The opening panel at Seattle AI Week 2025, from left: Randa Minkarah, WTIA chief operating executive; Joe Nguyen, Washington commerce director; Rep. Cindy Ryu; Nathan Lambert, Allen Institute for AI; and Brittany Jarnot, Salesforce. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)
Seattle is looking to celebrate and accelerate its leadership in artificial intelligence at the very moment the first wave of the AI economy is crashing down on the region’s tech workforce.
That contrast was hard to miss Monday evening at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week 2025 at Pier 70. On stage, panels offered a healthy dose of optimism about building the AI future. In the crowd, buzz about Amazon’s impending layoffs brought the reality of the moment back to earth.
A region that rose with Microsoft and then Amazon is now dealing with the consequences of Big Tech’s AI-era restructuring. Companies that hired by the thousands are now thinning their ranks in the name of efficiency and focus — a dose of corporate realism for the local tech economy.
The double-edged nature of this shift is not lost on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.
“AI, and the future of AI, and what that means for our state and the world — each day I do this job, the more that moves up in my mind in terms of the challenges and the opportunities we have,” Ferguson told the AI Week crowd. He touted Washington’s concentration of AI jobs, saying his goal is to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its downsides.
Gov. Bob Ferguson addresses the AI Week opening reception. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Seattle AI Week, led by the Washington Technology Industry Association, was started last year after a Forbes list of the nation’s top 50 AI startups included none from Seattle, said the WTIA’s Nick Ellingson, opening this year’s event. That didn’t seem right. Was it a messaging problem?
“A bunch of us got together and said, let’s talk about all the cool things happening around AI in Seattle, and let’s expand the tent beyond just tech things that are happening,” Ellingson explained.
So maybe that’s the best measuring stick: how many startups will this latest shakeout spark, and how can the Seattle region’s startup and tech leaders make it happen? Can the region become less dependent on the whims of the Microsoft and Amazon C-suites in the process?
“Washington has so much opportunity. It’s one of the few capitals of AI in the world,” said WTIA’s Arry Yu in her opening remarks. “People talk about China, people talk about Silicon Valley — there are a few contenders, but really, it’s here in Seattle. … The future is built on data, on powerful technology, but also on community. That’s what makes this place different.”
And yet, “AI is a sleepy scene in Seattle, where people work at their companies, but there’s very little activity and cross-pollinating outside of this,” said Nathan Lambert, senior research scientist with the Allen Institute for AI, during the opening panel discussion.
No, we don’t want to become San Francisco or Silicon Valley, Lambert added. But that doesn’t mean the region can’t cherry-pick some of the ingredients that put Bay Area tech on top.
Whether laid-off tech workers will start their own companies is a common question after layoffs like this. In the Seattle region at least, that outcome has been more fantasy than reality.
This is where AI could change things, if not with the fabled one-person unicorn then with a bigger wave of new companies born of this employment downturn. Who knows, maybe one will even land on that elusive Forbes AI 50 list. (Hey, a region can dream!)
But as the new AI reality unfolds in the regional workforce, maybe the best question to ask is whether Seattle’s next big thing can come from its own backyard again.
Second day of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 at San Francisco's Moscone West. Here's the rundown to what to expect, including the 50% discount on passes for remainder of the event.
The recent finalization of OpenAI’s recapitalization plan marks a pivotal moment in the trajectory of artificial intelligence, not just for the involved parties but for the entire tech ecosystem. On CNBC, David Faber broke down the intricate details of this agreement, joined by Jim Cramer, who offered his characteristic sharp market commentary. Their discussion illuminated […]
I’ve been building products and companies my entire career — Increo, Box, Crashlytics, Twitter and now, Digits — and I’ve had the privilege of speaking with some of the sharpest minds in venture and entrepreneurship along the way.
One recent conversation with a legendary investor really crystallized for me a set of truths about startups: what success really is, why some founders thrive while others burn out, and how to navigate the inevitable chaos of building something from nothing.
Here are some of the lessons I’ve internalized from years of building, observing and learning.
Success has no finish line
Jeff Seibert
In the startup world, we talk a lot about IPOs, acquisitions and valuations. But those are milestones, not destinations.
The companies that endure don’t “win” and stop — they keep creating, adapting and pushing forward. They’re playing an infinite game, where the only goal is to remain in the game.
When you’re building something truly generative — driven by a purpose greater than yourself — there’s no point at which you can say “done.” If your company has a natural stopping point, you may be building the wrong thing.
You don’t choose the work — the work chooses you
The best founders I’ve met — and the best moments I’ve had as a founder — come from an almost irrational pull toward solving a specific problem I myself experienced.
You may want to start a company, but if you have to talk yourself into your idea, it probably won’t survive contact with reality. The founders who succeed are often the ones who can’t not work on their thing.
Starting a company shouldn’t be a career move — it should be the last possible option after every other path fails to scratch the itch.
The real killer: founder fatigue
Most companies don’t die because of one bad decision or one tough competitor. They die because the founders run out of energy.
Fatigue erodes vision, motivation and creativity. Protecting your own drive — keeping it clean and focused — may be the single most important survival skill you have.
That means staying close to the product, protecting time for customer work, and avoiding the slow drift into managing around problems instead of solving them.
Customer > competitor
It’s easy to get caught up in competitor moves, investor chatter or market gossip. But the most important question is always: Are we delivering joy to the customer?
If you’re losing focus, sign up for your own product as a brand-new user. Feel the friction. Fix it. Repeat.
At Digits, we run our own signup and core flows every week. It’s uncomfortable — it surfaces flaws we’d rather not see — but it keeps us anchored to the only metric that matters: customer delight.
Boards should ask questions, not give answers
Over the years, I’ve learned the most effective boards aren’t presentation theaters — they’re discussion rooms.
The best structure I’ve seen:
No slides;
A narrative pre-read sent in advance; and
A deep dive into one essential question.
Good directors help you widen your perspective. They don’t hand you a to-do list. Rather, they help you see the problem in a way that makes the answer obvious.
Twitter: lessons from a phenomenon
When I think back to my time at Twitter, the most enduring lesson is that not all companies are built top-down. Some — like Twitter — are shaped more by their users than their executives.
Features like @mentions, hashtags and retweets didn’t come from a product roadmap — they came from the community.
That’s messy, but it’s also powerful. Sometimes your job isn’t to control the phenomenon, rather it’s to keep it healthy without smothering what made it magical in the first place.
Why now is a great time to start
If you’re building today, you have an advantage over the so-called “unicorn zombies” that raised massive rounds pre-AI and are now locked into defending old business models.
Fresh founders can design from scratch for the new reality; there’s no legacy to protect, no sacred cows to defend.
The macro environment? Irrelevant. The only timing that matters is when the problem calls you so strongly that not working on it feels impossible.
