— Drew Garner is now senior vice president of engineering for Smartsheet.

Garner joins the Bellevue, Wash., work productivity software giant as Rajeev “Raj” Singh recently took the helm as CEO. The two have significant overlaps in their resumes, with Garner rising to the role of chief technology officer at Accolade during Singh’s tenure as leader of the healthcare platform. And Garner was a senior director at Concur, the Bellevue-based travel expense giant that Singh co-founded.

Garner shared his excitement about the new role on LinkedIn.

“From my first conversation, I could feel the drive — the hunger to innovate, the pride in craft, and the focus on building things that genuinely make a difference,” he said. “Smartsheet is redefining how AI and automation power real work, helping teams move faster, think smarter, and stay more connected than ever.”

— Baskar Sridharan, a former Amazon Web Services’ vice president of AI/machine learning services and infrastructure, is now president of Trase, an agentic AI startup that publicly launched this week.

“AI adoption is faltering within sectors that need it most: complex, highly regulated enterprises overburdened with administrative tasks that are ripe for automation,” Sridharan said on LinkedIn. “The issue isn’t innovation, it’s implementation.”

Trase has $10.5 million in pre-seed funding, and states that its “initial focus is on complex, highly regulated industries, enabling enterprises in healthcare, national security, and energy to create and deploy autonomous turn-key agents into existing infrastructure…”

Sridharan began his tech career with a nearly 16-year run at Microsoft. He was a principal engineer and architect for an Azure data storage repository that served large analytic workloads. He then moved to Google’s Kirkland, Wash., office where he was vice president of engineering for the Google Cloud platform.

Trase is based in Virginia, but Sridharan will remain in Seattle.

— Qualtrics named two new leaders. The company, co-located in Seattle and Provo, Utah, offers technology that helps businesses gather data and improve the interactions that customers, employees and others have with their products and services.

• Provo-based Mark Hammond joined the company as SVP of core AI, previously working for Microsoft in autonomous systems and technology bridging physical and virtual assets.
• Seattle-based Jeff Gelfuso was promoted to SVP and chief product experience officer. Gelfuso joined Qualtrics in January. He previously worked at Workday, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

Qualtrics last month announced a $6.75 billion deal to buy Press Ganey Forsta, a company focused on managing experiences for healthcare companies.

— Seattle cybersecurity company WatchGuard Technologies named Joe Smolarski as CEO. Smolarski joined the company from security management company Kaseya, where he held the roles of president and chief operating officer. He is credited with helping lead a 10-fold revenue increase and multi-billion-dollar valuation growth for the Florida company.

Vats Srivatsan had been serving as WatchGuard’s interim CEO since May 2025, following the departure of Prakash Panjwani. Srivatsan will remain on the board of directors.

— Hubble Network, a Seattle-based space-tech startup, named two leadership hires. The news follows its September announcement of $70 million in new funding to accelerate the growth of its satellite-powered Bluetooth network.

• Damien Michau, an engineer with two decades of experience, is Hubble’s VP of engineering, joining from the software company Endor Labs.
• John Marbach, a past marketing manager, is head of growth. Marbach previously led growth marketing at the cloud company Grafana Labs.

— Mike McGee is CEO of For Effect, a new company that he’s helping launch that provides tech support for nonprofits and small businesses. “Our goal is to help organizations get the most out of their technology, implement automation, and utilize AI agents where appropriate,” McGee said on LinkedIn.

McGee was previously at Vacasa, Accolade, Concur and other Seattle-area tech companies.

— Caleb John is now a principal engineer at Pioneer Square Labs, a Seattle venture firm and startup studio. John was co-founder and CEO of Pongo, a search startup that was acquired last year by Moondream, and previously founded Cedar Robotics, a startup that built indoor delivery robots for restaurants.

— Seattle-based coaching firm Close Cohen Career Consulting announced that former Zillow VP Nancy Poznoff has joined as an executive coach. The firm, which advises senior professionals nationwide who are navigating career transitions, also shared that it has expanded into the Raleigh-Durham area.

