This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The NBA suspends former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a year and hits the Clippers with $30 million in fines and five lost draft picks over allegedly sham endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard, drawing comparisons to the Microsoft antitrust era. A new...
The Seattle Times and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Friday, accusing the tech companies of using their journalism to train AI products without permission. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Microsoft was sued Friday by the parent company of its hometown daily newspaper, The Seattle...
Betsy Cantwell, president of Washington State University, poses alongside an appropriately colored painting at Seattle’s Washington Athletic Club. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) WSU President Betsy Cantwell is a full-on techie. She spent more than two decades in national laboratories...
Sonic on display at the 210 Gallery in Pioneer Square on Sept. 3, as part of a media preview event. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde) If you attended the Sunset Market in Seattle’s Pioneer Square on Thursday night, you might’ve noticed that one of the local galleries had been transformed into a...
A hamburger photographed by SP Studio, left, and then tweaked by Scott Pitts in Pallat to add tomatoes. (Pallat Images) Longtime Seattle food photographer Scott Pitts spent 25 years capturing commercial imagery for major brands, and now he’s using that quarter-century archive to train Pallat....
Teens are taking questions about their health, their moods and their friendships to chatbots — often without telling anyone. (GPT-5.6 Sol) Kids are heading back to school across the country with a tool in their pocket that will do their homework, answer the questions they’re too embarrassed to...
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman addresses hundreds of Rocketdyne employees during his stopover at the company’s facility in Redmond, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) REDMOND, Wash. — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman came to Rocketdyne’s facility here today to give a pep talk to the space...
Sunny Gupta and the Seattle Seahawks mascot Blitz during a game at Lumen Field. (Photo courtesy of Sunny Gupta) Sunny Gupta has been a diehard Seattle Seahawks fan for almost 20 years, hosting tailgates and sitting in the exact same club-level seats with his family and friends since 2007. Now,...
The Seahawks open the 2026 season at Lumen Field on Sept. 9 against the New England Patriots. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The sale of the Seattle Seahawks to the Khosla family officially closed on Thursday, completing a historic ownership transition for the NFL franchise. But a small...
Kevin Owens, co-founder and CEO of Resect AI. (Resect AI Photo) Resect AI, an artificial intelligence startup led by a team of scientists and engineers in Washougal, Wash., launched out of stealth Thursday with $25 million in funding to commercialize an open-source technology designed to catch...
Aneesh Raman. (LinkedIn Photo) — Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years. The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and...
University of Washington College of Engineering Vice Dean Jihui Yang, right, and professor Xu Chen walk a robot dog on the UW campus. (Photo courtesy of Xu Chen) Robotics jobs in the Pacific Northwest are multiplying faster than universities can train people to fill them. The University of...
An artist’s conception shows the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter in Martian orbit. (Blue Origin Photo) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won a contract worth up to $700 million to boost NASA’s telecommunications capability in Martian orbit, using a version of the company’s Blue Ring...
Dara Khosrowshahi, now CEO of Uber, speaks at the 2016 GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire File Photo) Uber is laying off 93 Washington state-based employees as part of a sweeping global restructuring that will eliminate roughly 10% of the company’s workforce. The cuts heavily impact the...
Staff in the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds use machinery in the expanded battery lab. (UW Photo) The University of Washington on Thursday celebrated the opening of a public-access battery manufacturing lab that aims to propel energy innovation. The new lab — the first of its kind on the...
University of Washington computer science professor Stuart Reges. (Twinkle Don’t Blink Photo via Fire.org) The University of Washington has agreed to pay $600,000 to resolve a high-profile First Amendment lawsuit brought by computer science professor Stuart Reges, who was disciplined after...
Jack Boylan, left, Allen Institute research associate, and Jesse Gray, AI BioDesign executive director of strategy and platform, at the DNA sequencer inside the initiative’s new lab. It reads millions of designed DNA sequences at once, revealing which ones worked. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)...
Qualtrics Tower in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) Qualtrics is cutting 117 jobs connected to its Seattle headquarters, according to a state filing that provides new details of the layoffs that the experience management technology company made two weeks ago. Engineering and product...
