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 17, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Illustration generated by Google Gemini Twelve AI labs have a combined valuation larger than Ford and GM. None of them sell anything. I call them the Virgin Unicorns — valued above a billion dollars, but innocent of product or revenue. OpenAI proved that an AI research lab with the right...
This week on a supersized Memorial Day Weekend edition of the GeekWire Podcast: A massive IPO filing from SpaceX includes new details about Elon Musk’s Starlink business and its satellite factory in Redmond. Jeff Bezos talks about wealth, inequality and eventually tech in an hour-long...
Freshly sliced pepperoni is delivered via conveyer belt onto a pizza being assembled by a Picnic pizza-making robot. (GeekWire File Photo) Picnic, the 10-year-old Seattle food automation startup that set out to revolutionize the production of pizza with robotics, has shut down and liquidated its...
(Bungie press image) Thursday abruptly became a big news day for fans of Bellevue, Wash.-based video game developer Bungie, which announced that it plans to cease development on its popular online shooter Destiny 2. Eight hours after Bungie’s announcement, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier released...
Scott Van Vliet. (LinkedIn Photo) — Microsoft’s Xbox promoted Scott Van Vliet to the role of chief technology officer. Van Vliet, based in the Los Angeles area, has been with the company across two stints totaling more than seven years, with work on Teams and Azure Communication...
Lakshmi Agrawal, left, and Anusha Arora, both of Bellevue, Wash., hold their prizes at the Society for Science’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair earlier this month. (Lisa Fryklund / Licensed by Society for Science) Two teenagers from Bellevue, Wash., took home a combined...
Participants at the Bellevue Chamber’s Seattle-focused luncheon, from left: Joe Nguyen, Seattle Metro Chamber; Tiffini Connell, West Coast Commercial Realty; Jon Scholes, Downtown Seattle Association; and moderator Joe Fain, Bellevue Chamber. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) BELLEVUE, Wash. —...
Yusuf Mehdi speaks at Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC event in May 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Yusuf Mehdi, one of Microsoft’s best-known and longest-serving business leaders, whose tenure has spanned 35 years from Windows 3.1 to Copilot, plans to leave the company after one more year — his...
Crystal Palace Football Club and Seattle-area open-source software platform Temporal are partnering on a front-of-shirt sponsorship deal. (Crystal Palace Image) A Seattle-area developer tools startup is doing something that no amount of banner ads or conference booths could: it’s putting its...
Dr. Lynda Stuart’s last day at the Fund for Science and Technology was May 8. (File photo courtesy FFST) The first CEO of the Fund for Science and Technology, the $3.1 billion foundation responsible for giving away a large portion of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s fortune, has...
SpaceX is producing an average of 70 Starlink satellites per week in Redmond, its IPO filing shows. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) Redmond, Wash., has been known for decades as the home of Microsoft, to the extent that the city’s name has become synonymous with the software giant. Maybe it’s time...
University of Washington professor emeritus Ed Lazowska. (UW Photo / Mark Stone) Ed Lazowska needs to clear more room in the trophy case. The University of Washington professor emeritus — a longtime computer science educator, researcher and fixture in Seattle’s tech community — has been...
Housing costs, public safety concerns and the local political climate have all contributed to Seattle’s struggles. But tax policy influences business decisions too, particularly at the margin where firms decide where future hiring and expansion will occur. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt...
Artist’s rendering of a CoPower Platform by Electric Era. (Electric Era Image). Seattle EV charging startup Electric Era is applying its battery expertise to energy storage systems for data centers. The company on Thursday announced the CoPower Platform, which pairs large batteries with the...
L-R: Michael Atalla, chief marketing officer at UiPath and Katie Fath, director of community giving at Seattle Children’s Hospital with John Cook, GeekWire co-founder and publisher. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Seattle’s business and tech community just delivered a World Cup-sized assist for a...
GeekWire’s Todd Bishop interviews author and strategist Brian Evergreen for the GeekWire Podcast at an Agents of Transformation dinner presented by Accenture at El Gaucho in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Holly Grambihler) [Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire...
