GEEK News
June 05, 2015 - 01:04 PM
Amazon’s fight with Meta: Who owns the customer relationship when an agent does the buying?
Amazon and Meta are at odds over AI agents that shop on customers’ behalf. (GeekWire Illustration / GPT 5.6 Sol) Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse AI agent from its store Sunday night, and leaders across the tech industry have spent the past two days debating the bigger questions raised by the move. Among them: whether the big platforms will agree on rules for agents crossing into each other’s...
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Solo founder uses AI as backing band to build a music licensing platform for small businesses
John Boyle, founder of Music for Business Finder, and a screenshot of notifications on his phone from the autonomous AI agent helping to run his startup. (Images courtesy of John Boyle) For small business owners playing Spotify over their shop speakers, the threat of hefty copyright fines is very real. John Boyle‘s new startup might be music to their ears. Boyle, of Kirkland, Wash., is the...
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Microsoft cuts hundreds more jobs, shifts next ‘Halo’ game to Activision in Xbox overhaul
Microsoft cut hundreds of additional jobs Tuesday, including 268 across its Xbox game studios. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft is making hundreds of additional layoffs on Tuesday morning, continuing the Xbox restructuring announced in July but also extending beyond it with job cuts in areas including cloud, AI, marketing and research. The company said the total reductions...
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Bungie apologizes to fans, unseals ‘Destiny’ content vault, tries to convince the world it’s still Bungie
(Bungie press image) Bungie, the Bellevue, Wash.-based video game studio behind Destiny and Marathon, began its week with an apology from its new studio head, as it tries to win back its audience after several recent missteps. On Monday morning, in a blog post and video entitled “The Next Chapter for Bungie,” new studio head Poria Torkan and Josh Deane, Bungie’s head of product, directly...
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Former Seattle City Council president launches AI-powered site to track and report on City Hall
Sara Nelson launched the CivicTide website Monday. (Sara Nelson Campaign Photo) Sara Nelson, the former Seattle City Council president, is making her debut as a publisher and commentator, with an eye toward boosting civic engagement, and a little help from AI agents. CivicTide, which Nelson launched Monday at civictide.org, tracks and reports on Seattle City Council legislation from...
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Ex-Zillow VP’s startup Truelist acquired by Mainstay in $18M expansion of real estate AI
Truelist founder and CEO Carey Armstrong. (LinkedIn Photo) Seattle-based real estate tech startup Truelist has been acquired by San Francisco-based Mainstay as part of an $18 million growth funding round aimed at expanding AI-powered tools across the residential property market. Founded in 2024, Truelist built an AI-powered listing platform to help real estate brokers and agents manage,...
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Seattle startups DexCare and Mila Health combine to expand AI patient scheduling
Matt Blosl, left, CEO of DexCare, and Shailu Verma, co-founder and CEO of Mila Health. (LinkedIn Photos) Seattle health-tech startup DexCare today announced it’s acquiring Mila Health, a fellow Seattle-area company that has built AI agents to call and text patients seeking medical appointments. The startups did not disclose the terms of the deal. DexCare, which spun out of Providence’s...
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Plug and Play Seattle picks 11 startups for 4th cohort, from space robotics to biotech
Startup founders who pitched for Plug and Play’s batch four cohort take part in a selection day at UW’s CoMotion Labs. (Plug and Play Photo) Plug and Play Seattle selected 11 startups for the fourth batch of its accelerator program, bringing together a group of founders building everything from space-servicing robotic arms and data-center optical links to opioid-countering antibody...
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Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping
Meta’s promotional images show Muse comparing strollers and asking for approval before placing an order. (Meta Images) Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is...
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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Sept. 13, 2026
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 Sept. 13, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Neuramill is building software that captures how experienced machinists decide to make a part,...
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AI meets real estate: Zillow engineering SVP Toby Roberts on the future of buying and selling homes
Scenes from the live GeekWire Podcast recording at Atmosphere Seattle, with Zillow Senior Vice President of Engineering Toby Roberts, Real Estate At Work host Leka Devatha, and GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop. (GeekWire Photos / Curt Milton) Zillow launched 20 years ago, and we’ve been covering the Seattle-based company since before it had a name. This week,...
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Tech Moves: Ascend promotes Nate Bek; Microsoft Word ‘Agent Mode’ architect exits; TAF names new exec
Nate Bek, left, with Ascend founding general partner Kirby Winfield at the firm’s Founders Bash event Thursday night. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook) — Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend promoted Nate Bek to principal. Bek joined the firm as an associate in January 2024 and was most recently senior associate and head of research. Kirby Winfield, Ascend’s founding general partner,...
