04-06-24 -

Can AI save the world? New book from Microsoft aims to show the potential for...
A few years ago, Microsoft researchers and data scientists used machine learning to help marine biologists analyze patterns in underwater recordings of beluga whales. Upon learning about the project, another group asked if it would be possible to ...

04-05-24 -

Google giving $500K to expand robotics and AI education programs in Washingto...
Google’s philanthropic arm is giving a $500,000 grant to expand access to robotics and artificial intelligence education programs across Washington state middle schools, the company announced Friday. In partnership with the non-profits R...

04-05-24 -

Where Amazon Web Services is still hiring after cutting hundreds of jobs this...
Amazon Web Services announced hundreds of job cuts this week, in areas including training, sales, and physical stores technology, but noted that it’s still hiring in core areas of its business, with thousands of jobs currently posted. A ...

04-05-24 -

Seattle-area mental health startup focused on serving first responders is rai...
Mental health challenges can be doubly difficult for first responders such as firefighters and police officers. Their jobs have higher-than-average levels of trauma, stress and danger. There are also deterrents to getting help, including a stigma ...

04-05-24 -

Your (nearly) last-minute guide to getting the maximum out of the total solar...
It’s prime time for eclipse-chasers: A total solar eclipse will trace a line from coast to coast on Monday, and the anticipation is at its peak. So are the travel costs. Hard-core eclipse fans made their travel arrangements long ago. Tha...

04-04-24 -

Tech Moves: Ex-Smartsheet CMO lands at Conga; former Panopto CMO joins Valid8
— Andrew Bennett, the former chief marketing officer at Smartsheet, is now chief marketing officer at Conga, a Denver-area startup that helps companies manage revenue. Bennett, based in Seattle, previously spent a decade at Bellevue, Wa...

04-04-24 -

Seattle office market continues to struggle as vacancy rates rise for ninth c...
A new Q1 report from Kidder Mathews shows regional vacancy rates in the Seattle area rising to 15.1%, up from 13.9% at the end of 2023, the ninth consecutive quarterly increase. It also marked the ninth straight quarter of negative net office abso...

04-04-24 -

Blue Origin puts a test pilot who could have been NASAs first Black astronaut...
If the fates decided differently, Air Force test pilot Ed Dwight could have become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s — but he lost out, amid racial controversy. Now he’s in line to travel to space with Jeff Be...

04-04-24 -

Seattles AI2 Incubator launches online forum for spotlighting research and di...
Seattle’s AI2 Incubator launched a new online forum called Harmonious for discussing research papers and advances related to artificial intelligence, saying the aim was to cut through the glut of chatter on various platforms. In a post o...

04-04-24 -

Amazon restarting construction on 22 unfinished floors inside Bellevue office...
Amazon is restarting construction on a 42-story office tower in Bellevue, Wash., to complete 22 floors of the building’s interior and make room for an additional 3,000 employees. Located at 555 108th Ave. N.E., Sonic is currently home to...

04-04-24 -

AI and telecom breakthroughs dominate Innovation of the Year category for 202...
It’s a big year for artificial intelligence, telecom advances, and tools designed to make these emerging technologies safe and transparent, judging from the finalists in the category of Innovation of the Year. Continue reading for detail...

04-04-24 -

Seattle startup KredosAI raises more cash to help companies collect late paym...
KredosAI, a Seattle-based enterprise software startup that helps companies collect late payments from customers, raised more cash to fuel growth.

04-03-24 -

Google reportedly pausing Kirkland Urban office buildout in Seattle area
Google’s growth plans east of Seattle appear to be on pause, according to a new report from real estate firm Broderick Group. Broderick’s Q1 market update reveals details about Google’s activity — or lack t...

04-03-24 -

Amazon closing smaller Fresh grocery store in Seattle as it focuses on expand...
Amazon is closing its Fresh grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, the company confirmed Wednesday, saying that it plans to focus on redesigned stores with an expanded selection. The last day of business for the store at 6...

04-03-24 -

Washington governor signs bill that could stoke semiconductor industry, draw ...
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill into law that key players hope will be a boon for the semiconductor industry statewide and may open the door for more federal funding. House Bill 2482 extended two tax preferences for the semiconductor indu...

04-03-24 -

Tech Moves: F5 adds CTO and HR chief; Adaptive names CFO; Techstars Seattle l...
— Seattle-based application security and delivery giant F5 announced two new executive appointments this week: Lyra Schramm, the company’s new chief people officer, and Kunal Anand, chief technology officer. Schramm comes from Google,...

