Seattle venture firm Founders’ Co-op unveiled its sixth fund — $50 million, matching the size of its previous fund — to back another batch of early-stage tech startups.

Chris DeVore, founding managing partner at Founders’ Co-op, said about 80–90% of investments will go to Pacific Northwest founders, typically at the pre-product or pre-revenue stage.

Founded in 2008, Founders’ Co-op was an early backer of billion-dollar companies such as Remitly, Outreach, and Auth0.

The firm is sticking to its core strategy of backing ambitious technical founding teams in its backyard and helping them build companies that go on to raise capital elsewhere.

“Our strategy has always been to be the best first-check investor in our chosen market, not to grow our AUM and wind up competing with the money-center investors our founders need for the next leg of the journey,” DeVore wrote in a blog post.

He added, in reference to the fund size: “It’s not bigger, because as they say in venture, ‘your fund size is your strategy.'”

GeekWire previously reported on the fund earlier this year.

The new fund will go to about 30 companies. Average initial checks will range from $1 million to $1.5 million. The firm aims for 10% ownership at the first investment. It does not invest in specific verticals, instead placing more weight on entrepreneurs.

“We’re lucky to be alive in the greatest era of compounding technological advancement in human history,” DeVore wrote in the post. “And we expect that acceleration to continue. But no moment in the hype cycle — up to and including the current LLM wave — matters more than the people we back and the problems they choose to solve.”

Founders’ Co-op is now based inside Foundations, the new hub for Seattle-area entrepreneurs that Ginzburg helped launch last year. It has quickly become a magnet for the city’s startup community — and an advantage for Founders’ Co-op.

“Foundations is Aviel’s love-letter to the local founder community — so it’s not a fund project — but by making Seattle a better place to be a founder, and helping the strongest and most committed founders connect and share with each other, it has absolutely put compelling new investment opportunities in our path,” DeVore told GeekWire.

Asked this morning if the firm is still bullish on Seattle, DeVore said: “like you wouldn’t believe.”

Some of the firm’s more recent investments include land use data startup Aarden AI, business automation AI company Logic, and internal help desk startup Ravenna.

DeVore said one team “particularly worth watching at the moment” is RowZero, a Seattle startup that sells spreadsheet software and raised $10 million in a seed round earlier this year.

Most limited partners in the new fund are returning investors, with a few new backers from outside the region who “believe in small funds and the PNW as a differentiated and underserved market,” DeVore said.

Founders’ Co-op raised $50 million for its fifth fund in 2021 and $25 million for its fourth fund in 2018.

DeVore previously led the Techstars Seattle accelerator but stepped down in 2019 to focus on Founders’ Co-op full time. Ginzburg, a Simply Measured co-founder who joined the firm in 2015 and became general partner in 2018, was managing director of Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator from 2017 to 2020.

Ginzburg launched Foundations in the aftermath of the surprising closure of Techstars Seattle last year.

Other Seattle-area firms raising new funds include Ascend, Flying Fish, and Graham & Walker. Longtime firm Madrona raised $770 million for its new funds earlier this year.

Microsoft announced additional investments in the United Arab Emirates as it looks to expand its data center footprint and capitalize on export licenses.

The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant has already spent $7.3 billion since 2023, including a $1.5 billion equity stake in Abu Dhabi–based G42, the country’s sovereign AI company. Microsoft said Monday it plans to invest another $7.9 billion from 2026 to 2029.

The funding covers AI and cloud infrastructure, workforce training, and new governance initiatives.

“This is not money raised in the UAE. It’s money we’re spending in the UAE,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. “And as we do everywhere in the world, we’re focused not just on growing our business but also on contributing to the local economy. This involves bringing together three critical factors — technology, talent, and trust.”

Microsoft said it was the first U.S. corporation to get approval from the Trump administration to receive export licenses from the Commerce Department to ship Nvidia GPUs to the UAE. “We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers, and Microsoft itself,” Smith wrote.

