state of venture capital investing in the climate tech sector. The news was mixed. While deal activity in the climate tech industry was down 14% last year from a peak in 2021, it’s doing much better than the broader tech market, which fell by 24%.

Within climate tech, trajectories vary between sectors. Cupta noted that food and agriculture is “taking an absolute beating” after years of instability, whereas carbon capture and removal companies, and climate data startups have surged ahead in recent years.

The dip in funding for climate tech can create growth and longevity issues for companies with big dreams and high costs. But the report’s authors said the situation isn’t a cause for panic. They noted many hopeful trends in the data, and said that government incentives, particularly the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, continue to bolster growth in the sector. 

Panelists at the event, hosted by SVB, said companies that know how to get creative with funding sources and incentives stand out.

“They are using all the resources they have access to,” said Milo Werner, an investor and industrial strategist at NextGen Industry Group. 

All three panelists said that early stage companies should work with a target market in mind. 

“If you can guarantee that someone’s going to buy your product at a price, it’s a little easier to justify a factory to make it,” said Joshua Posamentier, managing partner and co-founder of Congruent Ventures. 

They also highlighted how important it is for companies to partner with financial backers who understand their vision and timeline, which can be a challenge for some hardware-intensive climate tech startups. Investors need to be more patient than they would be with faster-moving software companies. 

In the Pacific Northwest, climate innovators are finding a foothold. A report out last month put the Seattle area among the top U.S. cities for climate tech startup hubs. Companies in this region received $240 million in funding last year, according to PitchBook data analyzed by the venture firm Revolution.

Here are a few Seattle companies with recent investments to keep an eye on:

• Banyu Carbon, which aims to reduce the cost of carbon capture using light-based technology, has raised $8.5 million from investors so far this year.
• Recurrent raised $16 million earlier this year to fund its shopping platform that provides buyers and dealers information about batteries in used electric vehicles.
• In 2023, Omnidian announced that it landed $25 million for solar power development projects; LevelTen Energy, a platform for renewable energy transactions, raised $10 million; and Electric Era raised $13 million from Chevron Technology Ventures for their quick EV charging stations.

A new startup founded by longtime e-commerce leaders is using artificial intelligence in a bid to shake up the way people find and buy clothing online.

Daydream announced a massive $50 million seed round from top venture capital firms to develop technology that aims to supercharge the shopping search experience.

The company, which has offices in New York City and Seattle, isn’t revealing many details about its platform, which will launch in beta later this year. But its website hints at the vision with a series of hypothetical search queries, such as:

• Bright-colored sneakers that feel old school and classic
• Street style tops inspired by Bella Hadid
• I’m shopping for cozy and effortless vibes for fall in NYC
• I love this tote, but I want it without stripes
• I need a dress for a summer wedding in Costa Rica

Daydream said it has nearly 2,000 brands in its catalog through partnerships.

The startup is led by CEO Julie Bornstein, former chief operating officer at clothing rental giant Stitch Fix. Bornstein also held executive roles at Sephora, Nordstrom, and Urban Outfitters. Her previous startup, an AI-powered shopping platform called THE YES, was acquired by Pinterest in 2022.

Bornstein pointed to “massive gains in AI over the past year.”

“We can finally build an intelligent online shopping platform that will make it easy and fun for consumers to find products they love among the best selection of brands and retailers in the world,” she said in a statement.

The rise of generative AI and other advanced technologies could shift the way people find information on the internet — and have big implications for e-commerce.

Online retailers are testing different AI-related ideas in their search experiences. Amazon recently introduced its new AI shopping assistant Rufus. Alaska Airlines rolled out a new trip itinerary search tool earlier this year that leverages generative AI technology from OpenAI.

A recent survey from Adobe on generative AI trends found that two-thirds of respondents want brands to use purchase history and other data to make shopping experiences more relevant to what they want.

“Online shopping is in need of an overhaul, particularly in the realm of memory and context, to provide seamless and intuitive experiences that truly understand and anticipate customer needs,” Daydream CTO and co-founder Matt Fisher told GeekWire.

Fisher is one of several Seattle-area employees working out of Daydream’s office in Kirkland, Wash.

Dan Cary, co-founder and chief product officer who is also based in Seattle, previously spent 12 years at Google, most recently as a product manager for generative AI for YouTube.

Fisher said the company plans to grow headcount in the Seattle region.

Other co-founders include former Pinterest execs Lisa Green and Richard Kim.

Forerunner Ventures and Index Ventures led the round, which included participation from GV (Google’s VC arm) and True Ventures.

“We believe that search will transition to service, with the search giants dominating the space losing market share to new entrants providing personalized, AI-driven services that work in collaboration with consumers to meet their end goals and delight with a fundamentally new level of value,” Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner, said in a statement.

How is artificial intelligence making marketers more productive? How are journalists approaching the ethical dilemmas inherent to AI content creation? And how can scrappy startups hope to compete with well-funded tech giants in the fast-moving world of AI?

Those are some of the questions addressed by tech entrepreneur and marketer Adam Tratt and GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop on this episode of Shift AI, a show that explores what it takes to adapt to the changing workplace in the digital age of remote work and AI.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com.

AI and productivity

Todd: We’ve seen the awakening over the past year. People are trying to figure out what exactly to do with these tools. The capabilities and the weaknesses are becoming more and more apparent. And we’re at the stage where a lot of startups and big tech companies are looking for specific, vertical applications to provide more value.

I was talking with an entrepreneur who said he thinks that each of his engineers has gotten about 20% more productive over the past year to 18 months. And that feels about right to me. That’s about what my experience is

Right now we’re seeing a variety of companies in many different ways look for incremental productivity beyond that, trying to get up to maybe 30%, 40%, 50%. That’s my sense of things right now.

Adam: A lot of the work that I do is by myself. There’s so many different sub-disciplines within the category of marketing, and it’s hard to be great at all of them.

In fact, there’s almost nobody that’s great at all of them, because half of marketing is this analytical, spreadsheet exercise, where you’re trying to make every dollar that you spend work as hard as possible for your brand. It’s usually in driving demand. 

Then there’s another part that’s a creative exercise. That has a lot to do with, how do you present your brand? What are the words you choose? What are the visuals you choose?

There’s all these ways to use AI to help you compensate for whatever your weaknesses are. So whether it’s running an efficient LinkedIn advertising campaign, or creating tweets from a blog post, there’s ways you can deploy LLMs and other tools to do a great job.

AI startups vs. tech giants

Boaz: I’m seeing the big companies move so much faster. You wake up in the morning, like we did with Sora and OpenAI, and all of a sudden, all these small companies that were building text-to-video, they are now in a really, really awkward position to have to prove their value.

Todd: The scarcity of computing power is the huge hurdle. So you see this reshuffling of priorities and resources. I think you need some really savvy startups and some really smart founders to navigate this whole world, when you’ve got these giants who are moving so quickly.

Adam: Everybody I know is surprised that Microsoft has come out so strong, so fast. And Google is still apparently flat-footed. It’s very early days. And I would not be surprised if both Google and Amazon come out with very competitive offerings, as the smoke starts to clear. We all know Google has been working on AI for a long time. And they were intentionally pumping the brakes, until they realized OpenAI was eating their lunch.

[Editor’s Note: This podcast was recorded before Apple’s recent AI announcements.]

Todd: My impression walking away from Google I/O was that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is far more conservative, in terms of pushing the envelope on AI, than certainly either OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman, or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. My question walking away from that was, what has he seen?Adam: It might just be that he’s seen the Terminator trilogy.

The ethics of AI content creation

Adam: I do have some ethical concerns, but the way I’m using AI is, at the moment, somewhat benign: “Read this blog post, tell me what it says, help me create provocative, interesting social media posts, take this story, create an image for the story.” … I have no ethical qualms with generating a fake image for a story, as long as it doesn’t misrepresent the thing that I’m trying to say, and you need to credit appropriately.

Todd: That brings up an interesting ethical dilemma that we ran into at GeekWire. Recently, we decided, when we’re generating images to go with stories, we will not use photorealistic images. We’ll use things that are clearly illustrations, created by the AI generator, because otherwise there could be this confusion in the minds of readers. So we’re just coming up with these things on the fly — things that feel right based on our underlying principles.

Two words about the future of work and AI

Adam: Guarded optimism. In general, what I’ve seen in my career in tech has been steady progress, mostly for good. I think the people I’ve worked with have had good intentions. Occasionally, in the course of being competitive, things get out of hand. And then usually the government steps in, too late. I’m hoping that, just as we’ve seen in the first year-and-a-half of general availability of LLMs, that the promise will be elusive compared to the reality, and we’ll have time as an industry to course-correct as we get closer to this idea of more sophisticated models.

Todd: Hyper drive. I think that things are going to just accelerate and continue accelerating. I’ve been covering tech since 2002, more than two decades. I’ve never seen a year like this, ever. I missed the dot-com bubble. I didn’t get to see that. And I feel like this has made up for it in some respects. I just feel like it’s going to accelerate so fast that the only thing that’s going to slow us down is a backlash.

Listen to the full episode of Shift AI with Todd Bishop and Adam Tratt here.

Seattle’s Aurion Biotech announced Wednesday that it received special designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that should speed up the development of its treatment for a common disease that damages the cornea and can result in vision loss.

The FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designation for Aurion’s cell therapy treatment.

The designations accelerate the FDA’s review process, and are given to efforts that target serious diseases and offer significant improvements over currently available options.

Degeneration of the cornea with age or disease can result in a condition called corneal edema secondary to endothelial dysfunction. Associated with impaired, hazy vision and ultimately blindness, the condition affects millions of people globally, and about 4% of people over age 40 in the U.S.

Aurion recently completed the enrollment of 97 patients in a Phase 1 / 2 clinical trial being conducted in the U.S. and Canada. Its cell therapy has been approved for use in Japan.

