The ALIA CX300 electric airplane from Beta Technologies on approach at Boeing Field in Seattle. (Steve Rice Photo)
More than 117 years after Seattle residents first saw a flying machine in the sky, a unique aircraft over Jet City can still turn heads.
That happened this week with the arrival of Beta Technologies‘ all-electric ALIA CX300 conventional takeoff and landing aircraft as it dropped into King County International Airport – Boeing Field.
Photographer Steve Rice captured the strange-looking airplane with a rear propellor and posted images on Reddit, where aviation geeks launched into a debate about e-planes, range, charging times, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and more.
Vermont-based Beta wasn’t just doing a fly-by. The company brought the plane to Seattle for an official demonstration of the ALIA in an event that drew state officials, aviation experts, and industry leaders from across Washington.
(Steve Rice Photo)
In a news release Tuesday, Beta said Washington has a “deep-rooted aviation heritage that has long positioned the state as a global leader in aerospace innovation and manufacturing.” And the company said the state is now “actively advancing the future of flight through strategic investments in sustainable aviation and the critical infrastructure needed to support next-generation technologies.”
Beta founder and CEO Kyle Clark called the event at Boeing Field “a step toward realizing a future where electric aviation is accessible, reliable, and benefits local communities.”
Founded in 2017, Beta is building two electric aircraft — the fixed-wing ALIA CTOL, and the ALIA VTOL, a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — at a production facility in Vermont.
The inaugural flight of Beta’s first production model airplane was last November. The ALIA CTOL has a range of 336 nautical miles, and Beta’s planes are designed to carry passengers or cargo.
The company has also developed and is rolling out a network of charging infrastructure for use across airports and the electric aviation ecosystem.
(Steve Rice Photo)
Beta filed for an initial public offering earlier this month with plans to sell 25 million shares at $27 to $33 each — a price range that could value the company at $7.2 billion.
Vancouver, B.C.-based Helijet International previously placed orders with Beta for a fleet of eVTOL aircraft.
Other electric and hybrid aircraft makers are getting their planes off the ground in Washington, including Seattle-based Aero-TEC and Everett, Wash.-based magniX. Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft paused work on its Alice airplane earlier this year.
The co-founders of Alertmouse, from left: Nathan Kriege, Rand Fishkin and Adam Doppelt, along with Britt Klontz, founder of PR firm Vada Communications, who helped beta test the product. (LinkedIn Photos)
A trio of veteran entrepreneurs have joined forces to create a new Seattle startup — and any mentions of the company across the internet will likely be tracked by what they’re building.
Alertmouse generates email alerts for people and brands who want to know what’s being said about them — or anything else they’re interested in — online. The goal is to provide a better offering than other monitoring tools, most notably Google Alerts, which Alertmouse calls “so bad it might as well not exist.”
The startup was created by co-founders Rand Fishkin (SparkToro, Snackbar Studio), Adam Doppelt (Urbanspoon, Dwellable), and Nathan Kriege (Blueprint AI, Fresh Chalk).
Fishkin, the CEO, posted about Alertmouse on LinkedIn this week, saying that while the side project has turned into a full-fledged business, he’s not leaving his other two jobs.
“It doesn’t take a ton of my time but it has been really fun to build this thing that I desperately needed,” Fishkin said in a video on his post, before listing his grievances with Google Alerts, including how it “doesn’t pick up everything you want, it sends you useless alerts” and more.
Fishkin said tracking his mentions or those related to his companies, whether it’s in a news article or in a Reddit thread, allows him to monitor what’s being said and jump in if necessary to reply.
Alertmouse says it searches the index of websites and pages it can reach two or three times each day for the unique string of words/phrases/rules a user has entered. An email is sent with the pages that contained them.
“It’s not rocket science, but it takes a lot of clever programming, testing, and iteration to make a good alert service,” the company says in its FAQ.
In an interview with GeekWire this week, Fishkin said there are enterprise tracking tools that do what Alertmouse does, such as Mentioned, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch, but they can be cost-prohibitive.