Microsoft says the effort is guided by “technology, talent, and trust,” anchored by a new Responsible AI Future Foundation and a first-of-its-kind intergovernmental assurance framework designed to align its UAE operations with U.S. cybersecurity and data protection standards.

Microsoft has nearly 1,000 full-time employees in the UAE.

Job candidates are gaming applicant-tracking systems, and recruiters are struggling to sift through mounds of AI-generated resumes. Meanwhile, large tech companies are cutting jobs — yet still scrambling to hire people with AI skills.

Enter Provn.

The new Seattle startup, led by longtime entrepreneur Nikesh Parekh, wants companies to scrap the traditional resume and replace it with portfolios of real work and challenge-based assessments.

Provn’s software facilitates “AI challenges” — for example, building an AI agent or solving a business problem. It also records candidate video walkthroughs and uses analytics to measure performance. Companies get data-driven insights and candidates build profiles they can reuse across employers.

Parekh described it as a skills-first marketplace for AI talent, timed to a shift where “every job is becoming an AI role.”

Parekh told GeekWire the idea taps into several converging trends: “the buzz around AI replacing people, changing nature of work, and AI jobs being the only growth area.”

He said traditional job platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed have massive scale but are less effective at helping companies find high quality candidates, especially with more “AI slop” to wade through.

Provn also aims to go beyond technical-testing tools such as HackerRank and Codility, which Parekh described as narrow.

The company is targeting two main customer groups:

• Large companies that regularly hire early- and mid-career information workers and want a database of candidates assessed on real skills;
• Smaller startups without recruiting teams that need access to pre-vetted candidates who can demonstrate AI fluency.

Provn is partnering with startup communities and companies including Read AI, Yoodli, and other Seattle-area employers to launch its minimum viable product. It’s also working with recruiting firms.

The startup is self-funded so far, plans to raise a seed round, and isn’t generating revenue yet. Its business model will charge employers per hire and offer premium tools for candidates — such as an “AI agent” that helps them market themselves and find new opportunities.

Parekh is a familiar name in the Seattle tech startup scene. He co-founded Suplari, an AI-driven spend intelligence firm acquired by Microsoft in 2021, and then spent four years working on Copilot Studio and Power Platform. His career also includes leadership roles at real estate tech firms (Market Leader, Trulia) and early stage ventures.

Parekh’s former colleagues are part of the team at Provn, including:

• Kate Hill, former vice president of sales and customer success at ActiveRain, former business development leader at EY
• Ravi Mohan, former venture capitalist at Shasta Ventures and former board member at Suplari, Apptio, and Anaplan.

Provn joins a growing list of recruiting tech startups in the Seattle area that includes hiring platform Humanly, technical interviewing company Karat, staffing startup ConverzAI, and others.

Generative AI has made its way onto the professional soccer field.

Laura Harvey, head coach of Seattle Reign FC, said this week that ChatGPT helped her come up with a new defensive strategy.

Speaking on the Soccerish Podcast, Harvey said she was curious if ChatGPT could answer questions about soccer. So she started prompting OpenAI’s chatbot with questions about her team.

At first, she asked broad questions like, “what is Seattle Reign’s identity?” She didn’t really love the answer.

But then she asked: “What formation should you play to beat NWSL teams?”

It then listed every team in the women’s soccer professional league, with a suggested formation. And for two of the teams, it suggested “back-five,” a defensive setup using five players in the backline.

Harvey said she wasn’t super familiar with the strategy and had not used it as a coach.

She took the AI suggestion to her staff and did a deep dive on the potential change.

“We liked it,” Harvey said. “And it worked — we won the game.”

Harvey, a three-time NWSL Coach of the Year, didn’t reveal the opponent but said they were “really good.” Now the team uses the formation as an option during matches. The Reign have improved since last season and are ranked fourth in the NWSL heading into the playoffs.

It’s a fascinating example of using AI as a tactical consultant, combining human expertise and intuition with machine suggestions.

