Aigen raised $12 million in fresh cash, providing a boost for the company rolling out a solar-powered robot that uses advanced computer vision models to spot and kill weeds.

Founded in 2020, the Kirkland, Wash.-based startup recently unveiled the Aigen Element, which features two robotic arms that thump out unwanted plants on farms. Its robots can operate continuously for up to 14 hours and do not need to be plugged in

The company said it is also developing a low-energy AI model that can send real-time crop information to a farmer’s mobile app. The idea is to help farmers reduce carbon emissions, gain field insights, and reduce costs.

A new SEC filing revealed the fresh cash. Kenny Lee, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, confirmed the funding to GeekWire. He did not provide additional details but said the company will announce its investors in the “near future.”

Lee has a background in cybersecurity and co-founded a startup called Weblife.io that was acquired in 2017. He’s joined by co-founder Rich Wurden, a former senior engineer at Seattle electric boat company Pure Watercraft and mechanical engineer at Tesla. The duo met in a climate-focused group chat on Slack that helps engineers pivot their careers to address climate issues.

Aigen is part of a growing crop of Seattle startups using AI to automate labor-intensive farming tasks such as weed control, fertilization, field analysis, and more. Seattle startup TerraClear, for instance, uses machine learning and hardware to remove rocks from fields.

Aigen is similar to Carbon Robotics, a Seattle startup that also sells weed-zapping robots. Carbon raised $30 million in April and won the Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year honors at the GeekWire Awards in May.

One difference between the two startups is that Aigen is completely renewable powered, Wurden previously told GeekWire.

The startup said in a news release that pre-orders for the Element sold out in one day, “further demonstrating the excitement among U.S. commodity farmers for more effective approaches to weeding.”

Shifting pressures including rising costs are pushing farmers to be more open to purchasing ag-tech products, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. The study found that 39% of surveyed farmers worldwide intend to adopt at least one ag-tech product within the next two years.

Funding to ag-tech startups fell last year amid the larger tech downturn and have bounced back more recently, but not nearly at the same level as two years ago.

Aigen raised a $4 million seed round in 2022, bringing its previous funding total to around $7 million. Investors include NEA, AgFunder, Global Founders Capital, ReGen Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Industrious Ventures, E2 Ventures, and Cleveland Avenue.

The startups in the latest Techstars Seattle batch span a range of industries — and AI is having a significant impact on all of them.

We spoke to nearly 50 founders that are participating in the 15th cohort of Techstars Seattle, which counts companies including Remitly, Outreach, Skilljar, Mass Reforestation, and others as alumni.

Many of the 24 companies use AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT to boost productivity. Others have AI embedded within the products.

The companies represent industries including healthcare, finance, culinary, advertising, robotics, and more.

Keep reading below to learn more about AI’s impact on their industry, the biggest challenges they expect, and what they plan to do with their free time in Seattle. Comments were edited for brevity and clarity.

AdsGency

The pitch: A no-code platform to automate advertising workflows from ideation and content generation to performance monitoring and optimization.

Founder: Bolbi Liu was previously a product manager at Amazon Web Services.

AI’s impact on advertisements: Liu said advertisers can use AI for content generation, as well as machine learning models for prediction, optimization, and other attribution purposes. She said there’s a “certain room for hallucinations” in AI-generated marketing material and creative freedom compared to regulated sectors like healthcare or law.

On challenges: “I think there are a lot of competitors in what we do,” she said. “If I can see the value of AI ads, probably a lot of other people can as well.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I would like to explore the local bars. I want to get into the culture here, and also the nature or natural tourist spots.”

Astros

The pitch: A company that provides platforms and tools for mobile game studios to efficiently monetize their customers.

Founder: Zsika Phillip was an investment partner at Dorm Room Fund. He previously spent five years at Google, most recently as a product manager.

AI’s impact on video game industry: “From an industry perspective, the entire entertainment landscape is being transformed by generative AI. Synthetic data looks and feels real and really seems poised to be the standard going forward,” Phillip said.

On challenges: “The biggest uncertainty, so to speak, that we think about as a company is the trajectory of mobile entertainment consumption on a macro level, especially taking into consideration recent advances in VR/AR technology,” Phillip said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “I know there are some gorgeous hikes near by and I can’t wait to explore them — a Mt. Rainier trip is definitely on my list. I’m also looking forward to getting my road bike out here and checking out the routes around Washington state. Lastly, I’d just love to explore the city and Washington a bit — I’ve done driving around here and it’s just beautiful.”

Canopy

The pitch: A platform for social media creators to ask questions, gain industry insights, and talk in a safe space.

Founder: Ayomi Samaraweera was chief of staff to the president at content creator growth company Jellysmack. She previously worked as global head of internal communications at TikTok.

AI’s impact on the creator economy: Samaraweera said that it has become easier to manage the backend of being a creator through AI tools, such as managing tasks like caption generation, content ideas, administrative, and pitching brands. She pointed to Meta’s recently released feature that helps creators make AI avatars with their likeness, which fans can interact with through a chatbot.

On challenges: “There’s a lot of competition to get the attention of creators, and to help creators build a sustainable livelihood and living from it,” Samaraweera said. “I think right now it’s being attuned to what’s going on with the platforms and from a creators lens, you need to own your audience.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I want to go to the Space Needle because I haven’t seen that before,” she said. “To be honest, I’m actually more excited about getting plugged into the startup ecosystem here.”

CareCopilot

The pitch: An AI marketplace to help caregivers for older adults.

Founder: Alyse Dunn was a senior software engineer at Venmo.

AI’s impact on the caregiving industry: “I am interested in incorporating AI to be able to give families more granular guidance on exactly what they need to do for their loved one,” she said.

On challenges: “Sometimes I worry if I’m really digging below the surface,” she said. “I don’t want to just scratch the surface and solve some of those surface-level problems; I actually want to make it easy to take care of aging parents or grandparents.”

Unplug in Seattle: “Jujitsu is my unplugging activity,” she said. “I’ve started looking to see if there are any dojos near here where I can train.”

Chassi

The pitch: The startup helps robotics and embedded companies ship software by automating the development workflow.

Founders: Chuka Okoye was a co-founder of Lyft’s Level 5 infrastructure team, which developed autonomous vehicle tech. Mathew LeJeune was a senior designer at Nvidia.

AI’s impact on robotics development: “To help reduce the need to hire more senior developers,” Okoye said. “You can [hire] a modular developer and have the AI co-pilot be a guiding hand.”

On challenges: “We are trying to onboard some of our design partners to be customers on the product and ship it,” he said. “And get the most out of the Techstars program.”

Unplugging in Seattle: LeJeune said he is excited about interacting with other founders in a live setting. “We work remote,” he said. “So being face-to-face is very important.”

Chi

The product: The startup is building an AI software testing tool.

Founders: Arjun Menon previously founded information technology company Goodbits, which merged with Simelabs last year. Maneesh Shaji was head of engineering at Goodbits.

AI’s impact on software testing industry: Software testing is traditionally done manually by individuals or through complex open-source code frameworks, but an AI tool has the ability to automate test generation and test code creation, Menon said.

On challenges: “There are a lot of companies doing (testing),” he said. “It’s mostly either manual work or you have a code-based open-source frameworks, which are really hard to implement.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “There are a couple of cricket nets and clubs that I found here in Seattle,” Menon said. “I always carry my cricket ball with me to play.”

CloudFence

The pitch: The startup sells a full-stack network security and security insights tool to manage security for cloud infrastructure.

Founders: Mounira Remini was a product manager at cybersecurity company Fortinet. Satish Chitupolu served as cloud solutions architect at Fortinet.

AI’s impact on cybersecurity: “The attacker side is using more sophisticated tools and techniques,” Remini said. “The cybersecurity vendor side definitely wants to leverage AI to build smarter tools that don’t rely on static patterns, but more on behavioral [patterns] to detect and surface suspicious behaviors.”

On challenges: “We are building out a new offering, a new solution, that combines two or three tools today in a single dashboard,” she said. “Finding the right customers for this solution is what’s keeping me up.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I’m a yogi,” Remini said. “The first thing I do in every city is find a local yoga studio.”

Discoverist.ai

The pitch: An AI shopping assistant that helps e-commerce sites personalize guest experiences.

Founders: Alan John was vice president of engineering at e-commerce platform StockX. Harpreet Singh was a software developer at customer service tech company [24]7.ai.

AI’s impact on e-commerce: ChatGPT is allowing e-commerce sites to implement a chatbot function to interact with customers, John said.

On challenges: “It’s education of how to use the new set of products for e-commerce,” he said. “People went from shopping in brick-and-mortar stores to shopping online. That was a change in mindset and took some time. But now we are looking ahead to the next gen of e-commerce experiences.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I’m just spending time with my family,” he said.

Easy Platter

The pitch: Described as the “Airbnb for chefs,” the platform lets users hire a chef to cook weekly meals in their home starting at $89 per week.

Founders: Mandhir Singh was director of business development at digital consultancy company Content Bloom.

AI’s impact on the personal chef industry: “The whole industry is moving toward a personalized nutritionist consultant through AI,” Singh said. “So you don’t have to technically go to a dietician, nutritionist or weight watcher to tell you what the plan would look like.”

On challenges: “It’s a mindset change,” he said. “How can you let a stranger — even though we vet our chefs very thoroughly with police and background checks — in your house to do the meals for you?”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I really love hiking,” said Singh, adding that his goal is to summit Mount St. Helens.

Et Cetera Robotics

The pitch: The startup is building software to help warehouse businesses make more money by allowing their robots to operate faster through a dynamic vision sensor.

Founders: Robert Gens was a research scientist at Google. Kendall Lowrey was a post-doctoral researcher in robotics and machine learning at the University of Washington.

AI’s impact on robotics: At a high level, large language models are allowing robots to have more natural interactive behavior, Lowrey said. “But our focus is much more low level,” he said. “How do we actually have robotic systems that physically do what we ask of them?”

On challenges: “We’re talking about a brand new technology,” Gens said. “A lot of what we do is in terms of communication, but also, how do we learn how to interface in with the existing systems?”

Unplugging in Seattle: “We both have kids,” Lowrey said. “Our fun usually means taking the kids to a park or extracurriculars.”

Inquisio

The pitch: An AI tool to help with workflows including public information requests.

Founders: Joshua Penner is the mayor of Orting, Wash. Chris Lande is a staff software engineer at marketing software company Marchex. Scott Larson is a city administrator for the city of Orting.

AI’s impact on local government offices: “A lot of what we do is writing,” Larson said. “ChatGPT is the perfect tool for that. And there’s some other tools that are able to help you with the research process as well. And those are really nice tools in the public space.”

On challenges: “I think governments naturally are risk-averse,” Larson said. “Adopting new technologies doesn’t come naturally, and AI is very much emergent.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “Somehow we became known as the chicken team,” Larson said. “We’re both local and the three of us are apparently the only group that has chickens in this cohort. And we have families and places we are all going back to every night.”

Moyae

The pitch: An electronic health record tool for ophthalmologists and optometrists.

Founders: Sami Mirimiri was the director of engineering at EnterMedicare and master software engineer at Capital One. Douglas Phung is a senior software engineer at Hub International.

AI’s impact on healthcare: “We’ve seen a lot of changes on the (healthcare) payer side, in terms of how they’re processing it,” Mirimiri said. “In terms of the EHR (electronic health record) side, some of it has been there already in terms of scribing or using audio and translating that into the medical record.”

On challenges: “Historically, doctors — especially in ophthalmology and optometry — have to put together six or seven different products to make their practices work,” Phung said. “Regulation recently has changed, forcing everyone to adopt this new (data) standard called FHIR. That’s where we shine.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “We definitely are enjoying the walkability and eating at new restaurants,” Mirimiri said. “Just tapping into that foodie culture.”

Paralog

The pitch: The startup sells an AI platform to help game designers develop non-player characters’ behaviors in video games.

Founders: Elisabeth Gosselin was a manager of artificial intelligence training programs at AI research consortium Ivado. Carle Côté is a game AI lecturer at the Université de Sherbrooke and was lead AI programmer at video game developer Invoke Studios.

AI’s impact on video game industry: “Using ChatGPT or other (AI tools), people can ask, ‘We want to create a cool NPC,’ a house or other asset,” Côté said. “And it creates scenes automatically.”