Existing treatment for the condition includes corneal transplants, which are effective. But there is an insufficient supply of available tissue and the post-operative recovery requires a patient to lie flat on their back for up to three days to ensure the cornea adheres correctly.

Aurion, a spinoff of Seattle eye care company CorneaGen, has offices in Seattle, Tokyo and Cambridge, Mass. The company’s corneal therapy is based on technology Aurion licensed in 2020 from the Kyoto Prefecture University of Medicine.

In 2022, Aurion announced a $120 million Series C round of funding.

Ernst & Young on Monday named Aurion CEO Greg Kunst as its Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mountain West Region.

Butterflies, a Bellevue, Wash.-based social media platform that combines human and AI-generated content, launched Tuesday after raising $4.8 million in seed funding.

After five months in beta, Butterflies is billed as an app where “humans and AI coexist.” The Verge editor Alex Heath called the app, whose interface looks like Instagram, “one of the most provocative — and, at times, unsettling — takes on social media that I’ve seen in quite a while.”

The technology relies on public AI models as well as the startup’s own image rendering and LLM models to help users create an AI friend, called a Butterfly, in just minutes. These personas come complete with a profile, backstory, opinions and emotions, and they automatically create posts and interact with both real people and bots.

Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former engineer at Snap.

“To date, humans have been able to chat with AIs in one-dimensional conversations, but there has yet to be an experience where people can create and interact more dynamically with AIs,” Tran said in a news release.

He said tens of thousands of butterflies were created in beta and thousands of users have been spending an average of one to three hours a day interacting with them. 

The company’s long-term goal is to enhance the realism of AI, crafting digital beings that interact with people in a relatable and life-like manner, enriching personal experiences.

Tran said AIs today are primarily being used as helpers, admins or copilots, but in a year, conversations with AI friends will feel as natural and real as those with any human.

“Butterflies AI is demonstrating that AIs can also be your friend and guide,” Tran said. “Humans have always been drawn to entertaining stories and compelling characters. Artificial intelligence is allowing us to create and build relationships with them in an entirely new way.”

The seed round was led by Coatue with participation from SV Angel and several strategic angels.

Butterflies is available on iOS and Android.

Rene Bystron spent hundreds of hours at his last startup building an app that helps teach people how to use generative AI tools. And it was through that experience that the Seattle entrepreneur came to a realization.

“There’s this massive need in the market for a tool that allows people to leverage AI for workflow-specific tasks without prompting,” Bystron told GeekWire.

Bystron is the co-founder and CEO of DeltaGen, a new startup developing software that aims to help companies use AI tools that don’t require “prompting,” or the process of queuing AI systems for a specific answer.

Bystron previously launched and led AI LaMo, which built games, quizzes, and other interactive content to teach people how to improve their prompt engineering skills and interact with chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

“I’m cannibalizing years of work — I built my career in prompting,” Bystron said. “But I’ve just seen hundreds of companies and done dozens of generative AI workshops to know that this doesn’t come to people naturally.”

DeltaGen is building a platform targeted at enterprise workflows, starting with financial professionals. Its tool identifies workflows associated with a particular job by scanning LinkedIn profiles of users, and then provides solutions designed for specific tasks.

“You don’t really need to write anything,” Bystron said. “You select and choose.”

Bystron said the software leverages around 30 APIs from different AI models and picks the best one for a particular job.

“There are models that work better for some workflows, and others that work better for others,” he said.

DeltaGen is still in beta mode. It plans to generate revenue using a traditional software-as-a-service model, charging users for premium features.

The 5-person company recently joined the latest cohort of the Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator, a Denver, Colo.-based program designed for tech startups addressing labor market challenges. Another Seattle startup, Incskill, is also participating in the three-month program.

Techstars earlier this year shut down its Seattle accelerator.

Bystron previously was a project leader at Boston Consulting Group, and founded and led Meltingpot Forum, a large multidisciplinary speaker event in the Czech Republic.

DeltaGen co-founder and CTO Avinash Uddaraju previously co-founded Gritly, which also participated in Techstars’ workforce accelerator and was acquired by IIA Healthcare. Other co-founders at DeltaGen include CMO Abdullah Raja and COO Casey McCullar.

Another startup studio with roots in Seattle is incubating ideas and spinning out fledgling tech companies.

Mudita Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Detroit, launched its Mudita Studios arm about a year ago. Stephen Konig, a longtime Google product management leader based in Seattle, runs the program.

“It was important for me to stay here,” Konig told GeekWire. “It’s such an active and vibrant community from a startup and talent perspective.”

Four startups have spun out of Mudita Studios, including three based in Seattle: Official AI, which helps people monetize their digital likeness; Stellis AI, which offers AI advisory services; and legal tech startup Predict.law.

Mudita’s studio follows a similar thesis to its venture fund, focusing on early stage B2B enterprise software startups. It uses the typical startup studio model, testing different ideas and finding entrepreneurs to lead spinouts. Those companies are funded in part by Mudita Venture Partners.

The startup studio model has gained popularity over the past decade. Some criticize such programs for taking too much equity from entrepreneurs.

Konig said Mudita’s ownership stakes depend on the particular idea and circumstances. But he said startup studios can appeal to someone who can’t afford to spend months or years testing out their business idea.

“We’re taking a tremendous amount of the risk out of the equation,” Konig said.

Konig said Mudita axes 95% of ideas that come through the studio.

Mudita joins other startup studios in Seattle including Pioneer Square Labs, Madrona Venture Labs, Conduit Venture Labs, and TF Labs.

Others such as Kernel Labs and Pienza launched in the past several years but have since pivoted or are not active.

Mudita teamed up with Pioneer Square Labs to help incubate Official AI. Konig has a desk at PSL’s office in Seattle.

David Zager, partner at Pioneer Square Labs, said he’s happy to have another startup studio in town that can boost entrepreneurial energy and investment dollars in the Seattle region.

“The joint studio efforts have produced much serendipity,” he said. “We look forward to more Mudita collaborations.”

The other spinout from Mudita is Momentum Collective, a Denver, Colo.-based go-to-market consultancy for VC-backed startups.

Despite launching the studio during a broader slowdown in the venture capital market, Konig said the timing has actually been good, in part due to the rise of generative AI.

“Thinking through all the applications for generative AI, and all the things that it could do, has given us a huge pipeline of opportunities to explore,” he said.

Konig, who spent more than a decade at Google, said he’s learned to temper expectations amid the hype around AI.

“The due diligence that you have to do to build a successful business, I think is still very much true,” he said. “And I think it’s more important than ever.”

AI startups accounted for 40% of total venture funding in May. So it may seem strategic for startups to include AI as part of their pitches to investors.

But founders and CEOs should tread carefully when talking about their company’s use of the trendy tech, according to two Seattle-area venture capitalists who spoke at the PAN-IIT Seattle 2024 Conference event in Bellevue, Wash., earlier this month.

Over-branding in AI “shows you as an unserious company and unserious people,” said Vivek Ladsariya, who recently joined Pioneer Square Labs as a managing director.

“Serious investors — and more importantly serious customers — will really see through that,” he said. “That’s not the brand you want to build.”

AI has “sort of become table stakes” and should be part of a company’s strategy, but not overstating its role is crucial, said Heather Redman, co-founder and managing partner at Flying Fish.

“You can really lose a lot of credibility,” she said.

Vikram Chalana, CEO of Seattle startup Pictory.ai, joked that he went against the advice shared by the investors since his 4-year-old company literally has AI in its domain name.

AI is core to Pictory’s product, which automates video creation.

“At the end of the day, it has to be about a customer problem,” Chalana said.

Ladsariya echoed that sentiment.

“If you’re speaking to customers, it’s really important to talk about what you can do, rather than a general technology,” he said.

AI has been a core thesis at Flying Fish since it launched eight years ago. Redman said the firm specifically targets founders and teams with AI backgrounds.

“We are generally looking for a PhD on the team,” she said. “It’s not a must-have, but certainly a nice-to-have.”

But Anoop Gupta, CEO of SeekOut, said companies don’t necessarily need “AI experts” to take advantage of generative AI.

“If you’re building AI infrastructure, then having a lot of deep experience is necessary,” he said. “But my sense is that a smart engineer, a computer scientist — they can learn a lot about [AI]. Their sense of conceptualization and problem definition and how to experiment can take you a long way. You don’t need a machine learning specialist.”

Chalana agreed, noting that he’s seen people with advanced AI experience and education struggle with adopting generative AI. He said the best generative AI engineer on his team is a 26-year-old software developer.

Galvanic Games, the independent Seattle-based developer behind video games such as Some Distant Memory, Rapture Rejects, and last fall’s Wizard With a Gun, is closing its doors.

Studio head and founder Patrick Morgan announced the shutdown in a statement Friday.

“Despite the promising start of Wizard With a Gun, sales are not strong enough to sustain our studio,” Morgan wrote. “The last year has been particularly tough for games.”

Morgan continued: “While we had numerous encouraging conversations at [the DICE Summit] and [the Game Developers Conference], the process of signing new projects … takes longer than the runway we had left.”

Ten employees are expected to lose their jobs in the closure. Galvanic Games has put up a thread on LinkedIn to celebrate their contributions and help affected workers secure new jobs.

Morgan founded Galvanic Games in 2015. Wizard With a Gun might’ve been its highest-profile game to date, made through a collaboration with indie publisher Devolver Digital.

It also toured the indie circuit in 2019 with its story/exploration game Some Distant Memory, and collaborated with Seattle’s tinyBuild and the authors of the webcomic “Cyanide & Happiness” to create the now-defunct satirical battle royale Rapture Rejects.

Galvanic’s shutdown adds to a long list of layoffs that have plagued the video game industry for the last year and a half. More than 10,000 developers have lost their jobs since January, already topping the previous record cuts from all of last year.

The dismissals aren’t coming from any one source, but factors are theorized to include the rising costs of modern “AAA” game development; a dramatic slowdown in available VC investment; a delayed correction after the post-pandemic gaming boom of 2020-2021; a consistently busy release schedule, which may have saturated the market; and the long-term impacts of the industry’s gradual embrace of “games as a service.”