“It didn’t tell you how to play it, what to do in it or any of that stuff,” Harvey said on the podcast. “But it was like, ‘This is what we would say to do.’ And I was like, ‘Hmm, interesting.’ And that was what spurred me to look into it. So then I really looked into it.”

Across industries, professionals are treating tools such as ChatGPT as sounding boards — running ideas by them, exploring scenarios, or pressure-testing strategies before making decisions.

OpenAI’s own research this year found that people increasingly rely on ChatGPT “as an advisor rather than only for task completion.”

“ChatGPT likely improves worker output by providing decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where productivity is increasing in the quality of decision-making,” according to the research.

Inventprise, a Redmond, Wash.–based biotechnology company developing vaccines for infectious diseases, is laying off 76 workers, according to a new filing from the Washington Employment Security Department.

GeekWire has reached out to the company for additional details.

The layoffs impact employees across the company’s Redmond and Woodinville facilities, as well as some remote workers. The first separations are effective Dec. 31.

Job titles affected span a wide range of roles, including manufacturing, quality control, R&D, and technical staff, according to the filing.

The company has nearly 200 employees, according to LinkedIn.

Founded in 2012, Inventprise focuses on addressing global health challenges in low- and middle-income countries. Its pipeline includes lead candidate IVT-PCV-25, a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine candidate that is in Phase 2 trials, according to the company’s website.

Inventprise was founded by Dr. Subhash Kapre, who previously worked on vaccine initiatives with the Gates Foundation. The Seattle-based foundation has provided more than $13 million to Inventprise.

Kapre is currently chairman of Inventprise, which is led by CEO Yves Leurquin, a former Takeda exec who joined the company in 2021.

Alaska Airlines said Friday it has hired global consulting firm Accenture to conduct a full audit of its technology systems, part of a broader push to improve reliability after two major IT outages in recent months. The review will include a top-to-bottom examination of the airline’s systems, standards, and processes.

The move follows a major outage last week that grounded flights for eight hours. The Seattle-based company said more than 49,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted and more than 400 flights were canceled across Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary Horizon Air. The outage was severe enough to postpone the company’s scheduled quarterly earnings call. 

Alaska said the outage was due to a failure at its primary data center and was not related to a cybersecurity incident.

In a new regulatory filing, the airline said it does not plan on rescheduling its third quarter call and will provide updated guidance for its fourth quarter in early December, “once the full financial impact of the recent IT disruptions is understood.”

A separate July outage, caused by a failure of a “critical piece of hardware” at Alaska’s data centers, was expected to reduce earnings by about $0.10 per share, or roughly $12 million.

Alaska said it has boosted IT infrastructure spending by nearly 80% since 2019, investing in redundant data centers and migrating more guest-facing systems to the cloud.

The airline operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms, according to an interview last year with Vikram Baskaran, Alaska’s vice president of IT.

Alaska began migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure around 2015 and continues to maintain its own data centers for critical workloads, according to the interview.

Earlier this week, Alaska had another IT disruption, but this time blamed Microsoft Azure, which itself had an outage that temporarily disrupted operations for customers worldwide. The disruption impacted Alaska’s subsidiary Hawaiian Airlines.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s latest big round of layoffs — about 14,000 corporate jobs — wasn’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers, but rather a push to stay nimble.

Speaking with analysts on Amazon’s quarterly earnings call Thursday, Jassy said the decision stemmed from a belief that the company had grown too big and too layered.

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” he said. “Really, it’s culture.”

Jassy’s comments are his first public explanation of the layoffs, which reportedly could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people — and would be the largest workforce reduction in Amazon’s history.

The news this week prompted speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Earlier this year, Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.

But his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called “the technology transformation happening right now.”

Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021, has pushed to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company. Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more cautious hiring approach.

Bloomberg News reported this week that Jassy has told colleagues parts of the company remain “unwieldy” despite efforts to streamline operations — including significant layoffs in 2023 when Amazon cut 27,000 corporate workers in multiple stages. 

On Thursday’s call, Jassy said Amazon’s rapid growth led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making.