“Google Alerts has been this free alternative for a long time, but sometime in the last decade, maybe even before that, it just stopped sending me anything decent,” he said. “I have no idea what they’re doing under the hood. I suspect it’s a defunct product that no one maintains anymore, but I couldn’t tell you what’s really going on.”
On a website loaded with cheesy puns, Alertmouse has four pricing tiers, including Nibble (free), Slice ($120/year), Wedge ($600/year), and Wheel ($1,200/year).
Alertmouse attracted 1,000 sign-ups in the first several hours it was live, and Fishkin credits the fun interface and language on the website, and the fact that it’s easy to use.
“We wanted to make a brand that no one could confuse for AI,” Fishkin laughed. “This is not an AI company. There’s going to be no venture capital, there’s no AI under the hood. It’s just really simple, straightforward, fun, delightful humans.”
Fishkin, an SEO expert who founded and led Moz, a Seattle-based maker of marketing software tools, co-founded SparkToro in 2018. The audience research tool helps marketers and others understand their target audiences. He raised $2.15 million last year for his new independent video game studio, Snackbar Studio.
Doppelt and Kriege previously worked on vacation rental startup Dwellable (sold to HomeAway in 2015), local professional recommendation site Fresh Chalk, and task management company Blueprint AI together. Last year they teamed up to create a resource website for everything you’d ever want to know about smoke detectors.
The Alertmouse website says the startup has no plans to hire. But that could change after a morning in which lots of people were emailing with questions.
“If it keeps going like this we might have to bring someone on,” Fishkin said.
Amazon’s headquarters campus in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Reaction to a huge round of layoffs rippled across Amazon and beyond on Tuesday as the Seattle-based tech giant confirmed that it was slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs.
We’ve rounded up some of what’s being said online and/or shared with GeekWire:
‘Never been laid off before’
A megathread on Reddit served as a collection of comments by impacted employees who posted about their level, location, org and years of service at Amazon.
Workers across ads, recruitment, robotics, retail, Prime Video, Amazon Games, business development, North American Stores, finance, devices and services, Amazon Autos, and more used the thread to vent.
“TPM II for Amazon Robotics, 6.5 years there. Still processing this, I’ve never been laid off before.”
“L6 SDEIII, started as SDEI 7 years ago. I went L4 to L6 in 3 years. My last performance review I got raising the bar. Thought I was a top performer but guess I’m expendable.”
“Never been laid off before feels overwhelming on VISA! Someone please help me understand next steps in terms of VISA, if I am not able to get H1b sponsoring job in next 90 days will I have to uproot everything here and go back?”
“I heard AWS layoffs come after re:invent to avoid customer disruption and bad press.”
“It’s heartbreaking how impersonal and abrupt these layoffs have become. People who’ve given years to a company are finding out in minutes that they’re done.”
“Wait, I’m sorry: Amazon made people relocate, switch their kids’ schools, and bookend their days with traffic for RTO only to lay them off via a 3 a.m. text? What happened to the vibe and conversations that only being together at the office could allow?” Coulter wrote on LinkedIn.
‘Reduced functionality’
Some employees shared how they were quickly locked out of work laptops, expressing confusion about whether that was how they were supposed to learn about being terminated.
“I lost access to everything immediately :( ,” one Reddit user said.
Others discussed how they should have found time to transfer important work examples or positive interactions related to their performance over to personal computers.
“One thing I would recommend for everyone is to back up your personal files onto your personal laptop,” one user said on Reddit. “I used to keep all my accolades and praise in a quip file along with all my 2×2 write ups and MBR/QBR write ups cataloging my wins. When I found out I got laid off my head was spinning so I went outside for a walk, by the time I returned I was locked out of my laptop and no longer had access to anything.”
Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti pinned the layoffs in part on the need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence. Others looked for deeper meaning in the cuts.