Eric Berlinberg, who spent the past decade at Amazon and was a key leader on the company’s Prime Air team, is moving on from the Seattle tech giant for a new role at Torc Robotics, a subsidiary of Daimler Truck that is developing autonomous vehicle technology for self-driving trucks.

Berlinberg led program management, business intelligence, and more for Prime Air, the drone delivery division of Amazon.

“Almost a decade ago, I stumbled into one of the most incredible professional opportunities: bringing drone delivery to the world,” Berlinberg wrote on LinkedIn. “As one of the first members of this project, it has been inspiring to be at the forefront of this development. Every day, I’ve learned from brilliant engineers, aerodynamicists, and aviators. The attention to safety at all levels, and the unwavering focus on building a safe and scalable delivery system, have always impressed me.”

Berlinberg previously was a director at Manhattan Creative Group and a product manager at Coca-Cola.

He’ll lead program management at Torc, which spun out of Virginia Tech nearly two decades ago and is focused on enabling trucks to drive autonomously between hubs in the U.S.

Amazon has spent years developing drones that can deliver packages to customers. It has missed some projections for customer deliveries but is adding more delivery sites across the U.S. and last month won a key approval from the FAA to fly the drones beyond visual line of sight.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech ecosystem:

— John Montgomery, who spent more than 26 years at Microsoft and was most recently a corporate vice president, joined Meta as vice president of product management on the company’s infrastructure team. “After 25+ years at Microsoft, it’s invigorating to be starting something new!” he wrote on LinkedIn.

— Longtime marketing executive Jay Wampold joined Buildkite, a Perth, Australia-based software company. Wampold previously held marketing leadership roles at FasterBetter, Pulumi, Commerce IQ, and Cloudability. Former Chef CEO Barry Crist was named board chair of Buildkite last year.

— Michael Vogelsong, who co-founded Amazon’s Deep Learning Technologies team, joined Collaborative Robotics, the Santa Clara, Calif., company founded in 2022 by former Amazon Robotics VP and Distinguished Engineer Brad Porter that recently opened an office in Seattle.

— Katherine Bajjaliya Keileh joined Seattle-based risk intelligence startup Pendulum as head of sales. Keileh previously worked for One and EverFi.

— Whitney Ellison, former director of brand activation at Alaska Airlines, joined Starbucks as senior manager of brand marketing (coffee & culture). She previously worked at Hightower and CenturyLink.

— Aaron Kornblum is departing his role as global general counsel at BYJU’S Learning, part of the India-based edtech company BYJU. Kornblum was a former Microsoft manager and former general counsel at Bungie.

— Mark Musburger is stepping down as CFO of Seattle-area marketing software company Banzai. Musburger joined the company in 2022; Banzai went public late last year. He previously worked at Avalara, Identity Digital, and Corvee.

The founders at Autev envision a future where EV drivers simply park their vehicles in a garage, open an app and enter a parking space number. When they return, their EV battery is topped off.

The technology that could make this vision a reality includes autonomous robots being developed by the Autev team that charge electric vehicles without human assistance.

“It’s like a gas can on wheels,” said Syd Manna, co-founder and chief operations officer at Autev.

The device is essentially a giant, mobile battery outfitted with navigational sensors to help it independently maneuver to a vehicle, and it has a robotic arm with a nozzle that inserts into a vehicle’s charging port.

While the team is still developing prototypes, the Seattle-based startup hopes to be one of the solutions in the build-out of much-needed EV infrastructure, targeting charging opportunities at workplaces, apartments and condo buildings.

The EV industry needs more chargers, but they can be expensive to install given that many require costly electrical upgrades to existing infrastructure to meet high energy demands. Autev’s system provides an alternative, since its robots are simply recharged from a battery-powered docking station. That allows the Autev system to plug into existing power outlets.

“You don’t need to do any infrastructure. It’s a mobile service that’s plug and play,” said co-founder and CEO Osama AlSalloum.

By using mobile chargers, any parking spot can become an EV charging stall and there’s no worry about someone hogging a parking stall outfitted with a stationary charger. The plan is for users to schedule half-hour reservations for the robotic units, which should be able to recharge approximately 25% of an EV’s battery in that time.

The system will have multiple DC fast-charging robots per location, allowing some robots to charge EVs while others can be docked at the base, recharging themselves.

Autev aims to price the systems at $50,000, which would include one of the robot chargers and the base for recharging. Additional robots would cost $20,000-to-$30,000 depending on the number ordered. Each base could accommodate two or four robots.

While still costly, the installation of a conventional, slower charging Level 2 charger costs about $10,000-to-$20,000, while a station with four DC fast chargers can cost $750,000 or more.

Customers for the Autev system would be property owners and managers for residential buildings and office spaces. The team is considering offering their system as a service, in addition to selling it. Customers could recoup some of their costs when drivers pay for charging their EVs.

‘Legitimate effort’

But even if Autev’s solution is more affordable, the market is uncertain.

As EV charging speeds are getting faster, it’s possible that it would make more sense for EV owners in multi-family buildings to charge up at public fast chargers instead of plugging in at home.

That said, if the team is able to fully automate the charging process, “it has definite potential. I think it’s kind of a neat solution,” said Matthew Metz, co-founder and executive director of Coltura, a nonprofit promoting EV use.

But Metz had questions about the system’s practicality.

While relatively compact, the charging units are still a significant size, measuring 5-feet long, 3-feet wide and 4-feet tall. The charging base will take up space, and it could be tight fit for a robot to navigate a jam-packed parking lot and reach a charging port. The Autev team has tried to address this issue by designing the robot to connect to EVs from behind the car, and by making a robotic arm with a high amount of mobility.

Another concern is if there are problems with the autonomous service — a device gets stuck somewhere, or a nozzle fails to engage or disengage — which could create headaches and frustration for Autev users.

The startup team said that someone will be onsite when the first devices are deployed to address any technical issues. And every unit will remotely communicate with the main system so problems can be identified and reported, and someone with the company will quickly respond to problems.

“It is a pretty legitimate effort at dealing with a significant problem,” Metz said, but he still expects “it’s going to have significant headwinds.”

Charging ahead

Autev launched in October 2022 and has built a proof-of-concept device that can deliver slower, Level 1 charging and is manually controlled. The group is building their second prototype with Level 2 charging that operates autonomously. The goal for the third version is a prototype that will deliver a fast charge and be ready for manufacturing.

The startup founders are bootstrapping their effort, but looking to raise money in the coming months. They are targeting production by the end of next year.

The trio met as students in the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business Masters of Entrepreneurship program. Jay Strickland, portfolio analyst with The Energy Authority, is a technical advisor.

Autev is based at the UW’s CoMotion Labs in Fluke Hall as part of its Hardware Incubator. The startup has taken advantage of its university location and has 15 high school, undergraduate and graduate students working as unpaid interns or for college credits.

Others companies are developing related EV charging technologies. Automakers Hyundai and Volkswagen are working on robotic EV charging, though the devices don’t appear to be mobile units or include batteries. Seattle startup Electric Era, which recently won GeekWire’s Sustainable Innovation of the Year award, sells stationary EV charging system that also relies on batteries.

The Autev team is optimistic about future success, noting that all of the components of its system have been proven out technologically in other applications.

“We’re just combining it in a unique way,” Strickland said.

Brex is opening an office in downtown Seattle.

The Salt Lake City-based fintech giant operates as a “remote-first” company and a spokesperson said the Seattle office will be used “in a hybrid capacity which will allow us to advance competitively.”

The Puget Sound Business Journal first reported the news.

Brex already employs around 60 people in Seattle, and more than 200 across the Pacific Northwest. Brex President Karandeep Anand and VP of Engineering James Reggio both live in the Seattle region.

Founded in 2017, Brex raised more than $1 billion and gained widespread adoption among startups with its corporate card and expense management platform. It was valued at more than $12 billion in 2022.

However, following the tech downturn and companies tightening their spending, Brex laid off 20% of its staff earlier this year and lost two key executives.

The company ranked No. 4 on CNBC’s latest Disruptor 50 list. It has 1,000 employees.

Brex joins a number of other companies that operate satellite engineering offices in the Seattle region.

Companies of all shapes and sizes need to secure their infrastructure. But it’s not always clear what type of cybersecurity software can meet their needs. And it’s difficult to navigate marketing and sales tactics used by security services.

Cypher wants to help.

The new Seattle startup aims to democratize information about cybersecurity products while connecting buyers and sellers through its platform.

“The root of the problem is that what gets discovered is what gets marketed really well,” said Cypher co-founder and CEO Vinay Narayan.

Narayan said there are cheaper tools that provide adequate security protections — but they are harder to find.

Cypher also wants to help buyers who may not have big marketing budgets and can’t “pay to play” as effectively.

“We’re going to level the playing field between the haves and have-nots,” Narayan said.

Cypher’s software uses generative AI to understand a company’s cybersecurity needs. Its recommendation algorithm then offers a list of providers who can help.

The company, which is bootstrapped, generates revenue by charging buyers premium subscription offerings, including the ability to get more data points about sellers. And it makes money from sellers who use Cypher to find customers.

Narayan, who moved to Seattle from Silicon Valley three years ago, was previously a business strategy leader for the Oculus and Portal teams at Facebook. He also spent three years at Google.

Cypher co-founder and CTO Sachin Goyal was previously vice president of engineering for Multiverse, and was director of engineering at FanDuel.

More operators. More sizzle. More founders investing in each other. And making the city a better place to live.

Those are some of the ingredients that could boost Seattle’s startup scene, according to four early stage venture capitalists who spoke on a panel at the Seattle AI Investor Summit + Showcase, hosted by the Technology Alliance on Tuesday.

Seattle often gets criticized for not having enough homegrown money to help fuel the next great tech startups. The number of firms deploying dollars pales in comparison to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.