“When that happens, sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions — the ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line,” Jassy said, using a phrase popularized by Bezos to help determine how much thought and planning to put into big and small decisions.

The layoffs, he said, are meant to restore the kind of ownership and agility that defined Amazon’s early years.

“We are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy said, repeating a line he’s used recently.

Given the “transformation” he described happening across the business world, Jassy said it’s more important than ever to be lean, flat, and fast-moving. “That’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

Jassy’s comments came as Amazon reported quarterly revenue of $180.2 billion, up 13% year-over-year, with AWS revenue growth accelerating to 20% — its fastest pace since 2022.

Amazon said it took a $1.8 billion severance-related charge in the quarter related to the layoffs.

Amazon joins other tech giants including Microsoft that have trimmed headcount this year while investing heavily in AI infrastructure.

Related coverage:

• Amazon layoffs hit software engineers hardest in Washington
• Amazon stock soars 11% after topping Q3 estimates with $180B in revenue, $21B in profits

Amazon beat estimates for its third-quarter earnings with $180.2 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year, and earnings per share of $1.95, up from $1.43 in the year-ago period.

• Net income was $21.2 billion, up from $15.3 billion last year.
• Wall Street expected $177.7 billion in revenue, and earnings per share of $1.56.

Amazon shares were up more than 11% in after-hours trading. Growth in the company’s stock has lagged behind rivals Microsoft and Google this year.

Investors were likely pleased with a re-acceleration in Amazon’s closely watched cloud computing unit, which reported $33 billion in sales, up 20% year-over-year and topping analyst estimates. In a press release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AWS is “growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022.”

“We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity — adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months,” Jassy added.

The cloud growth should help Amazon counter the Wall Street narrative that its cloud business is falling behind Microsoft and Google in pursuing the AI opportunity.

• Amazon and other cloud giants are pouring billions of dollars into capital expenditures to support AI initiatives. Amazon said earlier this year it expects to increase capital expenditures to more than $100 billion in 2025.
• The company makes most of its operating profits from AWS — $11.4 billion in the third quarter, more than half Amazon’s total operating income.
• AWS was hit with a major outage last week that took down several major sites and services. It blamed an internal issue within the cloud giant’s infrastructure.

Amazon’s overall operating income reached $17.4 billion in the third quarter — flat compared to a year ago. The company had forecast operating income of $15.5 billion to $20.5 billion.

The company said its Q3 operating income reflected two special charges:

• A $2.5 billion charge related to a recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission related to Prime memberships.
• About $1.8 billion in estimated severance costs related to its massive 14,000 corporate layoff announced earlier this week.

The workforce reduction comes amid an efficiency push at Amazon. Jassy has cited a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.

• Reuters reported this week that the number of layoffs could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people, which is still a possibility as the cutbacks continue into next year. 
• Jassy told employees in a company-wide memo earlier this year that Amazon’s corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as generative AI takes hold.

Online store sales were $67.4 billion, up 10%.

• The revenue includes sales from the company’s annual Prime Day sales event from July 8-11.
• Analysts are watching for impact from tariffs on the company’s retail business, which still makes up the largest portion of its overall revenue.
• In its Q1 earnings report in April, Amazon added “tariff and trade policies” to a list of factors that create uncertainty in its results, joining existing risks such as inflation, interest rates, and regional labor market constraints.

Here are more details from the second quarter earnings report:

Advertising: The company’s ad business brought in $17.7 billion in revenue in the quarter, up 24% from the year-ago period, topping estimates. Advertising, along with AWS, is a major profit engine.

Third-party seller services: Revenue from third-party seller services was up 12% to $42.5 billion.

Shipping costs: Amazon spent $25.4 billion on shipping in Q3, up 8%.

Physical stores: The category, which includes Whole Foods and other Amazon grocery stores, posted revenue of $5.6 billion, up 7%.

Headcount: Amazon employs 1.57 million people, up 2% year-over-year. That figure does not include seasonal and contract workers.