If there’s one takeaway from all of this, it’s that success is continuing. The real prize is the ability to keep playing, keep serving and keep creating.
If you’re standing at the edge, wondering if you should start — start. Take one step. See if it grows. And if it does, welcome to the infinite game.
Jeff Seibert is the founder and CEO of Digits, the world’s first AI-native accounting platform. He previously served as Twitter‘s head of consumer product and starred in the Emmy Award-winning Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.”
While startup investment has been climbing lately, not all industries are partaking in the gains.
Cleantech is one of the spaces that’s been mostly left out. Overall funding to the space is down this year, despite some pockets of bullishness in areas like fusion and battery recycling.
The broad trend: Cleantech- and sustainability-related startup investment has been on a downward trajectory for several years now. And so far, 2025 is on track to be another down year.
On the bright side, however, there’s been some pickup in recent months, boosted by big rounds for companies in energy storage, fusion and other cleantech subsectors.
The numbers: Investors put an estimated $20 billion into seed- through growth-stage funding to companies in cleantech, EV and sustainability-related categories so far this year.
That puts 2025 funding on track to come in well below last year’s levels, which were already at a multiyear low.
Still, quarter by quarter, the pattern looks more encouraging. Investment hit a low point in Q1 of this year and recovered some in the subsequent two quarters. The current quarter is also off to a strong start.
Noteworthy recent rounds
The largest cleantech-related round of the year closed this month. Base Power, a provider of residential battery backup systems and electricity plans, raised $1 billion in Series C funding. The Austin, Texas-based company says its systems allow energy providers to more efficiently harness renewable power.
The second-largest round was Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ $863 million Series B2 financing. The Devens, Massachusetts-based company says it is moving closer to being the first in the world to commercialize fusion power.
For a bigger-picture view, below we put together a list of 10 of the year’s largest cleantech- and sustainability-related financings.
The broad takeaway: Startups innovating for an era of rising power consumption
Not to over-generalize, but if there was one big takeaway from recent cleantech and sustainability startup funding, it would be that founders and investors recognize that these are times of ever-escalating energy demand. They’re planning accordingly, looking to tap new sources of power, fusion in particular, as well as better utilize and scale existing clean energy sources.
Strong by Form has designed a structural floor piece that can span longer distances than existing engineered wood, making it a replacement for steel or concrete. At the same time, the product is lighter than all three.
MacroCycle's approach to recycling dramatically reduces the amount of energy needed to produce new material, potentially lowering costs to the point where it could compete with virgin plastic.
“Infrastructure is destiny,” declared James Hairston, Head of International Policy & Partnerships for Asia, Africa, & Latin America at OpenAI, encapsulating the strategic imperative facing Southeast Asia in the burgeoning age of artificial intelligence. This powerful statement set the stage for a compelling discussion at the Bloomberg Business Summit at ASEAN in Kuala Lumpur, where […]
Amazon is preparing for one of its biggest corporate shake-ups in years. The tech giant is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs starting Tuesday, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke with Reuters. The […]
Amazon is betting big on automation. Internal documents reviewed by The New York Times reveal plans to automate 75% of its warehouse operations using advanced robotics — a move that could eliminate the need for more than 600,000 new hires […]
The line between traditional banking and digital assets is disappearing fast. Pave Bank, a fully licensed commercial bank built for this new era of programmable finance, has raised $39 million in fresh funding led by Accel, with participation from Tether […]
IBM is doubling down on blockchain. The tech giant announced on Monday the launch of Digital Asset Haven, a new platform built to help banks, governments, and corporations securely build and scale their digital asset operations. It’s a move that […]
Nvidia is quietly gearing up for a new frontier—autonomous mobility. According to a report from Chinese publication 36Kr, the chipmaker is developing an internal robotaxi project that could put it in direct competition with Tesla and Waymo. The plan, shared in […]
Saudi state-owned AI startup Humain is building a full-stack AI ecosystem — from data centers and cloud infrastructure to advanced AI models and a new voice-controlled operating system called “Humain 1.” Saudi Arabia’s ambitious push into artificial intelligence just took […]
The company's so-called Pathfinder software can look at almost anything — buildings, tree-lined roads, even aerial views — and quickly match it to a database and generate real-time navigation.
“What we really do is we took the most constrained, complex, and costly medical imaging solution in radiology, and we supplanted it with what is the most accessible, simple and affordable, which is CT,” Sean Walsh, RADiCAIT’s CEO told TechCrunch.
Although Maxim was convinced that gene therapy could reverse PKD, the biggest hurdle was creating a mechanism to deliver the drugs directly to the diseased cells.
Mercor, which connects AI labs with domain experts for training their foundational AI models, is close to raising $350 million at a $10 billion valuation.
“These are use cases that I have actually been using,” declared Matthew Berman, the engaging host of a recent YouTube video, as he unveiled a compelling array of AI applications that are rapidly transitioning from futuristic concepts to indispensable daily tools. Berman’s presentation was not a speculative glimpse into AI’s potential, but a practical demonstration […]
“You will see a 30 to 50% correction in many AI-related names next year,” stated Dan Niles, founder and portfolio manager at Niles Investment Management, during a recent appearance on CNBC’s ‘Money Movers’. Niles joined the broadcast to discuss his outlook on Big Tech earnings and the current market sentiment surrounding technology stocks, particularly those […]
Pioneer Square Labs has launched more than 40 tech startups and vetted 500-plus ideas since creating its studio a decade ago in Seattle.
Now it’s testing whether its company-building expertise and data on successful startup formulas can be codified into software — with help from the latest AI models.
PSL just unveiled Lev, a new project that aims to be an “AI co-founder” for early stage entrepreneurs.
Developed inside PSL and now rolling out publicly, Lev can evaluate ideas, score their potential, and help founders develop them into companies.
Lev grew out of an internal PSL tool that used PSL’s proprietary rubric to score startup ideas. The studio decided to turn it into a product after outside founders who tested early versions wanted access for themselves.
Here’s how it works:
Users start by entering an idea (along with any associated information/background) and selecting “venture” or “bootstrap.”
Lev walks founders through milestones from solution to customer discovery, go-to-market, and product build.
It can generate “assets” like interview scripts, outreach templates, competitive maps, pricing models, brand palettes, customer personas, landing pages, potential leads, and even product specs.
“We’re mapping a lot of the PSL process into it,” said T.A. McCann, managing director at PSL.
Lev’s structured workflow sets it apart from generic chatbots, said Shilpa Kannan, principal at PSL.
“The sequencing of these components as you go through the process is one of the biggest value-adds,” she said.
Lev joins a growingnumber of startups leveraging AI to act as an idea validation tool for early-stage founders, though its precise approach makes it stand out.