But the panelists didn’t point to that as a pressing problem.

“We spent a lot of time here navel gazing and beating ourselves up for something that I don’t think matters — which is the number of VCs or the amount of money that lives here and gets deployed in this ecosystem,” said Kirby Winfield, founding general partner of Seattle venture firm Ascend.

Most Seattle startups raise investment from firms based outside Washington state. That’s a feature, not a bug, said Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner of Graham & Walker.

“Being a net importer of dollars is something we should be proud of,” she said.

Feinzaig said there’s something else lacking from the Seattle ecosystem — founders supporting founders.

“At the very earliest stages, one thing that I see in the Bay Area, and to a lesser extent New York and L.A., is founders investing in each other — really experienced startup people being the angel investors that fuel other startups,” Feinzaig said.

Winfield agreed, calling it a “level of connectivity” between founders at different stages in their careers that can make it easier for investors to back startups in those types of entrepreneurial communities.

There are efforts in Seattle to try to create those connections. Founders’ Co-op investor Aviel Ginzburg recently unveiled Seattle Foundations, a new invite-only organization and shared workspace that supports tech founders by surrounding them with fellow entrepreneurs and experienced startup mentors.

The panelists also touched on another critique — or advantage, depending on who you ask — of Seattle startup founders: their general subduedness.

Feinzaig said Seattle founders “need a little bit more sizzle” in their pitches. Her firm mainly invests outside the region, and she’s noticed a difference in the delivery of other founders.

The local startup scene also has too much “Seattle Nice” that can stall future innovation, said Heather Redman, managing partner at Flying Fish. In other words: investors and advisors need to be more transparent and direct when giving feedback.

“In the Bay Area, I think there’s a little bit more ruthlessness of, ‘that’s not going to get funded, so don’t do it. Do another thing.’ And Seattle doesn’t always do that,” Redman said.

Seattle is certainly not lacking in talent, particularly top engineers. The problem is that many have “beautiful golden handcuffs” at large tech companies based in the region such as Microsoft and Amazon, said Ken Horenstein, founder and partner at Pack Ventures.

“When you’re an AI engineer that can make seven figures, it would be insane to go start a company,” he said.

Horenstein, whose fund backs companies with ties to the University of Washington, said there are ways local government can incentivize entrepreneurial activity.

He added that Seattle could use more “operators.” He said many experienced startup execs, particularly in life sciences, move away after their company gets acquired. “We need to keep those people here,” he said.

The investors also talked about elevating Seattle’s image on a national and international stage.

“The number one thing to concentrate on is making this the best place to live,” Redman said. “If we can attract the very best talent here, because this is where people want to live and where they want to raise their families, then we will be the winners in the long run of the talent race, and we will have the best companies.”

— Digital remittance company Remitly hired Spyro Karetsos as its new chief compliance officer.

Karetsos previously held the same role at Google, where he was most recently chief legal officer. He also spent time at TD Ameritrade, SunTrust, Vanguard, and Goldman Sachs in various executive roles.

Seattle-based Remitly reported revenue of $269.1 million in its most recent quarter, up 32% year-over-year. The company’s stock is down more than 30% this year.

Last month Remitly hired Ronit Peled as its new chief people officer.

— Saurabh Tiwary, a longtime executive at Microsoft, joined Google as a vice president and general manager of Cloud AI.

Tiwary spent 11 years at Microsoft, most recently in a corporate vice president position leading a team that helped build Microsoft’s Copilot products and services. He previously worked at Google from 2010-2013 as a software engineer.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech ecosystem:

— Craig Saunders, a former director at Amazon, joined London-based Builder.ai as vice president of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year the company hired former Microsoft leader Vahé Torossian as president and chief partner officer.

— Sam Cook, a former design leader at Seattle startup Fixie.ai, joined Microsoft as a principal product design manager.

— Rolanda Fu and Rasik Parikh joined Madrona as investors. Fu was previously at EY-Parthenon and Parikh worked at Cascadia Capital.

— Todd Ludwig joined Valid8 Financial as executive vice president for sales. He was previously at DataVisor, Shape Security, IBM, HP Enterprise, and Akamai. Valid8 is co-headquartered in Seattle and Boulder, Colo.

— Regan Zeebuyth joined Seattle startup Syndio as vice president of communications. Zeebuyth previously worked at Amazon and Starbucks.

— Seattle-based startup studio Madrona Venture Labs hired Elizabeth Webber as product lead. She previously worked at Outreach, Rover, and Amazon.

— Jake Milstein joined Contrast Security as vice president of corporate communications. He previously was chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer at Critical Insight.

Seattle startup Flyhomes is beefing up its real estate search capabilities with the acquisition of technology from ZeroDown, a San Francisco startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that develops AI-fueled software for prospective homebuyers.

Flyhomes launched in 2016 and has focused on helping consumers toward the end of their homebuying journey. It offers a product that gives buyers faster upfront funding to sweeten their offers, and its Buy Before You Sell program lets sellers buy and move into their next home before selling their current property.

Now the company wants to reach consumers when they start their real estate search online. And it’s betting that AI can help.

Flyhomes traditionally hosted its own property listings but is now expanding in a big way by integrating ZeroDown’s database and home search technology. The revamped platform is now live across 28 U.S. states, and Washington D.C.

The deal with ZeroDown positions Flyhomes more directly in competition with fellow Seattle-based real estate companies such as Zillow Group and Redfin. The company’s site is now heavily geared toward the AI-enhanced search experience.

“We think the biggest friction for customers is information,” Flyhomes CEO Tushar Garg told GeekWire.

Founded in 2018, San Francisco-based ZeroDown originally set out to buy homes on behalf of homebuyers, then leased them back, essentially fronting the down payment.

Altman invested in a $30 million round in 2019, one of several startup investments made by the OpenAI chief.

But the company, a Y Combinator grad co-founded by former Zenefits execs, later pivoted to building an advanced home search portal powered by AI.

Flyhomes acquired ZeroDown in January and has spent the past several months integrating it into its broader platform.

“They have more data about a home than anybody else,” Garg said of ZeroDown.

The data comes from around 40 public sources, including U.S. Census information, along with multiple listing services (MLS databases).

In addition to granular information about a particular home — which direction the front door faces, details on lead paint, nearby daycares, wireless network coverage, etc. — Flyhomes now uses generative AI to answer questions from prospective buyers. The question-answer system is powered by OpenAI and other models.

Garg said it has a “super high” level of accuracy and compiles with the Fair Housing Act to ensure questions that would violate housing discrimination laws are not answered.

Redfin earlier this year rolled out a similar AI assistant tool that answers homebuyer questions.

Garg also pointed to tailwinds from the fallout of the National Association of Realtors commission lawsuit settlement — specifically how buyers must sign agreements with their agents at the outset of the homebuying process. It’s already a mandatory practice in some places, including Washington state, but will now be required more broadly.

That could lead buyers to find more information about a listing on their own — potentially driving traffic to a platform such as Flyhomes. The rule goes into effect August 17.

Flyhomes previously worked with its own representatives but is now partnering with outside loan officers and real estate agents, expanding its footprint across the U.S. It launched a “partner channel” in October to make its products available to third parties.

The company, ranked No. 45 on the GeekWire 200 list of top privately held Pacific Northwest tech startups, has raised $190 million in equity funding to date. It raised a $150 million Series C round in June 2021.

Flyhomes went through multiple rounds of layoffs over the past two years as the real estate slowdown impacted its business. In September it acquired assets from Home Sale Assured, a “buy before you sell” company, and acquired host-to-own platform Loftium in February 2023.

Flyhomes declined to disclose total headcount or revenue metrics.

Terms of the deal with ZeroDown were not disclosed. Flyhomes added 16 employees from ZeroDown as part of the deal, including ZeroDown co-founders Laks Srini and Abhijeet Dwivedi. Srini is now Flyhomes’ CTO; Dwivedi is chief growth officer.

Seattle startup Cyrus Biotechnology is spinning out a business that will expand access to the company’s software technology, with the potential of supporting innovation in drug development, agriculture, synthetic biology and manufacturing.

The new for-profit subsidiary is called Levitate Bio and will be owned by the Rosetta Commons Foundation. The foundation was created by RosettaCommons, a multi-institution coalition that built a software platform called Rosetta that is used for modeling biomolecular compounds.

The University of Washington has issued more than 60,000 non-commercial licenses to Rosetta users, and more than 200 licenses to commercial organizations.

David Baker, director of the UW’s Institute for Protein Design, runs the lab that developed Rosetta and is an advocate for open-source tools.

“Tech companies are really good at what they do. But by being in a closed environment, it’s hard to innovate broadly,” Baker said at a UW event earlier this year. “In our space, making code freely available has been clearly the best thing I could imagine.”

A release from Cyrus announcing the news explains that the spinoff is in line with a “software industry trend of pairing a for-profit services/software business with an innovative non-profit advancing core technology for industry-wide benefits.”

Cyrus, a drug company focused on autoimmune diseases, will continue using the Cyrus platform.

Levitate CEO Sam DeLuca is the former director of engineering at Cyrus. Karen Khar will serve as executive vice president of sales and business development for the startup. Khar was previously Cyrus’ manager of scientific affairs.

The Levitate team also includes engineers, bioinformatics developers and computational protein engineers with experience in physics- and AI-based algorithms.

Entrepreneurs building AI-fueled startups may soon have a new resource in Seattle, thanks to an effort from city and state leaders.

Earlier this year, Washington state lawmakers approved $800,000 in funding to the City of Seattle to lease space that would incubate tech startups — in particular those focused on artificial intelligence.

State Sen. Joe Nguyen, who helped spearhead the funding, spoke about the initiative during a panel discussion at a Seattle AI Week event on Monday, moderated by Boaz Ashkenazy, CEO of Simply Augmented and host of the Shift AI Podcast.

Nguyen said one idea is to have the University of Washington run an office where early stage startups could rent space, which could also host AI-related classes and other educational opportunities.