The rooftop park on Ocean Pavilion offers views of the Seattle skyline and Elliott Bay. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) While tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon call the Seattle area home, residents are voicing opposition to the construction of new data centers that underpin their...
S. “Soma” Somasegar at AWS re:Invent in 2019. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) The tributes came quickly for S. “Soma” Somasegar, and they came from seemingly everywhere and everyone he touched across the technology and business community. A consistent picture emerged: Somasegar was kind,...
Former Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle in October 2022. (GeekWire File Photo / Dan DeLong) Bruce Harrell has a new job — with term sheets and customers as opposed to stump speeches and constituents. The former mayor of Seattle is the new CEO of Filium, a...
Tech Alliance CEO Laura Ruderman addresses the crowd at State of Technology luncheon in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) It’s a complicated moment in Washington, our home state, where the tech giants are strong, the satellites are abundant, and economic growth may no longer be above...
The cover of Newsweek magazine, May 20, 1996 — exactly 30 years ago today. Take a breath, close your eyes, and think about the words that define Seattle. Innovative. Outdoorsy. Global. Inventive. Smart. Progressive. Independent. A little reserved. A little weird. Thirty years ago today,...
A computer-designed protein that forms a cage-like structure of pentagons and hexagons. (UW Institute for Protein Design Illustration) Medical experts use gene therapies for a variety of ailments — treating hemophilia with a clotting-factor gene or dosing a cancer patient with therapeutic DNA or...
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2 satellite in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration) Eleven months after launch, Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2 satellite is finally kicking its test mission into high gear, closing in for a rendezvous with a newly designated target. If all...
Jeff Bezos during a CNBC Squawk Box interview at Blue Origin’s Rocket Park in Merritt Island, Fla., on Wednesday, May 20, 2026. When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin described Jeff Bezos’ startup Project Prometheus as being “really about AI robotics” in an interview on Wednesday, the Amazon founder...
Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Amazon Leo, discusses Amazon’s plans for satellite broadband services while Chris Weber, Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product, looks on during the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology Luncheon in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Brian M....
S. “Soma” Somasegar at Microsoft in 2014, giving a tour of the revamped Developer Division offices. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) S. “Soma” Somasegar, a fixture in the Seattle tech community who led Microsoft’s Developer Division as part of his 27-year tenure at the company before...
From left: Expedia Group chairman Barry Diller, CEO Ariane Gorin, former CEO and current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and founder Rich Barton at Expedia’s Explore partner conference in Las Vegas this week. (Expedia Group Photo) From her office overlooking the atrium at Expedia Group’s sunlit...
Tin Can co-founder and CEO Chet Kittleson, right, speaks with Pioneer Square Labs Managing Director Greg Gottesman at Seattle Flow Startup Day at Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle on May 15. (Dan DeLong Photo) This past Christmas, Chet Kittleson was in the back of a minivan watching his...
The Washington Youth Aerospace team, from left: Nikhil Sirivara, Daniel Tadesse, Mikhail Antipin, Bao-Ky Tran, Antoine Vigneron and Anay Mediwala, pose with the rocket supplies vendor who found the motor the kids needed for a successful launch in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Sudheer...
A screenshot of TerraByte’s software platform pinpoints cargo ships, warehouses, solar farms, mining sites and areas of deforestation. One complex query generated more than 2,000 results that can be further filtered. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: TerraByte AI) A stealthy...
StitcherAI co-founders Varun Mittal (left) and Udam Dewaraja. (StitcherAI Photo) StitcherAI, backed by $3 million in pre-seed funding, launched today with an unusual approach to help companies get a handle on AI and cloud spending before the bills get out of control. Founded by a pair of...
Reporters and lawyers line up outside the federal courthouse in Oakland for jury selection. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) A jury ruled unanimously Monday that Elon Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, finding the defendants not liable on all...
Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) Layoffs at a Starbucks support center in Seattle will impact 252 corporate jobs, including a number of vice presidents, directors and senior managers, according to a new state filing on Monday. A Washington Worker Adjustment and...
The Gates Foundation marked its 25th anniversary in May 2025 with a panel, from left: Emma Tucker, Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief; Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation; and Bill Gates. (GeekWire screenshot from live stream) The Gates Foundation’s trust no longer owns any shares of...