Pioneer Square Labs Managing Director T.A. McCann (left) and Principal Shilpa Kannan. (PSL Photos)
Upcoming features will add team-building and fundraising modules and let users trigger actions — such as sending emails or buying domains — directly from within the platform.
McCann envisions Lev eventually connecting to tools like Notion and HubSpot to serve as a “command center” for running a company — integrating tools, drafting investor updates, tracking competitors, and suggesting priorities. There are several competitors in this space offering different versions of “AI chief of staff” products.
On a broader level, Lev raises an existential question for PSL: what happens when a startup studio teaches an AI to do the things that make a startup studio valuable?
“In some ways, this is ‘Innovators Dilemma,’ and you have to cannibalize yourself before someone else does it,” McCann said, referencing Clayton Christensen’s concept of technology disruption.
PSL also sees Lev as a potential funnel for entrepreneurs it could work with in the future. And it’s a way to expand the studio’s reach beyond its focus on the Pacific Northwest.
“It’s scaling our knowledge in a way that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” McCann said.
Kannan and Kevin Leneway, principal at PSL, wrote a blog post describing how PSL designed the backbone of Lev and how the firm used it to generate its own high quality startup ideas at higher volumes with lower cost.
“As we see more and more individuals become founders with the support of AI, we are incredibly excited for the potential increase in velocity and successful outcomes from methodologies like ours that focus on upfront ideation and validation,” they wrote.
Kannan told GeekWire that PSL is prioritizing founders’ privacy and intellectual property. “We are making intentional product and technical decisions to ensure Lev is designed from the ground up to safeguard ideas and founder data, including guardrails on data we collect and our team can access,” she said.
For now, PSL is targeting venture-scale founders — people in tech companies or accelerators with ambitions to build fast-growing startups. But McCann believes Lev could eventually empower solo operators running multiple micro-businesses.
Lev is currently free for one idea, $20 per month for up to five ideas, and $100 per month for 10 ideas and advanced features. It’s available on a waitlist basis.
Lev also offers a couple fun tools to help boost its own marketing, including a founder “personality test” and an “idea matcher” that produces startup concepts based on your interests and experience.
If you’re not able to attend in person, the next best thing is to check out our livestream of the Disrupt Stage. Tune in right here starting at 9 a.m. PT.
These 20 companies are more than just early-stage startups — they’re the architects of what’s next. And they’ll have just six minutes on the Disrupt Stage to prove it.
Today is the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, where 10,000 founders, investors, and builders are flooding Moscone West for a nonstop run of ideas, demos, and deals. The energy is electric, the conversations are everywhere, and the breakthroughs are only just beginning. Don't miss out. Register here or head straight to Moscone West to join.
Onfire, a vertical AI platform for IT revenue teams, is coming out of stealth with $20 million in funding, including a $14 million Series A co-led by Grove Ventures and TLV Partners.
“The technology of AI is truly transformative,” declared Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s Board Chair, during a recent interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box. This assertion, delivered with conviction, encapsulates the core message emanating from Tesla, suggesting a future far grander than merely building electric vehicles. Denholm, speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Becky Quick, outlined Tesla’s expansive […]
Correctly calling a market peak is a notoriously tricky endeavor.
Case in point: When tech stocks and startup funding hit their last cyclical peak four years ago, few knew it was the optimal time to cease new deals and cash in liquidatable holdings.
This time around, quite a few market watchers are wondering if the tech stock and AI boom has reached bubble territory. And, as we explored in Friday’s column, there are plenty of similarities between current conditions and the 2021 peak.
Even so, by other measures we’re also in starkly different territory. The current boom is far more concentrated in AI and a handful of hot companies. The exit environment is also much quieter. And of course, the macro conditions don’t resemble 2021, which had the combined economic effects of the COVID pandemic and historically low interest rates.
Below, we look at four of the top reasons why this time is different.
No. 1: Funding is largely going into AI, while other areas aren’t seeing a boom
Four years ago, funding to most venture-backed sectors was sharply on the rise. That’s not the case this time around. While AI megarounds accumulate, funding to startups in myriad other sectors continues to languish.
Biotech is on track to capture the smallest percentage of U.S. venture investment on record this year. Cleantech investment looks poised to hit a multiyear low. And consumer products startups also remain out of vogue, alongside quite a few other sectors that once attracted big venture checks.
The emergence of AI haves and non-AI have-nots means that if we do see a correction, it could be limited in scope. Sectors that haven’t seen a boom by definition won’t see a post-boom crash. (Though further declines are possible.)
In recent quarters, by contrast, the IPO market has been alive, but not especially lively. We’ve seen a few large offerings, with CoreWeave, Figma and Circle among the standouts.
But overall, numbers are way down.
In 2021, there were hundreds of U.S. seed or venture-backed companies that debuted on NYSE or Nasdaq, per Crunchbase data. This year, there have been less than 50.
Meanwhile, the most prominent unicorns of the AI era, like OpenAI and Anthropic, remain private companies with no buzz about an imminent IPO. As such, they don’t see the day-to-day fluctuations typical of public companies. Any drop in valuation, if it happens, could play out slowly and quietly.
No. 3: Funding is concentrated among fewer companies
That brings us to our next point: In addition to spreading their largesse across fewer sectors, startup investors are also backing fewer companies.
This year, the percentage of startup funding going to megarounds of $100 million or more reached an all-time high in the U.S. and came close to a record global level. A single deal, OpenAI’s $40 billion March financing, accounted for roughly a quarter of U.S. megaround funding.
At the same time, fewer startup financings are getting done. This past quarter, for instance, reported deal count hit the lowest level in years, even as investment rose.
No. 4: ZIRP era is long gone
The last peak occurred amid an unusual financial backdrop, with economies beginning to emerge from the depths of the COVID pandemic and ultra-low interest rates contributing to investors shouldering more risk in pursuit of returns.
This time around, the macro environment is in a far different place, with “a “low fire, low hire” U.S. job market, AI disrupting or poised to disrupt a wide array of industries and occupations, a weaker dollar and a long list of other unusual drivers.
What both periods share in common, however, is the inexorable climb of big tech valuations, which brings us to our final thought.
Actually, maybe the similarities do exceed differences
While the argument that this time it’s different is a familiar one, the usual plot lines do tend to repeat themselves. Valuations overshoot, and they come down. And then the cycle repeats.
We may not have reached the top of the current cycle. But it’s certainly looking a lot closer to peak than trough.
The old cliché says startups are born in garages and dorm rooms. That’s still true, but there’s a newer path: founding a startup inside a scale-up.
When you do that, you get the speed of a seed-stage team with the leverage of an established company. Executives and investors should care because this model can unlock new product lines, revenue and talent retention without recreating the wheel.