On challenges: “The biggest challenge is to make sure that the solution we’re bringing will be compatible with the current production pipelines,” Côté said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “I like to run, so I’ll try to run outside,” Gosselin said.

Pezzo

The pitch: The startup helps companies integrate AI into their software.

Founders: Ariel Weinberger founded Codingly, a software engineering consultancy company. Matan Abramovich was a business strategy analyst at StreamPay.

AI’s impact: As a startup helping companies integrate AI into their business, Weinberger said there are two areas in which businesses are using AI. The first is passive AI, which operates in the background to help augment existing processes. The second is active AI, which requires user interaction, which can automate anything from background tasks to direct interface operations.

On challenges: The startup will need to find a way to integrate AI into a product team’s delivery process and keep pace with the fast-evolving landscape, Weinberger said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “Hiking,” Weinberger said. “The nature in the Pacific Northwest is just incredible. Especially since I live in the Netherlands, which is a very flat country, and I’m a mountain person.”

Planette

The pitch: The company helps enterprises adapt to climate change by providing year-ahead extreme weather risk forecasts.

Founders: Kalai Ramea was an associate director and senior manager at the Palo Alto Research Center. Hansi Singh is an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria.

AI’s impact on weather: “The transformer network has the ability to process lots of data,” Ramea said. “It’s similar to neural networks, but it can remember things more in the time dependencies. It is very useful for climate, in that sense, because we are taking a chain of events, and then you’re predicting the next event.”

On challenges: The company, which is developing climate prediction tools to forecast for a few months up to five years, will face competition from a number of large companies, Singh said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “I will do the touristy stuff first,” Ramea said.

Produx

The pitch: An AI tool that helps B2B product management teams make decisions.

Founders: Tony Tom was a senior product manager at ZoomInfo. Jerin Mathews was a software engineer at ZoomInfo.

AI’s impact on personal chef industry: New AI products can help product managers synthesize data at a much faster clip than existing tools, Tom said.

On challenges: “When you look at product management as an industry, change is not very welcome,” he said. “They very much stick to the legacy tools that they are already familiar with, like an Excel spreadsheet or Jira platform.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I would love to go out for some hiking,” Tom said.

Propio

The pitch: Propio helps Latino gig workers manage payments, taxes, benefits and financial access.

Founders: Rodrigo Carriedo was executive director and chairman of the audit committee at the World Bank Group, representing the governments of Central America, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela. Fernando Aguilar Reyes was a software engineer at Microsoft. Orlando Gomez served as senior business development of startups and small businesses at Drift.

AI’s impact on finance: Advancements in AI are helping companies comply with financial regulations, accelerating the pace in which products are released, Carriedo said.

On challenges: A challenge will be securing funding amid the macroeconomic and funding situation for startups, Carriedo said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “I enjoy going to any local bar in downtown to see live music,” Reyes said.

Prospero

The pitch: Prospero automates email marketing for businesses.

Founders: Rotimi Iziduh was a product lead at Airtable and lead product manager at Facebook.

AI’s impact on e-commerce: “It’s good and bad,” Iziduh said. “Good from the standpoint that content creation is no longer going to be a barrier. Bad in that it will now become a lot harder to stand out. Valuable messaging could actually get lost in the sea of (AI-)generated content.”

On challenges: A hurdle will be delivering a product that makes its target customers’ lives easier and not more complex, Iziduh said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “I love to bike and just genuinely get outside,” he said. “Enjoy the bits of sunshine that Seattle has left.”

Stackoon

The pitch: Stackoon automates software and cloud management to help companies control access, usage, and costs of their tools.

Founders: Ole Shved was a product manager at marketing and advertising software development company Xenoss. Yarik Rozum served as senior software developer at Truebase.

AI’s impact: “Generative AI will hugely transform almost every industry in the next five years,” Shved said. “It’s a real big deal. At Stackoon, we leverage AI to allow our customers to integrate (the) Stackoon platform with all of the business software tools they use.”

On challenges: “I would say the thing that keeps us up at night is a growth rate,” he said. “We really want to build a unicorn and we have no option for any mistakes or slowdowns.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “We’d love to go to the local car racing track and also try water landing in one of those cute planes we constantly see in the sky,” Shved said.

TalkStack AI

The pitch: TalkStack sells an AI platform for enterprises that automates text and voice call interactions with customers.

Founders: Eunice Wong is the CEO and co-founder of Milky Way AI, a marketing insights startup. Pasquale Sorrentino was co-founder and software architect at Gummys, a Web3 streaming platform.

AI’s impact on call centers: Large language models have helped to speed up response times for voice and chat bots, making them sound more human-like, Wong said.

On challenges: “We have this word latency, which is basically the time between the question asked and the answer,” Sorrentino said. “If I ask a question, and you answer after five seconds, it’s clear that there is something behind it … but if the answer is very fast, like two seconds, then it makes the product more realistic. This is now our main focus.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “Probably surfing,” Wong said. “But we’re in Seattle, so hopefully some paddle-boarding.”

tawkitAI

The pitch: The startup helps companies build AI copilots into their products.

Founders: Atai Barkai was part of Meta’s media infrastructure team. Uli Barkai graduated from Columbia University with a financial economics degree.

AI’s impact: Copilots can take context from different conversation and help users get “80% of the job” finished for tasks such as drafting a paragraph for an article, Atai Barkai said.

On challenges: “We think it will become a highly competitive market,” he said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “The weather is going to change,” Atai Barkai said. “We’ll see how long that goes on. But I’ve got a 4-year-old, and we like to go hiking.”

Trellis Health

The pitch: The startup offers software to help users collect their personal health data.

Founders: Estelle Giraud was a senior manager at biotech company Illumina. Ryan Nabat was a senior data engineer at State Farm-owned insurance tech company BlueOwl.

AI’s impact on healthcare data: Once data is organized, AI tools can help users glean insights and see their “health journey over time,” Nabat said.

On challenges: “A lot of how our health data is stored in systems today,” he said. “These systems are originally built around billing. When you start to look at it, it is actually organized around events that are billable versus organized around the individual.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “I grew up sailing,” Giraud said. “There’s something innately relaxing about just being out in the water.”

Visionify

The pitch: The startup’s computer vision tools help companies improve workplace safety through monitoring and hazard alerts.

Founders: Harsh Murari was co-founder and CTO at TestFramework, which helps companies adopt automated software testing. Priyesh Sanghvi is a chief advisor at TestFramework and was a senior staff engineer at Qualcomm.

AI’s impact on workplace safety: AI tools can help companies identify “near misses,” or accidents on a factory floor that did not occur but could lead to injury in the future, Sanghvi said.

On challenges: The company has completed a pilot with some of its customers and is now preparing to scale. One of its customers has 150 sites, so a hurdle will be scaling the product with limited resources, Sanghvi said.

Unplugging in Seattle: “I’m coming from Colorado,” Sanghvi said. “We do a lot of biking, hiking, and skiing.”

ZippiAI

The pitch: The startup sells an AI co-pilot for maintenance engineers.

Founders: Upinder Singh recently graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Parminder Singh was CTO at Capteurio.

AI’s impact on maintenance: Manufacturing-focused AI copilots can reduce the time its takes maintenance teams to identify problems and repair machines when they break down, helping to minimize production losses, Upinder Singh said.

On challenges: “The biggest challenges are the sales cycles in the industry,” Parminder Singh said. “It’s pretty long to reach out to the customer, have a demo, then to finally close the deal.”

Unplugging in Seattle: “Along with sightseeing, we are more interested in knowing the people of Seattle,” Parminder Singh said.

Open up your networks.

That’s the message to investors from Jill Johnson, co-founder and CEO of the Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership (IFEL), a Newark, N.J.-based nonprofit organization that supports entrepreneurs with a focus on women and minority founders.

Johnson was in Seattle this week to host a networking and showcase event called Creating Conscious Collisions, which aims to create environments where entrepreneurs, investors, allies, and policymakers can connect.

Johnson told GeekWire that startup investors can boost returns and gain richer insights into the innovation economy by opening up their network to a more diverse group of founders, potentially landing deals that others would otherwise overlook.

“With respect to women of color entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, there is amazing innovation that exists and lots of creativity and brilliance,” said Johnson. “The challenge is that we’re not seeing them being funded in the way that it should.”

The percentage of venture capital dollars going to startups led by only female founders hasn’t surpassed 3% over the past decade. U.S. startups with at least one female co-founder raised $5.8 billion in the third quarter across 612 deals, compared to total deal value of $32.7 billion across 2,715 deals, according to PitchBook.

Johnson said many women of color founders lack connections to the people, entities, and organizations with resources, including capital.

“Unfortunately, too many people have just not had exposure, or any reason to meet people outside of their network,” said Johnson, who began her career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before founding IFEL with her father in 2002.

Seattle is the seventh stop on a 10-city roadshow for Creating Conscious Collisions. The event was hosted at the Madison Centre in downtown Seattle and featured slideshows from six startups led by women of color. Keep reading to learn more about their companies and traction.

Yolanda Barton is the founder of Revere XR, a Seattle interactive storytelling startup “bringing history to life.” The company uses virtual, augmented, and mixed reality along with AI to create interactive learning experiences. The idea is to capture historical events, making them as “captivating as viral videos” for students of history, Barton said. The company has beta tested with 700 users across three cities and is a finalist for the Pharrell Williams Black Ambition Award. Read more.

Henny Damian is the founder of Joola, a Seattle savings and rewards app for friends and family to build access to capital and gain financial wisdom. The startup is implementing gamification features, which allows users to earn points, collect badges, and compete with friends to save capital. The company has saved members more than $270,000 in capital, Damian said. Read more.

Yasameen Sajady is the co-founder and CEO of Maazah, a Minneapolis, Minn.-area family-run startup that sells a green chutney sauce and aioli, inspired by Afghanistan cuisine. The company, co-led with Yasameen’s sister Sheilla, was selected to be part of Kroger’s food accelerator cohort in 2021. Maazah is set to launch at Costco, Target and Whole Foods, Yasameen said.

Anisha Vinjamuri is the founder and CEO of Umm Skincare, a Bellevue, Wash.-based company that sells skincare products that infuse principles of the ancient Indian medical system called Ayurveda. The startup sells to retailers, more than 30 spas, and is in the process of building its direct-to-consumer platform. It’s on track to reach its year-end target of $500,000 in revenue, Vinjamuri said.

Julie Pham is the CEO of CuriosityBased, a Seattle consultancy that aims to help people build communication, collaboration, and inclusion skills by fostering curiosity. Pham, who previously served as an executive at the Washington Technology Industry Association, authored a book titled: 7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work. The company aims to scale through a digital course and by licensing its intellectual property, Pham said. Read more.

Reetu Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Cirkled In, a Seattle-based social media-style platform for students to showcase their profile, records, and accomplishments to better discover opportunities that are relevant to them. “What LinkedIn did for professional recruitment, we are doing the same thing for youth recruitment,” Gupta said. The startup has raised $1.5 million to date, garnered a user base of 910,000 users, and achieved $600,000 in annual revenue. Read more.

Flyhomes has a new home.

GeekWire spotted lease signs at the company’s former 9,000 square-foot Seattle headquarters near the new waterfront project. The real estate startup confirmed that it vacated the space on Sept. 1 and now occupies a 4,000 square-foot office at 500 Union St. Suite 325 in downtown Seattle.

“The move away from the waterfront was because our lease was up and because the new office we found which best met our needs happened to be in this location,” said Flyhomes spokesperson Justin O’Neill.

He added that the downsizing in space is a result of shifting to a remote-first work policy. O’Neill did not provide an updated headcount.

Flyhomes, which helps homebuyers make all-cash offers among other real estate services, has gone through multiple layoffs.

Many tech companies are downsizing or ditching office space as the Seattle real estate market continues to see rising vacancies.

Flyhomes’ exit opens up prime office space at the 1201 Western Building along Western Avenue, just across the street from Seattle’s Pier 56. The demolition of the double-deck Alaskan Way viaduct, part of ongoing waterfront renovations, opened the office to views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains.

Mark Vadon, a Flyhomes investor and board member, confirmed to GeekWire that he’s a minority investor in the 1201 Western Building. Its managing owner is Seattle commercial real estate firm Martin Smith.

Founded in 2016, Flyhomes offers a suite of mortgage and home-buying services. It provides a Buy Before You Sell program that helps sellers buy and move into their next home before selling their current property. The company went through its third round of layoffs earlier this summer amid a slow real estate market.

