Expedia is monitoring potential disruptions from the ongoing U.S. government shutdown and related FAA-ordered flight cancellations.

The Seattle-based company is “watching the government shutdown very closely,” said Scott Schenkel, chief financial officer, speaking on Expedia’s earnings call Thursday.

Schenkel said Expedia factors in “room for unknowns, like this type of thing,” when it sets a forecast.

“We factor these types of things in when we think about guidance, particularly in dynamic environments like this,” he said. Expedia generated $101 million from airline-related revenue in the third quarter.

Expedia shares rose nearly 20% on Friday after the company topped expectations for its third quarter, reporting revenue growth of 9% to $4.41 billion, and adjusted earnings per share of $7.57. The company raised its full-year guidance.

“The market was healthy in the quarter with an acceleration in the U.S. and continued strength in the rest of the world,” Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin said on the earnings call. “We saw longer lengths of stay and longer booking windows, both signs of a stronger consumer.”

Gorin, who is in her first year leading Expedia, called out an “exceptional quarter” for the company’s B2B business.

She also noted that “AI-driven search is transforming the way travelers discover and plan their trips,” and cited partnerships with Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity.

“We’re moving fast and deliberately to ensure our brands show up wherever travelers are,” she said.

Schenkel said AI is also helping internally: “Our virtual agents resolve over 50% of traveler queries. And when human support is needed, it delivers concise summaries to the agent, reducing our service cost per transaction,” he said.

Gorin said the company remains confident heading into the final quarter of the year. “While we saw continued momentum in October, we’re keeping a close eye on economic indicators and remaining focused and agile amidst a dynamic macro environment.”

Seattle’s startup lawyers and bankers have long helped founders raise capital. Now they’re pooling some of their own money to invest in promising early stage tech companies across the Pacific Northwest.

A trio of longtime Seattle startup service providers — Minh Le of Stifel Bank and Craig Sherman and David Wickwire of Wilson Sonsini — are teaming up to launch the Pacific Northwest fund for Service Provider Capital (SPC), a national firm that invests region by region.

SPC launched in 2014 out of Colorado with a unique startup investing model. It co-invests in early stage rounds led by institutional venture firms, typically writing smaller checks into those same deals.

The investors — limited partners, or LPs — come from law, banking, accounting, and insurance communities, reflecting an effort to let the professionals who support startups also invest in them. Angel investors and serial entrepreneurs are also part of the mix, using SPC as a way to back more local founders.

“It’s folks that support the ecosystem but oftentimes don’t have access to the asset class,” Le said.

The model aims to “index” a region’s early-stage activity, backing dozens of companies rather than betting on a few. SPC has expanded its model from Boulder into other regions such as New England, Texas, and Chicago. It has raised 11 funds across six regions, investing in about 60 companies per fund.

SPC began exploring a Pacific Northwest fund about a year and a half ago. Jody Shepherd, co-founder of SPC, said the region felt like a “perfect fit” given its strong venture community and deep talent pool around tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft.

“Once we found a team like Minh, David, and Craig to lead the fund, plus an outstanding crew of well-connected LPs, an SPC Pacific Northwest fund was a no-brainer,” he told GeekWire.

Le, Sherman, and Wickwire are mainstays of the Seattle tech ecosystem. Le, a former Silicon Valley Bank leader, joined Stifel Bank in 2023. Sherman and Wickwire have a combined four decades of experience at Wilson Sonsini, representing many of the region’s top venture-backed startups.

Unlike traditional funds, the local managing directors keep their day jobs. They help surface deals through their networks, while Service Provider Capital makes final investment decisions.

The goal isn’t to generate new business for their firms, they said, but to strengthen the broader ecosystem by expanding access to early capital. The fund’s LP base includes many of their professional peers and competitors, from other law firms and banks across the region.

The fund’s model is intentionally broad and formulaic. Diligence is minimal; meeting the criteria (early stage tech or life sciences startup in the Pacific Northwest raising its first round from an institutional investor) is often enough.

Because the fund relies on trusted institutional leads, founders don’t need to pitch SPC directly — if they meet the criteria, the fund can join a round quickly.

The new Pacific Northwest fund has raised $3 million and has already made two undisclosed investments. It writes checks in the $50,000 to $100,000 range.

The fund also aims to fill a gap left by longtime angels who’ve retired or joined venture firms, serving as a kind of “strategic angel” to help complete early rounds, Wickwire said.

