Amazon is teaming up with another retail competitor to offer customers more places to return products.

The Seattle retailer confirmed that it recently began testing a partnership with pet giant Petco, which will accept returns from customers who purchased items on Amazon.com.

Amazon did something similar in 2017 when it started accepting returns at Kohl’s stores. It also uses Whole Foods locations and Amazon Fresh grocery stores as return drop-off sites, and last year Amazon partnered with office supplies company Staples.

The strategy lets Amazon grow its physical footprint for returns without adding real estate.

For retailers like Petco and Staples, inking these deals with Amazon helps bring customers into their stories — though after they’ve bought products from their retail rival. Some offer in-store coupons to Amazon customers making returns at their store. Kohl’s said it added 2 million new customers in 2020 thanks to its Amazon partnership.

Petco operates more than 1,500 locations across the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The company reported net revenue of $1.53 billion in the second quarter, up 3.4% year-over-year.

A survey from Jungle Scout found that nearly a quarter of pet owners shop for pet products most frequently on Amazon. Pet food alone is a $1.4 billion industry on Amazon, according to the report.

Amazon helped set the standard for free online returns but more retailers — including Amazon — are charging for returns with rising shipping and labor costs.

Earlier this year Amazon began charging some customers $1 for returns made at UPS stores in a bid to reduce expenses. It also rolled out a new feature that flagged “frequently returned” products.

Amazon says most customers have at least one label-free, box-free return drop-off point within a 5-mile radius.

Among the laundry list of ideas and goals in Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “Downtown Activation Plan,” the city’s arts and culture scene is intended to play a major role in making the city’s core a place where people want to spend time.

James Miles plans to help with that.

Miles is the new creative economy manager for Seattle’s Office of Economic Development. The creative economy features jobs across a number of industries, from film and television, to theater and music, to digital arts and tech.

In a 2019 report, the latest year available, the OED said Seattle’s creative economy employs nearly 70,000 creative workers and contributed 18% of Seattle’s gross regional product. Tech workers make up a big chunk of those creatives, with OED listing software publishers as tops in creative industry earnings as of 2017.

A longtime teaching artist and professor in New York City, Miles now teaches arts management courses as an assistant professor at Seattle University. He previously served as executive director of Arts Corp and MENTOR Washington, and was most recently executive director of Third Stone, which helped bring back the beloved Bumbershoot arts and music festival.

GeekWire caught up with Miles to discuss Seattle’s creative economy, how art and tech can coexist and what his initial goals are in his new role. Our Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Is this a role you were looking for, or did it come looking for you?

“The answer to that question is yes. It was both a role I was kind of looking for and also it was looking for me. I think based on my experiences as both an artist and as a person that works with artists and supports artists, whether on boards or on commissions, it was directly aligned to everything I’ve wanted to do in my career.”

What’s your overall impression of the economic vitality of Seattle’s arts and culture scene compared to where you’ve been and what you’ve seen?

“It’s hard to compare the creative economy of Seattle to New York, just to be frank. However, there’s so much potential here because of the amount of creatives that are working together. And I think that’s what really draws me. The vivacity alone grabs me, the potential is also exciting. If creatives can work together, especially across sector and across discipline, there’s a lot of opportunity for exploration. I’m thinking about the Downtown Activation Plan and how you get people to reignite a city. It’s through the arts.”

When it comes to Seattle’s creative economy, the Office of Economic Development includes tech workers in that mix — software developers, designers, etc. Does that provide a creative boost other cities don’t get considering that Seattle is a tech hub?

“It is a tech hub, and I’m excited for us to embrace that. Once we embrace our technology, and our artistry and our creativity, then we will see not only communities come together, but we’ll see where they overlap. A person making video games is like, ‘I have an idea. I want to tell this story. I can only speak digitally, because that’s the world I know. I’m gonna tell my story through video games in ones and zeros.’ That person’s cousin can tell a story through a play, or through music or through a poem. I think we often get distracted by, ‘Oh, you’re an artist, so you’re creative, and you’re not an artist so you’re not creative,’ when in fact, if you can move you can dance, if you can talk, you can sing. We’re all creatives. We just tend we tamp it down because society tells us to, and I don’t think we need to. I think we should let that creativity blossom within all of us.”

Do you find that conversation — tech = arts — is tough to have because the traditional arts community has a negative perception about what tech has done to affordability and so forth in Seattle?

“Yes. It’s a tough conversation, but I think it’s a conversation worth having. And it’s a conversation that when I’ve had it in the past, they’ve said, ‘OK, if we connect to the cultural fabric of the region, there’s a place for all of us to be woven together.’ It just takes some outside-the-box thinking. I’ve worked as an artist in healthcare, worked as an artist in law firms. Those are not typically creative industries, but they’re all learning different things that impact their ability to make work happen. There’s a variety of things creativity can fit into, and that’s what excites me.”

What are your objectives out of the gate with this role?

“One is to support people entering a [creative] career. When I moved here, a lot of people that were artists said, ‘OK, I think I’ve made my time as an artist, I’m moving to New York or moving to L.A.’ I was like, ‘Why? There’s a creative city here, stay here.’ So that’s one, to see Seattle as a viable creative community in which you can not only live but thrive.

“And then opportunities. When I went to Amazon, not a single person from Amazon was from Seattle, yet you had all these creatives — audio designers, graphic designers, video game designers, digital creatives — and I was like, ‘Great, all these crazy creative gigs here. Let’s put some young people and some people that have been felt like they’ve been marginalized, into these jobs.

“And then most importantly, I’m just talking to people in the community to see what they need. I just want to make sure that our office is actually listening to the city of Seattle, its residents, the people that work here, live here, love it here.”

As far as revitalizing downtown, do you have big ideas around that, related to arts and culture, that you like to think about?

“I think first we have to get started and get people talking. Talking to me, talking to each other, and then we can start dreaming. I think there’s a tendency to move quickly. There’s a West African saying, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ I’d rather go far with people. So I won’t say anything yet about what we’re going to do downtown, but I will say we’ll do it together. And we’ll go very far.”

It is a challenge coming out of COVID.

“People just have to come out. They need a reason to come out. And we need to talk to them and find out what that reason is. And there we go. Then you have the creativity. It’s literally thinking outside the box.”

How does Bumbershoot illustrate your approach? Is there anything you learned that made you say, “Let’s keep doing more of this”?

“The biggest thing I learned from Bumbershoot is that people want it to happen. They wanted to be there. We wouldn’t have done anything successful if we weren’t out in the community every single day talking to people about what they want, engaging them like, ‘Hey, Bumbershoot’s going to be cool this year. It’s going to be different. It’s going to be the revitalization of the Seattle arts and music festival. You want to be a part of it. It’s going to be a thing not to miss.’ And people showed up. We had about three times the number of people that came in 2019. The people wanted to be present and they wanted to be in community.”

Are there areas right now where you think Seattle excels in the creative economy and areas that could use a boost?

“Yeah, I think there’s pockets of excellence in the creative economy everywhere. Whether it’s music, theater, dance, poetry, writing, AI, design, I think it’s more about a creative community. And I think that’s what the creative economy can help build. It can help connect those people so they can see we can work together and have a creative economic city, versus a creative economic bubble. I think Seattle’s rife with a lot of creatives, from the nonprofit side to the for-profit side.”

What are your views on AI and how you might utilize it, how you might teach artists and creatives to not be afraid of it?

“I think it’s definitely a tool. If people understand how to use it, we could use it to benefit all of us. A great example is a screenwriter who has a great idea for a movie and needs someone to help put it together. In years past you’d have to hire someone to storyboard that movie. That was a costly thing. To put that idea [to AI] and say, ‘Can you storyboard this idea so I can pitch it to a cinematographer or producer and get this film made?’ — that provides an opportunity for a person to open doors and enter that workforce and become a filmmaker. I just think it’s a great tool. The hammer and the nail is not gonna take over your life, it just makes things a little bit easier. That’s how I view AI.”

OK, now what?

I wasn’t sure we’d ever get here, but 21 months later, Microsoft has successfully fended off the FTC, pacified the CMA, and completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. One industry leader has merged with another, which means Microsoft, on top of everything else it does, is now one of the highest-revenue video game companies in the world.

It’s not a question of whether Microsoft will earn back that $69 billion, but when.