Flyhomes acquired the host-to-own startup Loftium in February. The company also acquired assets from Home Sale Assured, a Chicago-area company that helps homeowners move into a new home without needing to sell their current home.

Flyhomes is led by CEO and co-founder Tushar Garg. It has raised more than $200 million to date, including a $150 million Series C round raised in June 2021. Investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Fifth Wall, Camber Creek, Balyasny Asset Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Canvas Partners, and former Zillow Group CEO Spencer Rascoff.

• Founded in 2015, the company offers a remote patient monitoring and chronic care management software platform to independent practices, hospital systems, and more.
• The company is led by CEO Todd Haedrich, a former executive at Covetrus who took over from co-founder Jeff LeBrun in 2021.
• Foundry and Escalate Capital Partners led the round. Other backers include Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, Navigate Ventures, Attento Capital, OpenView, 500 Global, SOSV, and Jumpstart Capital.

Depending on who you ask, artificial intelligence is getting too much attention — or not enough.

That was one takeaway from my conversations last night at the opening reception for the IA Summit, which takes place today in Seattle and focuses on intelligent and generative applications.

A new report from insights firm GBK Collective found that 58% of senior leaders are actively using generative AI at work. A recent KPMG survey found that more than two-thirds of CEOs rank generative AI as a primary priority for their company.

But the electric buzz around AI may be simmering off. Fears of a bubble are growing, and venture capitalists are wondering if the technology will ever translate to profits.

We spoke to five people at Monday’s event to get their take on whether AI is overhyped or underhyped at the current moment. Comments were edited for brevity and clarity.

Gaurav Oberoi, CEO and co-founder of Seattle startup Lexion

“It’s both. Overhyped for a lot of business users, buyers of products, whose expectations have been set a little out of alignment with what is actually possible. On the other hand, it’s underhyped because the capabilities of what is possible are significant. And I think all of us building in the space see those capabilities and are like, gosh, a lot of really great products are about to come. So it’s an interesting time.”

Beth Birnbaum, former Expedia and Grubhub exec, current board member at WIley, Root, Fandom, and other companies

“It’s the appropriate level of hype. AI is the kind of transformative technology that’s not going to have the impact that people think it’s going to have in the next few years. But it’s going to have massively transformative impact over the decades to come.”

Jonathan Yan, CEO and co-founder of Seattle startup Roam

“It’s underhyped. It’s still really early days. We’re figuring out all the use cases and advancements through the technology. As time evolves, hopefully we’ll see the scale and the impact on our society. You could probably draw a parallel to the growth in Web3. But in terms of the pain points and problems that AI solves for society, I think it vastly outweighs Web3.”

Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake. current angel investor and board member at RelationalAI, Docugami, Fauna, and other companies

“It’s hard to say that it’s not hyped enough. So I can’t say it’s underhyped. I think we are about to enter, in Gartner terms, the classic trough of disillusionment. But it may be very short lived, depending on how good the products are.”

Wanda Wang, generative AI tech lead at Deloitte

“Overhyped because the folks that aren’t necessarily touching and building AI have all these misconceptions about it, like it’s magic. But it’s also underhyped because some don’t realize the staggering amounts of potential.”

• The grant program was facilitated through a partnership between the Life Science Washington Institute and Washington State Department of Commerce. It was funded through cash returned to the state’s Life Sciences Discovery Fund.
• The awards prioritized startups outside King County, as well as those that are women-led or socially or economically disadvantaged across the state.
• Read more about the 20 life science startup award recipients.

A startup that helps data teams at consumer packaged goods companies (CPG) analyze and visualize their data through an artificial intelligence platform won a Madrona Venture Labs startup formation competition on Sunday.

NoxuData received $250,000 in pre-seed funding, in addition to mentorship from industry experts, entrepreneurs, and investors. The week-long event, titled Launchable: Generative Apps, was designed to help launch “venture-scalable startups.”

The startup is led by co-founder Dae Kim, who is based in Seattle, and previously worked as a corporate strategy manager at Microsoft focused on AI and as a consumer packaged goods strategy consultant at L.E.K. Consulting. He’s joined by David Lee, who is based in New York, and most recently was co-founder and engineering lead at Seek AI and was a senior software engineer at Oracle.

The company aims to help business teams at CPG companies access data and generate analysis. CPG data is fragmented and siloed in sources such as NielsenIQ and IRI, forcing business teams to manually download files and sift through data, according to the company.

NoxuData sells an AI platform with a conversational dashboard interface for answering queries and visualization. It also provides insights that go beyond financial metrics, considering evolving context such as foot traffic, website visits, or even weather alerts.

For instance, users can ask why sales are slowing in southern California, receiving a context-driven response to help drive decision-making. It also has an added layer of quality assurance through human monitoring for answers it deems low confidence.

The company estimates the market opportunity to be $10 billion in the U.S. The startup has five customers, mostly startups, with three as paid pilots. It has raised and undisclosed amount of capital from Gold House Ventures and other incubators.

NoxuData competes with startups like Seek AI, along with incumbents such as Snowflake and Salesforce.

“How we win is by building our flywheel through our focus in the CPG vertical and by building human trust,” Kim said during the startup’s pitch during Demo Day on Sunday. He added that the company’s extra layer of quality assurance through human monitoring will help customers have confidence in the AI platform’s output.

The event was judged by Rajko Radovanovic (partner at a16z), Tina Hoang-To (founding general partner at Kin Ventures), and Jon Turow (partner at Madrona).

The Launchable event, the seventh hosted by Seattle-based startup studio Madrona Venture Labs, featured more than 40 mentors, 50 founders across 11 teams, and over 100 investors that signed up to attend the demo day in person and via live stream.

Last year’s Launchable winner was Storia AI, which is developing generative artificial intelligence tools for filmmakers and TV show producers plugged into its model. Seattle-based engineering productivity startup UpLevel also won a past competition; the company last year raised $20 million in venture capital funding.

Madrona Venture Labs earlier this year raised $11 million for its fifth fund.

Startup accelerator program Techstars Seattle on Monday unveiled 24 companies for its 15th cohort, doubling the class size from last year’s dozen graduates.

This year’s cohort is made up of industry vets from diverse fields like healthcare and robotics. Founders hail from large tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and Nordstrom.

“These experts have built really great businesses or products within those large industries,” Techstars Managing Director Marius Ciocirlan told GeekWire. “But now they can leverage AI to rethink those entire industries and build (products) from the ground up in a very native way.”

Techstars’ programs are typically divided into fall and spring sessions, but that offers limited time between cohorts for one-on-one founder mentorship, Ciocirlan said. By merging the sessions, he said, the accelerator has more time to offer founders individualized mentorship in areas like fundraising, customer acquisition and hiring, as well as engaging with new founders and investors.

A challenge for this year’s cohort will be navigating the declining venture capital markets, Ciocirlan said. Startups will need to have more headway under their belts before they can fundraise, as well as keep pace with the latest advancements in generative AI and other new tech trends, he said.

“We’re trying to help our teams move fast, gain a lot more traction, and do more with less,” Ciocirlan said.

On top of post-graduation support, Techstars brought in more mentors to help with the increased headcount. The accelerator last month announced four new entrepreneurs in residence: Arean Van Veelan, Bill Bryant, Chris Pitchford, and Yifan Zhang.

Techstars expanded to Seattle in 2010. Its portfolio startups have raised over $3 billion of capital, and more than 80% of them have either exited or continue to operate. The 2011 class produced three unicorns, including Remitly, Outreach, and Zipline.

Here’s a look at the companies in the 15th class:

AdsGency

The pitch: “A no code platform to automate advertising workflows from ideation and content generation to performance monitoring and optimization.”
Founder: Bolbi Liu

Astros

The pitch: “A developer-first company that provides platforms and tools for mobile game studios to efficiently monetize their customers.”
Founder: Zsika Phillip

Canopy

The pitch: “An anonymous community for social media creators to ask questions, gain industry insights, and spill the tea in a safe space.”
Founder: Ayomi Samaraweera

CareCopilot

The pitch: “An intelligent, managed marketplace of everything that you need when caring for an adult loved one with specialized care needs.”
Founder: Alyse Dunn

Chassi

The pitch: “Helping robotics and embedded companies ship software 10x faster and cheaper by automating their entire development workflow.”
Founders: Chuka Okoye, Mathew LeJeune

Chi

The pitch: “Actionable code risk intelligence for Microservices.”
Founders: Arjun Menon, Maneesh Shaji

CloudFence

The pitch: “One-click deploy full stack network security and security insights to manage security across your cloud infrastructure.”
Founders: Mounira Remini, Satish Chitupolu

Discoverist.ai

The pitch: “An AI-powered shopping assistant that optimizes discovery, decision-making, and shopping experiences.”
Founders: Alan John, Harpreet Singh

Easy Platter

The pitch: “Platform to hire a chef to cook weekly meals in your home starting at $89 per week.”
Founders: Mandhir Singh

Et Cetera Robotics

The pitch: “Etc. Robotics upgrades robots to see what others miss.”
Founders: Robert Gens, Kendall Lowrey

Inquisio

The pitch: “An AI-powered copilot eliminating repetitive workflows starting with public information requests.”
Founders: Joshua Penner, Chris Lande, Scott Larson

Moyae

The pitch: “The ultimate Electronic health record solution designed for ophthalmologists and optometrists.”
Founders: Sami Mirimiri, Douglas Phung

Paralog

The pitch: “Paralog is an AI platform to democratize and accelerate production of NPC (non-player characters) behaviors in video games.”
Founders: Elisabeth Gosselin, Carle Côté

Pezzo

The pitch: “Empowers organizations to seamlessly integrate and optimize AI in their software, without requiring prior AI/ML expertise.”
Founders: Ariel Weinberger, Matan Abramovich

Planette

The pitch: “Empowers enterprises to adapt to climate change by providing year-ahead extreme weather risk forecasts.”
Founders: Kalai Ramea, Hansi Singh

Produx

The pitch: “Enabling smarter decisions for B2B product teams with actionable intelligence from GTM
feedback.”
Founders: Tony Tom, Jerin A Mathews

Propio

The pitch: “Propio puts Latino independent workers in the driver’s seat to seamlessly manage payments, taxes, benefits and financial access.”
Founders: Rodrigo Carriedo, Fernando Aguilar Reyes, Orlando Gomez

Prospero

The pitch: “Prospero fully automates email marketing for businesses that do not have a marketing team.”
Founders: Rotimi Iziduh

Stackoon

The pitch: “Stackoon helps tech companies eliminate manual hassle of managing software tools by allowing IT & HR teams to control access and costs for 300,000 apps.”
Founders: Ole Shved, Yarik Rozum

TalkStack AI

The pitch: “TalkStack provides a no-code (generative) AI customer experience platform to enterprises without AI teams and can deliver human-like conversations including lead generation and qualification.”
Founders: Eunice Wong, Pasquale Sorrentino

tawkitAI

The pitch: “TawkitAI makes it easy to build copilots into products.”
Founders: Atai Barkai, Uli Barkai

Trellis Health

The pitch: “Modern personal health software for you to access your past, manage your present, and build a
foundation for the future of your family’s health.”
Founders: Estelle Giraud, Ryan Nabat

Visionify

The pitch: “Visionify helps improve workplace safety by providing VisionAI services.”
Founders: Harsh Murari, Priyesh Sanghvi

ZippiAI

The pitch: “AI co-pilot for maintenance engineers.”
Founders: Upinder Singh, Parminder Singh

Alaska Airlines wants to help more startups take off.

The Seattle-based airline announced Thursday a partnership with UP.Labs to launch Airline Venture Lab, a new collaboration to create aviation-focused spin-out startups.

The partnership, announced at the UP Summit event in Dallas, plans to deliver its first startup by next year. UP.Labs said it will focus on building startups that solve various pain points in consumer aviation travel, including routing, aircraft maintenance, revenue management, guest experiences, and more.

“We know that sometimes our innovation comes from within our company, and sometimes it takes key partners to unlock,” Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci said in a news release.

UP.Labs operates under the umbrella of UP.Partners, a Los Angeles-area investment firm that also manages a venture capital fund called UP.Ventures. Alaska Airlines is a limited partner in the fund.

