A view from a camera mounted on one of the Orion spacecraft’s solar array wings shows a sliver of the moon’s far side with a crescent Earth in the background during the Artemis 2 crew’s lunar flyby. (NASA via YouTube) Four astronauts today became the first humans to make a trip around the moon...
Browsing in another new Barnes & Noble bookstore, in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A new retail storyline is close to beginning in downtown Seattle with the opening this month of a Barnes & Noble bookstore — six years after the chain closed its longtime downtown...
Robbie Cape is a tech veteran and serial entrepreneur. (File Photo via 98point6) Robbie Cape, the Seattle tech entrepreneur who has dabbled in healthcare and fried chicken in recent years, has another new venture. In a post on LinkedIn on Monday, Cape said his nine-month search for a new job...
Yifan Zhang, AI2 Incubator co-managing director and AI House founder, speaks at the 2026 Seattle AI Startup Summit. (Ken Yeung Photo) The City by the Bay may be considered the center of AI and technology, but that doesn’t mean every founder should flock there to set up shop, right? That’s the...
Nadim Abdo. (Microsoft Photo) — After more than 26 years with Microsoft, Nadim Abdo is now the tech giant’s corporate vice president of Identity & Network Access (IDNA). The team’s services authenticate more than 1 billion users daily, and its Microsoft Entra technology is used by more than 95%...
Ridge AI co-founders Jeffrey Heer and Ellie Fields. (Ridge AI Photo) Ellie Fields and Jeffrey Heer know data visualization from the inside: Fields spent more than 12 years as a product and marketing leader at Tableau, and Heer is the University of Washington professor whose open-source tools are...
Eric Howard, founder of Dog Tired, rides his One Wheel while running Boone, a golden retriever, near Lake Tapps, Wash. (Photo courtesy of DogTired) It’s tough to tell who has the bigger smile: the guy zipping by on the Onewheel, the dog running alongside him at full sprint, or the passersby...
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 March 29, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
A microchip pet door awaits its fate at the FedEx Office on NW 46th Street in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) For a while now, since the closure of the Amazon Fresh Pickup in Seattle, I’ve been complaining about having to drive across the Ballard Bridge to Whole Foods to do my Amazon...
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Rec Room, the Seattle-based social gaming platform once valued at $3.5 billion, is shutting down — and Snap is picking up some of the pieces. Todd talks about what it was like fielding calls from distraught users on the night of the announcement. John...
Joy Chik. (LinkedIn Photo) — Joy Chik announced she will retire from Microsoft in July after nearly three decades. Her eight roles there ranged from software design engineer to her current title: president of identity and network access. “I’m excited to expand my public company board work...
A model of the inner solar system shows asteroids discovered by the Rubin Observatory in light teal. Previously known asteroids are dark blue. The model highlights almost 12,700 asteroids that the Rubin team has discovered over the course of a year and a half. (Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin...
Speedy’s fouder Tyler Swartz with the electric van he uses to pick up and drop off e-bikes. (Speedy’s Photo) If you’ve ever tried to lift and fit a big, heavy e-bike into the back of a car, Tyler Swartz feels your pain, and went to work on a solution. Swartz, a Seattle native and cycling...
Convoy co- founder and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Dan Lewis at the Seattle AI Startup Summit on April 2, 2026. (Ken Yeung Photo) Dan Lewis’ career is hard to summarize in a sentence. He was a product manager at Microsoft, then an early employee at the Seattle AI startup Wavii, which...
Artemis 2 astronauts are using Microsoft Surface Pro computers on board the Orion spacecraft. (GeekWire Illustration) Updated below with details from NASA press conference. Bound for the Moon, astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft experienced a challenge familiar to many of us...
Soma Energy’s co-founders, from left: CEO Ath Caramanolis, Chief Technology Officer Mario Souto and Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum. (Soma Energy Photos) Soma Energy, a startup founded by former Amazon energy managers, emerged from stealth Thursday with $7 million in funding. The...
Seattle independent radio station KEXP prides itself on being a leader in new music discovery. They may have moved the bar up several notches with a band and video that is going viral on YouTube. The performance by Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine, playing live during the Trans Musicales...