Activision Blizzard, along with its mobile subsidiary King, controls several of the highest-grossing franchises in the games industry, one of which is the perennial best-seller Call of Duty. In theory, Microsoft could simply allow Activision Blizzard to continue business as usual and throw a few games from A-B’s back catalog on its Game Pass service to entice subscribers.

That has traditionally been Microsoft’s approach to games-industry M&A. Like the Roman empire, the subtle genius of Microsoft leveraging its pocketbook is that it reportedly doesn’t force big changes on its newly acquired studios. It simply changes all the stationery and takes a hands-off approach.

That approach has actually backfired once in recent memory, however, with the notoriously dead-on-arrival vampire shooter Redfall. Initially announced as the next big, stylish Xbox exclusive, Redfall turned out to be a failed attempt to combine developer Arkane’s knack for immersive sims with the more readily monetized mechanics of a Fortnite or Destiny.

At least in theory, Microsoft could’ve stepped in to reverse course on Redfall but didn’t, which gave it a black eye in May. That experience could affect how it handles its integration approach to Activision Blizzard, particularly since A-B could use a lot more work.

The Microsoft acquisition process has served to turn a spotlight on the flaws in Activision Blizzard, many of which are thrown at the feet of departing CEO Bobby Kotick. Activision Blizzard’s games are still licenses to print money, but many of them are also naked exercises in revenue-boosting, primarily through the use of microtransactions.

This year alone, Diablo IV has been accused of making itself actively worse to play through repeated “nerfs,” so an invested player has to spend more time in-game, and is thus more tempted to spend real money on character improvements. Overwatch 2 is also seen as an unnecessary brand refresh that harmed the overall experience.

Essentially, Activision Blizzard under Kotick has been coasting off its own momentum for years, and even before the acquisition, was bleeding both player counts and experienced developers.

While this obviously can’t all be Kotick’s fault, Kotick is seen as the guy who decided to focus on profits above everything else by turning all of Activision Blizzard’s games into Skinner boxes: log in every day, get random rewards, hope for better luck tomorrow.

This has been the status quo at Activision Blizzard for long enough that it’s hard to know what the company will look like at all under Microsoft. We’re headed into uncharted territory for both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, because neither company’s now-standard rules can usefully be applied.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is expanding his real estate portfolio with the purchase of a $79 million mansion in South Florida. And it’s next door to a home he paid $68 million for in June.

Bloomberg reported that the seven bedroom, 14 bath estate is located in the exclusive Indian Creek area of Miami. The man-made barrier island is referred to as “Billionaire Bunker” and is home to notable residents including investor Carl Icahn, ex-NFL star Tom Brady, singer Julio Iglesias, and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Bezos reportedly paid 7.1% below a May listing price of $85 million. A Zillow listing for the property put the Zestimate in the $70 million range.

Bloomberg reported that the sale was handled by realtors Dina Goldentayer and Danilo Tavares with Douglas Elliman.

Goldentayer posted a reel on Instagram (below) celebrating the sale, but there’s no mention of Bezos. She called Indian Creek “an unmatched residential experience” in the clip, which showed the mansion and surrounding golf course.

The mansion spans roughly 19,000 square feet on 1.84 acres and includes a pool, theater, library and wine cellar, according to the listing.

Bezos, who is worth $156 billion, also owns luxury properties in Washington, D.C., Beverly Hills, Calif., and Maui.

He also owns a 417-foot, triple-masted sailing yacht that reportedly cost $500 million.

The Pacific Northwest will be home to one of seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) announced Friday by the U.S. Department of Energy. The hubs are meant to kick-start the nascent hydrogen fuel sector and each will be eligible for roughly $1 billion of federal funding.

Amazon, First Mode and PACCAR are among the companies with projects that could benefit from the deal.

The DOE last year received hub concept papers from 79 applicants, which it whittled down to 33 finalists that submitted full proposals. Two made the cut from the Pacific Northwest.

The winning bid is called the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association (PNWH2 Association) and will include Washington, Oregon and Montana. The Washington Department of Commerce led a public-private partnership that applied for the program. Details of the pitch were kept secret, but participants included state officials from Washington and Oregon; tribal leaders; business, union and university representatives; and an environmental group.

“This monumental investment will create thousands of new clean energy jobs for folks across our state and make sure that Washington plays a leading role in growing the green hydrogen economy, which is such an important part of our efforts to tackle the climate crisis,” said Washington Sen. Patty Murray in a statement.

Hydrogen is a versatile fuel dubbed the “Swiss Army knife” of clean energy. It can replace fossil fuels in hard-to-decarbonize applications, powering fuel cells and engines. But there is limited hydrogen production in the U.S. and the current supply is dominated by fuel made through dirtier processes. And there is a lack of infrastructure for transporting the fuel, as well as a small pool of hydrogen customers.

Washington had two particularly important strengths for its hub pitch: It has one of the cleanest energy grids in the U.S. — which is essential for producing climate friendly hydrogen — and it’s home to companies and government agencies eager to use the fuel.

Following Friday’s announcement, PNWH2 shared news that it’s eligible for up to $1 billion of funding and multiple organizations have proposed projects for the hub. The association will negotiate final terms of the deal with DOE this fall and the funding will be awarded over nine years.

The organizations with planned projects include:

• Air Liquide Hydrogen Energy US
• Amazon
• ALA Renewable Energy
• Atlas Agro
• Centralia College
• Mitsubishi Power America
• Northwest Seaport Alliance
• NovoHydrogen Development
• PACCAR
• Portland General Electric Company (PGE)
• Puget Sound Energy (PSE)
• PUD No. 1 of Douglas County
• Regis Solar
• First Mode (Synchronous)
• Twin Transit
• USA Fortescue Future Industries
• Williams Field Services Group

“The projects in this hub will support thousands of new jobs in Washington and the Northwest, while slashing emissions in sectors such as heavy-duty transportation, maritime, agriculture and industrial operations,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

Clean or “green” hydrogen fuel is made by splitting water to create hydrogen and oxygen, using a process called electrolysis. For the fuel to be climate friendly, the electrolysis needs to be powered with renewable energy, such as solar, wind or hydroelectric dams. Burning hydrogen creates water as its main emission.

Hydrogen can also be produced from sources like methane using pyrolysis, but that fuel typically is less clean. While environmental organizations back clean hydrogen, they warn against support for dirtier processes.

“The fossil fuel industry is working to continue our nation’s reliance on fossil fuels by any means necessary — and hydrogen offers yet another possible inroad for Big Oil and Gas to lock in polluting and non-economic uses of gas for decades to come,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous, in a statement following Friday’s announcement.

Other DOE hydrogen hubs will be in locations across the country, including California, Appalachia, Texas, the MidAtlantic, the Midwest and a hub including Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Washington leaders have been working for roughly the past five years to grow the hydrogen fuel sector in the state.

It built a coalition of interested parties through a group called CHARGE, or the Consortium for Hydrogen And Renewably Generated E-Fuels, which is associated with Washington State University. That organization became the anchor for a Department of Commerce-supported hydrogen innovation cluster.

Local companies already have been making strides in the sector. Seattle’s First Mode has hydrogen-fueled mega trucks working in mining while Bellevue’s PACCAR is building hydrogen fuel cell semis. Amazon and Microsoft both have partnerships with Power Plug, a company manufacturing hydrogen fuel cells in Spokane and elsewhere.

“Washington has come out on top on this highly competitive billion dollar federal award because we’ve been innovating and collaborating on clean energy technology for decades,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell.

The hub program was created by the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The other Pacific Northwest organization that submitted a full proposal for hub funding is called the Obsidian Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub, an effort launched by Obsidian Renewables, a utility-scale solar company based near Portland, Ore.

Obsidian’s plan asked for $700 million in funding and aimed to produce 360 metric tons of hydrogen per day at multiple locations and create a pipeline for moving the fuel.

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.

Updated on Oct. 13 with details of acquisition closing.

Microsoft completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard on Friday morning, nearly 21 months after the deal was announced, finalizing its biggest acquisition ever and the largest in the history of video games.

The deal adds blockbuster franchises including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush Saga to Microsoft’s portfolio. Activision Blizzard, headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., employed 13,000 people as of the end of 2022.

“We are eager to learn from their creativity, exchange insights and best practices, and empower our new colleagues to bring their visions to the widest possible audience,” said Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, in a memo to employees, published by the company online.

Spencer said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will remain in the role until the end of the year to ensure a smooth transition between the companies.