Launched in 2022, UP.Labs bills itself as a so-called “venture lab” that works with corporate partners in the mobility sector. The firm recruits business executives, investors, and corporate partners to spawn new startups. The goal is to enhance the transportation of people and goods, making it cleaner, faster, and safer by tapping into the scale and resources of its corporate partners.

Through a partnership with Porsche, UP.Labs launched a startup that sells a machine learning platform that captures and analyzes electric vehicle performance. The Los Angeles-based company raised $5 million in seed funding.

UP.Labs’ approach is similar to Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, which partners with corporations to develop ideas for potential spinouts and product innovations. The firm recently collaborated with Seattle-area manufacturing conglomerate Fortive to test ways to integrate AI into a business plan.

Alaska Airlines rolled out a number of tech features over the past few years, from electronic bag tags to AI to better map out flight routes. The airline reported profit of $240 million in the second quarter, up 73% from the year-ago quarter.

Stoke Space announced Thursday that it raised $100 million, boosting the Kent, Wash.-based company’s quest to develop a new breed of fully reusable rockets and reach orbit by 2025.

“This new round of funding is a huge vote of confidence in our team and the progress we’ve made,” CEO Andy Lapsa said in a news release. “We will now continue moving through our development program by increasing focus on our reusable first stage.”

The funding comes less than a month after the company showcased a successful up-and-down test of its “Hopper” developmental rocket vehicle. The startup said the test highlighted the tech it has developed, including its hydrogen/oxygen engine, heat shield, thrust control, avionics, software, and ground systems.

Stoke Space said it will use the funding to build its first-stage rocket engine and structure, in addition to its orbital version of its reusable second stage. The funding will also go toward upgrades and construction of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 14. Earlier this year, Stoke Space won the go-ahead to take over the site of John Glenn’s history-making Mercury launch in 1962.

Stoke Space said that it is on target to launch its first orbital test flight in 2025, part of a broader goal of developing a fully reusable launch system that operates with “aircraft-like” frequency to transport payloads to, through, and from space. In addition to hitting its engineering milestones, the startup said it has already taken steps toward commercialization including approaching customers.

The concept behind Stoke Space’s launch system has been compared to the much larger two-stage Starship system that’s being developed by SpaceX for trips beyond Earth orbit.

Along with the funding, Stoke Space unveiled the name of its rocket: Nova. The name was inspired by the astronomical event where new stars form from remnants of older ones. It’s worth mentioning that Stoke Space’s rocket finally has a name because it previously collected a number of nicknames: “The Rocket That Shall Not Be Named” and “Voldemort.”

The Kent, Wash.-based company has about 90 employees, up from 29 people when it raised a $65 million funding round in 2021 led by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The workforce, which is almost entirely based in Washington, includes engineers from Blue Origin, SpaceX and Spaceflight Inc., as well as bigger aerospace companies. The company said it continues to increase headcount.

Stoke Space’s relatively rapid ascent has also been sparked by a $9.1 million seed funding round, as well as research grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Air Force.

Stoke Space was founded in 2019 by Lapsa, a veteran of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture; and Tom Feldman, who worked at Blue Origin after interning at SpaceX. The startup was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2021 cohort.

The company has a a 75-acre rocket test facility in Moses Lake, Wash., in addition to a 21,000-square-foot engineering and manufacturing headquarters in Kent, Wash., not far from Blue Origin’s HQ.

Industrious Ventures led the Series B funding round, joined by the University of Michigan, Sparta Group, Long Journey, and additional contributors. Existing investors Breakthrough Energy, Y Combinator, Point72 Ventures, NFX, MaC Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and In-Q-Tel also participated. The round pushes its total raised to-date to $175 million.

Seattle-area recruiting software startup SeekOut laid off 16 employees, or about 7% of its workforce.

The company confirmed the layoffs in response to a GeekWire inquiry Wednesday, citing a restructuring to align with growth investment areas. The startup now has about 200 employees.

SeekOut is still hiring and plans to reach 225 employees by year-end.

The company raised $115 million last year, pushing its valuation past $1.2 billion, making it one of Seattle’s so-called “unicorn” startups.

It’s one of several Seattle unicorns to reduce headcount amid the broader tech slowdown. Rad Power Bikes, Highspot, Karat, Convoy, Flexe, and others have cut staff over the past year.

Founded in 2017, SeekOut’s software is used by more than 1,000 companies including Salesforce and McKinsey & Co. to help with recruiting. It pulls data on more than 700 million potential candidates from a myriad of sources, including GitHub and published papers. The software also features built-in diversity filters.

Earlier this year SeekOut launched SeekOut Assist, a generative AI product based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT that aims to speed up how recruiters find qualified candidates.

The company landed $65 million in 2021, when it won Startup of the Year honors at the GeekWire Awards.

Its investors include Tiger Global Management, Madrona Venture Group, Mayfield, and others. SeekOut has raised $189 million to date.  

SeekOut CEO Anoop Gupta is a former technical assistant to Bill Gates who previously led Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group. He won CEO of the Year honors at the 2022 GeekWire Awards. His co-founders include CTO Aravind Bala, a former Microsoft partner engineering manager who worked on products including Bing and Office, and Vikas Manocha and John Tippett, who both also worked at Microsoft. 

Seattle venture capital firm First Row Partners is launching The Ensemble Event Fund, a new startup competition that aims to help boost angel investor networks in the Pacific Northwest.

The new fund is accepting applications for startups across the U.S. and all tech sectors for a chance to be awarded $150,000-to-$200,000 in early-stage capital. A group of more than 15 experienced angel investors, primarily based in the Pacific Northwest and Bay Area, will screen applications over a multi-month process.

“Recently, the PNW (Pacific Northwest) has seen a decline in active angel group activity,” First Row Partners wrote in a blog post announcing the competition. “We are uniquely suited to fill this gap by leveraging the First Row networks, deal flow, reputation, frameworks and portfolio support of our main funds.”

Founded in 2019 by Minda Brusse and Yoko Okano, First Row Partners invests in pre-seed tech companies primarily in data and software. Brusse said the goal of the competition is to tap into the firm’s existing investing model to activate a new group of investors through social bonds and experience working together. She told GeekWire this will also help to deploy more capital into startups at a time when venture capital funding is declining.

While the startup scene in Seattle has grown, the region has been criticized for its lack of angel investor activity, especially given the success of homegrown giants such as Microsoft and Amazon and subsequent growth of accredited investors.

A recent survey from Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group found that angel investors want increased access to deals and education about investing.

Ensemble’s launch comes at a time when Seattle’s broader angel investing network is consolidating. Last month, the Puget Sound Venture Club, Seattle’s oldest angel group, merged with the Alliance of Angels.

Brusse said there are existing programs such as the Seattle Angel Conference, which offers workshops to help aspiring angel investors learn about pre-seed investment. However, she said that model is designed for those who are just getting started, adding that there is limited opportunity in the region for investors who want to go to the “next level.”

“After you’ve gone through that process, and you’re comfortable with angel investing, you still want to keep getting to know people,” said Brusse, adding that she led two sessions of Seattle Angel Conference with Okano. “But that format may no longer be the one you want to use because it has so much basic learning attached to the time commitment and the way it’s run.”

When founders pitch, Ensemble will task investors with providing feedback through a structured form, along with capturing notes from conversations about the startup. Brusse said the idea to aggregate that information to help founders better understand what they are communicating, helping them identify areas to focus on in future presentations.

She said that founders who apply will gain access to First Row Partners’ workshop recordings, typically reserved for portfolio companies. Startups advancing in the competition will also receive one-on-one access to office hours and specific experts, aimed at helping founders in refining their pitches and fundraising strategies.

“It’s not an accelerator,” said Brusse, who is also a venture partner at New York City-based 2048 Ventures. “But we want to provide entrepreneurial resources along the way, knowing that there may only be one winner in the investment award.”

Ensemble will welcome applicants from any technology sector and location. Brusse said that the decision to expand applications across the U.S. was driven by two insights: the pandemic simplified virtual investor-founder interactions, and a wider geographic perspective will help investor decision-making and support portfolio companies.

“We wanted to be able to show angels that while their relationships with each other might be more regional, there are ways to build deal flow across the U.S.,” Brusse said.

Ensemble said it will announce a winner in early December, with plans to deploy capital before the start of 2024. The fund said it prefers to participate in a startup’s active funding round but will consider other scenarios.

As a serial entrepreneur who started and sold three startups, David Niu knows what it’s like to be a CEO seeking media coverage. And he thinks there’s a better way for companies to land PR that can help drive overall success.

Niu is the CEO and founder of Delight Labs, a new startup that aims to apply lessons from Niu’s experience.

At his first two Seattle startups — NetConversions (sold to aQuantive) and BuddyTV (sold to Vizio) — Niu hired traditional PR firms. It mostly never paid off and Niu had no idea what was or wasn’t working.

“Despite hiring and firing numerous PR agencies, both large and boutique, I never quite cracked the code,” Niu said. “That was until TINYpulse.”

Founded by Niu in 2012, TINYpulse specialized in software that helped companies conduct quick employee surveys and gather feedback.

Niu took PR in-house and treated it more like a high-performing sales team that needed to drive revenue and growth. The company analyzed data and various metrics to boost its chance for media coverage.

TINYpulse also started publishing studies and other marketing content about employee engagement.

“I still remember when we landed a hit with BBC, and our leads funnel exploded overnight,” Niu said. “Leads were buying without a trial, and that spike added millions to our valuation.”

TINYpulse sold to Limeade in 2021 for $8.8 million in cash.  

Delight Labs is working with two clients in the health and wellness sector, and plans to expand. The 4-person company is bootstrapped by Niu.

“Everyone has their approach that can work well for their clients,” he said. “But our clients, like my own experience, oftentimes have unsuccessfully tried PR in the past and want a more transparent, accountable, predictable PR motion that drives acquisition, SEO, and branding success.”

The company generates revenue on a retainer-basis. Niu said he’s thinking about also rolling out a software offering that could compliment the company’s PR services.

Delight Labs released a study Wednesday with survey results related to why companies invest in PR and the metrics they use to measure success. The study found that smaller companies value more revenue-based goals while larger ones value communication-based goals.

Pacific Northwest startups raised $920 million in the third quarter, marking the lowest quarterly amount in five years and a 46% drop compared to the same time period in 2022.

The venture capital market has cooled considerably following a record 2021. The broader tech downturn and elevated interest rates are forcing startups to cut costs and investors are more selective. A number of cash-strapped startup founders are seeking buyers to avoid going out of business or raising cash on unfavorable terms.

Deal count in the Pacific Northwest actually rose to 48 from 46 deals in Q3 of 2022, according GeekWire’s fundings list, which tracks investment raised by privately held tech startups. But overall funding is down — and at a slightly higher clip compared to national trends.

Nationally, venture-backed companies raised $32.7 billion across 2,715 deals in the third quarter, according to PitchBook’s Venture-Monitor report released Wednesday. That’s a 30% drop from the $46.4 billion raised in 3,933 deals during the same quarter last year.

The lack of giant fundings in the Pacific Northwest, particularly deals of at least $100 million, is adding to the overall slump. Only one such deal occurred in the third quarter: Seattle-based biotech company Avalyn raised $175 million last week.

Last year, four Pacific Northwest companies had giant funding rounds: Terrapower ($750 million), Cap Hill Brands ($100 million), Swiftly ($100 million), and Flexe ($119 million), which recently laid off 33% of its workforce.

In addition to Avalyn, the third quarter funding total was buoyed by other notable rounds: Viome ($86.5 million), Wrench ($54.2 million), MotherDuck ($52.5 million), Propio ($43 million), Risc Zero ($40 million), and Hyperproof ($40 million).

About $2 billion was raised in 115 funding rounds through the third quarter, down from $6 billion in 189 deals in the same time period last year, according to GeekWire funding data.

Despite this dip, some remain bullish about the Seattle tech industry. Investors point to factors such as the region’s talent pool and the growth of generative AI as tailwinds for a potential rebound.

Here are other key takeaways from PitchBook’s third quarter report:

• Venture fundraising in the U.S. for the third quarter totaled $42.7 billion across 344 funds, a decrease from last year’s $150.9 billion, according to PitchBook. Pacific Northwest firms are still raising capital. Fuse, PSL Ventures, Ascend, Madrona Venture Labs, and AI2 announced new funds this year, while others such as Voyager Capital are raising.
• Exit activity in the third quarter remained subdued, but the total exit value rose, thanks to a string of public offerings. During this period, there were 216 deals totaling $35.8 billion in deal value, compared to 298 exits totaling $16.4 billion the previous year, according to PitchBook. Notable exits in the Pacific Northwest included Onder, DreamBox Learning, Procore, and APImetrics, according to GeekWire’s M&As and IPOs tracker.