That’s how we built Saily, a travel eSIM service launched from inside Nord Security (the company behind NordVPN). In 19 weeks, a seven-person team went from a blank page to a live product. A little over a year later, we had scaled to millions of users with plans offered in more than 200 destinations. We did not invent everything from scratch. We reused what worked and validated everything else fast.
Incubation lowers two risks most founders underestimate
Vykintas Maknickas
Every new product faces two existential risks: market and execution.
Inside Nord, I’d helped launch at least half a dozen new products before Saily. The pattern was consistent: Great ideas die when they target the wrong market or underestimate execution. With Saily, timing and infrastructure lined up: eSIM demand was accelerating, pain points were clear, and we could tap Nord’s backend, payments, app teams and distribution.
That allowed us to move at startup speed without startup fragility.
‘Product organization fit’ beats a great idea
Founders obsess over product-market fit. Inside a scale-up, you also need what I call “product organization fit” or the overlap between a new product and what your company already does well.
When that overlap is high, you ship faster, hire smarter and avoid costly relearning. For Saily, the overlap was obvious: Security tech we knew (virtual location, web protection and ad-blocking), and app development know-how we could bring to travel connectivity.
Competition helped more than it hurt. “No competition” usually means “no demand.” We treated competitors as free market research, reading hiring signals, product moves and funding announcements to understand where the market was headed.
And we made security the product, not a feature. Travelers don’t want another app — they want reliable connectivity that isn’t risky on unknown networks. Building privacy and protection at the network layer means safety works phone-wide with no tinkering.
Autonomy inside structure
The hard part is not technical, but cultural. Large companies run on process. Startups run on autonomy. We set up Saily as a company within the company: A dedicated product and marketing team with decision speed, plus shared services (legal, finance and design) when needed. Think of it as an internal accelerator, where the platform handles overheads so the team can focus on products.
We kept one rhythm: ship, learn, repeat. Those 19 weeks weren’t about perfection, but about getting a usable product into the world and compounding feedback.
Experimentation only works if you measure what matters: speed, unit economics and retention. For example, independent third-party testing confirmed Saily’s network-level ad-blocking reduces data usage by 28.6% — real money saved for travelers. That is a signal you double down on. If a feature or tool adds complexity without value, cut it quickly.
What founders (and operators) can steal
Derisk in two tracks: Validate market pull and execution feasibility before you scale spend. If the market isn’t growing and your organization doesn’t have overlap, think twice.
Reuse before you reinvent: Borrow talent, systems and channels where you can. Every overlap removes weeks of risk.
Measure what matters: Do a simple before/after on ship speed, customer acquisition cost and retention. If the needle doesn’t move, remove it.
Build momentum in full sight: Share milestones and learning. It sharpens the team and attracts partners.
Saily is still early, and the market is just getting started, but the model matters as much as the product. Many future founders already work inside growth companies. Give them startup autonomy and scale-up leverage and remarkable things can happen — in months, not years.
Vykintas Maknickas is CEO of Saily, a global eSIM app from Nord Security. A former head of product strategy at NordVPN, where he helped launch a series of new product lines, Maknickas has turned Saily into a globally successful brand with millions of users and serving more than 200 destinations. An entrepreneur since age 15, Maknickas brings a hands-on, execution-driven approach to building secure, scalable consumer tech.
It’s Saturday, October 25, 2025, and we’re back with the top startup and tech funding news stories spanning the U.S. and around the world. From billion-dollar AI infrastructure bets to fintech, enterprise SaaS, and Web3 innovations, investors showed no signs […]
SambaNova Systems, once one of Silicon Valley’s most promising AI hardware startups, is reportedly exploring a sale after struggling to secure new funding. The Palo Alto–based company, known for its AI chips and full-stack computing systems, has held early talks […]
Ravi Vakil, a distinguished algebraic geometer at Stanford and president of the American Mathematical Society, posits that artificial intelligence will not merely augment mathematics but instigate a profound “phase change.” Speaking with Daria Ivanova, Vakil shared his nuanced perspective on AI’s current capabilities, its potential for true creativity, and the inevitable, yet unpredictable, transformation it […]
On November 27, 2024, Unusual Machines announced that Donald Trump Jr. had joined its advisory board—bringing his name and 331,580 shares valued at roughly $4 million in the company. Less than a year later, the once-obscure Florida-based drone company has […]
“Deep learning is a bit like anything goes,” states the interviewer, encapsulating a sentiment echoed by Noam Chomsky, suggesting that while powerful, current AI models lack the fundamental theoretical underpinnings that define true scientific understanding. This provocative opening sets the stage for a compelling discussion with Chris Kempes, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, […]
The browser wars are heating up again, this time with AI in the driver’s seat. OpenAI just launched Atlas, a ChatGPT-powered browser that lets users surf the web using natural language, and even includes an “agent mode” that can complete tasks autonomously. It’s one of the biggest browser launches in recent memory, but it’s debuting […]
Ian Webster’s journey, culminating in Promptfoo’s $18M Series A, offers a compelling narrative of entrepreneurial pivot born from direct experience. Having spearheaded Discord’s AI chatbot, Clyde, Webster intimately understood the critical chasm between developing AI and deploying it safely to a massive user base. This foundational insight propelled him from a general evaluation tool to […]
The era of explicit, instruction-based prompt engineering is rapidly drawing to a close, giving way to a more intuitive, almost relational paradigm of interacting with advanced artificial intelligence. This profound shift, a central theme in Matthew Berman’s recent Forward Future Live session, posits that humanity’s final guide to prompt engineering will be less about logical […]
Crusoe, the startup calling itself “the AI factory company,” has raised a staggering $1.37 billion in Series E funding co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Capital, pushing its valuation above $10 billion. The new round cements Crusoe’s rise as […]
The same technology that can write poetry, design proteins, or diagnose disease is now being used to prevent something far darker — AI-assisted biological attacks. To get ahead of that threat, OpenAI has teamed up with Founders Fund and Lux […]
Applied Materials is cutting jobs as part of a major shift in its operations. The semiconductor equipment giant confirmed it’s laying off 4% of its workforce — about 1,400 employees — in a move that reflects the industry’s ongoing recalibration […]
It’s Thursday, October 23, 2025, and we’re back with the top startup and tech funding news stories shaping the global innovation landscape. From multimillion-dollar AI infrastructure rounds to autonomous mobility, clean energy, and longevity biotech, investors continue to pour capital […]
With TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 right around the corner, we’re thrilled to introduce the companies hosting Side Events that will extend the buzz and excitement to the thousands of attendees and Silicon Valley locals alike.
The full Disrupt 2025 breakout session agenda is now live. Join for tactical, small-group learning on AI, fundraising, M&A, workflows, and more. Browse the full lineup and register today to save up to $444, and get 60% off a second pass before prices rise on October 27.