The deal, originally announced in January 2022, cleared its final regulatory hurdle when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approved the acquisition late Thursday. UK antitrust regulators previously sought to block the deal. Microsoft responded by agreeing to sell Activision Blizzard’s cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft.

The companies originally set a deadline for July 18 to get a deal done, but extended it to Oct. 18 to help address regulatory concerns in the UK.

“We’re grateful for the CMA’s thorough review and decision today,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement. “We have now crossed the final regulatory hurdle to close this acquisition, which we believe will benefit players and the gaming industry worldwide.”

Microsoft faced opposition to the deal, led by PlayStation maker Sony, but a federal judge in July sided with the Redmond company following a challenge from the Federal Trade Commission to block the merger. An appeals court then denied a FTC motion to temporarily stop the deal. The FTC is still appealing the decision.

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.

It’s time for the second act at a beloved Seattle movie theater.

The former Cinerama is now SIFF Cinema, as new signs went up Thursday on the Belltown building that SIFF took over from the estate of Paul Allen in May.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), SIFF called it an honor to put its name where the Cinerama signs once hung.

“We do not take for granted how special it is to see SIFF’s name on the exterior of this iconic building,” the @SIFFNews account wrote. “And we can’t wait to welcome you back into this space. Stay tuned, stay cool, stay (choco-) poppin’ — more to come soon.”

X user Myra Kohn posted more photos and videos of the signs going up at 2100 4th Ave. The Cinerama signs came down on Oct. 5.

SIFF won’t have to wait long to welcome people back — the GeekWire Summit is taking place at the theater on Oct. 19. Our annual technology conference, now in its 12th year, will be a half-day format, focused on the new era of artificial intelligence.

In addition to in-depth panels and fireside chats, this year’s GeekWire Summit will include unique opportunities to connect, and will feature a surprise movie screening and, of course, the theater’s world-famous chocolate popcorn!

Check out the Summit agenda and get tickets here.

SIFF announced on May 5, at its Seattle International Film Festival, that it was purchasing Cinerama from Allen’s estate. The acquisition by the nonprofit film and education organization ended more than three years of uncertainty for the historic downtown theater.

The Cinerama originally opened in 1963, just a year after Seattle hosted the World’s Fair. As suburban multiplexes eventually gained in popularity, Cinerama’s ticket sales declined. By the late 1990s the single-screen theater had fallen into disrepair and was in danger of being demolished.

In 1998, Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, stepped in to save a place that he loved as a child. After a multi-million-dollar renovation, the Cinerama reopened in 1999. The theater became a destination for blockbuster first-run movies, cult classics, and several film festivals, including the Science Fiction, Classic Films, Horror, and 70mm festivals.

Allen poured more money into the theater over the years, before his passing in October 2018. The Cinerama closed in February 2020 for repairs on what was called “normal wear and tear” at the time, but the closure became more permanent when COVID-19 dealt a crippling blow to businesses that relied on being together in public.

The trademarked Cinerama name and the licensing agreement to use it went away with the sale to SIFF. SIFF said Allen’s Vulcan Inc. took possession of the signs and will find their next home.

Jessie Woolley-Wilson, president and CEO of DreamBox Learning, is stepping away from day-to-day duties at the Seattle-area edtech company following the completion of its acquisition to Discovery Education.

Woolley-Wilson, who started at DreamBox in 2010, will join the board of Discovery.

Founded in 2006, DreamBox sells education technology software to K-12 schools The company supports 6 million students and 600,000 educators.

Terms of the acquisition to Discovery, announced in August, were not disclosed.

Woolley-Wilson previously held leadership roles with Blackboard’s K–12 Group; LeapFrog SchoolHouse; the College Board; and test-prep company Kaplan.

Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:

• Reilly Devine, director of sales at Outreach, joined Seattle-based workforce collaboration software maker Zuper as sales director.
• Seattle biotech company Atoosa Therapeutics named Heather Rees as its principal financial and accounting officer. Rees was the company’s controller from 2017 to 2021. She replaces executive vice president and CFO Greg Weaver, who resigned.
• Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center announced that Dr. Lawrence Fong will join the Seattle-based research institution as scientific director of the Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center, effective July 1. Fong is a longtime professor at the University of California San Francisco and leads its Cancer Immunotherapy Program, which he founded.
• Connor Folley, co-founder of Seattle e-commerce startup Downstream, left Jungle Scout, which acquired Downstream in 2021.
• Seattle mental health startup Heard made three new hires: Donato Perconti as head of engineering; Chelsea Habermas as head of central operations; and Melanie Hahn as head of growth marketing.

Seattle-based pet insurance company Trupanion is suing the founder of an app it acquired, alleging that he stole trade secrets and violated agreements after joining a new company that later released a competing product.

In October 2020, Trupanion acquired BabelBark, an app that helped connect consumers with pet-related services and assisted with management of pet health records.

According to the suit, filed Sept. 26 in King County Superior Court, BabelBark CEO and co-founder Roy Stein agreed to a three-year “restricted period” deal that would prevent him from hiring Trupanion or BabelBark employees. He agreed to not provide information to competitors that would help them do business with Trupanion customers, the suit says.

Trupanion also paid Stein $50,000 for a consulting agreement that obligated Stein to maintain confidentiality of Trupanion intellectual property in perpetuity, according to the suit.

Stein joined Colorado-based pet care company Destination Pet in April 2021 as COO and president, according to his LinkedIn.

Trupanion alleges that Stein then hired three former BabelBark employees who had joined Trupanion as part of the acquisition.

In May of last year, Destination Pet released a pet care management app called Yourgi — which Trupanion alleges is “substantively identical” to the BabelBark app.

Trupanion claims that Destination Pet and Stein infringed upon the BabelBark intellectual property and misappropriated the company’s trade secrets. It accuses Stein of violating agreements when he hired his former colleagues.

Trupanion also claims the defendants violated the Washington state Consumer Protection Act. It is asking the court for an award of damages incurred and temporary and permanent injunctive relief preventing Destination Pet from operating the Yourgi app.

Trupanion declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire. We reached out to Destination Pet and Stein, and their lawyer, but did not hear back.

Stein, who co-founded BabelBark in 2015, left Destination Pet in August 2022, according to his LinkedIn. He’s now operating partner at LetterOne, an investment business headquartered in Luxembourg. He previously co-founded Energy Points and sold the analytics startup to Lux Research in 2015.

Trupanion, originally founded in Canada in 1998, went public in 2014. The company reported $270.6 million in second quarter revenue, up 23% year-over-year. It has more than 1.6 enrolled pets.

Destination Pet operates a network of pet resorts and veterinary clinics in more than 31 states, including Washington. It acquired Pet Palace Pet Boarding Resort in June.

Read the full complaint below.

Trupanion sues entrepreneur over trade secrets after it acquired his pet care app by GeekWire on Scribd

In a tour de force for neuroscience, teams of researchers have published a voluminous set of brain-cell atlases for humans and other primates.

The atlases are detailed in 21 research papers appearing in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine — and could point scientists toward new strategies for addressing mental conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia to epilepsy and ADHD.

“We need to understand the specifics of the human brain if we hope to understand human diseases,” Ed Lein, a senior investigator at Seattle’s Allen Institute, said in comments provided via video.

“Most of disease research tries to create a replicate or a model of a human disease in a species that doesn’t get that disease,” Lein explained. “But if we want to understand why we get it, and what the consequences are, and how one should treat it, we need to have a deep understanding of the human brain itself.”

The studies in the package released today are part of the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, or BICCN, a program that was launched in 2017. The Allen Institute for Brain Science has played a major role in sharing data produced by the program.

One study analyzed more than a million cells taken from 42 regions of the brain. Another study drew high-quality samples from more than 100 brain regions. Yet another study focused on samples from prenatal brain tissue. The collective efforts of the research teams characterized more than 3,000 human brain cell types.

The researchers didn’t just examine the brain cells themselves. They also ran them through DNA analysis to learn which genes appeared to be linked to the cells’ functions and dysfunctions.

A study led by Allen Institute scientist Nelson Johansen assessed variations in brain-cell types across 75 adult humans undergoing epilepsy and tumor surgeries. Johansen’s team saw wide variation among cells, but found that less than half of the differences could be explained by demographic indicators such as sex or ancestry.

“There is no single prototypical human; a spectrum of differences in genetic variation and environmental response exists both in healthy individuals and in disease states,” neuroscientists Alyssa Weninger and Paola Arlotta wrote in a commentary on the studies.