Poznoff will remain as CEO and co-founder of Mother Bear Agency, an independent marketing and communications firm. Her past roles include marketing leadership at Starbucks and T-Mobile.

— Angelina DiPreta is a principal at Maveron, a venture capital firm started in 1998 by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Seattle-based tech investor Dan Levitan. San Francisco-based DiPreta was formerly the consumer practice lead at the firm Premji Invest for nearly six years.

— Aaron Ward is co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry, a startup co-located in Portland, Ore., and New Zealand that’s developing a voice-enabled platform that allows managers, HR and teammates to share workplace performance feedback. Ward is a serial entrepreneur, previously launching AskNicely, a customer experience tech company.

— Longtime Seattle-area investor Brianna McDonald has joined the board of the Angel Capital Association Board. Earlier this year, McDonald became CEO of Ecosystem Venture Group, a new organization that blends startup investment funds with services for entrepreneurs and investors.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Before he launched a venture-backed biotech startup, prior even to landing a research role in one of the world’s premier academic labs, Anindya Roy arrived in the U.S. with two suitcases and $2,000 in the bank.

Roy grew up in rural India in a home that lacked electricity and running water during his childhood. A passion for science fueled his ambitions, leading him to earn degrees at the University of Calcutta and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.

Then he made the bold leap in 2008 to pursue his PhD at Arizona State University, which led to a postdoctoral fellowship with David Baker, a University of Washington professor who last year won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In 2023, Roy co-founded Seattle-based Lila Biologics, which uses the AI-powered protein design technology developed in the Baker lab to pursue cutting-edge medical therapies.

“Anindya is a brilliant and determined scientist and innovator who has made key contributions across diverse areas of science,” Baker said, “and is charting a most exciting path forward with Lila.”

Dr. Sheila Gujrathi, a biotech executive and chair of Lila’s board of directors, described Roy as “a thoughtful and creative problem-solver who approaches each challenge with genuine humility. He stands out not just for his innovative thinking, but also for his sincere kindness and integrity.”

Unlocking potential

In the lab at ASU, Roy focused on protein engineering for sustainable energy resources, but he was eager to apply those skills to medicine. He sent an email to Baker who invited him for an interview and tour of his protein creation lab, which delivered a kid-in-a-candy-shop kind of experience.

“That was the most exciting thing because it was such an amazingly diverse set of computational protein design problems, aiming to solve so many different kinds of things,” Roy recalled.

He jumped at the postdoc opportunity, joining the lab that is part of the UW’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD). There he began exploring the groundbreaking tools for creating proteins from scratch, ultimately pursuing a molecule that showed promise in cancer care and the treatment of fibrotic diseases that form scar tissue in various organs.

Roy eventually entered the IPD’s Translational Investigator Research Program, which gives entrepreneurial scientists the support and training to begin commercializing their discoveries. Two years ago, he and Jake Kraft, a fellow IPD postdoc, licensed the molecule they worked on at the UW and launched Lila.

While Roy has found success in his research, scientific inquiry can be slow-going and frustrating. To unwind he turns to intense weight training and goes to live shows — he caught Lady Gaga this summer and loves house music. Roy also whips up French pastries and tortes worthy of “The Great British Bake Off.”

And sometimes he reflects on the unlikely journey that led him to launching his own company.

“Whenever I get kind of discouraged or depressed about things, I look back at my career trajectory and how far I’ve come,” Roy said. “That does give me a lot of strength.”

The power of science

His startup is also making confidence-boosting progress. Lila has raised $10 million from investors and released two AI-powered platforms for creating therapeutic proteins. One is focused on targeted radiotherapy, generating proteins that precisely bind to tumors and carry radioactive isotopes that zap cancerous cells. The other platform is used to build long-acting injectable drugs that slowly release medicine over weeks or months.

In September, the seven-person startup announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to develop therapies for treating solid tumors.

Roy is grateful for U.S. support of the basic research that underpins the work being done at universities, institutions and companies nationwide. He’s also worried about federal funding cuts being pursued by the current administration that threaten America’s leadership in scientific innovation.