Another potential component is finding a way to provide computing resources — which are expensive — to help AI startups test and build their infrastructure.

Seattle’s Chamber of Commerce is partnering with the city and state on the initiative.

Nguyen said the broader purpose is to help boost Seattle as an AI hub and make it an attractive place for budding entrepreneurs.

“We’re connecting the dots between the public sector, private sector, academia, startups, and investors,” Nguyen told GeekWire.

The funding will be allocated over a two-year period, starting next month.

A new space could operate in conjunction with the UW’s CoMotion program, which already supports startups and technology commercialization. CoMotion operates co-working offices and incubators across the UW campus, just north of downtown Seattle.

Over the past several years, Seattle’s startup scene has lost a number of communities that catered to entrepreneurs and operated physical spaces, including the surprise departure of Techstars Seattle earlier this year. Some say these spaces are essential to help support entrepreneurs and the city’s startup climate.

Last year Seattle leaders released images created by AI of potential structures and communities that could mold the future of its downtown — including one that showed a makerspace concept.

GeekWire contributor Chuck Wolfe proposed an idea last year for an “Urban Innovation Lab” in Seattle that could spur entrepreneurship and boost downtown revitalization. There are similar “living lab” concepts in operation around the globe.

Nguyen noted that creating incubators or entrepreneurial hubs is not new, but the focus on AI and the partners involved makes this particular effort unique. “I don’t know of other ones approaching it like this — certainly not the way that we’re doing it,” he said.

Nguyen, a Democrat from West Seattle, spent nearly a decade at Microsoft before taking office in 2019. He has sponsored significant legislation addressing climate change and clean energy, facial recognition technology, and computer science education. He also sponsored a bill to create an AI Task Force that passed in March.

Nguyen was honored at the 2024 GeekWire Awards as this year’s Public Policy Champion for Innovation Award.

Seattle chef Joel Gamoran is raising more money to fuel his passions in the kitchen, including his dream of creating a product around “culinary medicine” to help people stay healthy through his cooking classes.

We spotted a new SEC filing Monday that revealed more investment for Homemade. Gamoran, founder and CEO of the Seattle startup, told GeekWire he’s raised about $1.5 million of a new funding round. The cash will be used to bolster ongoing projects and jumpstart new ones.

Homemade streams live, free cooking classes to a global audience, attracting as many as 3,500 viewers during shows that teach people how to make everything from happy hour bites to burgers to all kinds of desserts.

“We just continue to see the numbers go up, and the engagement on those classes just continue to grow,” Gamoran said, adding that 98% of viewers stay until the end of a 45-minute class. More than 4 million people have viewed Homemade’s online classes.

The startup also produced its first season of a cooking series for PBS called “Homemade Live!” that is shot in front a studio audience at the company’s headquarters along the Seattle waterfront. The new funding will help with putting season two together this summer.

Gamoran, who has worked in restaurants, written a book and traveled the country leading classes for Sur La Table, said his dream, and the big focus of raising cash, is to help get a product built around “culinary medicine.”

The goal is to help people who are diagnosed with a certain illness, such as diabetes, develop healthier eating habits.

“Instead of being prescribed medicine, per se, you’re prescribing cooking classes,” Gamoran said. “We really see a future where we can empower people to stay healthy. If we can target specific issues that are hurting people and making them sicker, if we can get them to cook whole foods in a responsible way, there’s a big win there.”

Gamoran envisions taking such a product to partners in preventative health such as health care providers or insurers.

Homemade is still a relatively small team of five employees plus a sizable group of contractors. The company added Ben Friedman as COO and Lauren Locke as head of brand partnerships.

And Homemade content is now available as free content on Alaska Airlines.

“I’m a nervous flyer, so watching cooking classes up in the air is perfect for me,” Gamoran said.

If you’re not spending time each day trying out new AI tools and understanding how the burgeoning technology may impact your work or life — you’re going to fall behind.

That was the message from a group of longtime technology leaders speaking about the future of artificial intelligence at the PAN-IIT Seattle 2024 Conference event in Bellevue, Wash., on Saturday.

“We are at a pivotal point in history,” said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer science professor, founder of TrueMedia.org, and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. “And anybody who’s asleep, you’re going to miss it. So I encourage you to latch on to this.”

Joseph Sirosh, a former executive at Microsoft and Amazon, said the ability for AI to generate novel outputs marks a key paradigm shift and a “fundamental transition.”

“My first neural networks class was in spring of 1991. I’m an old AI guy,” said Sirosh. “It’s changed a lot since then.”

Sirosh betting big on generative AI — it’s the basis of his new startup, CreatorsAGI, which aims to let creators build their own conversational AI agents.

Generative AI allows for the creation of new products and services that simply weren’t feasible just a few years ago, said Vijay Mital, chief advisor for AI transformations at Microsoft.

But amid all the hype and funding, there are still plenty of limitations with AI.

In a recent column, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims pointed to a slowing rate of improvement and innovation. “It sure seems like the AI hype train is just leaving the station, and we should all hop aboard,” he wrote. “But significant disappointment may be on the horizon, both in terms of what AI can do, and the returns it will generate for investors.”

Etzioni, who is tackling political deepfakes at TrueMedia, said generative AI systems aren’t reliable in their current state and “you would not want an AI system to do most things right now.”

That fact is leading some to question what — if any — products using generative AI will actually be adopted broadly. Tech analyst Benedict Evans addressed this problem in a blog post Monday. “How do we build useful mass-market products around models that we should presume will be getting things ‘wrong’?” he wrote.

Jon Turow, a former computer vision leader at AWS leader, told the audience on Saturday that they should be experimenting with AI “to understand what this technology does and does not do.”

It’s clearly still very early days for this latest iteration of AI. But the panelists seemed to agree that the impact will be massive — if not in the next few years, certainly in the next few decades.

“We really are in a paradigm shift, in a tremendous transition,” said Etzioni. He added: “We know something big is happening.”

Seattle fell 10 spots to No. 20 in Startup Genome’s annual “Global Startup Ecosystem Report,” a ranking of the leading startup regions in the world. But the city is still rich in tech talent and considered a “top-tier hub for innovation.”

The report measures factors including performance, funding, talent and experience, market reach, and knowledge in an analysis of 4.5 million startups across 300 ecosystems and 55 countries.

Silicon Valley is still No. 1, followed by London and New York which tied for second.

Seattle’s fall was the largest among the top 40 ecosystems. According to the report, the region’s 10 large exits in the 30 months leading to the end of 2023 ranked 26th globally. It only had two in 2023.

“The ecosystem is on a down cycle overall as its Series A deals have also slowed,” the report said, citing 25 such deals in 2023 that ranked Seattle 10th among U.S. ecosystems.

Funding to startups in the Seattle region slowed dramatically in 2023 compared to the boom times of the previous two years, as venture capitalists put the brakes on investing amid a broader tech industry slowdown. And after a number of early stage companies reached the billion-dollar valuation milestone, Seattle’s “unicorn” activity has also curbed. Some companies, however, are still raising sizable rounds.

Over the past several years, Seattle’s startup scene has lost a number of communities that catered to entrepreneurs and operated physical spaces, including the surprise departure of Techstars Seattle earlier this year. Some say new groups such as Seattle Foundations are needed to help support entrepreneurs and the city’s startup climate.

While Seattle’s ranking in the new report did represent a slide compared to previous years, Startup Genome still calls the city a “top-tier hub for innovation” with an “incredible depth of talent” and an “ideal breeding ground for future unicorns.”

AI, big data and analytics, life sciences, and ag-tech/new food are listed as Seattle’s strengths (below), with the city ranking second in the U.S. in terms of AI talent density.

And Startup Genome also offers up some compelling reasons for any startup to move to Seattle, including its established tech scene, strong talent pool and strategic location.

Garrett Vargas couldn’t shake the entrepreneurial itch.

Vargas previously co-founded and was CTO at LegUp, a Seattle-based child care enrollment startup that sold in 2022. He then and moved over to Microsoft as an engineering manager.

But at the same time, he wanted to remain involved in running a business.

“I was looking for something that wouldn’t be a full-time role, but not completely passive,” Vargas said. “And I was looking for something in the health and wellness space, not only because it is different than tech but also because I believe it’s a growing, fairly resilient industry.”

Vargas and his wife Sandra Vargas, a group product manager at Microsoft, are now franchisees with Heyday, a skincare company with 40 locations across the U.S. Their first location is celebrating a grand opening in Kirkland, Wash., on June 21.

Vargas said he considered a few different franchise paths before connecting with Heyday. He was attracted to the startup vibe at the time, when Heyday had just 10 corporate-owned locations. As an early franchisee, he was able to get his pick of territories, choosing Kirkland. He also has development rights for Bellevue and Seattle’s University District.

“I like the emphasis they put on employee development, because I really didn’t want an ‘exploitative’ franchise,” Vargas said. Unlike many spas, he said Heyday estheticians are employees of the company and get ongoing training and development when they aren’t performing facials.

The beauty market is growing, spurred in part by the rise of wellness, and is attracting attention from various entrepreneurs and investors. The skincare market is expected to top $186 billion this year, according to Statista.

Launched in 2015, Heyday began its franchise efforts in 2018. The company raised $20 million in a series B round in 2021 and added $12 million to that in 2022 to fuel expansion.

We caught up with Vargas for a quick Q&A about his latest venture (edited for length and clarity):

Q: What are the similarities/differences between this and running LegUp?

Vargas: I’ve really enjoyed the entrepreneurial skills I’ve been able to continue to flex with Heyday. While the franchisor provides the product and much of the marketing material, I still have key operational considerations including staffing and financial tracking. It’s not the same intensity as LegUp was for sure, but it still very much involves building a company from the ground up. One interesting observation — at LegUp I built a full childcare enrollment CRM system and while I wasn’t involved with the technical buildout at Heyday, I’m amazed at the similarities in terms of the pieces they have on the backend to make everything work. Different tech but all the same pieces — scheduling, landing pages, customer CRM, etc. Almost makes me wish we had sold our tech stack to Heyday instead!