Some researchers focused on analyzing brain cells from four non-human primate species — chimpanzees, gorillas, rhesus macaques and marmosets — to learn more about neural similarities and differences with respect to humans.

“Only a few hundred genes showed human-specific expression patterns, and these were disproportionately near genomic regions with signs of evolutionary selection in humans,” Weninger and Arlotta noted. “These results suggest that the specific properties of the adult human cortex may derive from relatively few cellular and molecular changes.”

Jay Shendure, a genomics professor at the University of Washington and director of Seattle’s Brotman Baty Institute, was a senior author of the macaque study. “Our data, which we have made open and available to the scientific community and broader public, represent the largest and most comprehensive multimodal molecular atlas in a primate to date, and are crucial for exploring how the many cells of the brain come together to give rise to the behavioral complexity of primates including humans,” Shendure said in a news release.

The newly published findings are expected to provide a baseline for future research into how healthy brains work, and what to do when someone’s brain isn’t working the way it should.

Weninger and Arlotta said the genetic differences found between the brains of human and non-human primates “highlight the need to complement the use of animal model systems with human model systems” — for example, human brain organoids that are grown in the lab from stem cells.

“Understanding how to build organoids, and whether they replicate features and properties of the native tissue, requires comprehensive datasets of the human brain not only in the adult but also across development,” they wrote.

The hundreds of researchers listed as co-authors for the 21 papers published in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine include more than 100 researchers affiliated with institutions based in the Seattle area, including the Allen Institute, the University of Washington, the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine, Providence Health & Services, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Sage Bionetworks.

An Amazon Fresh store in North Seattle is the world’s first grocery store to be certified as Zero Carbon by an international nonprofit promoting sustainable buildings. It’s also the first Amazon site to land the designation, the company announced on Thursday.

The 35,000-square-foot store includes a refrigeration system using natural refrigerants, a kitchen and hot water heating system powered by electricity instead of natural gas, floors made of a low-carbon concrete, and electric-vehicle charging for customers.

The ultra-green grocery supports Amazon’s efforts to become carbon neutral by 2040. This summer the cloud, retail and entertainment behemoth reported that its emissions for the first time declined slightly from 2021 to 2022, marking a 0.4% reduction.

To achieve Zero Carbon status, a new building must use low-carbon materials in construction and operate in an energy efficient manner, according to the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The Amazon Fresh store, which was completed in 2022, had its operations reviewed for 12 months by ILFI.

The project must additionally pay for offsets to cancel out the carbon impacts of construction and also fund the creation of new renewable power either on- or offsite from the building.

ILFI CEO Lindsay Baker praised Amazon’s leadership.

“A grocery store showing how to be accountable for all its carbon — from construction and materials to operations — is impactful from both a customer and industry perspective,” Baker said in a statement.

Amazon is aiming for additional Zero Carbon certifications for three Amazon Go locations in Los Angeles and an Amazon Same-Day site in Sacramento.

“At Amazon, we’re building a best-in-class grocery shopping experience, and part of that is bringing customers more sustainable options across our stores,” said Tony Hoggett, senior vice president of Amazon’s Worldwide Grocery Stores.

A short distance from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters is another ILFI certified building. In 2015, the Bullitt Center earned ILFI’s highest designation, the Living Building certification, making it the greenest commercial building in the world.

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.

Everything in AI is in flux. In fact, a lack of predictability will define this new era.

That was one of the overarching takeaways from the second annual Intelligent Applications Summit, hosted by Madrona Venture Group in Seattle on Wednesday.

“We’ve moved from a world of structured data and deterministic applications to a world that includes many forms of data, including many types of unstructured and semi-structured data, and apps that are, at some level, non-deterministic,” said Matt McIlwain, Madrona managing director, opening the conference.

McIlwain described a future world “where every single person, hundreds of millions to billions of people, have their own personal and customized apps, because that input mechanism is shaping the app.”

A few other highlights from day-long event:

Flexible and open AI models: Ali Farhadi, the new CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), discussed the changing nature of the foundation models that power AI, and the need to keep them open and accessible.

“We’re actually moving the notion of what the model is, from a static creature that we train, freeze, and deploy, to a fluid structure that we need to mess with all the time, continuously, forever,” he said.

Farhadi explained, “Because now a model is not a model anymore. A model is a whole family of models. From these kinds of models, you get thousands of models at your disposal.”

Before returning to AI2 as CEO this year, Farhadi was a leader of Apple’s machine learning projects. He is also a faculty member at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Projects at AI2 include OLMo (Open Language Model), a generative language model created by the institute; and Dolma, an open dataset derived from OLMo.

“AI was born and raised in the open,” Farhadi said. “Putting it behind closed doors will only slow down, if not hinder, the progress.”

Did AI write that email? The unsettled nature of AI norms was illustrated by an exchange between Sumit Chauhan, a corporate vice president in the Microsoft Office product group, and journalist Dina Bass of Bloomberg News, about the new Microsoft Outlook “sounds like me” feature that learns and matches the sender’s style and tone of voice.

Bass pointed out that recipients of these messages aren’t alerted to the fact that AI is involved in writing them, and asked Chauhan where the line should be drawn on transparency and disclosure.

Chauhan pointed out that, in many cases, the company’s products cite the sources of AI-generated information and the use of AI in the creation of content.

However, she said, “the email one is a little bit tricky,” because the sender may not want the recipient to know that AI played a role in writing the message.

“Why not?” Bass asked.

“Maybe you want the other person to know, maybe you don’t,” Chauhan said. “As AI is doing work on my behalf, and the work is up to my standards … the lines start to blur a little bit.”

Impact of tech regulation: Brad Gerstner, CEO and founder of the Altimeter investment firm, spoke bluntly about the implications of the current U.S. regulatory environment for tech in response to an audience question at the end of a session on public and private market perspectives on generative AI.

“I think Lina Khan is an unmitigated disaster for American capitalism,” he said, referring to the Federal Trade Commission chair. “But that’s going to change. And then the great thing about this system that we have is, she will come and go, and sanity will prevail.”

He continued, “The fact of the matter is, founders who are risking everything deserve the exits to bigger companies. It’s good for consumers. It’s good for the capital system. It’s good for the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And where did we lose our minds that actually doing something that’s beneficial to consumers should be blocked by Washington?”

“So that’s going to change. But in the interim, it’s caused a moratorium, really, in boardrooms and among CEOs focused on buying things. And it’s caused me as a capital provider to look at companies I would have otherwise funded and said, ‘Well, my downside protection is Meta buys it, or Google buys it, or Amazon buys it.’ And now I have to discount that at a much higher rate. … So it’s not a good thing for the funding environment today.”

Internal efficiencies and AI safeguards: For all the buzz about artificial intelligence, most companies are still taking a cautious approach, focusing initially on internal applications rather than external products.

“The plurality of use cases right now are people that are trying to make their own teams more efficient and effective,” said Matt Garman, the Amazon Web Services senior vice president for sales, marketing and global services.

Big companies want to mitigate the risk of AI hallucinations, and in cases where AI is used in products, companies are making sure there’s a human layer between generative AI systems and end users, Garman said.

Ian Cook, the president of Slalom Build, offered a similar take. He said his group has about 20 AI-related projects currently in production for customers, and about three-quarters of them are for internal use by those customers.

• 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.

An IRS audit examining nearly a decade of Microsoft financial reporting has found that the company owes $28.9 billion in tax for 2004 to 2013, plus penalties and interest, Microsoft said Tuesday afternoon.

The determination is not final, and the company says it plans to appeal. The appeals process is expected to take several years, and the IRS finding is not expected to reflect Microsoft’s upcoming quarterly report.

“We believe we have always followed the IRS’ rules and paid the taxes we owe in the U.S. and around the world,” wrote Daniel Goff, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for worldwide tax and customs, in a post disclosing the preliminary IRS finding. “Microsoft historically has been one of the top U.S. corporate income taxpayers. Since 2004, we have paid over $67 billion in taxes to the U.S.”

Goff noted in the post that taxes paid by Microsoft under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act could reduced the additional tax owed by the company by up to $10 billion. 

To put the figures in context, Microsoft’s total net income from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2013 was $198.7 billion, according to its historical financial results.

As described in the post, the disagreement involves the mechanism known as transfer pricing, related to the way Microsoft allocated profits among different companies and jurisdictions.

Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon faced a similar tax dispute but defeated the IRS in court in 2017.