Because while he has been doing de novo protein design for more than a decade, Roy is still amazed by what the technology can do and how fast it’s evolving.

“This is almost like science fiction,” Roy said. “Years ago, you never imagined what we are doing right now. You are designing molecules in the computer, and you are putting them in actual living systems, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. It is pure science fiction.”

Seattle’s Parse Biosciences is teed up for an acquisition by Qiagen, a Netherlands-based holding company, in a $225 million cash deal announced this week.

The transaction is expected to close in December.

Parse was co-founded in 2018 by Alex Rosenberg, who was a University of Washington postdoctoral fellow at the time, and Charles Roco, who was a UW graduate student. The company was an early entrant in the nascent field of single-cell RNA sequencing.

Rosenberg and his colleagues discovered a new way to profile RNAs while working in the lab of UW synthetic biology professor Georg Seelig. The business initially launched as Split Biosciences, later changing its name and growing to 110 employees.

Parse has raised more than $50 million from investors, including a $41.5 million Series B round announced in 2022.

Parse launched its first products in 2021 and currently serves 3,000 customers in more than 40 countries. The company is expected to add about $40 million in sales to Qiagen’s 2026 fiscal year.

Parse stated on its website that it will operate as a Qiagen subsidiary and “will maintain full operations in our Seattle headquarters and all other locations around the world.”

There’s a vast range of research questions that RNA profiling can help answer. Understanding which RNAs are present in a cell gives scientists a read-out of active genes. That helps distinguish different cell types, for instance in a blood sample or a petri dish of stem cells turning into heart cells.

Parse touts the accessibility of its technology, which does not require specialized lab equipment to use.

“As our team joins Qiagen, we want to accelerate that mission and extend the reach of our technology to more customers around the world,” said CEO Rosenberg in a statement, adding that Qiagen’s global infrastructure makes it “an ideal partner for our next stage of growth.”

Qiagen has developed technologies to isolate and analyze DNA, RNA and proteins from sources including blood, tissue and other materials. The company has about 5,700 employees in 35 locations. It serves 500,000 customers globally.

The acquisition is subject to clearance under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and other conditions.

A Seattle biotech startup born from a Nobel laureate’s lab has landed $12.7 million and partnerships with pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Kite Pharma by using AI to design proteins that mount a multi-pronged attack on diseases.

Accipiter Biosciences emerged from stealth today with a leadership team that includes researchers who worked at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design under David Baker, a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner for his breakthroughs in building proteins from scratch.

The company is using artificial intelligence tools developed at the institute to engineer de novo proteins that have the unusual ability to bind multiple cellular targets at once, potentially amplifying their illness-fighting impact.

“We want to establish this new modality,” said Matthew Bick, Accipiter Bio’s co-founder and CEO. The strategy, he added, could unlock new ways to more effectively treat complicated diseases.

There’s evidence that combinations of drugs sometimes perform better than single therapies, but the challenge has been coordinating their actions so they work together at the same location.

In some forms of cancer, for example, multiple cell functions need to be turned on simultaneously to produce helpful molecules that work synergistically to create an effect “that is not just additive, it’s multiplicative,” Bick said.

The approach could also speed U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval and cut costs. Typically, when two drugs are combined to treat a condition, each must undergo its own expensive Phase 1 safety trial, followed by an additional trial testing them together. A single multi-functional drug would need just one Phase 1 trial.

Multiple avenues to drug therapies

Accipiter Bio has entered into a collaboration and license agreement with Pfizer to research and engineer new molecules. The deal provides an upfront payment for the startup and the potential to earn more than $330 million if Accipiter Bio hits certain milestones and through royalties.

“With Accipiter’s platform technology and collaboration, Pfizer aims to solve complex therapeutic problems with biologics that may have previously been unattainable,” said Jeffrey Settleman, Pfizer Oncology R&D’s chief scientific officer.