Q: How does Heyday use technology to its advantage?

Vargas: Heyday uses technology to track the customer experience — their skin type, products they buy, and enhancements they prefer to deliver on this personalization promise. These preferences show at all customer checkpoints — from the esthetician to the front desk to follow-up e-mails.

Q: How does the business model work, and how you make money? 

Vargas: Heyday offers a membership that allows customers to get a monthly facial at a $31 discount, while bringing in predictable revenue for the shop. But what’s exciting about Heyday’s membership compared to other places is that we only require a two-month minimum commitment and allow you several options if you can’t come in each month — from gifting your facial to a friend to using the value towards product instead.

Q. What separates Heyday from competitors?

Vargas: We offer a truly personalized facial experience. We don’t make the customer choose from a menu of pre-packaged options, rather we offer one 50-minute facial product and let our expert estheticians assess and discuss skin care options with the client.

Q: What are the micro or macro tailwinds that you’re excited about, that could boost Heyday and your franchises?

Vargas: One of the exciting things to me is that with all the socio-economic turmoil, people are taking the time to prioritize self-care. The spa industry has seen revenue bounce back to pre-pandemic levels and there’s no sign of that slowing down.

Stuck in an airport due to a layover or flight delay, people seeking a place to work or rest grapple with limited and elusive options — a seat at the gate, a table in the food court, a spot at the bar, a shared counter in the concourse, or a chair in the lounge, if they’re lucky. And good luck finding anything resembling peace and quiet.

A fledgling Seattle-based startup wants to give solo travelers a sanctuary instead.

The company, Sanctum, is developing pods with doors that provide fully enclosed, private spaces, with a cocoon-like spherical shape. They feature seats designed for napping or working, with built-in ventilation, electrical and USB charging ports, and other planned amenities for both relaxation and productivity.

The idea is to give people a private space on the go, paid for by the minute.

Based inside CoMotion Labs at the University of Washington, the company was started by hospitality industry veteran Juriana Spierenburg, Sanctum’s CEO and co-founder, who works as area hotel manager at citizenM hotels in Seattle. She has been joined by Jason Koo, who is CTO and co-founder. The founders met at a GeekWire event last year.

Sanctum’s goal is to deploy the prototypes initially at airports as a proof of concept, to gather feedback from users. Ultimately, the company also plans to roll out the pods in gyms and co-working spaces in urban areas. Other possibilities being explored by the company include offering the pods as workspaces for journalists at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Spierenburg was inspired to pursue the idea based on her own experience traveling solo in different cities and continents, during which she personally experienced problems that solo travelers face — high and fluctuating accommodation costs, lack of flexibility in accommodation options, and safety/security concerns.

“What I feel very strongly about is the flexibility of providing a space where you can relax or work,” Spierenburg explained. “And I feel very strongly about individual costs for solo travelers.”

The pricing will consist of an unlocking fee and a pay-per-minute model similar to bike-sharing, to give users more control over how much they pay. In a recent demo at CoMotion Labs, the initial price was listed as $1 to unlock, and 45 cents per minute of usage, which comes to $27 per hour. Users will unlock the pods and pay via the Sanctum app.

The business model will be based on profit-sharing arrangements with airports and other venues.

In that way, the idea is to help airports and other venues generate new revenue from unused or underutilized spaces. Spierenburg said this approach differs from another company, Boston-based Sleepbox, which was one of the winners at a 2017 startup contest held during an Airport Innovation Forum at Sea-Tac Airport. Sleepbox instead leased spaces up-front and ended up folding after it was locked into lease obligations when the pandemic hit.

By using profit-sharing instead, Sanctum’s business model is more similar to Jabbrrbox pods. But Spierenburg said Sanctum is differentiating itself, in part, with pods that can be used for either work or rest, depending on the user’s preference, rather than focusing on one or the other scenario.

As a business so far, Sanctum has been bootstrapped, without any outside funding. Spierenburg and Koo are both continuing to work in their full-time jobs, developing Sanctum in their free time, with the goal of turning the startup into a full-time business after landing their first airport contract.

For the initial prototypes, Sanctum plans to partner with janitorial services to clean the pods between use. Longer-term, the goal is to implement automated cleaning using elements such as robotics, UV light, and sanitizing spray.

Users will be able to see when a pod has been sanitized before entering, to ensure cleanliness.

Two initial prototypes have been adapted from an existing pod that was created by another company to give workers privacy in open-plan office spaces. The seat is fixed in a reclining position at an upright angle for napping, resting, or working on a laptop. Future designs are expected to offer fully reclining chairs more suitable for sleeping.

The interior space of the current prototype is around 100 cubic feet, and Spierenburg said the goal is to expand that to around 125 cubic feet in future designs of the Sanctum pod.

Even at its current size, people taller than 6 feet can fully extend their legs inside. Sitting inside, even with the door closed, the height of the pod makes it feel spacious. Spierenburg said she has drawn inspiration from the car industry, and how car designers have perfected the art of making small spaces feel comfortable for long periods of time.

“I want every one, of every size, to be comfortable,” she said.

Docusign officially completed its acquisition of Seattle startup Lexion last week, and several former leaders at Lexion have new roles and titles.

Lexion CEO and co-founder Gaurav Oberoi is now a vice president of product management at Docusign; CTO and co-founder Emad Elwany is a vice president of engineering; and co-founder James Baird is a principal engineer.

Jessica Nguyen, who was chief legal officer at Lexion, is deputy general counsel for AI Innovation and Trust at Docusign.

Docusign last month announced that it was acquiring Lexion for $165 million and planned to integrate the Seattle-based company’s AI-powered contract management technology into its Intelligent Agreement Management Platform.

Lexion, a spinout of the Allen Institute for AI, raised about $36 million since its founding, including a $20 million round in April 2023, after tripling its revenue in 2022. After focusing initially on helping legal departments manage contracts, the company expanded to help people in sales, IT, finance, and HR manage contracts and other documents, such as RFPs and questionnaires.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest:

— Seattle-area wireless network company Spectrum Effect hired Shaun McCarthy as president and chief revenue officer. McCarthy was previously president of North America at Nokia, and was a vice president at Cisco. Spectrum Effect, founded in 2015, helps mobile network operators mitigate interference. The company raised $1.9 million last year.

— Shahar Ronen, a longtime product leader based in Seattle, joined SoFi as principal product manager. He previously worked for Plaid, SentiLink, and Remitly.

— Karen Clark Cole is retiring and stepping down as CEO of Blink, the user experience research and design firm she helped start 24 years ago. “I will always remain Blink’s proudest supporter and will be in the background as an advisor through the transition period,” Clark Cole wrote on LinkedIn.

— Karina Martija-Harris stepped down as a program manager at Washington Maritime Blue, a public-private coalition promoting marine-related technologies.

— Garett Ochs, former CEO of robotic food startup Picnic, joined Reflex Robotics as principal R&D mechanical engineer.

— Seattle venture firm Ascend hired Thomas Stahura as an analyst. Stahura previously co-founded Quasi and Pondr.

— Seattle startup vet Zachary Cohn joined food storage startup Tomorrow as director of product. Cohn previously held product leadership roles at Spark Hire and DemandStar.

— Dr. Guillaume Mauger was named director of the Office of the Washington State Climatologist. Mauger is a research scientist at Climate Impacts Group and a longtime climate science researcher.

A new startup out of Seattle called Tektonic AI has raised $10 million to fuel development of its software that automates business operations with the help of artificial intelligence technology.

There are plenty of existing tools that companies use today to automate repetitive tasks, such as robotic process automation (RPA) software. But they are limited when it comes to more complicated workflows with dynamic processes and data.

That’s where Tektonic AI comes in. The 5-person startup is building AI agents that understand natural language queries and help employees speed up how they get work done across various applications and systems.

The company is initially focused on helping sales and revenue teams complete tasks such as quoting or renewals.

With the proliferation of software applications over the past two decades, workers are spending more time jumping between different apps, said Tektonic founder and CEO Nic Surpatanu.

Up to this point, he said, there hasn’t been an effective way to streamline a lot of the tedious work required when making those apps work together, especially with complex data or contextual requirements that are constantly changing.

“People are manipulating tables and forms to get their job done,” he said. “I feel that there has to be a better way.”

Surpatanu said generative AI isn’t yet good enough to help a company with precisely pricing a product, for example. But it can understand a user’s request to find an answer via a computational program.

Tektonic wants to be the bridge between those two activities.

“I believe this is the future of how we’ll do this tedious work,” Surpatanu said.

Tektonic is one of several newer AI startups aiming to change the way companies take advantage of their data.

In a recent post, Box CEO Aaron Levie wrote about how generative AI can help companies make sense of unstructured corporate information.

“Multimodal models especially allow us to process this content using a computer and essentially perform any task that a human can, but at infinite scale and speed,” he wrote. “This is utterly game-changing when working with information in the enterprise.”

Surpatanu was most recently chief product officer at cybersecurity company Tanium, and previously was a senior vice president at UiPath, a leader in RPA. He also spent nearly 12 years at Microsoft in various engineering leadership roles.

Asked about competition from other startups or larger tech companies such as UiPath or Microsoft, Surpatanu said Tektonic differentiates itself by focusing on automating more complicated workflows.

“Many established companies are embedding AI copilots in their existing applications and systems (e.g., copilot in Excel). And most enterprise GenAI startups build to a specific vertical (e.g., norm.ai),” Surpatanu wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “These approaches enhance productivity within their vertical walled gardens and may even consolidate away some specialized tools. But they do not solve the business processes that cross application and expertise boundaries, nor eliminate digital overload and application sprawl.”

Tektonic does not yet have paying customers. It is targeting companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue.