A Seattle startup founded by veteran entrepreneurs landed investment for its artificial intelligence tool that helps account executives engage with customers.

A new SEC filing revealed that Docket raised $5.35 million. Arjun Pillai, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, confirmed the funding to GeekWire but declined to share additional details. Foundation Capital General Partner Ashu Garg is listed as a director in the filing.

“I believe AI will heavily augment the future of sales to make it easier on both the seller and buyer sides,” Pillai told GeekWire.

Docket sells an AI platform billed as a “virtual sales engineer.” The tool uses large language models trained on a business’ information to construct a knowledge graph. The goal is to become part of an account executive’s daily workflow, making it easier for them to ask the right discovery questions and provide answers to complex product inquiries.

“While the investments on the top of the funnel are very high, there hasn’t been enough innovation in the account executive (seller) phase,” Pillai said. “Account executive, sales enablement and product marketing will look very different once Docket takes full shape.”

Pillai most recently served as chief data officer at business intelligence giant ZoomInfo. Prior to that, he founded Seattle AI startup Insent, which ZoomInfo acquired in 2021 as part of an effort to integrate a chatbot function into the company’s suite of tools.

Pillai is joined by co-founder Anoop Thomas Mathew. They both previously co-founded Profoundis, a Kerala, India-based tech software development company. The startup was acquired by Denver-based cloud software company FullContact in 2016. After the acquisition, Pillai eventually became head of data strategy at FullContact, while Mathew served as senior product manager. Mathew most recently founded Iterflow, a tool for Web3 infrastructure.

A number of Seattle sales companies are releasing AI marketing and sales products: Highspot announced in June that it was rolling out AI tools for sales-enablement; Vieu, which emerged from stealth last month, offers an AI tool that provides buyer intelligence for customer engagement; Outreach revealed a GPT-powered email tool earlier this year; and Microsoft unveiled in February its Viva Sales platform, which uses GPT to auto-suggest emails for sales reps.

The news: Longtime Seattle software developers and entrepreneurs Darrin Massena and Mike Harrington have officially launched Hatch, an online makerspace aimed at bringing website-building capability to more “tech curious creators” without requiring programming expertise.

The tech: Hatch’s no-code platform features drag-and-drop design on provided templates or a blank canvas. Creators can experiment with interactivity, animation, responsive physics, and generative AI to make websites, link pages, portfolios, games and more. Users can build with their own materials or choose from thousands of stickers, GIFs, images, videos and more.

Use cases include building sites that feature an online portfolio, a storefront, a links page, and more. Hatch projects can also launch from a device home screen as a progressive web app.

The founders: Massena and Harrington have been collaborating together since about 1986. Both spent around a decade as software developers at Microsoft, working on such things as WindowsNT and Microsoft Bob.

Harrington helped start the video game developer Valve Software in 1996 with Gabe Newell, where he was a member of the core team behind the hit “Half-Life.” Massena also got on the gaming map after co-founding Spiffcode, makers of the award-winning mobile game “Warfare Incorporated.”

The two reunited in 2005 to co-found the online photo editing service Picnik, which was acquired by Google in 2010.

Why now? “We’ve had a lot of success, and still had some untapped ideas that we had been kicking around for a while, looking for the right time, for the right opportunity,” Massena said of working with Harrington again. The two first started building Hatch two years ago.

“As long-term software creators, we see software itself as a creative medium,” Massena added. “We can make solutions, we can make entertainment, we can make communications tools. All these things can be made by people who are skilled in the art, who’ve gone through the educational process and know how to use the tools. And that’s something that we’ve been thinking for a long time — can we bring that to more people?”

The competition: Harrington said Hatch goes beyond other no-code website makers such as Wix or Squarespace, and others that are almost all targeted at businesses.

“In terms of no-code website builders, a lot of them are more template-y and they’re kind of stuck in the grid,” Harrington said. “You can get pretty far pretty fast if you are happy with a certain look. The thing that we do is we get you out of the grid. It’s incredibly freeform.”

The view on artificial intelligence: Among its tools, Hatch features an AI coder which allows users to describe desired interactions and animations. Hatch writes and runs the code for the project and the user can ask for changes or edit the code themselves.

“There’s a lot of fear mongering,” Massena said of AI. “We see it just like we see software and computers … AI is another creative tool. The human is the architect or the director, saying, ‘This is what I’m trying to do.’ But having an assistant that can help you realize your vision, we think that’s a great place for AI.”

The community: Hatch allows registered users to create, publish and share pages publicly, and open source projects by making them “remixable,” which allows other users to duplicate and modify the content for their own projects.

Monetization: There are free and paid versions of the platform. A Hatch Pro account is $9 a month. That includes hosting and custom domain support; a removable Hatch watermark; 20 published projects; unlimited pages per project; and more.

The team: Hatch is bootstrapped and employs 14 people, with offices in downtown Seattle.

Seattle startup Pulumi landed $41 million as it looks to boost its leadership position in the infrastructure as code market and invest in new AI-fueled products.

Madrona Venture Group, which led the company’s seed round in 2017, led the latest round. Other existing backers including Silicon Valley heavyweight NEA, Bellevue, Wash.-based Tola Capital, and San Francisco’s Strike Capital invested again.

The Series C round is a vote of confidence in Pulumi, which helps developers build underlying cloud computing infrastructure using general purpose languages such as JavaScript and Python. Its tools work across platforms and technologies including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes and others.

“It allows us to just continue doing what’s working really well with Pulumi in the market, but then expand and do even more,” Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy said of the fresh funding.

Pulumi has more than 2,000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50, and counts 150,000 users on its open-source platform. Revenue has doubled over the past year.

The infrastructure as code market is expected to reach $2.3 billion by 2027, according to a recent report.

“We have the best product,” Duffy said. “Customers tell us this all the time.”

But Pulumi sees more opportunity beyond its bread and butter.

The company began releasing new products last year with Pulumi Deployments, which helps run deployments remotely. This year it rolled out Pulumi Insights, which provides analytics and search capabilities across cloud infrastructure, and Pulumi AI, which generates infrastructure as code using natural language.

“The infrastructure as code building block allows us to build these new product experiences,” Duffy said. “They are explicitly targeting other problems that we see with our customers.”

Increasing use of artificial intelligence is a tailwind for Pulumi, given the cloud computing demands of AI. And Pulumi itself is using AI to bolster its own products.

“Companies are thinking about cloud infrastructure as a competitive advantage, not an afterthought or a cost center,” Duffy said. “And AI is really taking that to the next level.”

The company did not provide an updated valuation. Total funding to date is $99 million.

“There is a huge opportunity to build a durable, iconic company in Pulumi,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director at Madrona.

Pulumi recently hired longtime cloud industry leader Bob Laskey as chief customer officer. The company has more than 100 employees.

Duffy and co-founder Eric Rudder are former Microsoft engineering leaders. CTO Luke Hoban spent 12 years at Microsoft and more recently was at Amazon Web Services.

Providence’s Digital Innovation Group announced a new platform to help hospitals sustain relationships with patients, part of the Seattle health system’s growing portfolio of healthcare-focused tech companies.

Praia Health aims to “remove barriers to patient care” by customizing health journeys and connecting them to suitable services, products, and resources.

Praia’s flagship product is its Health Identity and Engagement Platform. It offers four main components: patient profiling, consumer experience products, healthcare systems integration tools, and analytics. The goal is to create patient profiles that go beyond just clinical records, helping hospitals offer more specialized care throughout health journeys.

Providence said Praia’s platform launched internally in the beginning of 2022, supporting more than 3 million user accounts. The Renton, Wash.-based health system has more than 50 hospitals and hundreds of clinics.

The startup is led by executive-in-residence Justin Dearborn, who previously held CEO roles at PatientBond, Tribune Publishing Company, and Merge Healthcare.

In a Providence blog post, Dearborn said: “Health Systems have been hampered in their ability to digitally connect with customers in a meaningful way because the technical environment they operate within is clinically-oriented, resource-intensive and change resistant.”

The idea with Praia is to help healthcare companies adopt a digital flywheel, a method traditionally used by finance, retail, and ecommerce to retain customers through a platform that offers various benefits.

Since launching in 2014, Providence’s Digital Innovation Group has spun out companies including Xealth, a digital platform that collates services from multiple vendors; DexCare, which manages health system capacity and appointments and recently raised $75 million; and Circle, a women’s health app that was acquired by Wildflower Health in 2018.

The in-house technology incubator is led by Providence Chief Digital Officer Sara Vaezy, who was appointed to the role last year.

Related: Q&A with Providence’s new digital chief on spinning out startups and the future of health tech

A pair of longtime entrepreneurs wants to help you find yourself — with a little help from ChatGPT.

Erick Rivas and Simona Trakiyska are the co-founders of Kaji, an app featuring a library of self-improvement and wellness audio recordings, enhanced by a chatbot that personalizes content recommendations based on user preferences and mood.

Kaji’s goal is to help users in “scuba diving” into their own thoughts, said Trakiyska, a former journalist and wellness-focused content strategist who co-founded Seattle Yoga News and has been practicing yoga and meditation for more than 30 years.

Rivas is the co-founder and former CTO of Limeade, an employee experience software company based in the Seattle area that went public in 2019 via the Australian stock market. He also serves as co-founder and CTO of Keme IX, a “Chakra Healing Hotel & Holistic Center” in Tulum, Mexico.

Rivas said the startup sets itself apart from existing meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, and Meditopia through its AI-driven recommendation tool. When users talk to the chatbot, they complete a brief behavioral assessment. The app’s machine learning and AI then uses that information to create personalized audio playlists, covering topics such as grief, wisdom, loneliness, relationships, motivation, leadership, and more.

Trakiyska said the company’s user prototype is generally tech-savvy but seeks a fast way to disconnect. She said the app avoids tracking or gamification features, asking just three questions before suggesting an audio session. The idea is to let users multitask during activities like hiking, walking, lounging, or working at a desk.

“We don’t want people to be sitting there and chatting with a chatbot all day,” said Trakiyska, who was a content marketer at companies including Simplicity Consulting, Aduro, and Limeade.

App data shows that users are spending about an hour on Kaji on average per session, she said. It has been available for more than a year and has “thousands” of users, Rivas said.

Kaji said it includes ancient wisdom and modern psychology into its audio scripts. The startup owns its library of content, commissioning scripts from a network of therapists, psychologists, mental health experts, and advisors. It also hires voice actors, who create voice-over recordings and add background music.

“It’s all content that we’ve developed from scratch,” Rivas said.

The app is free to start, with a subscription-based tier costing $7.99 per month and $69.99 annually. Rivas said the startup is also rolling out an enterprise option for employers to offer as a workplace benefit.

Kaji has been primarily bootstrapped to this point, with some investment from friends and family. It does not have any employees on payroll, instead contracting engineering and content creation to gig workers.

Trakiyska said the next phase will be rolling out in-person workshops and retreats, where the startup takes customers to various destinations for “immersive listening experiences,” in addition to its online workshops.

— Rippl, a Seattle startup focused on the mental health of seniors, announced Jamie Sharp will join as chief medical officer.

Sharp previously worked as vice president and chief medical officer for Medicare at Aetna, a CVS subsidiary healthcare company. In that role, she led clinical oversight for the Medicare and Special Needs Plan division, overseeing a team of healthcare professionals in care management, risk-based provider relationships, appeals, and health equity.

Sharp earned her medical doctorate degree from the University of Colorado and began her career as a practicing physician in the state. She went on to hold medical leadership roles at Evolent Health, Catholic Health Initiatives, Humana, and others.

“Jamie has a long and successful track record finding new and innovative ways to provide better care for vulnerable seniors with complex conditions,” Rippl Care CEO Kris Engskov said in a statement.

Rippl is developing a care program focused on seniors with dementia and other neurocognitive conditions. The startup raised $32 million last year from Arch Venture Partners, General Catalyst, GV (formerly Google Ventures), F-Prime Capital and Mass General Brigham Ventures. 