Prime: Subscription services revenue, which includes Prime memberships, came in at $12.6 billion, up 11%. 

Guidance: The company forecasts Q4 sales between $206 billion and $213 billion. Operating income is expected to range between $21 billion and $26 billion, compared with $21.2 billion in the year-ago quarter.

$AMZN Amazon Q3 FY25:

• Revenue +13% Y/Y to $180.2B ($2.4B beat).
• Operating margin 10% (+0.5pp Y/Y).
• EPS $1.95 ($0.39 beat).
• Q4 Guidance: ~$209.5B ($1.4B beat).

☁️ AWS:
• Revenue +20% Y/Y to $33.0B.
• Operating margin 35% (-3pp Y/Y). pic.twitter.com/2kaNIvC7oy

— App Economy Insights (@EconomyApp) October 30, 2025

The University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering is reframing what it means for its research to change the world.

In unveiling six “Grand Challenges” at its annual Research Showcase and Open House in Seattle on Wednesday, the Allen School’s leaders described a blueprint for technology that protects privacy, supports mental health, broadens accessibility, earns public trust, and sustains people and the planet.

The idea is to “organize ourselves into some more specific grand challenges that we can tackle together to have an even greater impact,” said Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Allen School and a UW computer science professor, opening the school’s annual Research Showcase and Open House.

Here are the six grand challenges:

• Anticipate and address security, privacy, and safety issues as tech permeates society.
• Make high-quality cognitive and mental health support available to all.
• Design technology to be accessible at its inception — not as an add-on.
• Design AI in a way that is transparent and equally beneficial to all.
• Build systems that can be trusted to do exactly what we want them to do, every time.
• Create technologies that sustain people and the planet.

Balazinska explained that the list draws on the strengths and interests of its faculty, who now number more than 90, including 74 on the tenure track.

With total enrollment of about 2,900 students, last year the Allen School graduated more than 600 undergrads, 150 master’s students, and 50 Ph.D. students.

The Allen School has grown so large that subfields like systems and NLP (natural language processing) risk becoming isolated “mini departments,” said Shwetak Patel, a University of Washington computer science professor. The Grand Challenges initiative emerged as a bottom-up effort to reconnect these groups around shared, human-centered problems. 

Patel said the initiative also encourages collaborations on campus beyond the computer science school, citing examples like fetal heart rate monitoring with UW Medicine.

A serial entrepreneur and 2011 MacArthur Fellow, Patel recalled that when he joined UW 18 years ago, his applied and entrepreneurial focus was seen as unconventional. Now it’s central to the school’s direction. The grand challenges initiative is “music to my ears,” Patel said.

In tackling these challenges, the Allen School has a unique advantage against many other computer science schools. Eighteen faculty members currently hold what’s known as “concurrent engagements” — formally splitting time between the Allen School and companies and organizations such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2).

This is a “superpower” for the Allen School, said Patel, who has a concurrent engagement at Google. These arrangements, he explained, give faculty and students access to data, computing resources, and real-world challenges by working directly with companies developing the most advanced AI systems.

“A lot of the problems we’re trying to solve, you cannot solve them just at the university,” Patel said, pointing to examples such as open-source foundation models and AI for mental-health research that depend on large-scale resources unavailable in academia alone.

These roles can also stretch professors thin. “When somebody’s split, there’s only so much mental energy you can put into the university,” Patel said. Many of those faculty members teach just one or two courses a year, requiring the school to rely more on lecturers and teaching faculty.

Still, he said, the benefits outweigh the costs. “I’d rather have 50% of somebody than 0% of somebody, and we’ll make it work,” he said. “That’s been our strategy.”

The Madrona Prize, an annual award presented at the event by the Seattle-based venture capital firm, went to a project called “Enhancing Personalized Multi-Turn Dialogue with Curiosity Reward.” The system makes AI chatbots more personal by giving them a “curiosity reward,” motivating the AI to actively learn about a user’s traits during a conversation to create more personalized interactions.