Seattle venture firm Madrona and Point72 Ventures, which is increasingly investing in the Seattle region, led the seed round.

“The emergence of generative AI models with the ability to reason across data silos within applications and orchestrate tasks allow us to rethink process automation taking it to places it has never been before,” Madrona wrote in a blog post.

Tektonic got its start inside Madrona Venture Labs, the startup studio within Madrona.

Tektonic co-founder David Hsu is a former engineering director at StubHub and also spent time at Google. Mario Blendea, head of engineering, was previously an engineering manager at Meta.

Victor Cho wants to reimagine the way people communicate at work.

Cho, the former CEO of Evite, is leading a stealthy new Seattle startup that wants to do away with billions of written emails workers send every day and replace them with video messages.

Emovid isn’t out to be the next Snap or any other app targeting consumers. And it’s not Zoom or Teams, facilitating video communication in real time. The startup’s focus is purely business correspondence, and it’s asynchronous video, meaning content that is not live streamed but rather recorded and shared for later viewing.

Cho views it as a more authentic way of getting your message across.

“There’s an entire layer of communication impact that comes through with voice and tone and that is missing from the communication threads for large chunks of business today,” Cho said.

Cho, who is based in San Francisco, led the digital invitation company Evite for more than seven years. He previously worked at Microsoft, Intuit and Eastman Kodak, and holds board positions with a number of organizations.

He’s joined by co-founders Digvijay Chauhan, Emovid’s Seattle-based CTO, who previously worked with Cho at Microsoft, and Rupali Pathania, who was previously co-founder of Vidinvite, a video company enabling the celebration of special moments via video. Emovid employs a handful of people in Seattle and remotely.

Cho estimates that 20% of the email volume on the planet should move into the format Emovid is building. He argues that it’s faster to record a spoken message than to type 100 to 300 words.

There’s no need to download an app. Emovid videos can be recorded and sent directly from the startup’s platform, accessible to anyone with a web browser. A video link can be also embedded into an existing email client or can be dropped into a LinkedIn message, a messaging app, on Facebook or elsewhere.

“The video exchange lives as a URL transport in the same way a YouTube video does,” Cho said. “It’s a bi-directional communication stream that lives on a URL. It’s a very powerful model because of that fact.”

Emovid also taps into artificial intelligence and generative AI, producing an AI summary of each video to go along with a full transcript. AI is also being used to help users compose their video messages through prompts that generate speaking suggestions which then show up in the video recorder like a teleprompter.

The AI also spiffs up the background in a video as well as the appearance of a speaker as needed. But there’s no deepfake at play — Emovid is adamant about verifying who is doing the communicating and adds an “authenticity verified” seal to each video.

“You can’t even upload a video into our site,” Cho said. “It’s got to be real-time recorded for this reason of being able to verify identity and authenticity and make that very visible in a way that nobody else is doing.”

Longtime Seattle tech leader Forest Key took a shot at video as a way to disrupt workplace communication when he and other former Pixvana execs launched Voodle in 2020. The premise was two-way selfie video chat: “what if WhatsApp and TikTok had a baby?” Key notes in his LinkedIn profile.

But Key said Voodle struggled to insert itself among countless other apps. He said the bar to break into “must have” territory is quite high for startups offering new functionality in workflows when competing against the big suites of Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, etc. as the primary apps at work. 

“Our users found Voodle and asynchronous video communication ‘interesting’ but we didn’t nail ‘vital,'” Key said. “I think Emovid and others could crack the nut — selfie video really conveys emotion and humanity in a way that enhances personal connection and trust.”

Emovid is currently raising a seed round and is accepting users on its waitlist.

Vilya, a biotech startup built off technology developed at the Seattle-based Institute for Protein Design, announced an expanded $71 million Series A investment round.

The 2-year-old company, which has operations in Seattle and the Bay Area, uses advanced machine learning and AI techniques to help develop so-called macrocyclic drugs, a promising new type of medicine.

Vilya’s backers include biotech investor ARCH Venture Partners, as well as NVIDIA’s venture capital arm NVentures and other top firms including Seattle-based Madrona and Silicon Valley heavyweight Menlo Ventures.

“The current state of the art in discovering macrocycle drugs is slow and relies on legacy screening techniques with limited chemical diversity,” Madrona wrote in blog post Thursday about its investment. “Vilya is upending the status quo, leveraging best-in-class protein engineering tools to crack the code on intelligently designing these complex but powerful molecules.”

Vilya is one of several spinouts from the Institute for Protein Design, led by protein design pioneer David Baker.

Earlier this year the IPD published a study in Science on designing specialized peptides, sleek ultra-small proteins that form the basis for Vilya.

AI-powered protein design is being used to create new therapeutics, vaccines, biosensors, materials and more. The field is moving fast, and IPD research is behind many of the advances.

Vilya last year hired biotech vet Cyrus Harmon as its CEO. Harmon previously co-founded and led Olema Oncology.

Vilya has 40 employees, with about a quarter in the Seattle region. The company previously raised $50 million for its Series A round.

“Our platform is built on ground-breaking research in advanced computational approaches and taps into uncharted chemical space within cyclic peptides to design new molecular structures not found in nature,” the company says on its LinkedIn profile. “We aim to boldly leverage cutting edge computing to change how we design new medicines, and to ultimately cure diseases.”

• The filing shows $7.6 million in fresh cash. Inflection CEO Aaron Bird and MHS Capital’s Mark Sugarman are listed on the filing. The company declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire.
• Bird, a longtime Seattle tech leader, founded the company in 2021 with former colleagues Dave Rigotti and Vic Davis — the trio previously worked at Bizible, which Bird also founded.
• Inflection previously raised a $6 million seed round in 2022 led by MHS Capital, with participation from Version One, Cercano Management, Ascend, and angel investors.

Several new startups in Seattle are taking on one of the most pressing issues in tech: the growing problem of deepfakes and likeness issues driven by the rapid adoption of generative AI technology.

The generative AI boom has led to an increase in deepfakes, or digitally manipulated photos, videos, and audio that use someone’s likeness to generate synthetic media.

Deepfakes have already become a problem in schools, elections, entertainment, and various other sectors of society.

“There’s not a lot of control over this,” said Luke Arrigoni, CEO of Loti, a Seattle startup that helps public figures take down deepfakes and fake accounts.

Loti is among a crop of up-and-coming tech companies and nonprofits developing software to help identify deepfakes and protect their likeness.

But while venture capitalists are starting to put cash behind these nascent companies, The Washington Post recently reported that some question their accuracy, and whether they provide a false sense of certainty.

Another potential concern is that the line between what is real and synthetic is “increasingly blurring,” the Reuters Institute noted in a report detailing the limitations of such tools.

Loti

After running an AI consulting firm for a decade and working as a data scientist for Creative Artists Agency, Arrigoni started Loti two years ago. The company analyzes photos and audio from users, and then scours the internet for potential deepfakes, using advanced facial and voice recognition technology. The company also sends takedown requests to platforms after identifying illegitimate content.

WME, the talent agency giant based in Los Angeles, recently signed a deal with Loti and is using the platform for its clients.

Arrigoni founded Loti with Rebekah Arrigoni and serial entrepreneur Hirak Chhatbar.

Loti employs about 25 people, split between Seattle, Los Angeles, and outside the U.S.

Certifi

Certifi AI is also focused on spotting and eliminating deepfakes, but with a particular focus on girls and women who are targeted by bad actors.

Some studies show how women are overwhelmingly targeted in deepfake pornography.

Melissa Hutchins co-founded the company after her own personal experience as a victim of cyberstalking.

Certifi AI is initially focused on serving law enforcement and criminal prosecutions, and helping media platforms quickly recognize and remove inappropriate and illegal deepfake content.

Hutchins previously worked in product management at The Disney Company and Expedia Group.

Previously: After personal experience with cyberstalking, tech founder launches startup battling deepfake content

TrueMedia

TrueMedia is developing an AI-powered tool to detect deepfake videos, photos, and audio, aiming to combat political disinformation in the lead-up to the 2024 elections.

The non-partisan, nonprofit organization launched in January and is led by Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and longtime AI specialist.

“Help get the word out so that this incredibly critical election is not swayed by deepfakes,” Etzioni said on stage at the GeekWire Awards last month in Seattle.

The organization is funded by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp through his Camp.org nonprofit foundation.

Previously: As elections loom, TrueMedia.org releases AI deepfake detector to identify fake content

Official AI

Official AI is building a marketplace designed to help people control their digital likeness and connect them with marketers interested in using AI-generated talent.

“We’re really trying to build the ecosystem for authenticity,” said CEO Dave Siegfried.

The new startup is complementary to firms directly tackling deepfakes, according to Siegfried.

“We believe both approaches are needed for generative AI media to flourish equitably,” he said.

Official AI, which generates revenue in part through licensing fees, was originally incubated inside startup studios run by Pioneer Square Labs and Mudita Venture Partners.

Siegfried previously co-founded a lending startup called LOANtuitive and SkyMode, a mobile e-commerce platform. He co-founded Official AI with longtime engineering leader John Pletka.

Enterprise artificial intelligence company Xembly told users that it’s discontinuing its “customer-facing services,” which included an AI assistant that automatically handled tasks such as meeting notes, scheduling, and action items.

In a message received by Xembly users on Thursday, May 30, the company said, “recent changes in underlying AI platforms have made it difficult for us to continue operating; after much consideration, we are making the tough decision to wind-up Xembly operations and cease our customer-facing services.”

The message said the company was discontinuing its enterprise AI service as of Saturday, June 1, “and winding up Xembly as a business in the coming months.”

However, the message added, “Our team is excited to work on a new chapter and push the boundaries of AI. We will reach back out when we have more to share.”

Founded in 2020, the Seattle-based company has been working in the field of AI assistants since long before the current generative AI boom. The subsequent release of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other large language models has led to a wave of AI productivity assistants.