04-03-24 -

Shift AI Podcast: Cultivating the next wave of AI startups, with Yifan Zhang ...
As the managing director of the AI2 Incubator, where she plays an active role in investing in the next wave of AI-first companies, Yifan Zhang shares a nuanced view on the pace and impact of AI innovation in the workforce. “There&#82...

04-03-24 -

Biotech giant Genmab to acquire Seattle company ProfoundBio in $1.8B deal
ProfoundBio, a Seattle-based biotech firm developing drugs to treat ovarian and endometrial cancers, will be acquired by publicly traded Danish drugmaker Genmab in a $1.8 billion all-cash deal expected to close in the first half of this year, the ...

04-03-24 -

Microsoft and Quantinuum report a way to turn down the noise in quantum compu...
Microsoft and Quantinuum say they’ve demonstrated a quantum computing system that can reduce the error rate for data processing by a factor of 800. “Today signifies a major achievement for the entire quantum ecosystem,&#822...

04-03-24 -

Amazon Web Services cuts hundreds of jobs in sales, training, and physical st...
Amazon Web Services will cut several hundred jobs in its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred jobs on its Physical Stores Technology team, executives in the tech giant’s cloud computing division informed ...

04-02-24 -

Cyber Safety Review Board finds Microsoft security culture inadequate, calls ...
Microsoft comes under intense scrutiny and pointed criticism in a 34-page report released Tuesday by the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a group created by the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in 2021 to review major cybersecurity incidents. ...

04-02-24 -

Radian Aerospace updates its space plane design and hints at coming attractions
A Seattle-area startup called Radian Aerospace is fine-tuning the design of its orbital space plane, with an eye toward building a subscale prototype as early as this year. The company is also in the midst of a fresh round of fundraising, followin...

04-02-24 -

AI2 Incubator spinout Modulus sells cell therapy tech assets to Bostons Ginkg...
The news: Modulus Therapeutics, a Seattle-based cellular therapy company spun out of the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI2) Incubator, has sold its cell therapy platform assets to the Boston biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks. The compa...

04-02-24 -

As elections loom, TrueMedia.org releases AI deepfake detector to identify fa...
Seattle-based nonprofit TrueMedia.org released a free AI-powered media verification tool Tuesday to help journalists and fact-checkers detect deepfakes and combat misinformation ahead of upcoming U.S. and international elections. The non-partisan ...

04-02-24 -

Pollen Systems raises $2.4M and expands global reach of its crop analysis pla...
New funding, new hires: Pollen Systems, a Seattle-area ag-tech startup, has raised $2.4 million in new capital and hired nine new employees, including sales directors for Spain and Peru as well as Singapore and Southeast Asia. The company, which l...

04-02-24 -

Inside the new Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, which uses DNA to record bi...
Researchers opened the doors Monday to the new Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, a collaboration between the Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington. The hub combines �...

04-02-24 -

Read AI raises $21M from Goodwater and Madrona, adds AI summaries for email a...
Artificial intelligence startup Read AI raised $21 million in new funding from Goodwater Capital and Madrona Venture Group, and expanded its feature set by adding AI-generated recaps of email conversations and messaging threads. The announcements ...

04-02-24 -

Tableau releases Einstein Copilot beta as part of Salesforces broader AI rollout
Tableau is releasing a new artificial intelligence tool that aims to make its advanced data analysis and visualization features more accessible to a broader set of users. Einstein Copilot in Tableau will start to roll out as free beta Tuesday morn...

04-02-24 -

Concur founder Steve Singh leads acquisition of Direct Travel in ongoing ques...
Steve Singh is one step closer to the “perfect trip.” The Seattle-based business leader and investor, former CEO of companies including Concur and Docker, is leading a group of investors in the acquisition of Direct Travel Inc....

04-02-24 -

Startup building tech for patient portals spins out of Providence incubator w...
New startup, new funding: The Providence health tech incubator has spun out Praia Health as an independent company, and the startup on Tuesday announced $20 million in new funding. Praia has built a platform that powers the patient portals that al...

04-01-24 -

Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally in new attempt to appease antit...
Microsoft says it will offer its Teams and Office 365 separately for business customers globally, unbundling the two programs and expanding an approach that it introduced in the European Economic Area and Switzerland last year. The company says O...

04-01-24 -

Vote for UX Design of the Year: Finalists help users across investing, data a...
The finalists for UX Design of the Year at the 2024 GeekWire Awards are helping end users across home building, investing, AI-generated speech, data analysis, and schedule and expense tracking for gig workers. The award is intended to recognize a ...

04-01-24 -

Ag-tech startup TerraClear raises $15M to grow its end-to-end solution for ri...
TerraClear raised $15 million in new funding for its rock-mapping and picking technology solutions for farmers. The startup, based in Issaquah, Wash., and Grangeville, Idaho, will use the cash to focus on growth in its sales organization ...