— Diego Oppenheimer announced he is joining San Francisco-based startup Guardrails AI as co-founder and board member. He previously co-founded Seattle machine learning startup Algorithmia, which was acquired by DataRobot in July 2021. Oppenheimer is partner and CEO-in-residence at venture capital firm and incubator Factory.

— PitchBook, the Seattle-based financial database company, hired Paul Stoddart as chief marketing officer. He previously worked as chief marketing officer of customer and partner success at Salesforce.

— Tasso, a Seattle startup developing self-administered blood collection devices, appointed Monica Williams as CFO. She held CFO roles at Seattle rewards and payments startup Tango and general contracting platform Pro.com. Prior to that, Williams was vice president of FP&A and treasury at Zillow Group.

— Julie Gerardi joined Seattle biotech startup Parse Biosciences as vice president of business development. She previously served as vice president of business development, biological modeling and functional genomics at Tempus Labs.

— Cassie Pless was hired by Seattle legal tech startup Lexion as vice president of sales. She most recently was senior director of commercial sales at Seattle sales tech company Outreach.

— Carol Dahl, who spent 10 years as executive director of The Lemelson Foundation, joined the U.S. Small Business Administration. She will serve on the newly-formed Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Advisory Committee.

There are few who can say, as Ben Eidelson can, that perhaps his most important career decision came from an internal dialogue with his imagined teenage daughter.

Eidelson, an engineer whose first startup was acquired by Google and his second by payment processor Stripe, was struggling with the existential threat posed by global warming. His daughter was just a preschooler, but he was haunted by a vision of the teen she would become asking him if he’d understood the climate crisis, and what had prevented him from working to solve it.

“That ate at me,” Eidelson said.

So last year the Seattle dad assumed the role of Climate Papa. Eidelson purchased a web domain and quit his job at Stripe. He began investing in and advising climate tech startups. Along with his brother, he published a step-by-step guide encouraging other software engineers to seek out climate endeavors that needed their skills. In June, he launched the Climate Papa podcast. Now he’s raising money for Stepchange, a climate tech venture fund.

This week, Eidelson hosted the first Climate Papa meetup at a kid-friendly Seattle brewery. The event was part of PNW Climate Week, an informal climate summit held across Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, B.C.

Eidelson’s focus isn’t on creating a social networking group, but he was glad for the chance to meet in person with like-minded people. More than a dozen adults attended the event, with roughly half as many kids in tow. Age depending, guests tucked into baby oranges and cheese sticks or pints of Stoup Brewing IPA.

Patrick Gold was one of the attendees, along with his 13-month-old daughter. Almost two years ago he made the jump from software engineer for companies including Deloitte Digital and Slalom Build to the nonprofit Climate Neutral, which certifies climate neutral brands.

“I just really decided to do something better for the world rather than making money for other people,” Gold said. “Having a new kid, I wanted to change the world.”

For Eidelson, climate investing is potentially his most powerful tool for world-changing impact. He’s managing partner for the Stepchange fund, which will focus on early stage startups with investments of roughly $100,000-150,000. He plans to wrap up fundraising in the next month or two.

He is seeking partners not just with financial means, but also with pertinent expertise to share with the ventures they back.

“It’s a lot of operational people who have built companies or products,” he said in an interview after the brewery meetup.

Other Stepchange participants include:

• Arthur Shwab, part-time venture partner for the fund; lead of design and engineering teams at Bilberrry; and Eidelson’s brother-in-law.
• Stephanie Hannon, fund advisor whose experience includes chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
• Jessyn Farrell, fund advisor and director of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment.
• Ari Steinberg, fund advisor and former head of the Airbnb Seattle office.
• Ian Wong, fund advisor and co-founder of Opendoor.
• Bradley Horowitz, fund advisor and former vice president and advisor at Google.

Eidelson isn’t sure if he’ll be organizing many Climate Papa meetups given his other initiatives in the climate sphere. And there is at least one other effort focused on empowering and connecting climate-concerned fathers: Climate Dads, an advocacy and social networking group that launched in 2018 in Philadelphia and has more than 800 members.

Eidelson is already taking action on the investment front, backing companies that include Seattle’s Line.Build. The startup has a platform for helping contractors find rebates, grants and tax credits for climate friendly projects. Considering his professional expertise, Eidelson will continue focusing — at least for the next few years — on software startups.

“It’s where I can jump in and have the most impact as quickly as possible,” he said. “We all have to get going. We are at war with the emissions we’ve released.”

Seattle-area startup NorthStar Care raised $6 million in a seed funding round co-led by well-known author and business coach Tony Robbins and Chicago-based early-stage venture firm Starting Line.

The fresh cash will help boost its telehealth program that aims to help individuals facing alcohol and opioid use disorders. The program includes addiction-related medication, professional care and oversight, and peer support.

Founded in 2021, the startup offers a program to treat substance use disorders that it claims has an 86% success rate. The idea is to use telehealth to improve access to rehab for patients who would otherwise struggle to participate and to boost retention by removing barriers to entry.

“It’s hard to find companies that are innovating and getting real results in the field of addiction,” Robbins said in a statement. “Addiction is not a new crisis, and past approaches have been extremely expensive and massively ineffective.”

NorthStar was founded by Amanda Wilson, who also launched the Addiction Research and Education Foundation, a non-profit organization that conducts and publishes addiction medicine-related research. She previously co-founded Boulder Care, a Portland, Ore.-based startup using telehealth to treat people with substance use disorder that raised $36 million last year.

Wilson said NorthStar aims to combat high relapse rates in traditional rehab through a comprehensive approach that leverages technology. She said medication and other recovery tools are often viewed as unnecessary.

“Today, we’re treating alcohol and opioid addiction as if peer support were really the core part of the treatment,” said Wilson. “That’s a bit backwards.”

NorthStar offers a year-long program, combining medical supervision, nutrient and medication therapy, and group support. It has 27 employees, including physicians, clinicians, nurses, navigators, and peer guides.

Every patient who joins the program receives a virtual reality headset, allowing them to tune into group peer support or group therapeutic meetings with other patients in the program. Wilson said the startup also uses digital breathalyzers to track patient recovery journeys, with plans to roll out a wearable device that monitors alcohol intake and other health-related data.

NorthStar’s business model is primarily insurance-based, but it has contracts with employers and accepts out-of-pocket payments. The startup also serves both active and retired military personnel. It currently has 40 patients.

NorthStar is in the process of growing its network of insurance providers, part of a broader goal of having 150 million people covered for its care, Wilson said.

“Our vision is to try to get in-network with as many insurers as possible,” she said.

The startup operates both the for-profit clinical group practice and the non-profit research arm Addiction Research and Education Foundation. It has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles on best practices, buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder, and other methods to enhance access to care.

Wilson is joined by co-founder and Chief Science Officer Lisa Chiodo, who is CEO of the Addiction Research and Education Foundation. She is also an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the college of nursing.

When Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman briefly spoke with Sam Altman, he warned him to tread lightly when it comes to infusing artificial intelligence into real estate search.

“You should be careful about housing,” Kelman told the OpenAI CEO. “It’s not like other searches. There’s so much regulation around it — and for good reason.”

Kelman recalled the conversation during a virtual panel discussion hosted by real estate startup Pacaso on Tuesday.

In May, OpenAI began rolling out ChatGPT plugins in partnership with Redfin and Zillow Group to boost how people search for homes online.

But one month later, in response to a June report by real estate news site Inman discussing the discriminatory risks posed by chatbots, and after reviewing a 28-page report from Redfin, OpenAI swiftly deactivated all real estate plugins, according to Kelman.

The Redfin and Zillow plugins are no longer available on ChatGPT. Both were disabled in June.

“We agree with their decision and are working together with OpenAI to ensure ChatGPT’s responses to users’ questions meet fair housing standards — an issue we raised with them and are optimistic that they’ll be able to address,” said Redfin spokesperson Angela Cherry.

Redfin created the document for OpenAI to show examples of the “ideal way” that ChatGPT would respond to a user question about housing, in line with fair housing regulations, Cherry said.

Zillow spokesperson Claire Carroll said the company is focusing on “other AI priorities.”

“The generative AI space is fast-moving, and we’re excited about the ways it will help our customers and partners,” she said.

The rollout of the plugins sparked questions about how the new technology plays into the longstanding issue of racial discrimination in real estate, and the possibility of violating fair housing laws. The Inman report from June highlighted how users could ask ChatGPT which neighborhoods were associated with specific demographics.

Kelman was asked how Redfin avoids racial bias or discrimination when building AI models to identify buyer likelihood. He said the company does not provide demographic information.

“They don’t mind reading another book,” Kelman said of training AI models. “We’ve just taken some books off the shelf around user information.”

Redfin in 2021 announced it would not include neighborhood crime data on its real estate search platform.

“We were considering this because we’re very much focused on answering all the questions people have when they’re considering a home purchase, and we know that one of these questions is whether they’ll feel safe in a given home or neighborhood,” Redfin wrote in a blog post at the time. “But the data available don’t allow us to speak accurately to that question, and given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias.”

Redfin settled a lawsuit last year with the National Fair Housing Alliance and nine other organizations, which alleged the company’s minimum home price policy violated the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against buyers and sellers in communities of color.

Increasing use of automation and larger amounts of data have spurred debate about discrimination in online marketplaces such as eBay and Airbnb.

Kelman emphasized that Redfin has deeply considered bias in AI systems. “There’s no great solution to it,” he said. “And it’s a broader problem than just real estate search.”

AI’s biggest impact in real estate so far has been its ability to predict prices and recommend homes, Kelman said. In regard to recent advancements in generative AI, he said he mostly sees real estate agents use ChatGPT as a so-called “spam machine” to help with generating emails to send to customers.

Kelman was joined in Tuesday’s discussion by Spencer Rascoff, the former Zillow Group CEO and co-founder of Pacaso, a real estate startup that sells fractional shares of vacation homes. The former business rivals talked about the state of the market, real estate-related legal cases, and return-to-work’s impact on housing.

Kelman said the current housing market is unlike the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, sellers were pressured to sell their houses at much lower prices because they couldn’t afford their mortgages, making overall home prices cheaper, he said.

Kelman said there isn’t “widespread distress” in today’s market, meaning fewer homes are available for sale amid already-low inventory. At the same time, a recent Redfin study found that more than 90% of homeowners have mortgage rates below 6%, keeping them locked into their current homes to avoid today’s elevated rates.

Kelman said changes in the adjustable rate mortgage rate or a sudden economic swing, either up or down, could force movement in the housing market. But for now he said the market remains sluggish, with only 4 million units transacting annually, down from 6 million in 2021.

“It’s going to be a real grind,” he said.

Two class-action lawsuits could change the structure of real estate. Rascoff called out the “elephant in the room,” referring to a pair of lawsuits related to buyer-agent commission structures. The lawsuits claim that forcing a seller’s agent to share half of their commissions with the buyer’s agent keeps commissions artificially high in the U.S.

“My guess is that most judges are hesitant to cut the real estate industry in half and say all the buyer’s agents are out of work,” Kelman said about the lawsuits. “But it’s possible the DOJ could follow up and do something more aggressive.”

Return-to-office is having an effect on some housing markets. Kelman said there’s somewhat of a housing rebound in places like Seattle, as large companies are calling employees back to the office. Many workers who moved to more affordable regions like Florida and Texas during the pandemic are now returning, he said. Large employers, including Redfin and Amazon, have summoned employees back to their workplaces.

“A bunch of our Seattle agents are busy with people,” Kelman said. “Mostly for Amazon.”

Seattle startup Revefi raised $10.5 million in new funding for its artificial intelligence enterprise observability platform that helps companies keep track of their data costs, usage and performance.

Founded in 2021, the startup’s main product is its Data Operations Cloud, acting as a “co-pilot” for data teams to optimize data transfers to and from their cloud warehouses. The startup said the tool is “zero-touch,” meaning it works instantly with a customer’s data. Revefi also sells an AI feature for insights, helping data teams move quickly to identify and correct “critical data issues.”

The company is led by CEO Sanjay Agrawal, who was previously co-founder and head of the Seattle office for AI analytics company ThoughtSpot. Before that, he held software engineering roles at Microsoft and Google. He’s joined by CTO Shashank Gupta, a former senior staff software engineer of data infrastructure at Facebook. He was also co-founder and head of engineering at ThoughtSpot.

There are a number of startups building tools to help customers get a handle on their observability data. Seattle startup Edge Delta sells a software platform for engineering and security teams to analyze data at its source. The company raised $63 million in new funding last year.