On the subject of industry collaborations, the lead researcher on the prize-winning project, UW Ph.D. student Yanming Wan, conducted the research while working as an intern at Google DeepMind. (See full list of winners and runners-up below.)

At the evening poster session, graduate students filled the rooms to showcase their latest projects — including new advances in artificial intelligence for speech, language, and accessibility.

DopFone: Doppler-based fetal heart rate monitoring using commodity smartphones

DopFone transforms phones into fetal heart rate monitors. It uses the phone speaker to transmit a continuous sine wave and uses the microphone to record the reflections. It then processes the audio recordings to estimate fetal heart rate. It aims to be an alternative to doppler ultrasounds that require trained staff, which aren’t practical for frequent remote use.

“The major impact would be in the rural, remote and low-resource settings where access to such maternity care is less — also called maternity care deserts,” said Poojita Garg, a second-year PhD student.

CourseSLM: A Chatbot Tool for Supporting Instructors and Classroom Learning

This custom-built chatbot is designed to help students stay focused and build real understanding rather than relying on quick shortcuts. The system uses built-in guardrails to keep learners on task and counter the distractions and over-dependence that can come with general large language models.

Running locally on school devices, the chatbot helps protect student data and ensures access even without Wi-Fi.

“We’re focused on making sure students have access to technology, and know how to use it properly and safely,” said Marquiese Garrett, a sophomore at the UW.

Efficient serving of SpeechLMs with VoxServe

VoxServe makes speech-language models run more efficiently. It uses a standardized abstraction layer and interface that allows many different models to run through a single system. Its key innovation is a custom scheduling algorithm that optimizes performance depending on the use case.

The approach makes speech-based AI systems faster, cheaper, and easier to deploy, paving the way for real-time voice assistants and other next-gen speech applications.

“I thought it would be beneficial if we can provide this sort of open-source system that people can use,” said Keisuke Kamahori, third-year Ph.D. student at the Allen School.

ConvFill: Model collaboration for responsive conversational voice agents

ConvFill is a lightweight conversational model designed to reduce the delay in voice-based large language models. The system responds quickly with short, initial answers, then fills in more detailed information as larger models complete their processing.

By combining small and large models in this way, ConvFill delivers faster responses while conserving tokens and improving efficiency — an important step toward more natural, low-latency conversational AI.

“This is an exciting way to think about how we can combine systems together to get the best of both worlds,” said Zachary Englhardt, a third-year Ph.D. student. “It’s an exciting way to look at problems.”

ConsumerBench: Benchmarking generative AI on end-user devices

Running generative AI locally — on laptops, phones, or other personal hardware — introduces new system-level challenges in fairness, efficiency, and scheduling.

ConsumerBench is a benchmarking framework that tests how well generative AI applications perform on consumer hardware when multiple AI models run at the same time. The open-source tool helps researchers identify bottlenecks and improve performance on consumer devices.

There are a number of benefits to running models locally: “There are privacy purposes — a user can ask for questions related to email or private content, and they can do it efficiently and accurately,” said Yile Gu, a third-year Ph.D. student at the Allen School.

Designing Chatbots for Sensitive Health Contexts: Lessons from Contraceptive Care in Kenyan Pharmacies

A project aimed at improving contraceptive access and guidance for adolescent girls and young women in Kenya by integrating low-fidelity chatbots into healthcare settings. The goal is to understand how chatbots can support private, informed conversations and work effectively within pharmacies.

“The fuel behind this whole project is that my team is really interested in improving health outcomes for vulnerable populations,” said Lisa Orii, a fifth-year Ph.D. student.

See more about the research showcase here. Here’s the list of winning projects.