In a post on LinkedIn, Yahoo! Finance Executive Editor Brian Rozzi said stock price is likely a key consideration when it comes to top execs and the Amazon board signing off on such mass layoffs.
Amazon’s stock was up about 1% on Tuesday to $229 per share.
“If the layoffs keep jacking up the stock price, maybe I can retire instead,” one longtime employee told GeekWire.
Entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis posted on X about how AI was coming for middle managers and those with “rote jobs” faster than anyone expected. He encouraged workers to become a founder and do a startup before it’s too late.
Hard-hit divisions
Mid-level managers in Amazon’s retail division were heavily impacted by Tuesday’s cuts, according to internal data obtained by Business Insider.
More than 78% of the roles eliminated were held by managers assigned L5 to L7 designations, BI reported. (L5 is typically the starting point for managers at Amazon, with more seniority assigned to higher levels.)
BI also said that U.S.-focused data showed that more than 80% of employees laid off Tuesday worked in Amazon’s retail business, spanning e-commerce, human resources, and logistics.
Steve Boom, VP of audio, Twitch, and games said in a memo shared with The Verge that “significant role reductions” would be felt at studios in Irvine and San Diego, Calif., as well on Amazon’s central publishing teams.
“We have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work — specifically around MMOs [massively multiplayer online games] — within Amazon Game Studios,” Boom wrote.
Current titles in Amazon’s MMO lineup include “New World: Aeternum,” “Throne and Liberty,” and “Lost Ark.” Amazon also previously announced that it would be developing a “Lord of the Rings” MMO.
‘Ripple effects throughout the community’
Amazon employees and others line up at a food truck near Amazon offices in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), has previously praised Amazon for its mandate calling for employees to return to the office five days per week, saying that the foot traffic from thousands of tech workers in the city is a necessary element to helping downtown Seattle rebound from the pandemic.
On Tuesday, Scholes reacted to Amazon’s layoffs in a statement to GeekWire:
“As downtown’s largest employer, a workforce change of this scale has ripple effects throughout the community — on individual employees and families and our small businesses that rely on the weekday foot traffic customer base. In addition, these jobs buttress our tax base that helps fund the city services we all depend on. Employers have options for where they locate jobs, and we want to ensure downtown Seattle is the most attractive place to invest and grow. We must provide vibrancy and a predictable regulatory environment in a competitive landscape because other cities would welcome the jobs currently based in downtown.”
Office furniture from the former Zulily headquarters in Seattle. (Evergreen Goodwill Photo)
Zulily may no longer be a dominant player in Seattle’s tech scene, but physical pieces of the online retailer will live on in Evergreen Goodwill facilities across the region.
Hundreds of office chairs, desks, kitchen appliances, IT equipment, and more has been donated to Goodwill by Vanbarton Group, a commercial real estate investment firm that now owns the onetime Zulily building at 2601 Elliott Ave.
Vanbarton plans to convert the building, which occupies a full block near the waterfront, to 262 apartments, according to a Daily Journal of Commerce report from July.
A once-prominant online retailer, Zulily was a darling of Seattle’s growing tech scene when it was valued at $4 billion following its IPO in 2013. But after QVC parent Qurate paid $2.4 billion to buy the company in 2015, it was sold to Los Angeles investment firm Regent in May 2023 and eventually shut down.
In March, Zulily got a new owner for the third time in two years when Beyond, which emerged as a surprise buyer in 2024, announced plans to sell a majority stake in Zulily to Lyons Trading Company, the parent company of flash sales site Proozy.com.
Storage racks donated from the former Zulily headquarters in Seattle. (Evergreen Goodwill Photo)
Evergreen Goodwill said in a news release that the donation, facilitated by Vanbarton Group’s outreach, saved the nonprofit an estimated $100,000 in equipment costs and diverted valuable resources from landfills.
The office items are being repurposed in multiple locations, including Goodwill’s new Georgetown operations center, scheduled to open this fall, and job training and education centers that it operates in five counties.