The Seattle startup ecosystem has long been critiqued for lacking local capital to invest in up-and-coming companies. The closure of Techstars Seattle in 2023 created another gap in early stage funding and mentorship.

“There are great entrepreneurs here, there are great engineers here — and the more capital there is supporting the local market, the better off we’ll all be,” Sherman said.

Oleria, a Seattle-based cybersecurity startup that manages employee access to applications and data, raised $19 million in a new round of funding.

The company confirmed the funding after GeekWire spotted a new SEC filing this week. Oleria has now raised more than $60 million to date.

Founded in 2023, Oleria’s software is designed to help companies figure out who has access to various back-end systems and letes them analyze activity across their infrastructure.

The company is led by CEO Jim Alkove, a former chief trust officer at Salesforce and a former advisor for the World Economic Forum’s Global Center for Cybersecurity. Oleria co-founder Jagadeesh Kunda is the former chief product officer at Colorado-based cloud directory platform JumpCloud. Kunda also held engineering leadership roles at Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

Alkove told GeekWire that the company is growing revenue with multiple Fortune 500 customers.

“Every CISO we talk to, whether they’re running security for a Fortune 100 or a mid-market company, is asking for a fundamentally different approach to identity security,” he said in a statement. “One that’s secure, but also operates at the speed of business. That need is urgent. Legacy identity tools were already fragmented and inadequate, and AI is widening those gaps even further. Oleria is built to solve this problem.”

Seattle startup Upward raised $8 million and announced a strategic partnership with Mastercard to make it faster and simpler for businesses to roll out financial products.

Founded in 2021 by early Remitly executives, Upward provides infrastructure that lets businesses embed payments, cards, and banking products without managing separate integrations for banks, processors, or compliance.

The 20-person startup focuses on customers that sell to independent workers, creators, and small businesses — segments often underserved by other fintech competitors, according to Aaron Gregory, co-founder and CEO.

Gregory was general counsel at Remitly, where he helped the Seattle-based digital remittance giant go public in 2021. He co-founded Upward with Danielle Hill, former head of global operations at Remitly.

Upward said it’s processing more than $10 million in monthly payment volume.

Companies such as TipHaus and Solo, both based in Seattle, use Upward to embed instant pay and money-management features for independent workers. Scout, a name-image-likeness (NIL) platform for college athletes, uses Upward to manage payouts to athletes at schools including Alabama, SMU, Louisville, and Clemson.

Unlike traditional “banking-as-a-service” providers that rely on multiple vendors, Upward said it rebuilt its infrastructure from scratch, combining cards, payments, banking, and compliance into a single, developer-friendly system.

The partnership with Mastercard allows Upward’s customers to quickly launch Mastercard-branded card programs, including access to Mastercard’s Easy Savings and Business Builder programs.

“For too long, businesses that wanted to offer a financial product have had to choose between innovation, flexibility, and speed,” Gregory said in a statement. “This investment and our Mastercard partnership will help to tear down those barriers — empowering our customers to launch and operate smarter, customer-centric financial products faster than ever.”

Upward is part of a growing “embedded finance market” that has an estimated total addressable market of about $185 billion, according to BCG.

The funding round was co-led by Dundee Venture Capital and Seattle-based Breakwater Ventures Fund, with participation from Techstars, Altari Ventures, Cascade Seed Fund, Milwaukee Venture Partners, and Outside Ventures. Total funding to date is $12 million.

Digs, a Vancouver, Wash.-based startup that sells software for homebuilding, raised $5 million.

Founded in 2022, Digs’ software helps residential homebuilders streamline various aspects of their workflows including document organization, communication, and other tasks. It focuses on the pre-construction and design phase, turning static blueprints into digital, searchable files.

Digs also converts build documents (PDF floor plans, change orders, etc.) into a 3D digital twin that supports warranty agreements.

Digs CEO Ryan Fink describes the company as “CarFax for the home.”

“Digs offers homeowners a first-of-its-kind 3D digital twin and AI-powered home ownership experience to become a living record of value and improvements,” he said in a press release.

Fink said revenue is growing but didn’t provide specific metrics. The company said it has nearly 10,000 homes on its platform.

Fink previously founded an augmented reality glasses startup called ONtheGo Platforms, which Atheer acquired in 2015. He also founded Streem, a startup that developed AR technology for home improvement technicians, which was acquired in 2019 by home services company Frontdoor.

Fink started Digs with Ty Frackiewicz, who previously co-founded ONtheGo and was vice president of product at Streem.