Just 3 days until liftoff for Disrupt 2025 — and the Space Stage is ready to explore the future of space tech (and every other frontier of innovation). Adam Maher (Ursa), Dr. Lucy Hoag (Violet Labs), and Dr. Debra L. Emmons (The Aerospace Corporation) will unpack how AI is transforming life in orbit. Register now to save up to $444 on your pass, and 60% on a second.
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2025 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board.
This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding rounds here.
This was another active week for large startup financings. AI data center developer Crusoe Energy Systems led with $1.38 billion in fresh financing, and several other megarounds were AI-focused startups. Other standouts hailed from a diverse array of sectors, including battery recycling, biotech and even fire suppression.
1. Crusoe Energy Systems, $1.38B, AI data centers: Crusoe Energy Systems, a developer of AI data centers and infrastructure, raised $1.38 billion in a financing led by Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Capital. The deal sets a $10 billion+ valuation for the Denver-based company.
2. Avride, $375M, autonomous vehicles: Avride, a developer of technology to power autonomous vehicles and delivery robots, announced that it secured commitments of up to $375 million backed by Uber and Nebius Group. The 8-year-old, Austin, Texas-based company said it plans to launch its first robotaxi service on Uber’s platform in Dallas this year.
3. Redwood Materials, $350M, battery recycling: Battery recycling company Redwood Materials closed a $350 million Series E round led by Eclipse Ventures with participation from new investors including Nvidia’s NVentures. Founded in 2017, the Carson City, Nevada-based company has raised over $2 billion in known equity funding to date.
4. Uniphore, $260M, agentic AI: Uniphore, developer of an AI platform for businesses to deploy agentic AI, closed on $260 million in a Series F round that included backing from Nvidia, AMD, Snowflake Ventures and Databricks Ventures. The round sets a $2.5 billion valuation for the Palo Alto, California-based company.
5. Sesame, $250M, voice AI and smart glasses: San Francisco-based Sesame, a developer of conversational AI technology and smart glasses, picked up $250 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital. The startup is headed by former Oculus CEO and co-founder Brendan Iribe.
6. OpenEvidence, $200M, AI for medicine: OpenEvidence, developer of an AI tool for medical professionals that has been nicknamed the “ChatGPT for doctors” reportedly raised $200 million in a GV-led round at a $6 billion valuation. Three months earlier, OpenEvidence pulled in $210 million at a $3.5 billion valuation.
7. Electra Therapeutics, $183M, biotech: Electra Therapeutics, a developer of therapies against novel targets for diseases in immunology and cancer, secured $183 million in a Series C round. Nextech Invest and EQT Life Sciences led the financing for the South San Francisco, California-based company.
8. LangChain, $125M, AI agents: LangChain, developer of a platform for engineering AI agents, picked up $125 million in fresh funding at a $1.25 billion valuation. IVP led the financing for the 3-year-old, San Francisco-based company.
9. ShopMy, $70M, brand marketing: New York-based ShopMy, a platform that connects brands and influencers, landed $70 million in a funding round led by Avenir. The financing sets a $1.5 billion valuation for the 5-year-old company.
10. Seneca, $60M, fire suppression: Seneca, a startup developing a fire suppression system that includes autonomous drones that help spot and put out fires, launched publicly with $60 million in initial funding. Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital led the financing for the San Francisco-based company.
Methodology
We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of Oct. 18-24. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week.
When Tim Chen tried to break into venture capital six years ago, multiple firms in Seattle turned him down. “Nobody wanted to hire me,” he recalled in an interview with GeekWire. “I was too technical, they said. Too nerdy.”
Chen, a University of Washington graduate and infrastructure engineer who had just sold a startup, decided to launch his own firm.
Six years later, Chen’s investors — known as limited partners, or LPs — line up to give him money before he even opens a pitch deck.
Chen recently raised $41 million for a fourth fund at Essence VC, his venture firm that backs infrastructure startups. His LPs include institutional investors such as Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Cendana Capital’s Michael Kim.
TechCrunch described Chen as “one of the most sought-after solo investors,” highlighting how investors preempted the latest fund.
“I had no deck, no memo — I hadn’t even started raising,” Chen told GeekWire. “The LPs just all came in.”
Chen used AngelList to raise $1 million for his first fund in 2019, focusing on developer tools and infrastructure — categories he knew inside out. The experiment quickly snowballed: he raised $5 million for Fund II and $27 million for Fund III.
A dozen companies from the Essence portfolio have been acquired, including Tabular, a data management startup that sold to Databricks last year for a reported $2.2 billion.
What started as rejection has become a calling for Chen — and an unconventional venture capital success story.
After studying computer science at the UW, Chen worked at Microsoft and VMware, helped launch open-source cloud startup Mesosphere, and later founded Hyperpilot, an “AIOps” company acquired by Cloudera.
Chen’s experience as a software engineer and operator has become his edge in VC — especially amid the AI boom. He’s able to make faster decisions and gain respect from founders.
“Tim asked the hardest, most interesting questions about how we were going to build what we said we were going to build,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO of Seattle startup MotherDuck. “From a founder perspective, this let me trust that he actually believed in what we were doing and was coming to his decisions on his own.”
Seattle entrepreneur Patrick Thompson raised capital from Chen twice — with his previous startup Iteratively, which was acquired, and his current company Clarify. “He’s one of the most technically-minded people, but also super humble and easy to work with,” Thompson said.
The combination of engineering depth and empathy has helped Chen win competitive early-stage deals. He’s built a niche around helping technical founders translate research and code into products and go-to-market strategies.
“I’m looking for people that have a deep enough background, with high intensity, and huge flexibility on learning,” he said.
Essence’s portfolio spans across the U.S. and beyond. LPs ask Chen why he hasn’t moved to the Bay Area yet.
Chen is staying in Seattle, where he’s lived since high school. He believes Seattle’s tech scene is under-networked but brimming with talent.
“There’s so much great engineering talent with great iconic companies here,” he said.
Essence plans to make around 40 investments out of its fourth fund. Seattle is certainly on Chen’s radar.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m meeting people here, like UW PhDs. I like technical people. The nerdier, the geekier, the better.”
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Nearly four years ago, the market hit a cyclical peak under conditions that in many ways look quite similar to what we’re seeing today.
Sky-high public tech valuations. Booming startup investment. Sharply rising valuations. And, a few cracks emerging on the new offering front.
Sure, there are quite a few differences in the investment environment, which we’ll explore in a follow-on piece. For this first installment, however, we are focusing on the commonalities, with an eye to the four highlighted above.
No. 1: Sky-high public tech valuations
First, both then and now, tech stocks hit unprecedented highs.
In mid-November 2021, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index hit an all-time peak above 16,000. Gains stemmed largely from sharply rising tech share prices.