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.”

Prior to launching Molecule, Zenk was a business development strategist at now-closed Phytelligence, a well-funded Seattle startup behind a novel method of rapidly growing fruit trees. He was executive vice president at Algenol Biofuels, leading business development partnerships in the U.S., China, India, and others. Prior to that, Zenk served as senior vice president of corporate development and policy at Sapphire Energy, a Bill Gates-backed company that focused on developing renewable crude oil from algae.

Zenk also served on California’s advisory committee on implementation of the low carbon fuels standard in California. He also held leadership roles in federal and state governments, including deputy press secretary and campaign chairman.

Founded in 2019, Molecule helps sustainability-focused companies with communication strategies to advance their objectives in policy or national interests.

“Tim adds depth and breadth to our climate policy domain expertise to help clients and partners accelerate the global journey to a sustainable economy,” Reuven Carlyle, the co-founder of Earth Finance, said in a news release.

Earlier this year, Jennifer Sullo was hired by Earth Finance as managing director of asset management and investing solutions. She previously worked more than nine years at Goldman Sachs, most recently as global head of sustainable investing solutions, and was a vice president at J.P. Morgan. Sullo also worked for ING and GE.

Earth Finance raised $14 million and launched earlier this year. Carlyle recently retired from the Washington state Senate. The other two founding partners are investment executive Bryan Weeks, who serves as CEO, and climate strategy expert Garrett Kephart, who is president of the firm.

— Seattle early-stage venture capital firm Trilogy Equity Partners hired Ernie Archambault as an analyst. Archambault recently graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in finance. He previously was an associate at Salt Lake City-based venture firm University Growth Fund and intern at Seattle-based search fund Blue Wood Capital.

— Lindsay Randall will join J.P. Morgan in Seattle as vice president for startup banking. She is a senior program manager at Moonbeam, a Seattle company that connects enterprises with startups. “I am beyond excited to help JP Morgan support founders in the PNW in this new role,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

— The Washington Research Foundation named five venture analysts as part of its sixth cohort to assist with grant-making and investment activities:

• Cade Ito is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Washington (UW) in the Molecular Medicine and Mechanisms of Disease program, focusing on engineered B cells and other cell therapies.
• Kevin Jiang is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at UW’s Department of Bioengineering specializing in developing point-of-care diagnostic technologies and medical devices for detecting viruses and bacteria.
• Ashish Phal is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at UW’s Department of Bioengineering. He uses computer-designed growth factor mimics to study early development cellular fate decisions.
• Chase Suiter is a fifth-year doctoral candidate at UW in molecular and cellular biology. He is developing techniques for studying protein degradation at scale.
• Lillian Tatka is a fifth-year UW doctoral candidate in bioengineering and data science, creating software tools for computational systems biology.

— Seattle law firm Perkins Coie named Roger Wilkes as COO. He previously spent four years as COO at New York-based law firm Kobre & Kim. Prior to that, Wilkes served as COO for U.S. marketing and sales at PwC.

When Boaz Arbel woke up Saturday to the news of what was happening in Israel, he knew immediately that he would need to go back and find a way to help defend his homeland.

Arbel took a 10-hour flight from Boston to Tel Aviv, and by Tuesday he was working as a coordinator between the Israeli Air Force and ground forces on the frontlines in Israel’s rapidly escalating war with Gaza and Hamas militants.

“The magnitude of the attack, the number of casualties, the number of civilians taken over the border by terrorists — that was unbelievable,” Arbel told GeekWire via a Zoom call Tuesday. “I knew immediately that I had to do something. I cannot just stand aside and do nothing. It was a no-brainer.”

Upon arrival in Israel, he barely had time to visit with family in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, where he grew up.

“I kissed my parents, gave them a hug and rushed to base. There’s no time to waste here, unfortunately,” said Arbel, who was also interviewed by a Boston TV station this week.

Arbel, 53, is a Needham, Mass.-based technology executive who is co-founder and chief revenue officer of Worknet, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup that helps enterprises integrate external communication into Slack and Microsoft Teams.

The company emerged from stealth mode this summer with $5 million in funding, and is led by CEO Ami Heitner, a former SAP and Microsoft exec who co-founded machine learning platform Komiko.

Heitner, also an Israeli who was an officer in the Israeli Air Force, said he and his colleagues are “immensely proud of, and fully support, Boaz’s decision.”

“In these challenging times for Israel, individuals and companies have the opportunity to demonstrate their true values and priorities,” Heitner told GeekWire. “Clearly, this is the right choice.”

Arbel is joining his four daughters, ages 21-to-26, who all graduated from Boston-area high schools and are now serving in the Israel Defense Forces. He said his wife, Naomi, who works for a nonprofit called Friends of the IDF, “has a lot to worry about.”

Arbel himself enlisted in the IDF when he was 18, as is the law for every citizen in Israel. He served for seven years and then stayed on as a reserve fighter navigator in the Israeli Air Force. He has lived in Munich, Germany; in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast; and he got his master’s degree in Birmingham, England.

At age 40, after 22 years of active service, Arbel moved to the U.S. His tech experience in Massachusetts includes roles at Profitect, Logz.io, and MaiView.

“There’s no place like Israel, and it will always be home,” he said. “We became American residents and citizens and we see America now as our home. But it’s OK that we have two homes. And I’m willing to do for America what I’m doing for Israel.”

Returning to active military duty wasn’t as easy as just deciding to hop on a plane. Arbel said it took some effort to find connections to people who were willing to find him a role.

He credits an officer who was convinced that it’s OK to think outside of the box in order to achieve extraordinary results. He said that mindset can be a typical one for Israelis, and it shows up in the country’s robust tech scene.

“I think that’s why Israel became a startup nation,” Arbel said. “If I thought that I should serve, there’s no way someone will stand in my way. I will find a way to do that in one unit or another, in this assignment or another.”

And if a military position didn’t pan out, Arbel would have found a civilian role to take on, volunteering at a hospital or delivering supplies for soldiers on the frontlines, or whatever else was needed.

Arbel is one of many tech startup employees, both in Israel and beyond, who are leaving their day jobs to join the war.

Worknet employs 10 people. Beyond Redmond and Boston, the company has engineering teams in Israel and in Warsaw, Poland, where employees hosted refugees from Ukraine after Russia invaded.

“And now [Israel] is under attack,” Arbel said. “Imagine how hard it is to sit down and try to do some work and concentrate when you are in a bomb shelter and mortars and missiles are shot at you, and jets and helicopters are flying all over.”

Arbel calls Worknet “lean and mean” and he’s optimistic that the startup can weather ongoing economic uncertainty back in the U.S. He thinks what’s he’s doing reinforces the message to employees to believe in and love what they do, and that standing for something makes them better.

“If you work with people that have values, that are willing to sacrifice their comfort and their income for a good reason, for a reason they believe in, I want to work with those people,” Arbel said. “Because when push comes to shove, I know they can deliver. They can show up in hard times.”

The GeekWire Summit is fast-approaching — and so is the deadline for early bird tickets, which ends this Thursday.

We’re reinventing our annual technology conference, now in its 12th year, with a half-day format on Oct. 19 focused on the new era of artificial intelligence, and a new venue, the beloved former Cinerama in Seattle.

In addition to in-depth panels and fireside chats, this year’s GeekWire Summit will include unique opportunities to connect and a surprise geeky movie screening, topped off with the theater’s world-famous chocolate popcorn!

Check out the full agenda here.

Don’t snooze. Tickets are selling fast. Visit the Summit event site here to secure tickets at early bird rates.

Thank you to our GeekWire Summit sponsors. Our gold-level sponsors are: Astound Business Solutions, Amazon, Calgary Economic Development, Delta, and Blink UX. Our silver-level and supporting sponsors are: SMM Marketing, SeaCiti, Remitly, TalentReach, SoluCIO Partners, Submittable, DialPad, British Columbia, Washington State Department of Commerce, ALLtech, SIFF, and Adavanza.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued a statement on the war in Israel and the company shared a memo it sent to employees.

“Heartbroken by the horrific terrorist attacks on Israel and the escalating conflict,” Nadella said on Tuesday evening. “My deepest condolences are with all those killed and impacted. Our focus remains on ensuring the safety of our employees and their families.”

The company has nearly 3,000 employees in Israel, according to the memo from Microsoft HR chief Kathleen Hogan, shared publicly on Microsoft’s blog.