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Space hardware startup plans $125M stock offering and Nasdaq listing through shell company merger
An artist’s conception shows Gravitics’ Diamondback orbital carrier, which is due to make its debut as early as 2027. (Gravitics Illustration) Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics, which is developing orbital carriers for government and commercial customers, is getting ready for a reverse takeover that could lead to a $125 million public offering. The arrangements are being made with...
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Twin tech founders who left Seattle for Alaska bet on an AI agent named ‘Walter’ to cover local news
Twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown co-founded Seattle’s HasOffers in 2009 and rebranded to Tune in 2014. (Instagram / Geeks in the Woods) Several years after leaving Seattle’s startup scene to build a “tech outpost” in the Alaskan wilderness, serial entrepreneurs and twin brothers Lee and Lucas Brown have set their sights on a new frontier: replacing the traditional newsroom with artificial...
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From elections to board games: Washington’s secretary of state does double duty as a tabletop trade envoy
Steve Hobbs, secretary of state for Washington, poses at his booth during the 2026 Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo/Thomas Wilde) If you explore the main expo hall during the Penny Arcade Expo, you can often find some interesting booths around the edges of the room. These can offer rare games, designer clothing, blind boxes of themed merch, and occasionally/inexplicably,...
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Fewer lab animals, better drugs: This startup wants to fix how experiments get designed
ModernVivo co-founders Colin Small (left) and Ian Levine (right). Seattle-based ModernVivo is using AI to help scientists design preclinical studies for drug discovery. The goal: better experiments that are also faster, cheaper and less reliant on animals. “You’d be shocked at the way scientists design their experiments,” co-founder Ian Levine told GeekWire. “It’s very manual.” To...
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Inside Temporal’s journey to a $12.55B valuation, and its bet on building a backbone for AI agents
Temporal co-founders Maxim Fateev, CTO (left), and Samar Abbas, CEO. (Temporal Photo) One of the hottest infrastructure companies in AI today is a startup established nearly seven years ago, tracing its roots to work its founders were doing before the cloud was a thing. Temporal, based in Bellevue, Wash., announced this week that it raised $550 million at a $12.55 billion valuation, led by...
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Seattle’s KEXP eyes a second physical home — in San Francisco’s historic Haight-Ashbury
The Doolan-Larson House and Storefronts in San Francisco, a potential future KEXP location. (SF Heritage Photo / Alvis E. Hendley) Seattle independent radio station KEXP is exploring the possibility of building out a second physical home — far from its beloved base at Seattle Center — in San Francisco. Three years after expanding its broadcast footprint to the Bay Area with the acquisition...
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Startup Ravel raises $8.2M to help solve clothing recycling’s spandex problem
The Ravel team at its Seattle pilot facility in March 2025, from left: Forest Davis, process development scientist; John Goods, co-founder and chief technologist; Zahlen Titcomb, co-founder and CEO; Zack Wolford, research engineer; and Kristen Albrecht, chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations. Not pictured: Jules Valenti, director of engineering and pilot plant manager....
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Startup Spotlight: Local Crew uses video and AI to cut out in-person home repair estimates
Saad Nadeem, co-founder of Seattle startup Local Crew. (Photo courtesy of Saad Nadeem) Saad Nadeem doesn’t have any professional background in home improvement. But like any self-respecting weekend warrior, his experiences as a homeowner have taught him some valuable lessons. The biggest lesson, perhaps, was to create his own startup to solve his problems. Nadeem is co-founder and...
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Portland startup Antfly raises $2M to streamline data infrastructure for AI agents
Antfly co-founders James McDermott, left, and AJ Roetker. (Photos courtesy of Antfly) Antfly, a Portland startup building software to streamline how artificial intelligence systems access corporate data, announced Thursday that it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Heavybit, with participation from 8-Bit Capital. The company is tackling...
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Oracle cuts 359 Washington jobs in latest AI-driven layoffs; Seattle offices ‘not closing’
Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk. (Oracle Photo) Oracle is laying off 359 employees in Washington state — its second significant job cuts this year — according to a filing Wednesday with the state Employment Security Department. The cuts affect remote employees across Washington state as well as on-site staff at Oracle’s downtown Seattle facilities, located in the Russell Investments Center on...
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How UW’s solar vehicle team harnessed the sun and hard work to shine on the national stage
Elijah Yan, left, and Rudy Heredia-Jantz, members of the Solar Vehicle Team at UW, with Sakura, the solar-powered vehicle the student-led team constructed in their shop at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) In a cramped corner workspace in a mechanical engineering building at the University of Washington, a team of students is working to harness the power of the...
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UW, Microsoft and E8 back climate tech incubator targeting data centers as AI energy concerns surge
Taylor Brugh, Microsoft sustainability markets partnerships & ops lead, at Tuesday’s CoMotion Labs Climate Tech Incubator Demo Day, where the data center-focused program was announced. (CoMotion Photo) As public concern grows about the environmental impact of AI data centers, the University of Washington is launching a startup incubator to support climate tech innovations addressing those...