Today, the Nasdaq is hovering not far below a new all-time high of over 23,000. The five most valuable tech companies have a collective market cap of more than $16 trillion. Other hot companies, like AMD, Palantir Technologies and Broadcom have soared to record heights this year.
While private startups don’t see day-to-day valuation gyrations like publicly traded companies, their investors do take cues from public markets. When public-market bullishness subsides, private up rounds tend to diminish as well.
No. 2: Booming startup investment
In late 2021, just like today, venture investment was going strong.
Last time, admittedly, it was much stronger. Global startup funding shattered all records in 2021, with more than $640 billion invested. That was nearly double year-earlier levels. Funding surged to a broad swathe of startup sectors, with fintech in particular leading the gains.
For the first three quarters of this year, by contrast, global investment totaled a more modest $303 billion. However, that’s still on track for the highest tally in years. The core driver is, of course, voracious investor appetite for AI leaders, evidenced by OpenAI’s record-setting $40 billion financing in March.
The pace of unicorn creation is also picking up, which brings us to our next similarity.
No. 3: Up rounds and sharply rising valuations
At the last market peak, valuations for hot startups soared, driven in large part by heated competition among startup investors to get into pre-IPO rounds.
This time around, we’re also seeing sought-after startups raising follow-on rounds in quick succession, commonly at sharply escalated valuations. Per Crunchbase data, dozens of companies have scaled from Series A to Series C within just a couple of years, including several that took less than 12 months.
We’re also seeing prominent unicorns raising follow-on rounds at a rapid pace this year. Standouts include generative AI giants as well as hot startups in vertical AI, cybersecurity and defense tech.
No. 4: A few cracks emerging
During the 2021 market peak, even when the overall investment climate was buzzier than ever, we did see some worrisome developments and areas of declining valuations.
For that period, one of the earlier indicators was share-price deterioration for many of the initial companies to go public via SPAC. By late 2021, it had become clear that there were numerous “truly terrible performers” among the cohort, including well-known names such as WeWork, Metromile and Buzzfeed.
This time around, the new offerings market hasn’t been quite so active. But among those that did go public in recent months, performance has been decidedly mixed. Shares of Figma, one of the hottest IPOs in some time, are down more than 60% from the peak.
Online banking provider Chime and stablecoin platform Circle have shown similar declines.
At this point, these are still generously valued companies by many metrics. But it’s also worth noting the share price direction in recent months has been downward, not upward.
Next: Watch for more cracks
Looking ahead, one of the more reliable techniques to determine whether we are approaching peak or already past is to look for more cracks in the investment picture. Are GenAI hotshots struggling to secure financing at desired valuations? Is the IPO pipeline still sluggish? Are public tech stocks no longer cresting ever-higher heights?
Cracks can take some time to emerge, but inevitably, they do.
While this growth is breathtaking, some analysts are beginning to question its sustainability. They warn that AI spending may soon reach a peak and that unprofitable tech companies could be hit hardest when the cycle turns. If that happens, many investors in AI will find themselves in a difficult position.
Predicting a bubble is rarely productive, but preparing for volatility is. It would be wise for both founders and investors to ensure that portfolio companies have enough resilience to withstand a potential market shock.
The key lies in assessing the durability of ARR. In a major downturn, the “growth game” quickly becomes a survival game. History suggests that while a few companies may continue to grow more slowly, the majority will struggle or disappear.
The question, then, is how to tell the difference between sustainable and hype-driven ARR.
What distinguishes durable ARR from hype?
Alexander Lis
Several factors set true, sustainable revenue growth apart from hype.
The first is customer commitment. Sustainable revenue comes from multiyear contracts, repeat renewal cycles and budgeted spend within core IT or operating lines. When revenue depends on pilots, proofs of concept or amorphous “innovation” budgets, it can vanish when corporate priorities shift. A company that touts these short trials as ARR is really reporting momentum, not recurring income.
Traditional software firms can thrive with monthly churn in the low single digits — think 5% to 7%. But many AI companies are seeing double that. This means they have to sprint just to stand still, constantly replacing users who move on to the next shiny tool.
Another differentiator? Integration and workflow depth. Durable ARR is embedded into the customer’s core workflows, data pipelines or multiple teams. Ripping it out would be costly and disruptive. Hype ARR, by contrast, lives on the surface — lightweight integrations, fast deployments and limited stakeholders. Without unique intellectual property or deep workflow integration, such products can be replaced with minimal friction.
And finally, real growth is defined by clear value-add. True ARR is backed by measurable ROI, well-defined outcomes and long-term customer roadmaps.
In contrast, hype ARR is driven by urgency (we need to show our shareholders our AI deployment ASAP), or undefined ROI. In those cases, customers don’t even know how to define success. They are testing, not committing.
Beyond ARR
It is important to put ARR traction in context. Investors and founders should focus on a broader set of indicators — conversion from pilots to long-term contracts, contract length and expansion, net revenue retention, and gross margin trajectory. These metrics reveal if growth is sustainable.
It would also be helpful to assess the product’s real impact: efficiency uplift (more code, content, or customer conversations per employee-hour), accuracy improvement (e.g. for detecting bad actors), and higher conversion rates, among others. These metrics should exceed client expectations and outperform alternative tools. That’s what signals genuine value creation and a higher chance for experimental revenue to turn into durable ARR.
After all, AI may be changing how fast companies can form and grow, but it hasn’t suspended the basic laws of business.
For founders, the message is simple: Celebrate ARR if you so wish, but pair it with proof of retention, profitability and defensibility. For investors, resist the urge to chase every eye-popping run rate. The real competitive edge in this next phase of AI is stability, not spectacle.
Alexander Lis is the chief investment officer at Social Discovery Ventures. With 10-plus years of experience across public markets, VC, PE and real estate, he has managed a public markets portfolio that outperformed benchmarks, led early investments in Sumsub, Teachmint and Byrd, and achieved 20%-plus IRR by investing in distressed real estate across the U.S.
Award-winning immunologist Susan Kaech is the new executive vice president of the Allen Institute’s Immunology Moonshot, an initiative that aims to understand the immune system’s role in human health and disease.
Kaech currently leads the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and will join the Allen Institute in January.
“The appointment comes at a critical time in bioscience when the immune system is regarded as the cornerstone of all diseases and understanding its foundational principles is vital to unlocking new treatments and therapies,” the institute said in a statement.
Kaech’s research includes the investigation of how the immune system remembers infections to develop immunity, T-cell communications, and the role of metabolism in the immune system’s fight against cancer.
Arthur Valdez Jr. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Seattle RFID company Impinj named Arthur Valdez Jr. to its board of directors.
Valdez recently left the role of executive VP of global supply chain and customer solutions at Starbucks and his career includes leadership roles at Amazon, Target and elsewhere.