Armoire’s “Outfit Inspiration” feature allows shoppers to cycle through a number of options for pieces to create the right outfit. (Armoire Image) Seattle-based online clothing rental company Armoire is leaning into the AI in fashion with a new feature called “Outfit Inspiration” that allows...
(Company logos) The path from successful startup to industry heavyweight is often marked by the ability to solve massive, complex problems at scale — whether those challenges are on a farm, battlefield or in low-Earth orbit. This GeekWire Award, presented by Baird, takes notice of the next...
A research team determined that the torpedo bat, left, and traditional bat perform equally well in hitting power with only a slight difference in the location of the bat’s sweet spot (WSU Photo / Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture) The New York Yankees just cruised through Seattle...
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Microsoft is expanding its roster of in-house AI models, releasing a new speech-to-text system and making two existing models broadly available to developers for the first time. The moves by Microsoft AI (MAI) are...
Emily Power, CEO of Ocean Made, shows the difference in the root structure of tomato plants grown in the startup’s kelp-based pots, on the left, versus plastic pots. (Ocean Made Photo) The University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs has selected the second cohort of startups for its Climate Tech...
NASA’s Space Launch System rises from its Florida launch pad, sending the Artemis 2 crew into orbit. (NASA via YouTube) After years of postponements and close to $100 billion in spending, NASA has launched the first mission to send astronauts around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The...
The downtown Seattle skyline. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle has officially leveled up from a “secondary” tech market to a critical “reinforcer” of the global innovation economy — but the city is running out of room to grow, according to a new report. The latest edition of...
David Pogue’s new book, “Apple: The First 50 Years,”is packed with stories about the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft. But one stands out above the rest. In late 2005, Steve Jobs attended the 50th birthday party of a Microsoft engineer, the husband of a friend of his wife, Laurene. Over...
Robinhood isn’t waiting to get sued in Washington state. The financial services company filed a preemptive federal suit against Washington’s attorney general and gambling commission, arguing the state can’t use its gambling laws to shut down prediction market trading that it contends is...
Finalists for GeekWire’s 2026 Sustainable Innovation Award, from left going clockwise: Helion Energy fusion device (Helion Photo), OCOchem team (OCOchem Photo), TerraPower’s mock fuel rods (TerraPower Photo), Ravel team (Ravel Photo), and IUNU’s image capturing system. (IUNU...
A delivery of medical supplies by Project C.U.R.E. (Project C.U.R.E. Photo) [Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and agents. See coverage of our related event.] Project C.U.R.E. had the...
Oracle’s Cloud Experience Center in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Oracle is laying off 491 employees in Washington state, according to a filing Tuesday from the state Employment Security Department. The cuts impact workers at two Seattle offices as well as remote...
Moss: Book II. (Polyarc screenshot) Polyarc, the Seattle-based VR gaming developer behind the award-winning Moss series, announced that it’s had to “significantly reduce the size of the company.” The announcement, via LinkedIn on Monday, notes that the layoffs come after “an unsuccessful...
Meta’s Dexter Station office in Seattle. (Meta Photo) Another round of layoffs at Meta will affect 168 employees in Washington state, according to a filing from the state Employment Security Department. The cuts are part of a broader reduction impacting hundreds of Meta workers around the...
(Rec Room Image) The despair among Rec Room players is real. Users of the popular social gaming platform expressed their disbelief and sadness over the demise of the Seattle-based company, which announced Monday that it is shutting down on June 1, and that some of its assets are being...
A Seattle startup founded by former Google and Microsoft engineers is betting that companies will increasingly want to build and own smaller, specialized AI models rather than relying on general-purpose alternatives from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Oumi, which launched its...
Lindsay-Rae McIntyre. (Alaska Airlines Photo) Lindsay-Rae McIntyre is the new chief people officer at Seattle-based Alaska Airlines. She joins the airline from Microsoft, where she most recently served as chief diversity officer and corporate VP of Talent and Learning. “There is a vast,...
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Brent Urke, program manager for L3Harris’ facility in Redmond, Wash., check out a model of the Orion spaceship that’s due to take four astronauts around the moon as early as this week. Cantwell is pointing to the model’s set of eight R-4D thrusters. An actual R-4D...