“Since the attacks unfolded on Saturday, we have been focused on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and their overall wellbeing,” Hogan wrote.

Hogan said the company created a way for employees to support relief efforts, and Microsoft is connecting with local organizations to support first responders with tech and other services.

Nadella is one of several tech execs who have expressed sadness and outrage at the surprise offensive by Hamas militants, which began Saturday near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip and has escalated into full-scale war.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called the attacks against civilians in Israel “shocking and painful to watch” in a post on X on Monday night.

The Information reported Monday on how the conflict could affect tech companies in Israel, whether because Israeli tech workers will be headed to the front lines or because U.S. firms have large offices there.

Most of the Microsoft employees in Israel work on cybersecurity research and development, according to The Information. The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s careers page for Israel also lists offices in Herzliya, Haifa, and Nazareth. A 2-year-old video on the site, below, provides a tour of an R&D center.

The U.S. Coast Guard says it has recovered and transferred the remaining evidence and debris from OceanGate’s Titan submersible to a U.S. port for cataloging and analysis — nearly three months after the deep-sea implosion that killed the sub’s five crew members in the North Atlantic.

In an update issued today, the Coast Guard said the transfer was made on Oct. 4. “Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals,” it said.

OceanGate was a startup headquartered in Everett, Wash. — and the company’s founder and CEO, Stockton Rush, was among the casualties. In August, OceanGate said a new CEO with tech industry experience, Gordon Gardiner, would lead the company through the investigation and the closure of operations.

Salvage teams started gathering up evidence soon after a survey conducted by remotely operated vehicles confirmed that the submersible blew apart in the midst of a dive to the Titanic shipwreck, amid the crushing pressures of the ocean’s depths. The most recent follow-up salvage mission was conducted under an existing agreement with the U.S. Navy Supervisor of Salvage and Diving.

A photo released by the Coast Guard shows engineers examining the submersible’s aft titanium endcap. The fore endcap, which was equipped with the sub’s forward-facing viewport, was brought to shore just days after the tragedy.

The Coast Guard convened a Marine Board of Investigation to look into the causes of the incident, in cooperation with the National Transportation Safety Board and its counterparts in Canada, Britain and France.

Although today’s update signaled that the at-sea recovery operation has come to an end, the investigation is still in its evidence-gathering phase. The Coast Guard said anyone wishing to provide information that could assist investigators could submit that information via email to accidentinfo@uscg.mil.

Eventually, the Marine Board of Investigation will schedule a joint evidence review of the recovered Titan debris, in preparation for a public hearing into the tragedy.

Don’t worry, this article will be short enough to not create a time-consuming task for readers looking to absorb its key points. Researchers don’t always have that luxury when they’re trying to keep up with the latest scientific papers and publications.

The Allen Institute for AI has created a tool that uses artificial intelligence to help readers skim more effectively.

Semantic Scholar, a research and product development team within AI2, has released a new tool as part of its Semantic Reader that enhances skimming. It’s an AI-powered tool that automatically pre-highlights and color codes a research paper to show the goals, methods, and key results, helping scholars focus their reading, and improve their research skills over time.

Cassidy Trier, a senior product designer at AI2, designs human and AI interactions. In a new blog post, Trier highlights the design steps taken to arrive at the latest iteration of AI2’s augmented scientific reading application.

Trier said the skimming feature started as an internship project by Raymond Fok, a PhD student at the University of Washington, who interned at Semantic Scholar.

Fok researched and developed an early PDF reader with automatically-generated highlights called Scim, according to Trier. The Scim prototype was tested with 458 papers and 31 participants across two studies. The study results suggest that the system “helps study participants gain a high-level understanding of papers and draws their attention to details in the paper that might otherwise be skipped. Participants noted this is particularly helpful in dense passages and with papers in unfamiliar domains,” Trier wrote.

Early research and design of the tool was passed to the product team at Semantic Scholar, which worked on subsequent iterations and features, while gaining feedback from users.

Users can try Semantic Reader’s skimming feature by visiting this example paper, or another of the roughly 480,000 computer science papers available from ArXiv sources. You must be on a desktop device to use Semantic Reader.

Washington leaders on Wednesday launched an initiative to support companies in the state that want to play a role in the offshore wind energy sector. The nonprofit Washington Maritime Blue is leading the collaboration, which is dubbed Blue Wind.

The Biden administration set a target of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind electricity by the end of this decade, which would be enough power for more than 10 million American homes. That goal and the programs that bolster it have helped to nearly double the demand for offshore wind in the U.S. last year, according to an industry trade group.

“This is truly one of the largest maritime opportunities since the advent of the shipping container,” said Maritime Blue CEO Joshua Berger in a statement. “The Blue Wind collaborative will define the roadmap and innovation path to ensuring Washington state’s role as we coordinate these efforts throughout the West Coast.”

Much of the sector’s focus has been on the Eastern Seaboard, but there is growing interest on the West Coast. Oregon and California anticipate deploying floating offshore wind energy by 2030, while Washington does not yet have a process for facilitating the projects.

Despite the lack of plans for Washington installations, leaders argue the state is positioned to participate in the supply chain thanks to the area’s advanced manufacturing expertise, deepwater ports and skilled labor.

Blue Wave’s initial annual budget is $485,000 with funding roughly evenly split between public and privates sources that include federal, state and port dollars, as well as foundations, industry and labor, and seed funding. The effort’s objective is to identify the supply chain opportunities available to Washington companies and organize events to strategize and act on those opportunities.

Berger joined Gov. Jay Inslee; officials from the Ports of Seattle, Tacoma and Everett; the president of the local longshoremen union; and a vice president of Foss Offshore Wind to kick off the effort at an event at the Northwest Seaport Alliance in Seattle.

The initiative is one of multiple programs to bolster Washington’s historic maritime industries, which includes plans for a Maritime Innovation Center in Seattle to house multiple startup accelerators.

• The company said it is increasing focus on its ex vivo cell therapy product candidates, resulting in a “strategic re-positioning” and delaying other projects.
• Sana previously cut 15% of its staff in November. The company employed about 500 people at the time. It also laid off employees earlier this year.
• Sana, which went public in 2021, said it will continue development of its manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash.
• The company said it had $325.9 million in cash as of June 30, down from $434 million in the year-ago period. It reported a net loss of $114 million in its most recent second quarter.

• 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.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called the attacks against civilians in Israel “shocking and painful to watch” in a post on X on Monday night.

Jassy joined the chorus of those expressing sadness and outrage at the surprise offensive by Hamas militants, which began Saturday near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip and has escalated into full-scale war.

According to the Amazon jobs page for Israel, Seattle-based Amazon opened its first office in Tel Aviv in 2014, and has continued to grow and invest in its Israeli client base. The Amazon Web Services space in Tel Aviv called Floor28 opened in 2018 as an education hub for events and workshops.

Jassy said he has been in touch with teammates in Israel to make sure the company is doing everything it can to “help support their family’s and their safety, and to assist however we can in this very difficult time.”

Amazon told GeekWire Tuesday that the company is in touch with employees on the ground and is providing individual support.

An internal web page has been set up where any employee can donate to humanitarian missions, and Amazon has started the process for making cash donations to international organizations operating in the area.

Amazon has a robust disaster response and relief apparatus that utilizes the company’s global logistics capabilities, and normally responds to crises such as hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. According to its website, since 2017, Amazon has donated more than 23 million relief items to support people impacted by over 108 disasters around the world.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky also weighed in with a post on LinkedIn in which he called the attacks against Israel “sad and distressing.”

“Through the past few days we’ve been talking to our AWS teammates in Israel, offering our support,” Selipsky wrote. “Our priority is to make sure they are safe and have the resources they need during this difficult time. We are also in close contact with international humanitarian relief partners providing support to impacted civilians. We hope deeply for peace.”

The Information reported Monday on how the conflict could affect tech companies in Israel, whether because Israeli tech workers will be headed to the front lines or because U.S. firms have large offices there.

Microsoft has a significant presence in Israel, employing more than 2,000 people at its Tel Aviv campus, most of whom work on cybersecurity research and development, The Information said. The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s careers page for Israel also lists offices in Herzliya, Haifa, and Nazareth. A 2-year-old video on the site, below, provides a tour of an R&D center. Microsoft declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire on Monday.

The Information said Google employs roughly 2,200 people in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and operates data centers in the country for its cloud computing division.

