Seattle tech leaders say their city is a hub for AI innovation. But you wouldn’t know it after scanning recent lists highlighting the most promising AI startups.
- Forbes’ AI 50 had zero Seattle startups. That list sparked an Axios story with this headline: “AI boom’s big winners are all in four states.” Washington didn’t make the cut.
- Bloomberg‘s story highlighting “10 AI Companies to Watch Right Now” mentioned no Seattle companies.
- Only one appeared on Insider’s “34 most promising AI startups of 2023” post.
- And in the latest Y Combinator cohort, just three of 138 AI-related startups are rooted in Seattle.
There were two Seattle companies on the IVP Enterprise AI 55 list. But they were overshadowed by the Bay Area.
“San Francisco & California are the headquarters for AI companies & the source of talent,” proclaimed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a tweet referencing the IVP list.
Seattle’s subduedness and a lack of awareness beyond its borders may hurt the city’s ability to attract leading entrepreneurs and executives in AI — which could be problematic as the industry, buoyed by recent developments in generative AI, is projected to generate trillions of dollars in economic impact.
Seattle should be “viewed as one of the very best centers of excellence for AI,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director at Seattle VC firm Madrona, on a recent episode of the Shift AI Podcast.
But, as McIlwain told GeekWire last week: “sometimes we are too understated.”
Maybe all of the great minds in AI are hard at work in Seattle, a city not known for thumping its chest and touting itself.
And maybe it just doesn’t matter that people elsewhere don’t recognize Seattle as an AI hub, even if it is.
“Builders and practitioners are what matter, and we have more of them than nearly any other market outside of the Bay Area,” said Kirby Winfield, founding general partner at Seattle venture firm Ascend.vc.
But what others think could make a difference in further establishing Seattle as a magnet for AI talent and getting the city’s innovation flywheel spinning with more force.
“Perception certainly matters in attracting talent and other resources to a region,” said Tren Griffin, a longtime member of the Seattle technology and investing community.
Seattle “undersells itself” and “should fix this,” said Heather Redman, managing partner at Seattle VC firm Flying Fish. She said partnerships between the tech sector and the non-tech sector “should be top of mind for all of us.”
“AI is going to be transformative across the economy and has major implications for all sectors and aspects of society,” Redman said.
Seattle’s AI clout
Many acknowledge that Silicon Valley is the epicenter for AI startups.
San Francisco-based AI and machine learning companies raised $12.8 billion across 219 deals through August, according to PitchBook.
That’s in another ballpark compared to Seattle, where AI and machine learning companies raised just $170 million across 24 deals in the same time period.
But Seattle ranks second nationally in regard to AI talent density, which measures how many workers have an AI specialty, according to data from Seattle-based recruiting platform SeekOut.
“Perception certainly matters in attracting talent and other resources to a region.”
“At the end of the day what matters for these startups is hiring great talent and delivering great products, and I think Seattle shines above most other cities outside of the Bay Area here,” said Vivek Ramaswami, a partner at Madrona who is based in San Francisco.
The Seattle region is home to cloud computing giants Microsoft and Amazon, which sell essential tools and services that power AI and machine learning applications. “The investments in AI being made by these two companies alone are massive by any measure,” said Griffin.
Meta, Google, and Apple maintain large engineering centers in the Seattle area, employing thousands of top AI researchers and engineers.
The city attracts leading AI researchers to the University of Washington computer science school and the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). The AI2 Incubator, which raised $30 million for its latest fund, has spun out more than 20 AI companies, including startups acquired by Apple and Baidu.
Time’s recent list of 100 top AI influencers included seven names with ties to Seattle: Microsoft’s Kalika Bali, Kate Crawford, Kevin Scott, and Jaime Teevan; sci-fi writer Ted Chiang; and UW professors Emily Bender and Yejin Choi.
“We are an AI hub, if ‘AI expertise’ rather than ‘buzzy startups’ is the definition of an AI hub,” said Ed Lazowska, a longtime University of Washington computer science professor.
There are many fast-growing AI startups in Seattle. The lists above, as well as others such as NFX’s AI Hot 75 and the IA40, include legal tech startup Lexion; speech recognition startup WellSaid Labs; AI ‘chief of staff’ company Xembly; large language model startup Fixie; machine learning startup OctoML; and video analysis platform CLIPr.
Other AI-focused startups on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of top privately held Pacific Northwest startups, include Icertis, Highspot, Textio, Defined.AI, and WhyLabs.
A-Alpha Bio; DropZone AI; and Protect AI are among the Seattle-area AI startups that raised capital this summer.
“The way Seattle will continue to elevate itself in the national economy as an ‘AI hub’ is for both startups and large companies to continue to grow, hire well, and deliver the best AI products into the market,” said Ramaswami.
McIlwain said companies like Amazon and others can “tell their stories better.”
“It is important for all of us to share and amplify the Seattle AI story,” he said.
