GEEK News

NanoString’s GeoMX Digital Spatial Profiler was at the heart of a patent lawsuit filed by 10x Genomics. (NanoString Image) NanoString announced Wednesday that it will be acquired by Bruker, ending the company’s restructuring process that included a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan. Bruker, a...

Shein, the fast-fashion e-commerce retailer that recently announced plans to open an office in Bellevue, Wash., is hosting a pop-up experience in Seattle next week. The event will take place April 26-29 at the O’Shea Building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pine Street in downtown Seattle....

Plants line the living wall at Climate Pledge Arena. Amazon bought naming rights to the arena, helping tout its commitment to reach net-zero carbon by 2040. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) More than 100 companies, tribal groups, union organizations, environmental nonprofits and political...

Sarah Bird. (LinkedIn Photo) Sarah Bird, the Seattle tech veteran who led SEO software startup Moz for seven years, is the new CEO of Canvas, a software company that builds technology for remodeling, architecture and interior design. A former lawyer who started at Moz as chief operating...

Validated, a Seattle startup that uses AI to help companies figure out what product features and messaging resonates with customers, raised more investment and released a new product. The company this week launched Taglines, which ingests info about a business and generates ads. The product...

Dilip Kumar, VP of AWS applications, at an Amazon event in 2022. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon’s grocery technology has been in the news a lot over the past couple of weeks, following layoffs in the Amazon Web Services group responsible for the company’s physical store checkout and...

Gurdeep Singh Pall. Technology leader Gurdeep Singh Pall, a longtime Microsoft executive, is joining experience management technology company Qualtrics as its first president of artificial intelligence strategy. Pall left Microsoft last fall after a 33-year career that spanned from Windows NT...

Kristen Forecki. (WTIA Photo) The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) named longtime Seattle tech leader Kristen Forecki as the new chair of its board of directors. Forecki is currently a senior director of experiences and device strategy at Microsoft. She previously worked at...

Tech workers from Google and Amazon alongside activists protested the tech giants’ cloud contract with Israel at a demonstration outside of Google offices in Seattle on April 16, 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) Google and Amazon workers held protests on Tuesday in Seattle and other tech...

Jeff Bezos spoke in New York City on Sept. 20, 2021 to announce $1 billion in grants from the Bezos Earth Fund. (Bezos Earth Fund Photo) The Bezos Earth Fund on Tuesday announced the creation of a $100 million grand challenge that’s seeking artificial intelligence-powered solutions for climate...

Ross Tennenbaum. (Avalara Photo) — Seattle-based tax software company Avalara named Ross Tennenbaum as its new president. Tennenbaum joined Avalara in 2019 and became its CFO a year later. He will continue to serve as CFO while taking on more responsibilities overseeing the company’s main...

There was a packed house at the Ignite 25+5 Awards in Spokane in February, including longtime members of the tech community and newcomers. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) SPOKANE, Wash. — The “great migration” got a head start here. Long before the rise of remote work spurred many tech workers...

Cyan’s headquarters on the outskirts of Spokane. (Photo courtesy of Rand Miller) SPOKANE, Wash. — “The House that Myst Built” could have been built anywhere. The home of Cyan Worlds, on the northern outskirts of Spokane, was made possible by the success of the company’s iconic adventure video...

Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft is making another big AI-related investment, this time pouring $1.5 billion into G42, a AI holding company based in the United Arab Emirates. The deal marks Microsoft’s latest strategic move in the AI race and...

Radious helps companies locate collaborative workspaces in homes or apartments or other residential locations. (Radious Photo) Radious, the Portland startup that runs a marketplace where residential properties can be used as collaborative workspaces, expanded its reach across the U.S. with a new...

Tadao Nagasaki. (LinkedIn Photo) Tadao Nagasaki, a longtime tech exec who led Japan-related operations for Amazon Web Services and F5, is joining OpenAI to head up the company’s new hub in Tokyo, its first office in Asia. Nagasaki previously spent more than 12 years at AWS. Before that, he...

Ravi Grover, general partner at Data Tech Fund. Back when Ravi Grover and his colleagues at Data Tech Fund were getting off the ground a few years ago, not everyone was excited about their focus on data. “Some of the feedback we got was that it sounded too boring,” Grover said. But with...