Remaining items will be sold in Goodwill stores, with proceeds supporting free job training and education programs for people facing barriers to employment, according to Goodwill.
Day job: Senior design technologist for Amazon Devices, working on concepts for new devices or new features on existing devices, such as Fire TV, Alexa, and Echo smart speakers.
Out-of-office passion: Using machines to create art.
Before he pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Maksim Surguy made an initial — and brief — run at a bachelor’s in art.
“Two weeks later, I realized that I suck at art and I switched to computer science,” he laughed.
Fourteen years after completing his education at California State University, Fullerton, Surguy has found happiness and success in marrying the two disciplines, as a technologist and an artist in Seattle.
“My sketching is not to the level that I want, so instead I use code to create artwork,” he said in describing the “robot art” that occupies his free time.
Surguy not only relies on machines to generate his artwork, he creates the software tools that facilitate such art, whether the finished pieces exist as digital NFTs or as physical works such as pen plotter drawings made via scalable vector graphics.
“I spend a lot more time making the tools than actually using them,” Surguy said. “But other people use them to actually make something. So I enjoy both sides of this.”
A screenshot from a tutorial video demonstrating Maks Surguy’s workflow for the artwork “Vector Wave, 2022.” (Image courtesy of Maks Surguy)
For a hardware/software project, he created a 3D-printed drawing machine with his own electronics program. During the process, he couldn’t find a community for like-minded people who make such things. So he started DrawingBots, a website/Discord that’s attracted thousands of artists and engineers.
Surguy was born and raised in Ukraine and was an accomplished breakdancer who competed as a professional in Eastern Europe when he was younger. He moved to the U.S. in 2004.
He’s been at Amazon for six years and his artwork has been displayed in the company’s headquarters buildings, in public exhibitions — including at Seattle’s NFT Museum, and on his website and social media channels. He’s also written extensively about technology.
And in the blurring space between human and AI-created artwork, he’s leaning further into technology.
“I use AI for a lot of things, and especially now with code, it makes it easier to create tools that are custom and specific for whatever use case,” Surguy said. “I just open-sourced one last weekend. It’s a tool that allows artists to preview their artwork, how it’s going to look before they make it on paper. So it saves them time and money and art supplies.”
Prints of some of Maksim Surguy’s “plotter” artwork. (Photo courtesy of Maks Surguy)
Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Surguy most enjoys the growing community he helped foster around the tools and art he makes.
“I got to know thousands of people that do this kind of stuff and are very interesting people,” he said. “Some of them were TED speakers. Some of them are PhDs, very well known researchers, scientists, artists. I had conversations with all of these people and consider some of them my friends. So that’s the most rewarding part.”
The lessons he brings back to work: “This kind of procedural and algorithmic art definitely has a place in making products that are digital experiences,” Surguy said of the connection between his hobby and his work at Amazon.
For example, his Devices team launched a dynamic art feature for Fire TV: a screen saver that created artwork on the fly based on data such as weather, time of day, and other inputs.
Surguy said the ideas he generates outside of work serve as inspiration for what he creates at work, whether it’s creative coding or simply expanding the boundaries of what he makes and how he makes it.
Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.
Founded in 2021, Chainguard aims to help customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term used to describe a company’s software production line.
Chainguard focuses on helping companies keep their open source software secure and offers tools to manage container images, a core code component of cloud-based applications. It has more than 200 customers, including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VPBank, and Wiz.
Technically based in Kirkland, Wash., the remote startup employs more than 500 people and has raised $892 million to date as its valuation has risen to $3.5 billion. The company is ranked No. 3 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, and Chainguard recently landed on LinkedIn’s list of the top 50 startups in the U.S. (at No. 18).
In fiscal year 2025, Chainguard says it grew its annual recurring revenue seven times to $40 million.
CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc said the funding will help accelerate the adoption of Chainguard across more companies.