Other notable Seattle ties and comments about the war:

• Dr. Hayim Katsman, a University of Washington Ph.D. student, was one of the Americans killed in the attacks.
• Tech execs with Seattle ties are reportedly heading back to Israel to fight in the war.
• “It’s hard to explain how emotionally shattering the last few days have been,” wrote Shahar Ronen, a longtime Seattle-area engineering leader. “Fortunately my family and friends in Israel are safe, mostly sheltering in place. But in my second circle there are people who were murdered or are being held hostage. Regardless of where you stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this attack by Hamas should be unequivocally condemned.”
• Craft PNW, a therapy center led by Seattle health tech entrepreneur Grin Lord, is hosting Israeli support groups this week.

Inside the Seattle-area home of their new boss, a group of Washington Post leaders nervously waited as Jeff Bezos silently reviewed a memo detailing a struggling newspaper business.

The Amazon founder stood up. Some thought he was going to leave. He went to grab some water and came back.

“I don’t get discouraged that easily,” he told them. “You’re right. We need to grow. We’ll just figure out how to do it.”

That was the beginning of a resurgence at the Post sparked by Bezos, according to Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor who stopped in Seattle on Monday to discuss his new book, “Collision of Power.”

Baron said it was a total surprise when Bezos paid $250 million a decade ago to buy the Post from the Graham family. But he was optimistic, given that the paper badly needed new ideas as it was cutting staff and “sliding into oblivion,” as Baron described.

Bezos pushed the Post to establish a bigger national and international presence, and to appeal to a younger audience.

“The internet is destroying the pillars of your business, but it’s also giving you a gift,” Bezos told leadership. That gift was limitless distribution around the globe, thanks to the internet.

“The cost of adding an additional reader or subscriber was essentially zero,” Baron said. “[Bezos] said, ‘take the gift.”

But not every idea from Bezos was well received.

Baron criticized Bezos’ decision to eliminate pension benefits for longtime employees, calling it “needlessly provocative.” He also took issue with a proposal to create an overnight team that would aggregate other news coverage and publish content every 15 minutes, and the way Bezos viewed editors as “indirect” employees who had less impact on the reader.

“That was a complete misreading of what editors do,” Baron said.

But overall Baron said he appreciated Bezos’ business and technology acumen and how he stayed away from editorial decisions, particularly related to himself or Amazon.

Embed from Getty Images

Baron also respected how Bezos handled criticism from former President Donald Trump, who went to battle with the ex-Amazon CEO on a number of issues, including his ownership of the Post.

“I admire the fact that he showed a lot of integrity and protected the independence of our journalism, despite being subject to unrelenting pressures by the most powerful person on Earth,” Baron said.

The Post developed its current motto — Democracy Dies in Darkness — under Bezos’ ownership.

“He wanted us to come up with something that would define our role in this country,” Baron said. “He wanted it to be an idea that people wanted to hold on to, not just a newspaper that people would subscribe to.”

Before joining the Post in 2012, Baron was editor of the Boston Globe, where he led investigative coverage of systemic child sex abuse by Boston Catholic priests that was depicted in the Academy Award Best Picture winner movie Spotlight.

Baron said he’s concerned about both the future of democracy in the U.S. and the demise of many news organizations across the country. Even the Post is struggling to retain subscribers and plans to reduce staff.

Baron said it’s critical to “hold power to account,” both at the national level and with smaller local outlets that he described as “the glue that holds the community together.”

“When people in office feel that nobody’s watching, they act accordingly,” he said. “It’s not in the best interest of the public. Thankfully we still have an independent press in this country but it needs to be a lot stronger, and needs to be more strongly supported.”

— Longtime tech executive Liz Pearce announced Monday that she is joining Seattle-based climate marketplace startup Ever.green as chief revenue officer.

Pearce said she was motivated to make the career pivot due to the growing urgency to address the impacts of climate change, including heat waves, floods, fires, and droughts.

“I want to use as much of my time and energy as possible to make some kind of impact,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Ever.green operates a marketplace that matches corporations spending money to reduce their carbon footprints with developers that need funding to build energy facilities. The idea is to make these transactions quicker, less risky financially, and easier for smaller corporations to participate.

Pearce spent more than a decade at Seattle project management software startup LiquidPlanner, including five years as CEO. She then joined Portland, Ore.-based augmented reality company Streem as chief revenue officer, later co-founded a recommendation platform startup called Fresh Chalk. In 2021, she was hired as vice president of marketing at GoDaddy, helping to lead the company’s go-to-market function for its U.S. business unit.

Ever.green, spun out of Pioneer Square Labs, raised $6.1 million earlier this year. The company’s investors include PSL Ventures, Designer Fund, Baker Tilly, Fin Capital, City Light Capital and Climate Capital. The startup is led by CEO and co-founder Cris Eugster, who previously was COO at San Antonio’s CPS Energy.

— Vancouver, Wash.-based biotech company Absci, which is developing technologies to accelerate the process of drug discovery, hired Amaro Taylor-Weiner as chief AI officer. Weiner was vice president of machine learning at PathAI, a Boston-based AI drug and diagnostic development startup.

— Kelsey Lewin, a co-director at The Video Game History Foundation, said she will step down from the role. Lewin is the co-owner of Pink Gorilla, a chain of used video game stores in Seattle, which opened a new location in Capitol Hill earlier this year.

— Andrew Mitrak was hired by Google as a senior manager of the Workspace marketing team. He announced that he will also be stepping down from his operational role at Wolfscale, the growth marketing agency he co-founded with Sean Jones. Mitrak held marketing leadership roles at Seattle startups Glue, Convoy, and Haptx.

— The Seattle Seawolves, the city’s Major League Rugby team, named Tom Barden as president and COO. He spent more than 27 years at IT company Accenture in various roles, most recently as managing director of operations in North America communications, media, and technology. Barden was an adjunct professor at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. He has been an investor in the Seawolves since 2018.

— Gabriella Lopes announced she was named CEO of the Legion Networking Community. She is the COO of Evoke NFT Marketplace and ambassador for Women in Games.

With a small earthquake near Seattle still top of mind, it’s a good time to remind people that the Great Washington ShakeOut earthquake preparedness drill is coming up next week.

The ShakeOut on Oct. 19, at 10:19 a.m., is a chance for people to practice the drop, cover and hold maneuver wherever they are — at work, home, school, walking in a park or at a shopping mall. At about the same time, more than 120 Washington tsunami sirens along the inner and outer coast will be tested using the real wailing sound of a tsunami warning.

Organized in part by the Washington Emergency Management Division, the ShakeOut will also feature a test of the free MyShake Earthquake Early Warning app, for those who have downloaded it to their smartphones.

The test alert will sound the tone it will use to warn of an earthquake and will display a message indicating that it is a test. The MyShake App is powered by the USGS ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning system and can provide a few seconds of warning before an actual earthquake hits. There will not be a test using Android’s built-in earthquake alerts or the Wireless Emergency Alert system.

ShakeAlert was reportedly not activated during Sunday’s 4.3 magnitude earthquake 35 miles northwest of Seattle because the quake was below magnitude 4.5. ShakeAlert debuted in Washington state two years ago; it’s available in other West Coast areas.

According to ShakeOut organizers, more than 1.2 million Washington residents have registered to participate in the earthquake and tsunami drill so far. Registration isn’t required but it helps agencies understand how effective outreach is.

This Thursday, a week before the drill, the Washington Emergency Management Division will team with scientists and other preparedness experts for an Ask Me Anything event on Reddit at 11 a.m.

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.

Pamela Hayter just wanted someone at Amazon to answer “the why.”

After more than eight years at the tech giant, Hayter had come to expect that decisions large and small at the company were always rooted in data.

Following three years of pandemic-induced remote work, Hayter figured Amazon’s February mandate calling for corporate and tech employees to return to the office at least three days a week must have been a data-driven decision.

“There was no data,” Hayter said. “I kept trying to find the reason. That’s what we do at Amazon, we find the why. There was no why that I could find. And I think that really got to me.”

Hayter isn’t just another employee frustrated by having to leave the comforts of home to return to the office. A former executive assistant and program manager who has only ever worked for Amazon since moving to Washington state from Virginia, Hayter became a leading critic in the push back against return-to-office mandates.

She launched an internal Slack channel at Amazon called “Remote Advocacy” that quickly attracted 33,000 users. She helped organize a petition against the mandate, helped draft a six-page document (a nod to Amazon’s “six-pager”) advocating for remote work that was sent to company leadership, and she was an organizer of an employee walkout in May.