The seed round was led by Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha, with participation from GTMfund, Neythri Futures Fund, Ajeet Singh, and others. 

The news: Seattle-area financial services technology startup PortX landed $16.5 million in fresh cash.

Investors: The Series B funding round was co-led by Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse — which just raised its own $250 million fund — and Curql, a collective of credit unions. BankTech Ventures, EJF Capital, and the Btech Consortium also joined.

The tech: PortX, led by CEO David Wexler, sells financial services infrastructure software to community banks, credit unions, and fintech companies. It aims to help customers enable embedded banking-as-a-service solutions, eliminate vendor dependencies, and streamline access to banking data. The company says the new money will power initiatives including “enhanced AI offerings and data automation components.”

New subsidiary: With the backing of Curql, PortX is also forming a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) to better serve its credit union customers. Curql manages a strategic investment fund representing 68 credit unions and credit union industry partners. 

Background: Mercer Island, Wash.-based PortX was spun out of ModusBox last year. That startup was founded in 2013 with a focus on design, development, and support for financially inclusive, national-level real-time payment networks.

Quotable: “Their vision and technology align perfectly with the industry’s evolving needs,” Brendan Wales, a founding partner at Fuse, said of PortX. “This is our second investment in the company, and it’s not just a vote of confidence in PortX, but a bet on the transformative power of open banking in shaping the future of commerce and financial services.”

Final details: PortX has raised $26.5 million to date, including a $10 million Series A round a year ago. The company employs 78 people.

What if you could ask a robot to warm up your lunch and have it find the microwave by itself?

That was a question posed by a group of Microsoft researchers in a February paper exploring different ways OpenAI’s ChatGPT could create technical instructions for robotic tasks through simple prompts.

A new Seattle startup called Scaled Foundations aims to expand on that research through an AI-powered development platform that makes it easier for non-technical users to create commands for robots.

Launched earlier this year, the Seattle company emerged from stealth mode Wednesday and announced an undisclosed investment from Khosla Ventures and E14 Fund.

The company is led by Ashish Kapoor, who spent 17 years at Microsoft, most recently as general manager of autonomous systems and robotics research. In the position, he created AirSim, an open-source simulator for drones.

Kapoor also co-authored the paper “ChatGPT for Robotics.” In the report, the researchers wrote that robotics systems, unlike text-only applications, demand a grasp of real-world physics, environmental context, and the ability to perform physical actions.

Scaled Foundations, which operates independently from Microsoft, is trying to accomplish that goal with its flagship platform called General Robotic Intelligence Development (GRID). The product includes an AI foundation model for robotics, synthetic data generation, and a tool for orchestration, training, and fine tuning.

For example, customers can use the startup’s platform to program a drone for an inspection mission. GRID can help plan the best flight path, analyze data with an inspection model, and ensure the drone is safe by avoiding obstacles and finding safe landing spots.

Scaled Foundations has a similar approach to Seattle startup Groundlight, which taps into a company’s network of cameras to gather real-time data using computer vision and AI. Groundlight’s platform lets users ask questions in natural language — such as, “is there a truck in the loading dock?” — and then get results instantly. It works in a variety of applications including video stream analysis, industrial automation, process monitoring, retail analytics, and robotics. The startup raised $10 million in April.

Scaled Foundations is initially focusing on aerial robotics and vehicles, with a plan to eventually roll out tools for manipulation and wheeled robots. It declined to disclose customer data, but said that it works with industries across renewable energy, oil and gas, wildfire detection, and urban air mobility vehicles.

Dinesh Narayanan, the company’s co-founder and head of commercialization, said there are currently no regulatory barriers unique to infusing AI into robotics. “However, AI capabilities will ensure safer operations for robots and commercial vehicles, which we believe will accelerate regulatory support for these critical categories,” he said.

Kapoor brought on former Microsoft colleagues Sai Vemprala and Shuhang Chen; both were part of the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s Autonomous Systems Research team. Vemprala and Chen, who are co-founders, lead technical strategy for Scaled Foundations. They are joined by Narayanan, who previously held international business development and strategy roles at Microsoft. The company has five employees.

A growing number of leaks and stolen intellectual property are unsettling leaders at large-member organizations and government agencies. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court said it could not determine the leaker of Justice Samuel Alito’s high-profile opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.

Now a new Seattle-area startup wants to help prevent these types of leaks and data breaches using digital watermarking and forensics technology.

EchoMark is emerging from stealth mode and announced a $10 million seed round on Wednesday led by San Francisco venture capital firm Craft Ventures.

Founded in 2022 by former Microsoft corporate vice president Troy Batterberry, the Kirkland, Wash.-based startup gives customers a way to place both visible and invisible forensic markings on documents and emails to help identify leakers, or individuals who release secret information to the public. The company also aims to address information stealing when employees move from one company to another.

EchoMark adds visible watermarks in the style of personalized tags to emails and documents, and inserts hidden markers or subtle text alterations for tracking.

In a recent demo with GeekWire, Batterberry showed how EchoMark’s tools can slightly alter spacing between letters or the alignment of text within documents, creating “subtle visual perturbations” in each file.

Batterberry said the software is designed so that documents are “cryptographically and statistically unique,” preventing individuals from being able to guess how they are being altered.

In the event of a leak, the startup’s computer vision tech can pinpoint the version of the document that was released to the public or stolen, helping forensics teams move quickly to identify a leaker with high confidence. The company also offers “advanced natural language analysis” to detect if information was copy-and-pasted, as well as tools to identify if information was captured through a screenshot.

In the demo, Batterberry also showed how EchoMark users can use the company’s large language models to slightly rephrase text and grammar within emails to create unique copies of the same message. For instance, a company-wide email from a CEO could have slightly different words in each paragraph but the same overall semantic meaning, he said.

The rephrasing feature resembles a Canary Trap, a method for detecting leakers by adding variations in document versions.

EchoMark is focused on documents and emails for now.

Other companies are working on similar technology. Google last month released an invisible watermark feature for its AI images.

Data breaches are becoming more frequent and intense, costing an average of $4.45 million per data breach, up 15% from three years ago, according to a 2023 report by IBM.

Whistleblower protection laws provide federal protections for individuals who report wrongdoing or illegal activities within an organization or government agency, shielding them from retaliation such as termination or harassment. The idea is to encourage transparency and accountability in both the public and private sectors.

Asked about potential ethical concerns about suppressing information leaks, Batterberry said the company’s technology is designed to “keep private information private.”

Batterberry spent more than 25 years at Microsoft, working in managerial roles in various departments including Bing, MSN, Xbox, Dynamics, and Teams. Prior to that, he was a systems engineer at Sony, part of a team that created interactive TV and entertainment systems for commercial aircraft. Batterberry began his career at the U.S. Department of Defense, serving as a missile systems engineer.

EchoMark has three customers, including auction house Christie’s and Craft Ventures. The startup has 12 employees and plans to increase headcount across sales, marketing, customer success, and engineering teams.

Flexe, a Seattle logistics startup that hit a $1 billion valuation last year, has laid off 33% of its staff.

The company confirmed the cuts to GeekWire but did not provide specific headcount data. Flexe employs more than 400 people, according to LinkedIn. Update: A new filing with the Washington state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system shows 131 layoffs at Flexe.

Founded in 2013, Flexe sells on-demand warehousing space for online retailers, as well as transportation and fulfillment services. The company raised a $119 million Series D round last year, becoming one of Seattle’s rare “unicorns,” or startups valued at $1 billion or more.

The freight market slowdown is impacting various logistics startups, including freight forwarding giant Flexport, which laid off 20% of its workforce in January and is in cost-cutting mode.

Seattle digital trucking marketplace Convoy, another unicorn, has laid off employees several times over the past year.

It’s a different environment than 2021, when funding to logistics startups such as Flexe nearly doubled year-over-year amid a pandemic-driven surge in online shopping and higher freight volumes.

Flexe is led by CEO and co-founder Karl Siebrecht, the former CEO of AdReady and former president of aQuantive’s Atlas technology division.

After the company raised its Series D round last year, Siebrecht told GeekWire that “we need to be really smart about how we manage that cash given the market uncertainty,” adding, “we have to make investments in scalable growth — not just growth itself.”

The broader tech downturn spurred thousands of layoffs across the tech sector, though cuts have slowed in recent months.

Flexe won Next Tech Titan honors at the GeekWire Awards in May.

The company’s former longtime CTO David Glick stepped down in January.

Flexe investors include Activate Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Prologis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., and Tiger Global. Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock invested in the Series D round.

T-Mobile Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of T-Mobile, is launching a second investment fund to back 5G-related products and services for the T-Mobile network in areas including AI for mobile and edge computing.

Portfolio startups will get access to the telecommunication giant’s network and expertise, infrastructure, and cash. The first fund, announced in 2020, includes investments in AI-powered wildfire detection startup Pano AI, cloud data protection company Trilio, mobile communications startup Movius, driverless car startup Halo.Car, and others. The fund has 11 active companies in its portfolio, according to PitchBook.

The size of the new fund, announced Tuesday, was not revealed.

T-Mobile said it will invest in tech to add to its line of consumer products and services, such as smart home products, connected wearables, and mobile apps for sports and entertainment. The company said it will also invest in startups that can add to its business services through edge computing, vehicle navigation, cybersecurity, workforce applications, among others.

The company partners with Touchdown Ventures to help manage the fund.

T-Mobile reported $19.2 billion in revenue for the second quarter, down 2.2% year-over-year. The company beat analyst expectations for customer additions. Last month T-Mobile said it would lay off 7,000 employees, or about 7% of its workforce.

Former Tableau CFO Damon Fletcher is coming out of retirement to launch a startup that helps tech companies get a hold of their cloud costs amid a surge in spending driven by artificial intelligence.

Millworks Analytics is a cost analysis platform that helps businesses better understand and manage their cloud expenses. The Seattle-based startup emerged from stealth mode Tuesday alongside the launch of its flagship product Caliper.

Fletcher spent more than seven years at Tableau in various financial leadership roles, eventually becoming the data visualization giant’s CFO in 2018. Before that, he held managerial roles at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and was most recently CFO at DataRobot.

Fletcher recruited former Tableau colleague Michael Arvold to be the company’s co-founder and CTO. Arvold was a former senior director at Tableau who worked in the office of the CTO. He also held software engineering roles at Microsoft and Donnelley Financial Solutions.

Fletcher pointed to two opposing forces driving demand for the product: elevated interest rates are pushing companies to reduce costs, while advancements in artificial intelligence are causing a bump in cloud spend. He said he recently spoke with an executive who saw their company’s cloud costs go from $5,000 to $50,000 because it implemented AI models in production.

Fletcher said he was inspired to launch Millworks earlier this year after seeing the layoffs at Tableau and the broader tech industry, where he had a hand in workforce reductions at DataRobot last year. The goal with the startup is to create value for these workers and investors, while providing tools that help companies reduce costs and create a culture of fiscal responsibility to avoid future layoffs.

Millworks helps finance leaders pinpoint areas to cut costs. The platform currently works with Amazon Web Services, with plans to integrate with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake and Datadog.

Fletcher said the startup will soon roll out generative AI features. This includes a tagging tool for automatically labeling budget items, a forecasting option to determine cloud spending optimization, and a gamification component designed to foster a culture of fiscal responsibility, including leaderboards, personal accountability trails, and action impact scores.

“People are going to have to be more nimble and manage their costs differently than they did two or three years ago,” Fletcher said, adding that it’s also difficult for companies to raise cash from investors at the moment.

A market study by Gartner found that worldwide cloud spend is expected to grow more than 21% in 2023 to $597 billion, reaching a total of $724 billion in 2024. Cloud costs represent the second largest expense for most tech companies, trailing only employee salaries, Fletcher said.

Several cloud cost measurement companies exist on the market, such as CloudHealth, which VMWare acquired in 2018, and Cloudability, which Apptio acquired in 2019. There are startups like Seattle-based MontyCloud, Reserved.AI, and CoreStack, as well as Boston-based CloudZero, which recently raised $32 million.

Millworks, which has been bootstrapped to this point, has five employees.

Costco is broadening its reach into healthcare through a partnership with Sesame, a New York-based medical care marketplace startup that connects consumers directly with primary care and mental health clinicians for appointments online and in-person without insurance.