“Open source powers the world, but the way it’s delivered and deployed often introduces risk,” Lorenc said in a statement. “At Chainguard, we’re flipping that script: we guard open source from all the things that can go wrong with it, so engineering teams can build anything they want with it.”
Chainguard CFO Eyal Bar said the partnership with General Catalyst enables Chainguard “to scale go-to-market investment without diluting ownership or slowing innovation.”
Instead of using equity to fund sales and marketing spend, General Catalyst provides structured growth capital tied directly to customer acquisition and recurring revenue. The goal is to let startups like Chainguard preserve equity while using outcome-based financing to scale efficiently.
Previous Chainguard investors include Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
Carbon Robotics founder and CEO Paul Mikesell with the company’s LaserWeeder G2. (Carbon Robotics Photo)
Seattle agriculture-tech startup Carbon Robotics raised $20 million in new funding to support the creation of another piece of AI-powered machinery for farms.
With its signature LaserWeeder and relatively new Autonomous Tractor Kit (ATK) already being used by hundreds of customers, Carbon founder and CEO Paul Mikesell told GeekWire that “a brand new AI robot” is coming.
Mikesell said the machine, which is at least nine months away from being revealed, will leverage the same AI system used in Carbon’s other equipment but perform tasks beyond weeding.
“It’s very flexible, capable of doing a lot with the world around it, understanding what it’s seeing, what’s happening,” Mikesell said of Carbon’s system that uses an array of AI, computer vision and machine learning technology. “We see our ability to reinvest in that platform and double down on what it can do in some new activities.
“It’ll blow your mind,” he added.
Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics made its name across ag-tech with the LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses its tech to detect plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The latest iteration, the LaserWeeder G2, was released in February.
In March, the company unveiled the Carbon ATK, previously called the AutoTractor. That autonomous platform is designed to fit on and control existing farm equipment and serve as an answer to labor shortages and increased productivity in farming.
Both platforms are continuing to grow and scale, and “things are moving really fast,” according to Mikesell, a longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems.
LaserWeeders are active on farms across the U.S. and in 14 countries around the world. Mikesell said revenue continues to grow every year, but Carbon is not yet profitable.
Carbon Robotics says it has hundreds of customers across the U.S. and 14 countries. (Carbon Robotics Photo)
Ranked No. 9 on the GeekWire 200 list of top privately held startups based across the Pacific Northwest, Carbon has previously been backed by NVIDIA and Seattle-based Voyager Capital.
The Series D-2 extension round attracted Giant Ventures as lead investor. The UK-based VC invests across a variety of “purpose-driven” startups, and Mikesell said, “They got what we were trying to do.”
Beyond the secretive new machine, Carbon is revealing more about the “large plant model” at the heart of how it does computer vision through its AI systems.
Mikesell said the company is at the point where it has enough training data and labeled images that it can teach its AI to learn about the basic structure of the plants it’s seeing. This allows Carbon to run one model on every machine in the world.
“If new weeds pop up in an onion field in France, and those are eventually going to show up in a carrot field in the U.S., the first time we see that weed anywhere it can be part of the model and be ready to go,” Mikesell said. “It also means that if we want to go into a new crop that we’ve never seen before, we can do it immediately.”
A LaserWeeder is designed to target the meristem of a weed to kill it as quickly as possible and the large plant model helps it understand where to precisely target its zap.
Carbon Robotics, which has raised $177 million to date, now employs about 260 people. The company runs a manufacturing facility in Richland, Wash., and added another in the Netherlands to offset some trade and tariff issues as well as speed deployment of machines in Europe.
Mikesell said as far as competition, there are some companies in Europe who claim to be building some version of a LaserWeeder, but he’s never seen one in a field or competed against one.
“It’s very hard to create a LaserWeeder,” he said. “The targeting system is so special, and the AI is so special. It’s not just about detecting where the weeds are. The trick to making it work is you need a targeting camera to be able to keep the lasers on target [while moving], and everybody I’ve seen that says they’re gonna build a LaserWeeder doesn’t understand that concept.”
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