(Cowboy Space Corp. Photo) Cowboy Space Corp., a space startup growing out a new satellite and rocket engineering center in Seattle, raised $275 million in a Series B funding round this week that valued the company at $2 billion. The Bay Area-based company — formerly known as Aetherflux — was...
Kevin Scott, Microsoft CTO, in Redmond in May 2025. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott took the stand Wednesday and, for the first time, publicly addressed the internal email that Elon Musk’s lawyers have cited to support allegations that Microsoft knew OpenAI was...
(Google Gemini Image) [Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series by Oren Etzioni about AI usage and best practices.] I’ve been writing code since before most of today’s vibe coding founders were born. So when I sat down to try the latest vibe coding tools — Lovable, Claude code, and the...
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket lifts off from its Florida launch pad in April. (Blue Origin Photo) For more than a quarter-century, Jeff Bezos has been funding his Blue Origin space venture primarily with his gains from Amazon, the other big company he founded — but according to a report in the...
Pamela Bhattacharya. (LinkedIn Photo) — Pamela Bhattacharya has left her role as senior director of AI at Microsoft to join OpenAI as a member of its technical staff, where she is leading AI safety work with a focus on child safety. Bhattacharya spent nearly nine years at Microsoft as a...
(Bigstock Photo) LinkedIn is laying off workers across engineering, product and marketing, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, as the tech sector continues shedding roles. CEO Daniel Shapero disclosed the cuts in an internal memo cited by Bloomberg. The professional networking platform, which is...
Defense giant Anduril is operating its autonomous naval vessel manufacturing facility at the old Foss Shipyard on the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook) Anduril Industries announced a massive $5 billion funding round Wednesday as the fast-growing defense tech...
How an Alexa for Shopping price alert flows across the Amazon app, phone notification and Echo Show. (Amazon Image) Amazon.com and Alexa are finally talking to each other. The tech giant on Wednesday announced Alexa for Shopping, a new capability that connects its Rufus...
Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in November 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Sam Altman faced pointed questions Tuesday about his personal financial ties to Helion Energy, the Everett, Wash., fusion startup that’s aiming to supply vast amounts of energy to both OpenAI and...
Part of the Seattle skyline as seen from the waterfront. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Two new rules governing H-1B visas took effect last year, aiming to fix the program’s two most persistent criticisms: that foreign workers were taking jobs Americans wanted, and that visa holders were...
Amazon’s Kiro AI coding tool is getting a new feature that uses mathematical proofs to catch flawed software requirements before AI agents start writing code. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon Web Services is adding a feature to its Kiro AI coding tool designed to mathematically prove that...
Winners and mentors at the TYE Seattle Chapter Finals, from left: Kishore Panpaliya, TiE board member; Yash Wagh, TYE program chair; Ashish Naik, DuggAI; Vicky Mehta, founder of PathIvy; Shaurya Duggal, DuggAI; Kruthik Ankam, DuggAI; Aravind Bala, TYE instructor; Aalok Doshi, TYE program co-chair....
Mpathic CEO Grin Lord, left, and Alison Cerezo, chief science officer. (Mpathic Photos) Mpathic, a Seattle startup that helps AI companies stress-test their models for dangerous responses, has a new message for Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini: you’re getting safer, but you’re still not safe...
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, right, on stage with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI Dev Day in San Francisco in 2023, about two weeks before Altman’s brief ouster from the company. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene was the name that drew the “strong, strong...
Amazon has been testing Amazon Now 30-minute deliveries since last fall in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Amazon is expanding its 30-minute “Amazon Now” service to dozens of U.S. cities, with plans to reach tens of millions of customers across the country by the end of the...
Shawn Bice (LinkedIn Photo) Microsoft security exec Shawn Bice is returning to Amazon Web Services as VP of AI Services, leading the company’s Automated Reasoning Group as AWS doubles down on making AI agents more reliable. Bice will report to Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s VP of Agentic...
Sam Altman greets Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Satya Nadella drew a historical parallel to Microsoft’s early PC partnership with IBM as the tech giant prepared to invest $10 billion more in OpenAI in April 2022 —...
Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A new filing with Washington state shows that Starbucks’ previously reported job cuts will impact 61 tech jobs at its Seattle headquarters. The layoffs are the result of “a reorganization of the technology department at the...
DubHacks Next Batch 5 founders at Demo Day on May 7 at the University of Washington. (DubHacks Photo) Senior engineers are retiring faster than companies can replace them, creating a widening expertise gap in industries from aerospace to nuclear energy. Hera, a project developed by...
An interactive “Sunscore” visualization on Redfin shows the path of sunlight on GeekWire’s offices in Seattle. (Image via Redfin) What’s it take to be a neighbor with a sunny disposition? Perhaps more sunlight, for starters. Seattle-based real estate brokerage Redfin launched “Sunscore” on...
An Armada Galleon portable data center in transit. The company has grown its Bellevue, Wash., engineering team to about 120 people as demand increases for AI infrastructure that can operate in remote environments. (Armada Photo) A heavily-funded San Francisco-based startup by the name of Armada...
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of May 3, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Tracy Drinkwater, founder of the Seattle Universal Math Museum, accepts the 2026 GeekWire Award for STEM Educator of the Year, presented by First Tech Federal Credit Union, at the Showbox SoDo in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Conversations with...
Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin. (Expedia Group Photo) More than 30% of Expedia Group’s self-serve customer support interactions are now handled by AI. Its fastest-growing marketing channel is getting its brands to show up in AI responses. And the company now has travel booking integrations...
The scene at the 2026 GeekWire Awards at Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Thursday night. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Hundreds of Pacific Northwest tech community members turned out to honor each other, network and party at the 2026 GeekWire Awards in Seattle on Thursday. The shimmering scene...
Members of Maison de V’s circus and dance community perform at the opening of the 2026 GeekWire Awards at Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) The love for Seattle runs deep. During a night of celebration for innovators, entrepreneurs, educators and even soccer...
Helion Energy is building Tiny Merge, a fusion device that is one-eighth the size of its seventh generation prototype and will serve as a testbed for faster iterations of its designs. (Helion Photo) EVERETT, Wash. — With just three years left on a hard deadline to prove its fusion approach...
From left, Microsoft deputy general counsel Brian DeFoe, Seattle Sounders FC captain Cristian Roldan, and GeekWire co-founder John Cook on stage at the 2026 GeekWire Awards, announcing an online auction for a private suite at the FIFA World Cup Round of 16 knockout match at Lumen Field on July 6,...
Workers install equipment in the data center housing the new Ai2 computing cluster funded by Nvidia and NSF. (Ai2 Photo) The Allen Institute for AI says it has brought online and started using a powerful new computing system funded by Nvidia and the National Science Foundation, the first big...
Microsoft’s Fairwater data center near Atlanta is part of the company’s broader AI expansion. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft is considering scaling down or scuttling a pledge to match its electricity use with carbon-free power around the clock by 2030, according to Bloomberg. As tech companies...
Lumen Field in Seattle, home of the Seahawks. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Former Boston Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck and Aditya Mittal, an investor in the NBA team, are preparing a bid to purchase the Seattle Seahawks, according to a report Thursday by Sportico. The report cites...
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent in 2025. (GeekWire File Photo) Generative AI bear Gary Marcus called the AI capex boom the “greatest capital misallocation in history.” Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan reaches the opposite conclusion in his “AI in a Bubble?” research...
A Microsoft-branded beanie at the company store at the tech giant’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft employees eligible for the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program are learning the details of the package Thursday morning, including the...
Washington state’s Legislative Building in Olympia, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) [Editor’s Note: Sales consultant and former startup founder Ron Davis is a candidate for the Washington state Legislature, who has written for GeekWire previously on startup sales hiring practices....
Bigstock Photo Zillow Group says its engineers are shipping 40% more code each, on average, thanks to internal use of AI tools, allowing them to move features faster from concept to launch. That’s one of the AI claims the company made in its first-quarter shareholder letter Wednesday, which...