But when pushed to the brink by, among other things, concerns about being able to afford to commute again from her home in Kirkland, Wash., back to an office in South Lake Union, Hayter left Amazon this summer.

Now she’s contemplating what she learned about the company and herself, what she would do differently, and what she would say to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about his return-to-office directive. Her story reflects the ongoing push and pull between employers and tech workers navigating when and how — if at all — to return to the office.

Learning to love remote work

When Hayter started at Amazon in 2015, she was completely bought in. She said she enjoyed working with smart and capable people. She appreciated learning, growing, and being allowed to try things and fail. She loved the culture.

“I loved it. Absolutely loved it,” she said. “I very, very much drank the Kool Aid, like everybody else does. I think a part of you has to, in order to just make it there, because it’s a very harsh environment. They don’t do a lot of hand-holding.”

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in Seattle and elsewhere, word came down at Amazon, like many places where it was feasible, that employees were being sent home to work remotely.

Hayter learned of the directive while in the middle of a session training fellow employees as part of her work with the Learning & Development team. Before Zoom calls became commonplace, some people would even fly in to attend such week-long classes.

“How do we do this? How do we pivot?” Hayter said she wondered at the time.

Hayter admitted that she never really understood why anyone would want to work from home. There was too much distraction from family, chores and daily life.

“Then I had to work from home and I realized I didn’t know what I was talking about,” she said. “Everyone’s life is so different, and I can see how this is very beneficial to people.”

A mother of two daughters in their 20s, Hayter became especially sympathetic to working parents of little children, those who had to take care of an ill family member, those with disabilities, and women and minorities who discovered they were treated more equally on video calls than they were in in-person meetings.

In a new study by the women’s advocacy group LeanIn.org, the overwhelming majority of women and men surveyed said that working remotely or on a hybrid schedule made it easier to balance work and life. And that the arrangement made them more efficient and productive, according to Axios.

For her commute from Kirkland to downtown Seattle, Hayter used to take I-405, SR 520 and I-5. She said she was spending roughly $600 a month on tolls, plus gas, parking and wear and tear on her car. And she was losing more than an hour every morning and evening sitting in traffic.

“By the time I come home, I’m dead. I’m mentally, emotionally exhausted,” Hayter said.

Working from home, Hayter also went to work on herself. After three years away from the office, Hayter said she completely changed as a person. She got to spend more time with her daughters, she was healthier than she’d ever been because she ate better, and she wasn’t drained from driving back and forth.

She also got divorced, and lost half the income she relied on to pay for her commute and other expenses.

Turning anger into action

On Feb. 17, Jassy sent a memo to Amazon employees stating that it was time to return to the office for the majority of the work week. The company was hardly alone in bringing workers back or issuing mandates. Redfin, Disney, Starbucks, DocuSign, and Apple also set in-person requirements.

CNBC reported last month that 90% of companies in one survey plan to implement return-to-office polices by the end of 2024, though some companies such as Zillow Group are committed to remote policies.

“It’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues,” Jassy told employees. “Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re in person.”

Hayter read the announcement and felt what she described as a mixture of anger and incredulousness.

“‘Oh, hell no,'” she remembered thinking. “‘Wait a minute, this is not gonna happen.'”

She started thinking about her future, all that had changed while working from home, and all that she would lose again by returning to an office.

She started the Slack channel.

The online meeting place for those who were angry and confused, or those who just wanted to witness a venting of the anger and confusion, quickly blew up as thousands of employees joined. Someone added Jassy to the channel, but Hayter said the CEO never chimed in.

“It would have been lovely if he had. I wanted desperately for him to,” she said. “I wanted him, and any other leader in that company, to see that we were very serious, and we weren’t joking around. We weren’t just doing this to pass memes back and forth. It was human beings talking about how [return to office] is going to affect our lives, sometimes positive, majority negative.”

In Amazon’s view, the plan to bring employees back at least three days a week would yield the best long-term results for customers, business, and culture.

“While we understand some people didn’t agree with the direction, they were in the minority,” Amazon spokesperson Rob Munoz said. “Now that we have several months under our belts of people in the office more frequently, there’s more energy, connection, and collaboration, and we’re hearing that from employees and the businesses that surround our offices.”

Speaking to the crowd at the employee walkout in May, Hayter called the Slack channel “the largest concrete expression of employee dissatisfaction in our entire company history.”

She was joined that day at the podium by Emily Cunningham, co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Cunningham was fired by Amazon in 2020 and ultimately settled with the company in 2021 over allegations of illegal retaliation for her activism.

Hayter said she started to notice her work environment was changing. She was “below bar” on her annual review for the first time in eight years, and in June she said she was investigated by an employee relations team.

“They basically were saying that I was instigating, leading people into being angry at leadership, if you will,” Hayter said. In July she was told she was going to be placed in a program called Pivot, which is intended for employees who are not performing to standards.

She spoke with her manager about potentially shifting to a virtual role, perhaps with a different team, but Hayter said she didn’t find anything that interested her in internal job postings. In August she decided it was time to leave Amazon, voluntarily, and at least get some severance.

She has since filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against the company.

“We respect the right of every employee to share their experience, but these claims are without merit, and we will demonstrate that through the legal process,” Amazon’s Munoz said.

‘Listen to your people’

In a Washington Post story last month about workers quitting rather than returning to the office, Hayter was among those profiled. She said, “I assumed Amazon was going to be my forever company.”

Her goal isn’t to get her job back. She doesn’t even know if she’d work in tech again, much less for a massive company. She just wants people to understand how the return-to-office decisions at Amazon and other companies are negatively affecting many workers.

Asked if she would do it all again, she said, “1000%” yes, and that she would go at the company even harder.

“I don’t think I did enough. I would have just gone all in from day one. I didn’t because I was nervous. I was afraid of losing my job,” Hayter said. “Not to downplay anything that we did, because we did a ton of stuff, but I think that I maybe would have set a different tone and a different pace.”

Amazon has changed its own tone and pace in recent months when it comes to letting corporate and tech workers know how serious it is about getting them back in the office.

In July, the company started asking some workers to relocate to ensure they’re close enough to work in person with others on their teams. The company has said that requests for exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Last month, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported that Amazon told employees it’s monitoring their individual badge swipes into office buildings. Other companies such as TikTok are implementing similar tracking tools.

Amazon’s Munoz said in a statement that the “information will help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues.”

Hayter said it’s fascinating to see that step by Amazon actually playing out.

“When we first started the [Slack] channel, that was one of the things that we were talking about: how long until they start tracking?” she said. “It was almost kind of a joke. Now, fast forward. They know who you are, where you are.”

Longtime human resources professional Mikaela Kiner, founder and CEO of Seattle-based HR consulting company Reverb, said there’s speculation that large employers in particular are using return-to-office mandates to force attrition, especially given the economic downturn and layoffs of the past year.

Amazon in January announced an 18,000-person layoff, the largest in its history. An additional 9,000 layoffs were announced in March.

“As always, people react negatively to any kind of monitoring of their whereabouts,” Kiner said.

She added that workers are choosing companies and roles that are location agnostic. It shows “how much of a driver that is in terms of attraction and retention,” she said.

“The policies I’ve seen that make the most sense lead with flexibility, are thoughtful about when and why people should come together, and use incentives (carrots not sticks) to encourage people to use the office,” Kiner said.

A recent survey of CEOs by professional services giant KPMG found 90% of CEOs saying they will “reward employees who make an effort to come into the office with favorable assignments, raises or promotions.”

Even though she never connected with him over Slack, Hayter still has a message for her former CEO. She said Jassy should be upfront about the real reasons and data — “the why” — behind making people return to the office.

“If it’s because of taxes, just say it. If it’s because of your real estate investments, just say it,” Hayter said. “We’re not children. The whole time you’re at Amazon, you’re told you’re an owner and a leader. Treat us like those things that you say that we are.”

And she said Jassy, and other corporate leaders making the same policies, should trust employees to know what is best for their own lives and livelihoods.

“Listen to your people,” Hayter said. “They are telling you what they need, and you’re turning a blind eye to it. You know how that makes people feel? It certainly isn’t conducive to culture that you keep carrying on and on about. And it really isn’t conducive to productivity. It’s not going to make people be loyal to you. It certainly isn’t going to make anyone want to go work there.”

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