Shannon Smith. (LinkedIn Photo) Shannon Smith, an experienced public-sector technology executive, will be the City of Seattle’s next chief technology officer. A city spokesperson confirmed to GeekWire that Mayor Katie Wilson made the selection, which has not been announced publicly. Smith’s...
The superyacht support vessel Wingman is seen docked at the Smith Cove Cruise Terminal at Pier 91 at the northern end of Seattle’s waterfront this week. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Mark Zuckerberg — or whoever is traveling aboard his superyacht in Seattle this week — brought a...
Neil Lindsay, left, and Dr. Roy Schoenberg. (Amazon Photos) Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, is leaving his post after five years — capping a 15-year tenure at the tech giant. As the head of Amazon’s healthcare business, Lindsay oversaw divisions including Amazon...
Possible co-founders Prasad Mahendra, Tyler Conant, and Tony Huang in an early photo, left, and at the 2026 GeekWire Awards. Possible Finance CEO Tony Huang describes the startup’s history as “a tale of three chapters.” They could be summed up as a rocket launch, a survival test, and a comeback...
“Incorruptible” author Eric Ries, left, with GeekWire’s Todd Bishop at Seattle Flow Startup Day 2026. (Photo by Dan DeLong for Seattle Flow) Eric Ries wants to retire the word “profit,” or at least the way we usually define it. In his new book, “Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and...
Two people in a dinghy get a c loser look at Launchpad, the superyacht docked in Seattle on Lake Union on Wednesday. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) People saw it on Facebook. And they saw it on Instagram. But many had to come see it up close and in person. Social media scrollers turned...
New Glenn rockets are being processed inside Blue Origin’s Florida facility. (Blue Origin Photo) Five weeks after experiencing its first launch failure, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is getting ready to put its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket back in service to launch 48 satellites into low Earth...
Snowflake’s office in Bellevue’s Spring District, where it expanded its regional presence last year. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Snowflake on Wednesday committed to spend $6 billion on Amazon Web Services over five years, adding to the cloud giant’s growing roster of AI infrastructure...
The Triton Robotics team, back row from left: Griffin Fisher, Tenzin Larkin, Thomas Gust, Simon Hajduk, Theo Lipson. Front row from left: Miles Lipson, Emi Enoki. (Triton Robotics Photo) A team of Seattle high schoolers will compete against underwater robotics teams from around the world during...
CodeIntegrity’s co-founders are CEO Steven Jung, left, and CTO Abi Raghuram. (CodeIntegrity Photo) The computer security startup CodeIntegrity on Wednesday announced a $5 million seed round to support its efforts to build meaningful protections for agentic AI applications. The San...
Curevo CEO George Simeon. (Curevo Photo) Eli Lilly has agreed to acquire Curevo Vaccine in a deal centered on a next-generation shingles vaccine aimed at improving tolerability and boosting vaccination rates among older adults. The deal includes up to $1.5 billion in cash for the Bothell,...
A demo of the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant: an AI-powered style advisor operating on a retailer’s mobile site. (AWS Photo) Amazon’s cloud division announced an AI shopping assistant for retailers, following the company’s broader blueprint of turning its internal technology into products for...
Mark Zuckerberg’s 387-foot superyacht Launchpad passes through Seattle’s Ballard Locks on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht passed through Seattle’s Ballard Locks on Tuesday, the same day Meta disclosed plans to cut nearly 1,400 jobs in Washington...
An artist’s conception shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander lowering an Astrolab rover to the lunar surface. (NASA Illustration) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won NASA’s nod to deliver crew-carrying rovers to the lunar surface as part of the space agency’s decade-long plan to...
On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity”— the first encyclical of his papacy, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” There’s something incongruous about turning to the Catholic Church for moral guidance on...
One of Meta’s buildings in Bellevue’s Spring District, where nearly 700 jobs are being cut. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Facebook parent company Meta is cutting 1,395 jobs in Washington state, about 20% of its local workforce, as part of a companywide effort eliminating about 8,000...
Canopii’s team among its robotic system and basil plants. CEO and co-founder David Ashton is tossing greens. (Canopii Photo / Bryan Aulick) A running joke in the agricultural field is the average age of a U.S. farmer is 58 today, but that will tick up by one next year. The trouble is, it’s not...
Ryan Spies, Alaska Airlines’ managing director of sustainability. (Photo courtesy of Spies) Ryan Spies, Alaska Airlines’ managing director of sustainability, isn’t a climate perfectionist. Yes, he drives an EV — but he also eats a relatively carbon-intensive cheeseburger now and then. What...
Hadi Partovi, founder of Code.org and new CEO of Payam Music, speaking at a Microsoft event in July 2025. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Hadi Partovi helped kids around the world learn to code. Next on the playlist: piano. The Code.org founder, who earlier this year handed off the CEO role at...
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...