Digs employs 28 people and has raised nearly $20 million to date.

The latest $5 million raise is part of a “pre-Series A funding.” The round was led by Dallas-based firm SPLY Capital. Other backers include Oregon Venture Fund; Flying Fish; Portland Seed Fund, and Cascade Seed Fund. Digs customer Lanthorne Homes also invested in the latest round.

SPLYCAP General Partner Tyler Williams joined the board at Digs. The startup recently hired longtime sales leader Stephen Molen as chief revenue officer.

Rajeev “Raj” Singh has made a career out of seeing the next wave before it hits. He bet on software-as-a-service with travel expense giant Concur three decades ago. He bet on virtual care with Accolade before telehealth went mainstream.

Now, he’s betting that Smartsheet can redefine enterprise software for the AI era.

“If this transformation moment weren’t happening, I probably wouldn’t be here,” Singh said in an interview with GeekWire after his keynote at Smartsheet Engage at the Seattle Convention Center.

Singh took the stage Wednesday morning at the company’s annual conference — less than 30 days into his new role as CEO of the Bellevue-based software maker best known for helping businesses organize and track work.

Founded two decades ago, Smartsheet is one of region’s iconic tech companies, with a large customer base of major businesses and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It went private earlier this year in a $8.4 billion deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.

Smartsheet competes in a crowded and fast-evolving market for productivity and work-management software that includes legacy players such as Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce, along with newer challengers including Asana, Monday.com, Airtable, and ClickUp.

Singh, who succeeds longtime CEO Mark Mader, framed the transition as an opportunity to challenge old perceptions of Smartsheet. He referenced enterprise buyers who still ask if it’s just an “online spreadsheet company” or a to-do list manager.

“It’s time to step out of the shadows for Smartsheet,” Singh said in his keynote speech at the conference, which runs Nov. 5-7 and attracts around 5,000 attendees.

Smartsheet on Wednesday announced new features as part of its “Intelligent Work Management” platform that combines AI agents, knowledge graphs, and automation. The update introduces tools like Smart Assist, Smart Flows, and Smart Agents to help teams create projects, manage tasks, and spot potential issues automatically. It also adds new enterprise features such as Scenario Planning and Security Score to give companies more control and visibility across their operations.

Singh described the evolution of AI in three phases: copilots as generation one, autonomous agents as generation two, and cross-system automation — the integration of multiple enterprise tech stacks — as generation three.

“That last one is really hard, and there’s only a few companies in the world that can do it,” Singh said. “We’re going to be one of those that lead the world there.”

He said Smartsheet is focused on using AI to drive business outcomes.

“Agents aren’t definitionally valuable,” Singh said. “What’s valuable is productivity. What’s valuable is revenue. What’s valuable is cost reduction. What’s valuable is quality improvement. That’s what you can charge for — AI is a tool, not a revenue model.”

Under new private equity ownership, Singh said Smartsheet has more freedom to accelerate.

“It gives us more license to do what we need to do and to go fast — which we have to do,” he said.

Asked how Smartsheet will compete against AI-driven startups tackling work productivity, Singh — who recently invested in a Seattle-area AI company — said incumbents still hold the edge “if they have courage.”

“The incumbency advantage is customers, workflows, data,” he told GeekWire. “If I have petabytes of data and you’ve got none — if you beat me by understanding my customer better than me, then I was asleep at the switch and I was supposed to lose.

“You might go faster building software, but I should go faster building insight. And if I lose, it’s because I was lazy. If I lose, it’s because I wasn’t paying attention. And I’d like to think that’s not going to be us.”

Voters in Seattle have overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, which will reshape the city’s business and occupation (B&O) tax that applies to gross revenue. It will impact both small startups and large tech companies such as Amazon.

The ballot measure garnered a 67.7% approval in King County’s unofficial election results posted Tuesday evening.

The initiative will temporarily eliminate B&O taxes for small- and medium-sized businesses — including tech startups — with gross receipts of $2 million or less.

To offset the revenue loss for the city, large companies would see their B&O tax rate increase by more than 50% — from 0.427% to 0.65% for service businesses. Only revenue above $2 million will be taxed.

The new tax rules is expected to raise an additional $81 million per year for human services and other city programs.

The city, which is trying to address a substantial budget shortfall over the next two years, says about 90% of small- and medium-sized businesses in Seattle will pay fewer B&O taxes if the proposal passes.

Smaller companies and those just getting off the ground would no longer pay B&O taxes, potentially saving them thousands of dollars per year. A services company with $1 million in revenue pays $4,270 in B&O tax annually at the current rate.