Teachally founder Daniel Bernstein is also known in Seattle tech as the founder of Sandlot Games. Daniel Bernstein spent much of the past decade as an M&A advisor, selling other people’s software companies. This time the company was his own, and he found a buyer in McGraw Hill. The education...
Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, center, at a game inside Staples Center in 2018. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) The NBA dropped the hammer on Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday, suspending the former Microsoft CEO from all league and team activities for one...
Longtime T-Mobile exec Mike Katz touts the company’s T-Satellite service in Bellevue, Wash., in June 2025, with a slide taking shots at Verizon and AT&T — a tradition dating to the early Un-carrier years. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) In 2012, T-Mobile was losing hundreds of thousands of...
The housing markets in San Francisco, left, and Seattle have been diverging for the past year. Prices started falling in Seattle on an annual basis about a year ago, while prices in San Francisco have been rising since November. (BigStock, GeekWire File Photos) While a fresh wave of AI-generated...
Aayushi Dangol, a recent University of Washington doctoral student in human centered design and engineering, explains an AI toy during a KidsTeam UW session. (UW Photo / Jacob Adams) We’ve come a long way from Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels that couldn’t talk to us. Today, plush toys aren’t just...
Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff inside Highspot’s longtime offices in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Highspot’s branding is still everywhere inside its longtime headquarters at World Trade Center East, overlooking the Seattle waterfront. But outside the corner office that once belonged to the...
NewDays founders Daniel Kelly (left) and Babak Parviz. (NewDays Photo) NewDays, a Seattle startup using a generative AI therapy to treat people with mild dementia, has raised additional funding and closed its seed round with $16 million. The funding was led by Madrona and General Catalyst....
Smart home device maker Wyze wants to end notification fatigue by turning security footage into something more akin to an Instagram feed. The Kirkland, Wash.-based company launched “Wyze Stories,” a new AI-powered feature that stitches together clip sequences from multiple cameras into a...
The winners on Madrona’s 2026 Intelligent Applications 40 list, grouped by funding stage. (Madrona Image) Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona released its sixth annual Intelligent Applications 40 list this week, naming 45 private AI companies (the five extras come from ties) that have...
The Juno Propulsion team includes, from left, fluid systems engineer Andrew Adams, facility operations engineer Cody Niggemyer, chief technology officer Ari Martinez and CEO Alexis Harroun. (Juno Propulsion Photo) The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Tukwila,...
A bobcat inside a home as seen on video captured by a Kirkland Police Department drone. (Kirkland Police Department Image) Most high-tech police drones are deployed for high-speed chases or search and rescue missions, but officers in Kirkland, Wash., recently launched one indoors for a wilder...
(Headset Image) Seattle-based cannabis data analytics company Headset has agreed to pay more than $1 million to resolve allegations that it improperly received and obtained forgiveness for a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. The settlement, announced Monday by the U.S....
Philip Johnston, co-founder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission, stands on an outcrop in Chile’s Atacama Desert and points at Alpha Centauri in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Johnston and his teammates aim to launch a probe by the end of 2029 that would reach Alpha Centauri roughly...
This story originally appeared on Real Estate News. (Illustration by Real Estate News/Shutterstock) Compass and the Washington state-based Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) have settled their year-plus-long lawsuit, Compass announced on Monday. A new marketing option Compass...
Movable shelving towers that hold items that are autonomously moved to Amazon employees who pack them for shipping. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Amazon is accused of artificially inflating the ad prices on its e-commerce site in a lawsuit filed Monday by Washington’s attorney general, the...
Two of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters towers rise above the Spheres. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Amazon is cutting 121 jobs in Washington state, according to a new state regulatory filing on Monday, hitting corporate tech teams in Bellevue and Seattle as well as fulfillment operations...
EIT Pharma CEO Leen Kawas (EIT Pharma Photo) A Kirkland, Wash.-based biotech company led by former Athira Pharma CEO Leen Kawas has raised $35 million in a Series A round led by Propel Bio Partners, the Los Angeles investment firm where Kawas is a co-founder and managing general partner. EIT...