Accipiter Bio also has an agreement with the oncology drug company Kite, which is owned by Gilead Sciences, to design proteins for use in cell therapies. The arrangement similarly includes initial funding with the possibility of milestone payments and royalties. Kite has the option of acquiring molecules created through the arrangement and develop them into therapeutics for global sales.

On top of those efforts, Accipiter Bio has four of its own drug-development programs. Two programs are preparing for formal FDA discussions about human testing — a stage called pre-IND .

Bick would not provide details on the efforts, but said the company is researching agents for treating cancers and irritable bowel syndrome, among other ailments.

Funding and leadership

Flying Fish Partners and Takeda co-led the seed round. Additional investors are Columbus Venture Partners, Cercano Capital, Washington Research Foundation, Alexandria Investments, Pack Ventures and Argonautic Ventures.

“We’ve reached the point where computation isn’t just speeding up biology,” said Heather Gorham, principal at Flying Fish Partners and Accipiter board member. “It’s expanding what’s biologically possible.”

The startup launched in March 2023 and previously raised about $800,000 to get off the ground. Bick was a senior fellow in Baker’s lab for more than seven years and later a senior director for Seattle’s Neoleukin Therapeutics.

Accipiter Bio has 17 employees. The leadership team has three members in addition to Bick.

• Javier Castellanos, co-founder and chief technologist, was a graduate student with Baker; co-founder and CTO of Cyrus Biotechnology, another protein design startup; and a past director at Neoleukin.
• Hector Rincon-Arano, co-founder and chief scientist, was with Seagen (now a division of Pfizer) for more than seven years where he helped take a therapeutic from proof-of-concept to the first step of getting a new drug approved. He was also briefly at Neoleukin.
• William Canestaro, chief operating officer and chief strategy officer, has worked on the business and investing side of biotech with roles at the UW’s Michael G. Foster School of Business, Washington Research Foundation, Pack Ventures, Pioneer Square Labs, Cyclera Therapeutics and others. He has served on the board of directors for multiple startups.

Building on experience

While the strategy of using AI to build a new class of proteins could open the door to groundbreaking therapies, drug development is a risky business.

Neoleukin was a biotech company co-founded by Baker that spun out of the UW in 2019. The startup’s lead drug candidate, an engineered protein used in cancer treatment, under-performed in a Phase 1 trial. Neoleukin laid off many of its employees before merging with another company.

The three co-founders met at the startup and gained valuable technical and strategic lessons from the experience, Bick said. That included the need to have multiple drug programs running at once and insights into preventing immunogencity, which is an unwanted immune response to foreign bodies.

“We were part of the team,” he said, “that took the first fully de novo protein into patients.”

Clean energy startup ExoFusion today announced it has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy through its Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) program.

The FIRE award will support research into the use of liquid metal walls in fusion generators and will be led by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory with ExoFusion co-founder and chief science officer Michael Kotschenreuther spearheading one of the project’s initiatives.

ExoFusion launched in 2022 and is jointly based in Bellevue, Wash., and Austin, Texas, and bills itself as a boutique fusion company supporting the growing energy sector.

Its business model includes selling or licensing patents; providing simulations, testing and other design support for fusion technologies; developing new innovations; and fusion commercialization consulting services.

The Pacific Northwest is a hub for the technology, which aims to replicate the reactions that fuel the sun and the stars to create clean energy on earth. Local companies include Avalanche, Zap Energy, Helion Energy, Kyoto Fusioneering and Altrusion in Washington state, and General Fusion in British Columbia.

Three of ExoFusion’s co-founders are fusion physics professors at the University of Texas, including Kotschenreuther, senior scientific advisor Swadesh Mahajan, and chief technologist David Hatch. Bellevue-based CEO Romi Mahajan has held leadership for multiple startups and is the son of Swadesh Mahajan.

ExoFusion has been awarded approximately $3 million in grants from sources including DOE’s Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), though some of the money is being issued over time.

The startup previously raised less than $800,000 in seed funding.

Researchers from Nobel Laureate David Baker’s lab and the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) have used artificial intelligence to design antibodies from scratch — notching another game-changing breakthrough for the scientists and their field of research.