The tax change adds another wrinkle to the dynamic between Amazon — Seattle’s largest employer — and city lawmakers, following years of a strained relationship over tax policy.

GeekWire has reached out to Amazon for comment on the new B&O tax.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck unveiled the proposal in June, framing it as a way to protect Seattle’s small businesses while shielding from potential federal funding cuts. They have also cited the city’s gaping budget deficit.

Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, called it “a boneheaded proposal of epic proportions” in a post on LinkedIn in June. Scholes supported exempting small businesses from the B&O tax. But he said raising taxes on larger companies “will ultimately result in Seattle defunding its tax base.”

Previously: Bold or boneheaded? Seattle’s proposed tax hike on big business draws fire as Amazon stays silent

Our latest spotlight on up-and-coming startups in Seattle covers a lot of ground — dog-influenced connections, shareable travel itineraries, personalized exam prep, and streamlined product reporting.

This regular series spotlights early stage startups that are getting off the ground with innovative ideas.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — and a pitch assessment from GPT-powered “Mean VC,” which we prompt to offer both positive and critical feedback.

Check past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies or startup news.

AceRocket

Founded: 2025

The business: Learning platform that helps high school students prepare for SAT, ACT, and AP exams through personalized daily practice. Uses AI and an adaptive question engine to tailor each learning path to a student’s performance. The bootstrapped startup has served more than 200 beta users and plans to expand its pilot program later this year.

Leadership: CEO Dong Zhang spent three years at Amazon as a machine learning scientist and two years at IBM as a data scientist.

Mean VC: “AceRocket hits a timeless market with an AI-driven, adaptive prep system that could actually make standardized test study less soul-crushing and more effective. But the test-prep space is dominated by giants with brand trust, so unless you show radically better outcomes — or pivot fast when tests go optional — you’re launching into headwinds, not orbit.”

Boop

Founded: 2025

The business: AI-native social travel companion that automatically turns real trips into shoppable itineraries friends can copy, personalize, and book. Boop wants to create the world’s largest network of itineraries — connecting travelers, creators, and local businesses through personalized recommendations. Boop is backed by Bling Capital, BBG Ventures, and the AI2 Incubator, and just launched its public waitlist.

Leadership: CEO Nancy Li Smith is a longtime product leader with stints at Meta, Microsoft, and more recently BrightAI.

Mean VC: “Boop taps into the perfect intersection of social discovery and travel commerce, with a clear path to viral growth if itineraries truly feel personal and shareable. But unless Boop cracks retention and monetization beyond influencer sparkle, it risks becoming another glossy app people forget between trips.”

Dotted

Founded: 2025

The business: Automates product reporting by pulling live data from tools like Jira, GitHub, and Slack, turning it into leadership-ready narratives. Aims to replace slide decks, free product teams from manual updates, and give executives real-time visibility and control. Dotted is currently in closed beta is building out its B2B early access program.

Leadership: Co-founder Dunni Abiodun spent nearly a decade at Microsoft as a software engineer and manager. Co-founder Eric Neuman was a principal product manager at Axon, and worked at Amazon and Microsoft. Former Microsoft director Jeremy Schreiber recently joined as chief commercial officer.

Mean VC: “Dotted smartly targets a universal pain point — turning scattered product data into clear, executive-ready updates without wasting a PM’s weekend on slides. But automation in reporting is a graveyard of ‘almost useful’ tools, and unless Dotted nails narrative accuracy and context, leaders won’t trust what it writes any more than what they already ignore.”

FurFriends

Founded: 2024

The business: Aims to help locals break the “Seattle Freeze” through dog-friendly social connections. The app organizes puppy playdates and events that help dog owners form real-world friendships. The company plans to launch premium subscription features and partnered with the Seattle Mariners earlier this year for a Bark at the Park event at Victory Hall.

Leadership: Founder Avery Morton is a former senior technical product manager at Amazon and was a product manager at Prodege.

Mean VC: “FurFriends cleverly uses dogs as social catalysts to thaw the ‘Seattle Freeze,’ tapping into a playful, emotionally resonant niche with real community stickiness. But unless you crack consistent engagement beyond the first tail wag, you’ll end up with more ghost towns than dog parks.”

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 founded last year by Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op. 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 other recruiting tech startups in the Seattle area that includes hiring platform Humanly, technical interviewing company Karat, and staffing startup ConverzAI.

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.