03-31-24 -

Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of March 24, 2024
See the technology stories that people were reading on GeekWire for the week of March 24, 2024.… Read More

03-30-24 -

Seattles Soundry AI creates text-to-sample generator to help prompt enhanced ...
The news: Seattle-based Soundry AI, a platform that uses generative artificial intelligence to help musicians create samples for songs, is part of the latest cohort at the startup accelerator Y Combinator. The tech: Soundry AI has created a text-t...

01-03-24 -

SpaceX launches the first set of Starlink satellites for T-Mobiles direct-to-...
The first satellites capable of providing direct-to-cellular service via SpaceX’s Starlink network and T-Mobile’s cellular network have been sent into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Six of the cell-capable satellites we...

01-03-24 -

Curiosity, communication, and capital efficiency: Investors share their tips ...
Be curious. Communicate openly and honestly. Maintain capital efficiency with a focus on growth. Those are some of the top tips for founders heading into 2024, according to Seattle-area tech investors we polled. It’s shaping up to be a u...

01-03-24 -

Pacific Northwest National Labs chief scientist for AI finds links between te...
Bringing artificial intelligence to bear on issues relating to nuclear weapons might sound like the stuff of a scary sci-fi movie — but at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, it’s just on...

01-02-24 -

Amazon leader and Army vet launches Seattle wellness startup to support new moms
Yuzi founder Stephiney Foley graduated from West Point and worked for the U.S. Army for more than seven years, serving as a platoon leader in Afghanistan and Hawaii and a supply chain and operations officer in California. When in comes to war, Fol...

01-02-24 -

Tech investors give their top predictions for 2024
The pace of AI-related innovation accelerated, to say the least, in 2023. Expect the same this year — or even more. That’s the word from a group of Seattle-area tech investors who shared their top prediction for the new year. Read on f...

12-31-23 -

Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Dec. 24, 2023
See the technology stories that people were reading on GeekWire for the week of Dec. 24, 2023.… Read More

12-30-23 -

GeekWire Podcast: NY Times vs. Microsoft; Plus, Oren Etzioni on AI in 2023 an...
“The biggest surprise is that AI used to be narrow. … And when you went from one application to the other, you had to redo it all from scratch. What’s really surprised us is the emergence of general tools. …...

12-29-23 -

I had a blast playing Squid Game Virtuals at a VR arcade but heres why I like...
After years of hype, virtual reality still hasn’t achieved mainstream consumer adoption. But it sure helped my group of friends have a ton of fun earlier this month. We spent a weeknight at Sandbox VR in Seattle, one of more than 45 loca...

12-28-23 -

NYT v. GPT: Microsoft finds itself on the other side of an industry-defining ...
“Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” Bill Gates wrote those words in a landmark open letter in February 1976, calling on personal computer hobbyists to stop stealing software produced by the scrappy young &...

12-28-23 -

Same-day delivery service Shipt to pause Seattle operations, blaming recently...
Citing new ordinances recently passed in Seattle that aim to help gig workers, the Target-owned delivery service Shipt informed customers this week that it will pause operations in the city starting Jan. 10. Birmingham, Ala.-based Shipt works li...

12-28-23 -

VC investments slowed in 2023, but these Pacific Northwest startups still rai...
Tech startup investments continued to retreat in 2023 as venture capitalists tightened their belts and companies trimmed costs amid uncertainty about the broader economy. Total funding to Pacific Northwest startups fell nearly 60% year-over-year i...

12-28-23 -

A year for gearing up: Aerospace ventures are counting down to big missions i...
If 2022 was packed with headline-grabbing aerospace developments — including the first pictures from the James Webb Telescope and the first launch of NASA’s giant moon rocket — 2023 was what you might call a rebuildin...

12-27-23 -

Seattle startup Olamedi building platform to automate health clinic communica...
A new Seattle startup led by co-founders with experience in health tech is aiming to automate communication processes for healthcare clinics with its software platform. Olamedi is a year-old company co-founded by CEO Daniel Sarfati and COO Noah Lo...

12-27-23 -

Zillow Group sues listing services in Arizona and Wisconsin over ShowingTime ...
Zillow Group and ShowingTime have announced a new lawsuit against the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) and Wisconsin’s Metro Multiple Listing Service (Metro MLS) over what the tech giant claims is an unfair and anticompe...

12-27-23 -

The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI chatbots on its ...
The New York Times filed a lawsuit Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of copyright infringement for training artificial intelligence models on millions of articles published by the newspaper. The suit, filed in Federal ...