“It was really a grand challenge — a pipe dream,” said Andrew Borst, head of electron microscopy R&D at IPD. Now that they’ve hit the milestone of engineering antibodies that successfully bind to their targets, the research “can go on and it can grow to heights that you can’t imagine right now.”

Borst and his colleagues are publishing their work in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. The development could supercharge the $200 billion antibody drug industry.

Before the advent of AI-based tools, scientists made antibodies by immunizing animals and hoping they would produce useful molecules. The process was laborious and expensive, but tremendously important. Many powerful new drugs for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases are antibody-based, using the proteins to hit specific targets.

Baker, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, was recognized for his work unraveling the molecular design of proteins and developing AI-powered tools to rapidly build and test new ones. The technology learns from existing proteins and how they function, then creates designs to solve specific challenges.

In the new research, the team focused on the six loops of protein on the antibody’s arms that serves as fingers that grab its target. Earlier efforts would tweak maybe one of the loops, but the latest technology allows for a much bigger play.

“We are starting totally from scratch — from the loop perspective — so we’re designing all six,” said Robert Ragotte, a postdoctoral researcher at IPD. “But the rest of the antibody, what’s called the framework, that is actually staying the same.”

The hope is that by retaining the familiar humanness of most of the antibody, a patient’s immune system would ignore the drug rather than mount an offense against an otherwise foreign molecule.

The researchers tested their computer creations against multiple real-world targets including hemagglutinin, a protein on flu viruses that allow them to infect host cells; a potent toxin produced by the C. difficile bacteria; and others.

The lab tests showed that in most cases, the new antibodies bound to their targets as the online simulations predicted they would.

“They were binding in the right way with the right shape against the right target at the spot of interest that would potentially be useful for some sort of therapeutic effect,” Borst said. “This was a really incredible result to see.”

Borst added that the computational and wet lab biologists worked closely together, allowing the scientists to refine their digital designs based on what the real-life experiments revealed.

The software used to create the antibodies is freely available on GitHub for anyone to use. Xaira Therapeutics, a well-funded biotech startup led by IPD alumni, has licensed some of the technology for its commercial operations and multiple authors on the Nature paper are currently employed by the company.

While the antibodies created as part of the research demonstrated the software’s potential, there are many more steps to engineering a potential therapy. Candidate drugs need to be optimized for additional features such as high solubility, a strong affinity for a target and minimizing immunogenicity — which is an unwanted immune response.

Before joining IPD four years ago, Ragotte was a graduate student doing conventional antibody discovery and characterization using animals.

The idea that one day you could get on a computer, choose a target, and create a DNA blueprint for building a protein was almost unimaginable, he said. “We would talk about it, but it didn’t even seem like a tractable problem at that point.”

The Nature study is titled “Atomically accurate de novo design of antibodies with RFdiffusion.” The lead authors include Nathaniel Bennett, Joseph Watson, Robert Ragotte, Andrew Borst, DéJenaé See,
Connor Weidle and Riti Biswas, all of whom were affiliated with the UW at the time the research was conducted, and Yutong Yu of the University of California, Irvine. David Baker is the senior author.

Additional authors are: Ellen Shrock, Russell Ault, Philip Leung, Buwei Huang, Inna Goreshnik, John Tam, Kenneth Carr, Benedikt Singer, Cameron Criswell, Basile Wicky, Dionne Vafeados, Mariana Sanchez, Ho Kim, Susana Torres, Sidney Chan, Shirley Sun, Timothy Spear, Yi Sun, Keelan O’Reilly, John Maris, Nikolaos Sgourakis, Roman Melnyk and Chang Liu.

Philips Ultrasound is laying off 33 employees from its Bothell, Wash., facility, which serves as a hub for the engineering and manufacturing of ultrasound equipment and other healthcare devices.

The cuts were disclosed in a new filing from the Washington Employment Security Department and will take effect Dec. 31.

Production operators, warehouse operators and technicians were affected by the cuts.

The layoff “is part of a limited restructuring of specific Philips Ultrasound activities within an ongoing strategic transition plan that was announced in 2024,” Mario Fante, Philips’ global external relations director told GeekWire via email.  