Madrona Prize Winner: “Enhancing Personalized Multi-Turn Dialogue with Curiosity Reward” Yanming Wan, Jiaxing Wu, Marwa Abdulhai, Lior Shani, Natasha Jaques

Runner up: “VAMOS: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Model for Capability-Modulated and Steerable Navigation” Mateo Guaman Castro, Sidharth Rajagopal, Daniel Gorbatov, Matt Schmittle, Rohan Baijal, Octi Zhang, Rosario Scalise, Sidharth Talia, Emma Romig, Celso de Melo, Byron Boots, Abhishek Gupta

Runner up: “Dynamic 6DOF VR reconstruction from monocular videos” Baback Elmieh, Steve Seitz, Ira-Kemelmacher, Brian Curless

People’s Choice: “MolmoAct” Jason Lee, Jiafei Duan, Haoquan Fang, Yuquan Deng, Shuo Liu, Boyang Li, Bohan Fang, Jieyu Zhang, Yi Ru Wang, Sangho Lee, Winson Han, Wilbert Pumacay, Angelica Wu, Rose Hendrix, Karen Farley, Eli VanderBilt, Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna

Editor’s Note: The University of Washington underwrites GeekWire’s coverage of artificial intelligence. Content is under the sole discretion of the GeekWire editorial team. Learn more about underwritten content on GeekWire.

Live-shopping startup Whatnot plans to grow its new Seattle outpost following a $225 million funding round announced this week.

The company aims to hire more than 75 employees in the region over the next six months — tripling its current local headcount — across product, engineering, and related roles.

Whatnot opened its downtown Seattle office earlier this year. The Los Angeles-based company, now valued at $11.5 billion (up from $5 billion a year ago), said the Seattle expansion is one of its largest talent investments to date.

Founded in 2019, Whatnot’s platform mixes e-commerce and livestream entertainment. Sellers host live video shows on the Whatnot app or website, auctioning or selling products in real time. Buyers can watch, chat, and bid directly during live streams.

The New York Times described the trend as “QVC for the TikTok era.” Whatnot competes against the likes of TikTok (TikTok Shop) and Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon (Amazon Live).

Whatnot facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers, and handles payments, logistics, and safety features. The company earns revenue by taking a commission — typically around 8% — on sales made by sellers ranging from independent entrepreneurs to established retailers.

Whatnot more than doubled live sales on its platform this year, to $6 billion. Buyers spend more than 80 minutes per day on Whatnot’s live shows, according to the company. Whatnot is not profitable.

Some of its fastest-growing categories include beauty, women’s fashion, handbags, electronics, antiques, coins, golf, snacks, and live plants.

The company’s Seattle office focuses on product and engineering, including areas such as machine learning, marketplace integrity, and trust & safety. Whatnot has 900 employees across its workforce.

Dan Bear, vice president of engineering, and Kelda Murphy, vice president of talent acquisition, are both based in Seattle. Bear previously opened Seattle offices for Snap, Hulu, and CloudKitchens.

Whatnot is one of more than 130 companies that operate satellite offices in the Seattle region, tapping into the area’s technical talent pool.

The company has 31 open positions on its jobs page. It is hosting an engineering and product networking event in Seattle on Nov. 4.

Software development engineers make up the largest group of employees affected by Amazon’s latest round of layoffs in its home state.

GeekWire reported Tuesday on a new filing from the Washington Employment Security Department revealing that the tech giant is laying off 2,303 corporate employees, mostly in Seattle and Bellevue. The cuts are part of broader layoffs announced Tuesday that will impact about 14,000 workers globally.

A detailed list included with the state filing reveals which roles are impacted by the layoffs. More than 600 software development engineering roles are being cut among the 2,303 affected workers in Washington — more than a quarter of total cuts.

The trend mirrors layoffs at Microsoft earlier this year, as companies reassess their engineering needs amid the rise of AI-driven coding tools. Amazon itself recently introduced its own AI coding tool Kiro in July, and has reportedly explored adopting the AI code assistant Cursor for employees.

The layoffs of software engineers reflect a striking shift for an industry that has traditionally relied on coders to help build and maintain the backbone of digital platforms.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti wrote in a message to employees Tuesday, saying it’s enabling teams to “innovate much faster than ever before.”

Amazon’s engineering layoffs are part of a broader industry reckoning with AI’s impact on traditional tech roles and white-collar jobs. A Wall Street Journal report this week detailed how the adoption of AI is contributing to a wave of layoffs across the country. Axios published a story Wednesday on a similar topic with the headline: How an AI job apocalypse unfolds.