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From school nuggets to insect kibble: How the next generation of faux meats aims to win over skeptics
Taoran Wang, senior food scientist at Rebellyous Foods, displays a tray of experimental chicken patties. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Subscribe to Positive Charge: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, All Episodes More than 40 years ago, the first commercial veggie burger made its debut in London markets as packets of dehydrated ingredients that were mixed with water...
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Interlune raises $5M for initiatives that go beyond mining the moon
An artist’s conception shows a mining operation on the moon, including harvesters and a solar power plant. (Interlune Illustration) Seattle-based Interlune has raised $5 million in fresh funding to support a business plan that involves building space infrastructure as well as mining the moon for helium-3 and other valuable resources. The funds were raised through a Simple Agreement for...
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Helion funding round grows to $500M amid uncertainty over fusion startup’s Microsoft timeline
An aerial view of Orion, Helion Energy’s planned fusion plant being built in Malaga, Wash. (Helion Photo) Helion Energy on Tuesday said that it added $35 million to a funding round initially announced in June. The Everett, Wash.-based fusion company originally shared news of a $465 million Series G round. “After initially closing the round earlier this summer, we are excited to bring on...
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Terry Myerson retires as Truveta CEO, with co-founders stepping in to lead $1B health data startup
Terry Myerson, Truveta’s co-founder and CEO, will retire at the end of September. (Truveta Photo) Terry Myerson, the former Microsoft executive who co-founded Truveta during the pandemic, growing it to 500 employees and a valuation of more than $1 billion, is retiring as CEO of the Bellevue, Wash.-based health data company at the end of September. Truveta co-founders Jay Nanduri, CTO, and...
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Uncommon Thinkers 2026: Last call for nominations for Seattle’s boldest innovators
The 2025 “Uncommon Thinkers” award winners, from left: Anindya Roy, co-founder of Lila Biologics; Kiana Ehsani, co-founder of Vercept; Max Blumen of Tin Can representing winner Chet Kittleson, co-founder of Tin Can; Jeff Thornburg, co-founder of Portal Space Systems; Jay Graber of Bluesky; and Brian Pinkard, co-founder of Aquagga. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) It’s the final call to...
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Sen. Maria Cantwell warns of autonomous AI ‘swarms’ as she calls for federal guardrails
Pointing to recent security incidents where networked AI agents spontaneously formed “swarms” to hack computer systems, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) took to the Senate floor Monday to demand urgent federal guardrails and mandatory independent safety testing for frontier AI models before their release. Cantwell warned that recent security incidents involving autonomous AI agents...
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Goldman Sachs plants flag in Bellevue, opening hub for more than 125 AI and cloud engineers
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon Goldman Sachs is expanding its technology presence in the Seattle region, opening a new Bellevue engineering center that will accommodate more than 125 employees focused on artificial intelligence and cloud transformation. The New York-based financial giant held a ribbon-cutting ceremony this month for the new office, its first dedicated space for engineers...
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Seattle’s Nuance Labs raises $50M to give AI models human expression and nuance
Nuance Labs co-founders, from left, Fangchang Ma, Edward Zhang, and Karren Yang. (Nuance Photo) Nuance Labs, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup developing a foundational AI model designed to perceive and respond to real-time human expression, raised $50 million in Series A funding. Founded in early 2025 by former Apple PhD researchers Fangchang Ma, Edward Zhang, and Karren...
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Providence to receive $1.1B from Nike co-founder to build women’s health hospital in Oregon
Oregon’s first hospital focused on women’s health will be built on the campus of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland. (Providence Illustration) Providence will receive $1.1 billion — one of the largest gifts ever pledged to a U.S. healthcare institution — from Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny. The donation will allow the nonprofit health network to build Oregon’s...
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America’s machinists are retiring, and two startup founders in their 20s want to salvage what they know
Neuramill co-founders Nick Khormaei (COO) and Nistha Mitra (CEO) at the Reindustrialize summit in Detroit. (Photo courtesy of Neuramill) When machinists with decades of experience retire, everything they know about how metal behaves under a cutting tool — or anything else they learned through a career of scrapped parts and expensive mistakes — walks out the door with them. A startup with...
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BuyWander raises $21M as retail returns startup expands nationwide from new Seattle HQ
BuyWander co-founders Jordan Allen, left, and Brock Kowalchuk. (BuyWander Photo) BuyWander, an auction-based online marketplace for returned and overstocked retail items, announced Tuesday that it has raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group and Inspired Capital. The fresh capital comes on the heels of the startup relocating its headquarters from Spokane,...
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