The Netherlands-based company has around 1,500 employees in the Seattle area, according to LinkedIn.

In a separate incident, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in September issued a warning letter to the CEO of Royal Philips citing oversight concerns at the Bothell facility as well as a location in Pennsylvania and another in the Netherlands.

The issues at the Bothell site relate to a lack of documentation regarding the company’s response when ultrasound devices are reported to be defective and either break or perform incorrectly.

“We are not able to determine the adequacy of the proposed corrective actions for your responses for the Bothell and Reedsville facilities. We understand that Philips Ultrasound has revised their complaint procedures and have updated the corresponding complaint records to include additional information and to address the inspectional findings,” states the FDA letter.

The layoffs are “completely unrelated to any regulatory action,” Fante added.

Editor’s note: Story updated to clarify that the FDA warning is unrelated to the reduction in force and to add comment from Fante.

— Julie Van Ullen is now president and chief revenue officer for iSpot, a Bellevue, Wash., company that measures the impact of advertising campaigns on TV and video streaming. Van Ullen serves on the board of directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group. She joins iSpot from Rakuten Rewards, a leading e-commerce loyalty company.

“Julie is a dynamic leader with a proven track record of building high-growth teams and fostering trusted relationships with customers across the media and advertising ecosystem,” iSpot founder and CEO Sean Muller said in a statement.

iSpot ranks No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top privately held startups in the Pacific Northwest.

— MoxiWorks named Ashley Fidler as chief product officer of the Seattle-based real estate platform. Fidler joins the company from Pure Property Management and was a Microsoft program manager earlier in her career.

“Ashley brings an incredible depth of experience in building category-defining platforms that marry cutting-edge AI with real-world business impact,” said Michael Messig, MoxiWorks’ CTO, in a statement.

MoxiWorks last month appointed a new chief marketer, and in May sold its back-office accounting product in order to focus on sales and marketing.

— Seattle Sounders FC and Seattle Reign FC hired Ro Vega as chief marketing officer for the two soccer clubs. Vega has worked in brand management for nearly two decades, including positions with Beats by Dr. Dre and Nike, where he focused on soccer products in North America. He joins the Seattle teams from The Trade Desk, a digital advertising company.

— F5 CEO and President François Locoh-Donou is taking the additional role of chair of the board of directors in March 2026. The company shared the news in an SEC filing. Locoh-Donou is succeeding Alan Higginson, who disclosed in August that he is retiring after nearly 30 years as an F5 board member and 20 years as board chair.

— Trupanion, the longtime Seattle-based pet insurance provider, named Bradley Powell as a member of its board of directors. Powell was previously chief financial officer of the global logistics company Expeditors International of Washington. He was also CFO of Eden Bioscience, a publicly traded biotech company.

— Gurobi Optimization, a Beaverton, Ore.-based company offering mathematical problem solving technology, named Oliver Bastert as chief technology officer. Bastert, who will work remotely from Munich, Germany, joins the company from the analytics and credit-scoring company FICO where he was vice president of product management.

— Bill Platt, former leader of Amazon Web Services’ agentic AI division, joined San Francisco-based Alchemy as chief operating officer. Platt’s mandate is “to weave AI agents deeply into blockchain infrastructure,” according to the company. Platt was with AWS for nearly 12 years over two stints, most recently based in the Boston area.

— Seattle Metro Chamber named Mara Samudrala as director of communications and marketing for the region’s leading business association. Samudrala comes to the role from the Greater Phoenix Chamber.

— Halley Knigge has done a Seattle co-op swap. The former communications and inclusion lead for REI Co-op is now VP of communications at BECU, a financial cooperative. Her past experience includes a media leadership role at Alaska Airlines.

— Casium, a Seattle-based immigration tech startup, named Kaustubh (Kaust) Yadav as product designer. Yadav has experience in creative direction, copywriting and product design, working on campaigns for companies and brands including Amazon, AmEx, BMW, Citi and Pepsi.