Inside the attic where Galvanick got its start. From left: Josh Steinman; Brandon Park; and Feliks Pleszczynski. (Galvanick Photo) Josh Steinman spent four years working as a senior director inside the National Security Council at the White House. One of his biggest takeaways from that...

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of April 7, 2024. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...

Jessie Woolley-Wilson, former CEO of DreamBox Learning. (DreamBox Learning Photo) — Jessie Woolley-Wilson, former CEO at DreamBox Learning, joined Silicon Valley venture capital firm Owl Ventures as an operating partner. Woolley-Wilson previously led DreamBox for more than 13 years. Founded...

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sits down for a wide-ranging conversation on the GeekWire Podcast at Amazon in Seattle, focusing on issues including AI and social responsibility. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Early versions of generative AI were “like a dancing bear,” says Werner Vogels, the Amazon...

Data from GeekWire’s funding list. Startup fundraising activity didn’t budge much in the first quarter of 2024 across the U.S. as the venture capital slowdown continued into the new year. Quarterly deal value hit the lowest level since 2018, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor...

Bill Gates visited the startup Modern Hydrogen on Wednesday and had the chance to fill a pothole in the company’s Woodinville, Wash., parking lot with an asphalt that sequesters carbon captured from natural gas. (Gates Ventures Photo) Bill Gates grabbed a wheelbarrow and shovel on Wednesday to...

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket sends two prototype Project Kuiper satellites into orbit for Amazon in October 2023. (ULA Photo) In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s Project Kuiper satellite venture will be “a very large revenue opportunity” in...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy appeared on CNBC in conjunction with the release of his annual letter to shareholders Thursday morning. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letters to shareholders haven’t yet reached the canonical business status of his predecessor’s essays, but they still offer an...

(MagicSchool AI Image) Seattle Public Schools (SPS) this month started rolling out new software from a startup called MagicSchool AI that sells generative AI tools to help teachers quickly generate lesson plans, student feedback, and more. MagicSchool AI, a Denver, Colo.-based company...

Business and technology leader Andrew Ng was named to Amazon’s board Thursday. (Photo via Amazon) Amazon’s newest board member is Andrew Ng, a business and technology leader, serial startup founder, investor, and educator who specializes in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and online...

Munil Shah. (Talkdesk Photo) — Munil Shah, a former engineering leader at UiPath who previously spent 23 years at Microsoft, has joined San Francisco startup Talkdesk as chief technology officer. Shah, based in Seattle, was most recently a CTO at UiPath, the robotic process automation...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s compensation has come under close scrutiny from investors since he took the role in 2021. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s compensation for 2023 totaled $29.2 million, including his base pay, the value of shares that vested during the year, and...

Alpine Immune Sciences CEO Mitchell Gold in 2017. (AIS Photo) Boston-based biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals agreed to acquire Seattle-based Alpine Immune Sciences for $65 per share, totaling about $4.9 billion in cash, a 38% premium over Alpine’s closing price on Wednesday...

(Mega Crit screenshot) Slay the Spire 2, a sequel to the hit 2019 video game, is planned for release next year via Steam Early Access. Its developer, the Seattle-based studio Mega Crit, made the announcement during Wednesday’s Triple-i Initiative Showcase, a livestreamed event that...

Curious, a new Seattle investment firm that looks to buy software startups with limited funding options, acquired Convox, a 10-year-old infrastructure company that helps developers deploy and scale applications. Founded in 2014 by former Heroku engineers, Convox participated in the Y...

An EV in Seattle gets charged up at home. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Washington state car buyers are increasingly going electric. New data shows that 19% of new cars registered in Washington in 2023 were electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids — almost double the U.S. average. That’s...

Seattle, with its tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, has the potential to be a top-tier startup ecosystem. However, according to Peter Mueller, co-founder and managing partner at Breakwater Ventures, there’s a missing “middle layer” hindering its growth. In a recent episode of the...

Increasing numbers of Pacific Northwest entrepreneurs are turning their significant talents to addressing serious environmental and climate problems impacting planet Earth. The 2024 finalists for Sustainable Innovation of the Year at the GeekWire Awards are blasting both pollutants and...