Sesame announced Monday that Costco members will receive primary care visits starting at $29 and other discounts. The startup, which does not accept insurance, aims to accommodate individuals who are uninsured, have a high deductible insurance, or want to pay-per-visit.

Sesame, which raised $27 million last year, has more than 3,500 clinicians on the platform who set their own price and typically work from their own clinics. The startup is backed by GV, Virgin Group, General Catalyst and Giant Ventures.

Costco and Sesame are not planning to open clinics in stores, according to Bloomberg.

The partnership is another effort by Costco to boost its healthcare services options, expanding on its pharmacies, optical care and hearing aids. The company — which increased net sales by 1.9% to $52.6 billion in its most recent fiscal quarter — is looking to boost sales after low growth coming out of a pandemic surge. It has nearly 125 million membership cardholders worldwide.

Costco’s growing healthcare push follows other retailers, including Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce giant earlier this year acquired primary care company One Medical for $3.9 billion. Last year it shut down Amazon Care, a hybrid of virtual, in-home primary care and urgent care services, without brick-and-mortar clinics or physical locations.

Peregrine Hydrogen, a Santa Cruz, Calif., startup developing technology for producing clean hydrogen, raised $7.8 million in seed financing.

The company is aiming to manufacture climate friendly hydrogen that is cost competitive with dirtier hydrogen made from methane. Its strategy includes using electrolyzing technology to produce valuable industrial chemicals alongside hydrogen.

Bill Gates connection: Peregrine spun out of Orca Sciences, a climate-focused R&D incubator funded by Bill Gates and now affiliated with his Breakthrough Energy organization. Gates Frontier, the Microsoft co-founder’s investment firm, contributed to the seed round.

The team: Peregrine’s CEO and co-founder is Friðrik Lárusson, a Seattle-based entrepreneur, physicist and electrical engineer who spent more than six years at Intellectual Ventures, an innovation hub created by former Microsoft researcher Nathan Myhrvold and backed by Gates.

Other co-founders include Stefan Omelchenko, a former Apple engineer; chemical engineer Matthew Shaner; and Orca Sciences founder Ian McKay.

The investors: Bidra led the investment round, with participation from Gates Frontier, Builders, Presidio Ventures, RiSC Capital and Schox. The startup said the funding will be used to “refine and scale-up their proprietary technology and expand into commodity chemical markets.”

The problem: Hydrogen is made from a variety of sources, namely fossil fuels, and through the use of dirty power. Peregrine is among the ventures aiming to make hydrogen without carbon dioxide production.

Editor’s note: The hydrogen being produced by Peregrine is not for fuel use, but for industrial processes.

Fuse is pouring more fuel on its fire.

The Seattle-area venture capital firm raised $250 million for its second fund, a major swath of cash that will support early stage enterprise software startups across the Pacific Northwest. GeekWire previously reported on the fund last year.

It’s one of the largest funds ever raised by a venture capital firm in the Seattle region, where Fuse plans to double down on its investments.

“We’re super fired up about the density of talent here and the resulting entrepreneurs starting companies here,” Kellan Carter, general partner at Fuse, said in an interview with GeekWire.

Carter and Cameron Borumand launched Fuse in 2020 as a spinoff from longtime Seattle-area firm Ignition Partners. It raised $170 million for its first fund and invested in 24 companies, including Carbon Robotics, Pictory, WellSaid Labs, and others. Nearly all were based in the Pacific Northwest.

Fuse expects to back 30-to-35 companies with the second fund.

The latest fundraise is notable in part due to the venture capital slowdown. PitchBook reported just $33.3 billion raised across 233 venture funds for the first half of the year. Firms raised more than $167 billion in 2022.

Emerging firms like Fuse — which is led by general partners all under the age of 40 — will likely have their worst fundraising year since 2015, according to PitchBook.

Fuse managed to navigate the headwinds, crediting its growth in part to the Pacific Northwest ecosystem.

“Everything going on here has exceeded a very high bar of expectation that we have,” Carter said.

As Fuse doubles down on its backyard, other Seattle-area venture capitals firms are dipping their toes into other regions.

Flying Fish said it would look beyond Seattle for investments after raising a new fund last year. Madrona Venture Group recently opened a Silicon Valley office.

“We’ve done the Bay Area thing. We know what that’s like,” said Brendan Wales, who joined as general partner in 2021 after relocating from San Francisco.

Ignition spread itself outside of the Seattle region, with a Bay Area presence and even a China investing arm.

But Fuse is staying focused on Seattle.

“The moment we start flying to Minnesota to do a deal, we’re in trouble,” Wales said. “We’ve got to stay patient and feel comfortable that this is a great market opportunity and keep doing it better than others.”

The firm, like others, is bullish about the AI talent in Seattle — home to cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon — and the potential impact on enterprise startups.

“With the entire public cloud flowing through Seattle, there is no team as strong and as prepared as Fuse is to back the emerging technologists coming out of the area,” Eric Sprunk, a former Nike exec and Fuse limited partner, said in a statement.

Fuse made room on its cap table for more limited partners in the second fund, including institutions “that saw market opportunity in the Pacific Northwest,” said Borumand.

The firm is bullish about the performance of its first fund. “There have been a number of significant milestones crossed in these companies,” Borumand said.

Fuse does not have any acquisitions within its portfolio. The firm typically leads investments up to the Series A round, and invests between $1-to-$10 million.

Bill Bryant, a longtime Seattle-area investor and limited partner at Fuse, told GeekWire last year that Fuse was “filling a gaping hole in the Pacific Northwest venture landscape” since it can lead big seed rounds without syndication, and follow on with significant capital at the Series A stage.

Venture capital activity has dipped considerably in the Seattle region this year amid the larger tech slowdown. Fuse investments this year include companies such as Griptape, PDM Automotive, and Digs.

“It feels like we’ve been managing a firm for 30 years of cycles,” Carter said, alluding to the turbocharged startup investing environment in 2021 and subsequent slowdown.

John Connors, an Ignition managing partner and former Microsoft CFO, is an operating partner at Fuse, along with Satbir Khanuja, who was a venture advisor at Ignition.

Seattle Seahawks star Bobby Wagner is a Fuse operating partner.

Other Pacific Northwest firms that announced new funds this year include PSL Ventures, Ascend, Madrona Venture Labs, and AI2. Trilogy and Madrona raised funds in 2022. Voyager Capital is raising a new fund.

Seattle-area startups that just graduated from Y Combinator’s summer 2023 batch are tackling a wide range of problems — with plenty of help from artificial intelligence.

The companies include:

• Talc AI, a service for assessing large language models.
• Watto AI, an AI program that generates consulting reports.
• Neum AI, a platform designed to assist companies in maintaining the relevancy of their AI applications with the latest data.
• Gleam, a platform for insurance brokers to implement self-funded health plans for SMBs and startups.

Founded in 2005, YC is one of the leading startup accelerators. Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart, Reddit, Twitch, and many others went through the program. More than 90 of its graduates are now valued at more than $1 billion.

Seattle startups that graduated from YC include LifeAt, ShelfEngine, Strac, Needl, Humanly, and others.

YC received more than 24,000 applications for this year’s summer batch. It funded 229 companies, down from last year’s 240. The Silicon Valley accelerator has been scaling back its investment pace.

Many of the companies in the summer cohort are working on AI-related products or services.

The latest cohort also includes Line.Build, led by Seattle-based CEO Dasha Cherepennikova. The startup sells tools that help users search for funding options for decarbonization projects.

GeekWire spoke to founders from Talc, Watto, Neum, and Gleam to learn more about their companies and how they are leveraging AI.

Talc AI

Co-founders: Matt Lee and Max Kerr

Explain what your startup does in two sentences: We provide end-to-end evaluation of large language model apps. When developers make a change to their AI, from prompt changes to retrieval strategy updates, we provide details on exactly how accurate their new build is.

What’s your secret sauce? We borrow proven techniques from the latest in NLP (natural language processing) academia to build evaluation tooling that any software engineer can use. Devs shouldn’t be neck-deep in evaluation pipelines just to test their software, so we solve that complexity for them.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: Teaming up together. We’ve been climbing partners for almost 10 years, forging our relationship through cold nights in the Cascade mountains, but it wasn’t until the YC interviews that we decided to join forces for a startup as well. We’ve trusted each other with our lives, from sharing the last few scraps of food to catching 20-foot falls off of granite cliffs, and that working relationship and deep trust is already paying off in the high demand environment of a startup.

The biggest challenge we’re facing: Telling [YC Managing Director] Michael Seibel that we haven’t moved to SF yet.

How are you using AI and how do you see it affecting your industry? We use Github Copilot daily, but haven’t begun to use it for email. We’re considering it for outbound sales.

There was no demand for us 2-to-3 years ago as large language models weren’t viable yet and so the industry didn’t exist, but Pandora’s Box has been opened and every knowledge work industry is about to be shaken up — it’s a matter of when, not if.

Watto AI

Co-founders: Rishabh Panwar, Ishita Bhandari and Suryansh Soni

Explain what your startup does in two sentences: Watto AI uses LLMs to generate McKinsey quality reports in seconds. One of our customers uses us to generate custom white papers and marketing collateral for their enterprise prospects, by combining customer notes in Salesforce with market reports in Google Drive.

What’s your secret sauce? Watto integrates with petabyte-scale that pervades a modern enterprise across tools like Google, Atlassian, Microsoft suites, Slack, Jira and more. Watto securely uses this contextual data to build high quality documents/reports that employees spend quarters in writing and getting reviewed. Over time, our proprietary LLMs fine-tune and learn to become your team’s star performer.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: We use Watto ourselves to synthesize all the client meetings and public information of our customers to build a hyper-personalized game plan for every prospect. This not only helps us familiarize with their pain points, but helps demonstrate early value to those prospects.

The biggest challenge we’re facing: AI is progressing at breakneck speed and companies are scrambling resources to build internal AI committees, security teams to understand its potential and impact. In general, that has been slowing a lot of similar startups; however, we are helping our prospects in setting up these guidelines to make sure that every company leverages AI and empower their users and employees in turn. 

How are you using AI and how do you see it affecting your industry? Watto uses AI to automatically generate high quality documents and reports. We seamlessly integrate with an enterprise’s internal and external tools to build context-aware reports. Watto empowers users to do high quality work that directly impact business and user metrics.

AI will positively impact every vertical in every industry to not only boost their productivity but to help build better products faster. Manual, repetitive busywork will be a thing of the past and everyone will be empowered to do more high-quality work in their respective domains. 

Neum AI

Co-founders: David de Matheu and Pinhas Kevin Cohen

Explain what your startup does in two sentences: Neum AI is the next generation of data pipelines built specifically for retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Neum AI helps companies create vector embeddings and abstracts away the complexity of managing and keeping them up to date in real-time at a massive scale. 

What’s your secret sauce? Neum AI supports vector embedding workflows at a large scale while helping reduce the amount of time it takes to generate embeddings and saving on costs of maintaining them up to date.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: Getting into Y Combinator.  

The biggest challenge we’re facing: Continuing to evolve and keep up with the market needs. Generative AI applications continue to change as new use cases are developed. This is especially challenging when it comes to the needs of enterprise customers.

How are you using AI and how do you see it affecting your industry? Neum AI at its core is an enabler for generative AI applications by helping connect data into vector databases and making it accessible for RAG.

We are also using AI as part of the platform to help make data pipelines more contextual and easier to build for customers. By analyzing their data, we can predict the best processes and transformation to ingest that data into vector databases. We use this process to also analyze results and continuously improve the performance of the pipeline over time.

Gleam

Co-founders: Emeka Itegbe and Oliver Keh.

Explain what your startup does in two sentences: Gleam is a platform that helps insurance brokers implement self-funded health plans for SMBs and startups. Brokers can give their clients access to high-quality insurance at a fraction of the cost, without having to worry about plan design and administration, banking, or compliance.

What’s your secret sauce? We’ve got a great team. We’re highly technical founders with experience building products in the healthcare space.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: Easy — joining Y Combinator.

The biggest challenge we’re facing: There’s so much we want to do and build, and not enough time to do everything. 

How are you using AI and how do you see it affecting your industry? We have plans to incorporate more AI into Gleam in the near future. Today, the insurance industry relies heavily on manual, human processes that add to administrative burdens and rising costs. There’s a huge opportunity for AI to automate those processes and make the industry more efficient and affordable.