The enterprise AI company raised a total of $20 million from investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ascend, Seven Peaks Ventures, and Flex Capital, in addition to angel investors. Its most recent funding round totaled $15 million in October 2022.

Customers included Salesforce, Qualtrics, and Twilio, among others. Xembly’s message to users last week said it “has supported thousands of companies saving teams hundreds of thousands of hours of valuable work time.”

Xembly is led by co-founder and CEO Pete Christothoulou, a business and technology industry veteran who is the former CEO of Marchex, the publicly traded call and conversational analytics company.

Reached via phone Friday evening, Christothoulou said the company is still operational. Further details about the “new chapter,” as referenced in Xembly’s message to users, were not available.

Xembly spun out of Madrona Venture Labs in Seattle. In addition to Christothoulou, other founders included CTO Jason Flaks, a Microsoft and Marchex veteran; and Chief Growth Officer Peter Francis, former global growth leader at Qualtrics.

The company employed 45 people as of August 2023.

Xena, the company’s AI assistant, was able to schedule meetings, take notes during meetings, then track and remind users about action items. Xembly described the approach as an AI “Chief of Staff” or executive assistant.

“An effective enterprise productivity platform should not be a tool that operates alongside your work,” Xembly said in a March 13 post, differentiating itself from Microsoft and others. “It should be a tool that works with you and does tasks for you. Enterprise productivity platforms are not co-pilots but autopilots.”

One Xembly user, David Witkowski, CEO of Oku Solutions, wrote on LinkedIn that he was disappointed with the discontinuation of the Xembly service, after he previously experienced the shutdown of the X.ai assistant.

Xembly “did an amazing job recognizing voices and creating action item summaries. It wasn’t really a personal assistant, but I came to rely on it. Xembly is more accurate than AI summary bots from Zoom, etc.,” he wrote.

The message received by Xembly users May 30 said they could save their data by downloading videos, or preserving summaries that they wished to keep by sharing them to their email, Google Docs, or other destination by the end of the following day, May 31. After that, they would be unable to access Xembly through the web, Chrome extension or Slack app, the message explained.

A separate message from Xembly to administrators at the company’s corporate customers also referenced the company’s work on a “new chapter,” but did not mention the plan to wind up Xembly as a business.

Seattle-area high school students competed in the finals of the TiE Young Entrepreneur (TYE) Seattle chapter finals competition last week and a team called Soundwave is moving on to TYE’s Global Business Plan Competition next month.

Soundwave created an artificial intelligence-enabled accent softening program for call center agents aimed at increasing customer satisfaction. They won the top prize of $2,750.

Two other groups gained recognition for top business ideas at the competition, held May 23 at Bellevue City Hall, including:

• KEY Beauty: An AI and scanning technology platform for creating accurate makeup shade matches for girls and women of color. (1,250 prize)
• MyPath: An AI-driven college counseling bot providing personalized feedback and detailed application analysis for high school students. ($1,000 prize)

Ten other teams won $250 awards (two in each category) for best teamwork, execution, customer validation, elevator pitch and business model. And three teams won $100 honorable mention prizes.

The finalists were part of the TYE 2023-2024 program, which aims to guide and mentor young entrepreneurs in creating and launching their first real businesses. The Seattle program featured 14 teams and more than 70 young entrepreneurs who presented their ideas in two semifinal tracks.

Soundwave’s members include: Pradyu Kandala (Eastlake High School); Sathvik “Andy” Kurapati (Transition School at UW Robinson Center for Young Scholars); Dhruv Arora (Skyline High School); Vedaant Kulkarni (Eastlake High School); Prithvi Aravind (The Overlake School); and Koshin Sharma (Bellevue High School).

Along with the three top teams, other business ideas from students at Seattle-area schools included a two-sided marketplace for carbon credits; a haptics and LIDAR-enabled camera for the visually impaired; biodegradable bottles; analyzing real-time concussion-related data; and an AI bot for talking to special needs and autistic people and helping them focus.

During the program, TYE mentors support students in ideation, market opportunity assessment, product-market fit validation, and prototype creation. The aim is to give students essential skills and knowledge for creating a viable startup.

“The students in our TYE program are not just entrepreneurs of tomorrow but are also a source of inspiration and energy to us all — entrepreneurs, mentors, judges, instructors, and the entire TiE fraternity,” said Yash Wagh, TYE program chair.

The final competition was judged by a panel of Seattle-area tech executives, including Anoop Gupta, CEO of SeekOut; Joseph Sirosh, CEO of Creators AGI; Aseem Datar, vice president of Next-Gen Computing & AI at Microsoft; and Sabrina Wu, a principal at Madrona Venture Group.

SeekOut CTO Aravind Bala, a TYE instructor and mentor, said he was amazed by the students’ dedication and commitment.

“Despite their busy schedules, they have gone above and beyond my expectations,” Bala said. “Collaborating with new team members, developing innovative ideas, creating demos, and preparing presentations are not only the core activities of this program but also vital skills that will serve them well in their future endeavors.”

Soundwave will represent TYE Seattle at the TYE Global Business Plan Competition in Silicon Valley, June 19-21.

Founded in 2000, TiE Seattle is a chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs, a global nonprofit with 61 chapters in 14 countries, dedicated to growing and fostering entrepreneurship throughout the world.

Yi-Jian Ngo, a fixture of the Seattle startup community and longtime leader of the Alliance of Angels, is stepping down from the angel investor group.

Ngo will depart to spend more time looking after his family. Maren Nelson, a board member at AoA, has taken on the interim executive director role.

Founded in 1998 under the umbrella of the Technology Alliance, AoA spun out of the nonprofit in 2012.

Ngo joined AoA a year earlier, after stints with AT&T and Microsoft. Under his leadership, AoA has grown its membership from 60 to 180 people and now invests $4 million to $6 million in startups each year.

Its investors review more than 150 deals annually and make individual investment decisions in up-and-coming tech startups based across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

AoA members have pumped more than $125 million into 250-plus startups, with more than 40 exits from companies such as DocuSign and Elemental Technologies.

AoA is raising its third annual “Innovation Fund,” a more structured investment vehicle the group launched in 2022. It raised $1.3 million for the initial fund and $1.9 million for the second fund.

Satya Singh, a Seattle-area technology and startup leader who was previously a data platform executive at Expedia, co-founded Scispot, a data infrastructure platform for biotech companies. He recently shared his story on the Startup Project podcast. 

Singh’s passion for data started at a young age, sparked by his fascination with numerology. He went on to build a successful shoe business, Jacksin.co.uk, before moving to Seattle to work for Expedia, where he led product development for platform and marketplaces.

It was this experience, combined with his brother’s unique insights on modern biotech, that led him to co-found Scispot.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from his comments, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to Startup Project and hear more episodes at thestartupproject.io

Modern Biotech: A New Data Frontier 

After years of navigating the complex world of travel data at Expedia and Hotels.com, Singh found himself drawn to a new challenge: unlocking the potential of data in life sciences. His brother, Guru Singh, a seasoned expert in the field, saw a significant gap in the market for data products in biotech.  

“Eighty percent of biotech data never gets analyzed,” Singh reveals, citing reasons like paper-based processes, unique file formats, and a lack of platform integration within labs. This insight gave birth to Scispot, a platform that aims to bridge the gap between wet-lab and dry-lab data by connecting various data points from instruments to experiments, ultimately reducing the noise-to-signal ratio.

Y Combinator, Market Signals, and Building a Solid Foundation

Within weeks of launching, Scispot was accepted into the startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) in its summer 2021 batch. Singh’s experience in Y Combinator (YC) played a crucial role in Scispot’s trajectory. He emphasizes the importance of being humble and open to market signals and not getting too attached to your initial idea. YC taught him the value of prioritizing market feedback over personal assumptions. 

The team learned how to operate remotely during the pandemic, building a foundation for the company. They learned to trust each other virtually and navigate the complexities of a remote working environment. 

Singh highlights the importance of building a profitable business, saying, “Our goal has been to be default alive.” This mindset helped them secure funding even during a challenging market climate. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on customer needs and building a company with a solid foundation, rather than just chasing funding. 

Scispot was also selected by Creative Destruction Lab, Seattle, as one of the companies to present in the CDL Super Session in Toronto in 2023. 

Scispot’s Approach: A Data Lake House for Biotech

Scispot positions itself not as a single source of truth, but as a middleware that connects various tools within a customer’s existing tech stack. This approach allows customers to build their own intellectual property, leverage foundation models, and ensure compliance.  

“We’re building a data lake house platform, but for modern biotech,” Singh explains.

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs 

Here’s what Singh advises for anyone starting their own business:

• Go with the flow, like a river: Pay attention to what customers want and be ready to change your plans if needed. Don’t be afraid to shift gears!
• Build a strong base, like a sturdy house: Focus on making your customers happy and build a business that can stand on its own two feet.
• Focus on teamwork: Make friends with smart people who can help you. Mentors, investors, and other entrepreneurs can be your best allies.

To listen to the full conversation and learn more about Scispot, check out the Startup Project podcast episode here.

Seattle-based Climate Vault Solutions, a startup working to reduce carbon emissions, has raised $2.5 million in new investments.

The business launched last year and takes a somewhat unusual approach to helping companies, organizations and individuals reduce their carbon emissions. Instead of paying for tree plantings or solar installations, Climate Vault buys cap-and-trade carbon pollution permits and “vaults” them so they can’t be used by polluters.

Climate Vault Solutions is the sales and marketing arm of Climate Vault, Inc., which is a nonprofit initiative based in Chicago and founded in 2021.

Climate Vault is additionally taking the value of the emissions permits and paying companies deploying carbon removal technology to physically pull carbon from the atmosphere.

The non-profit was launched “to fix a broken supply chain in the voluntary carbon offset market and to spur innovation in carbon dioxide removal,” said co-founder Michael Greenstone, a distinguished University of Chicago professor in economics and energy policy.

Total funding to date for Climate Vault is $11.9 million, according to spokesperson Brandy Gaskins.