More than 500 manager-level titles were also heavily affected by Amazon’s layoffs in Washington, according to the filing — aligning with a company-wide push to use the cutbacks to help reduce bureaucracy and operate more efficiently.

Amazon also made reductions in recruiting and HR roles. Other impacted areas include marketing, advertising, and legal.

The largest single site impact is at SEA40, Amazon’s Doppler office building on 7th Avenue in Seattle, where 361 employees are affected, according to the filing.

More than 100 remote employees based in Washington are also being let go.

In the era of AI-generated software, developers still need to make sure their code is clean. That’s where TestSprite wants to help.

The Seattle startup announced $6.7 million in seed funding to expand its platform that automatically tests and monitors code written by AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.

TestSprite’s autonomous agent integrates directly into development environments, running tests throughout the coding process rather than as a separate step after deployment.

“As AI writes more code, validation becomes the bottleneck,” said CEO Yunhao Jiao. “TestSprite solves that by making testing autonomous and continuous, matching AI speed.”

The platform can generate and run front- and back-end tests during development to ensure AI-written code works as expected, help AI IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) fix software based on TestSprite’s integration testing reports, and continuously update and rerun test cases to monitor deployed software for ongoing reliability.

Founded last year, TestSprite says its user base grew from 6,000 to 35,000 in three months, and revenue has doubled each month since launching its 2.0 version and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. The company employs about 25 people.

Jiao is a former engineer at Amazon and a natural language processing researcher. He co-founded TestSprite with Rui Li, a former Google engineer.

Jiao said TestSprite doesn’t compete with AI coding copilots, but complements them by focusing on continuous validation and test generation. Developers can trigger tests using simple natural-language commands, such as “Test my payment-related features,” directly inside their IDEs.

The seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Techstars, Jinqiu Capital, MiraclePlus, Hat-trick Capital, Baidu Ventures, and EdgeCase Capital Partners. Total funding to date is about $8.1 million.

Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson is threading the needle when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Ferguson made a brief appearance at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week on Monday evening, speaking at AI House on Pier 70 about his approach to governing the consequential technology.

“I view my job as maximizing the benefits and minimizing harms,” said Ferguson, who took office earlier this year.

Ferguson called AI one of the “top five biggest challenges” he thinks about daily, both professionally and personally.

In a follow-up interview with GeekWire, the governor said AI “could totally transform our government, as well as the private sector, in many ways.”

His comments came just as Amazon, the largest employer in Washington state, said it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.

Ferguson told the crowd that the future of work and “loss of jobs that come with the technology” is on his mind.

The governor highlighted Washington’s AI Task Force, created during his tenure as attorney general, which is studying issues from algorithmic bias to data security. The group’s next set of recommendations arrives later this year and could shape upcoming legislation, he said.

States are moving ahead with their own AI rules in the absence of a comprehensive federal framework. Washington appears to sit in the pragmatic middle of this fast-moving regulatory landscape — using executive action and an expert task force to build guidelines, while watching experiments in states such as California and Colorado.

Seattle city leaders are also getting involved. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.

Ferguson said he’s aware of how AI can “really revolutionize our economy and state in so many ways,” from healthcare to education to wildfire detection.

But he also flagged his concerns — both as a policymaker and parent. The governor, who has 17-year-old twins, said he worries about the technology’s impact on young people, referencing reports of teen suicides linked to AI chatbots.

Despite those concerns, Ferguson maintained an upbeat tone during his remarks at Seattle AI Week, citing the region’s technical talent and economic opportunity from the technology.

He noted that the state, amid a $16 billion budget shortfall this year, kept $300,000 in funding for the AI House, the new waterfront startup hub that hosted Monday’s event.

“There is no better place anywhere in the United States for this innovation than right here in the Northwest,” he said.

Related: A tale of two Seattles in the age of AI: Harsh realities and new hope for the tech community