“Arthur’s expertise transforming and optimizing strategic supply chain and logistics networks for large consumer-facing companies will be invaluable as we continue to advance our vision of connecting every thing,” said Impinj CEO Chris Diorio in a statement.
Jason Bennett. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Jason Bennett has taken a new role at Amazon Web Services, shifting from VP of U.S. enterprise to VP of worldwide startups and venture capital. Bennett has been with the company for more than 17 years.
On LinkedIn Bennett shared his fondness for working with startups and said he was eager to return to a position serving that community.
“I’m energized by the opportunity to work alongside our teams to support a thriving startup ecosystem — from founders and VCs, to accelerators, and the broader innovation community,” he said, adding that the work “has a lasting impact on the direction of industries and the future of AI.”
James Canafax. (NuScale Photo)
— NuScale Power named James Canafax as chief legal officer and corporate secretary. The Tigard, Ore.-based nuclear energy company is developing small modular reactors.
Canafax has decades of legal experience and joins NuScale from Maritime Partners. Past positions include executive leadership at BWX Technologies, which supplies nuclear components and services.
“[Canafax’s] extensive experience in the nuclear industry, deep familiarity with the regulatory environment and track record of guiding organizations through key growth periods make him uniquely suited to support NuScale at this important moment for our company,” CEO John Hopkins said in statement.
Elvis Dieguez. (symphonie Photo)
— Seattle entrepreneur Elvis Dieguez is now VP of data science, analytics and platforms for the healthcare startup hims & hers. Diegeuz joins the company from symphonie, a Seattle e-commerce marketing platform where he was CEO and co-founder. He was previously at Amazon for more than four years working in business analytics and as a senior manager.
Hims & hers offers a telehealth platform for conditions including sexual health, hair loss, mental health, skincare and weight loss.
“I look forward to leading and working with a ~70 person team who’ve been working hard to make the #healthcare system work for all Americans,” Dieguez said on LinkedIn.
Ariel Brumbaugh. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Biotech startup Synthesize Bio named Ariel Brumbaugh as senior director of business development. In the role, Brumbaugh will help the company partner with biopharma companies interested in using Synthesize’s AI-based research platform to accelerate and de-risk drug development.
Seattle’s Synthesize Bio was founded by leaders from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Last month it announced $10 million in funding from Madrona.
Brumbaugh joined the startup from the San Francisco biotech company Gladstone Institutes.
— Sophie Brougham is director of philanthropic operations for the recently launched Clean Economy Project. Nicknamed CleanEcon, the effort includes past employees of the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy and is a policy and advocacy platform promoting clean power.
Prior to Breakthrough, Brougham was with the Paul Allen holding company Vulcan (now known as Vale Group) for more than a decade, where she was a senior manager and led programs including philanthropic and grants management.
— Seattle’s Jake Laes is now executive director of AI Tinkerers, a global network of AI engineers and builders. Laes joined the group from Deel, where he helped facilitate partnerships between investors and accelerator programs. Laes is the founder of YoungTech Seattle, and his background includes mentoring and leadership roles at the University of Washington’s CoMotion and Techstars.
— Pranam Kolari, VP of search and recommendations at Coupang, is resigning from his role next month. Coupang is South Korea’s largest e-commerce platform and is headquartered in Seattle. Kolari, based in San Jose, Calif., was previously at Walmart Labs for nearly a decade where his roles included vice president of engineering for search.
— Datavault AI appointed Pete Scobell as VP of global security. The Beaverton, Ore.-based company helps businesses monetize their data and create digital twins of physical objects. Scobell is a decorated U.S. Navy SEAL veteran and will oversee Datavault AI’s security operations, risk management and asset logistics.
— Erin McHugh Saif, a former Massachusetts-based Microsoft executive, is CEO of an as-yet unnamed data and AI venture to serve “place-based partnerships,” which are networks of nonprofits, government agencies, and educational entities that aim to address education, jobs and housing needs.
“With better access to data, these organizations will leap ahead in this moment of AI transformation, gaining faster insight into which programs deliver the greatest improvement to significantly scale their impact,” Saif said on LinkedIn.
The effort has the support of the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organization co-founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, and the nonprofit TechSoup.
— Karen Ng was promoted to executive VP of product at HubSpot. Ng has been with the company since 2022, joining as senior VP of product and partnerships. Past employers include Common Room, Google and Microsoft, where she was chief of staff across the company’s developer tools business. Ng is based in the Seattle area.
Founded in 2021, Chainguard aims to help customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term used to describe a company’s software production line.
Chainguard focuses on helping companies keep their open source software secure and offers tools to manage container images, a core code component of cloud-based applications. It has more than 200 customers, including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VPBank, and Wiz.
Technically based in Kirkland, Wash., the remote startup employs more than 500 people and has raised $892 million to date as its valuation has risen to $3.5 billion. The company is ranked No. 3 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, and Chainguard recently landed on LinkedIn’s list of the top 50 startups in the U.S. (at No. 18).
In fiscal year 2025, Chainguard says it grew its annual recurring revenue seven times to $40 million.
CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc said the funding will help accelerate the adoption of Chainguard across more companies.
“Open source powers the world, but the way it’s delivered and deployed often introduces risk,” Lorenc said in a statement. “At Chainguard, we’re flipping that script: we guard open source from all the things that can go wrong with it, so engineering teams can build anything they want with it.”
Chainguard CFO Eyal Bar said the partnership with General Catalyst enables Chainguard “to scale go-to-market investment without diluting ownership or slowing innovation.”
Instead of using equity to fund sales and marketing spend, General Catalyst provides structured growth capital tied directly to customer acquisition and recurring revenue. The goal is to let startups like Chainguard preserve equity while using outcome-based financing to scale efficiently.
Previous Chainguard investors include Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
Carbon Robotics founder and CEO Paul Mikesell with the company’s LaserWeeder G2. (Carbon Robotics Photo)
Seattle agriculture-tech startup Carbon Robotics raised $20 million in new funding to support the creation of another piece of AI-powered machinery for farms.
With its signature LaserWeeder and relatively new Autonomous Tractor Kit (ATK) already being used by hundreds of customers, Carbon founder and CEO Paul Mikesell told GeekWire that “a brand new AI robot” is coming.
Mikesell said the machine, which is at least nine months away from being revealed, will leverage the same AI system used in Carbon’s other equipment but perform tasks beyond weeding.
“It’s very flexible, capable of doing a lot with the world around it, understanding what it’s seeing, what’s happening,” Mikesell said of Carbon’s system that uses an array of AI, computer vision and machine learning technology. “We see our ability to reinvest in that platform and double down on what it can do in some new activities.
“It’ll blow your mind,” he added.
Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics made its name across ag-tech with the LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses its tech to detect plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The latest iteration, the LaserWeeder G2, was released in February.
In March, the company unveiled the Carbon ATK, previously called the AutoTractor. That autonomous platform is designed to fit on and control existing farm equipment and serve as an answer to labor shortages and increased productivity in farming.
Both platforms are continuing to grow and scale, and “things are moving really fast,” according to Mikesell, a longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems.
LaserWeeders are active on farms across the U.S. and in 14 countries around the world. Mikesell said revenue continues to grow every year, but Carbon is not yet profitable.
Carbon Robotics says it has hundreds of customers across the U.S. and 14 countries. (Carbon Robotics Photo)
Ranked No. 9 on the GeekWire 200 list of top privately held startups based across the Pacific Northwest, Carbon has previously been backed by NVIDIA and Seattle-based Voyager Capital.
The Series D-2 extension round attracted Giant Ventures as lead investor. The UK-based VC invests across a variety of “purpose-driven” startups, and Mikesell said, “They got what we were trying to do.”
Beyond the secretive new machine, Carbon is revealing more about the “large plant model” at the heart of how it does computer vision through its AI systems.
Mikesell said the company is at the point where it has enough training data and labeled images that it can teach its AI to learn about the basic structure of the plants it’s seeing. This allows Carbon to run one model on every machine in the world.
“If new weeds pop up in an onion field in France, and those are eventually going to show up in a carrot field in the U.S., the first time we see that weed anywhere it can be part of the model and be ready to go,” Mikesell said. “It also means that if we want to go into a new crop that we’ve never seen before, we can do it immediately.”
A LaserWeeder is designed to target the meristem of a weed to kill it as quickly as possible and the large plant model helps it understand where to precisely target its zap.
Carbon Robotics, which has raised $177 million to date, now employs about 260 people. The company runs a manufacturing facility in Richland, Wash., and added another in the Netherlands to offset some trade and tariff issues as well as speed deployment of machines in Europe.
Mikesell said as far as competition, there are some companies in Europe who claim to be building some version of a LaserWeeder, but he’s never seen one in a field or competed against one.
“It’s very hard to create a LaserWeeder,” he said. “The targeting system is so special, and the AI is so special. It’s not just about detecting where the weeds are. The trick to making it work is you need a targeting camera to be able to keep the lasers on target [while moving], and everybody I’ve seen that says they’re gonna build a LaserWeeder doesn’t understand that concept.”
Fueled by AI, both Dell and its investment arm are on a hot streak this year.
The PC maker has seen demand for its server products surge with $20 billion in AI server shipments projected for fiscal 2026. At the same time, its investment arm, Dell Technologies Capital (DTC), has notched five exits — an IPO and four acquisitions — since June, an especially notable track record in a venture industry that has been challenged in recent years by a liquidity crunch.
Daniel Docter, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital
On the heels of that success, we recently spoke with Dell Technologies Capital managing director Daniel Docter and partner Elana Lian.
DTC was founded more than a decade ago and operates as a full-stack investor, backing everything from silicon to applications.
“One big part of our network is the Dell relationship, which is the leader in GPU servers,” said Docter. As a result, Dell is connected to all the major players in the AI space, he said.
Elana Lian, partner at Dell Technologies Capital
One of its earliest AI investments was during the machine-learning era in 2014 in a company called Moogsoft. Dell went on to acquire the alert remediation company in 2023.
DTC’s investment thesis was that the advent of machine learning was going to disrupt the tech industry. At that time, data had expanded to such a degree that new tools were required by the market to analyze data and find patterns, which informed the firm’s early investments in AI.
The investment team at DTC is largely comprised of technical people, often “double E” degree engineers.
Docter has an electrical engineering background, worked at Hughes Research Labs, now HRL Laboratories, and transitioned from engineering to business development. He joined the venture industry 25 years ago and spent more than a decade at Intel. He joined DTC in 2016 through Dell’s EMC acquisition.
Lian worked in semiconductors for a decade, joined Intel Capital in 2010, and then joined Dell Technologies Capital in 2024.
Data evolution
Docter believes we are in the fifth generation of AI, which becomes more powerful with every iteration.
“We’re seeing that AI is almost a data problem,” said Lian. “For AI to get better and better, there’s an uncapped ceiling where there’s high-quality data coming in.”
The team is meeting startups focused on training, inference, reasoning and continuous learning along with safety requirements. Data is core to these advancements.
Even the definition of data is changing. “It used to be a word, then it was a context, then it was a task or a rationale or a path. Then it’s reasoning,” said Docter. “Who knows what’s next?”
As AI improves, there is demand for frontier data and for specialized data in fields such as philosophy, physics, chemistry and business. Humans are in the loop as these capabilities expand, said Docter, which has informed some of the firm’s investments.
On deal flow
DTC is a financial investor, assessing a potential company on whether it is a good investment, rather than backing businesses based on Dell’s strategic goals.
Startup revenue is exceeding what was previously possible, Docter said: “I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’ve never seen companies that have this type of revenue growth.”
The best deals are always hotly contested, he noted.
The question to ask when it comes to revenue, Docter said, is: “Is that an innovation CTO office budget? Or is that a VP of engineering budget?”
When assessing a potential portfolio investment the team asks: “Is revenue durable? Is there value in using this?”
The pace of investment also seems unprecedented. “We’ll meet with a company on a Tuesday for the first time and sometimes by Thursday, they have a term sheet that they’ve already signed,” he said.
The firm does not have a dedicated fund size, which is an advantage as it can be flexible in the size of the check as well as the stage to make a commitment and how it invests over time.
DTC has invested $1.8 billion to date across 165 companies. It likes to invest early, at seed or Series A, with check sizes running from $2 million to $12 million, and leads or co-leads 80% of new deals. The firm makes around 15 to 16 new investments per year.
Once DTC has invested, it looks at how the firm can help portfolio companies sell to potential customers across Dell’s deal partner network.
DTC is investing a little more actively than it has in the past, but remains disciplined, Docter said. The investment team is focused on complex enterprise use cases and challenges, following the Warren Buffett rule, which is to invest in what you know.
The firm invests at the silicon level because you “can be incredibly disruptive to the ecosystem,” said Docter.
The DTC portfolio companies we discussed include the following in areas ranging from silicon to applications.
Infrastructure and hardware layer:
AI chipmaker Rivos, which Meta plans to acquire for an undisclosed amount. (The deal is pending regulatory approval.)
SiMa.ai, which makes a chip for embedded edge use cases including in automobile, drone and robot technologies.
Runpod, an AI developer software layer with on-demand access to GPUs. It allows developers to play with AI and then scale it to production. The service has 500,000 developers, including 30,000 paying monthly, said Docter.
SuperAnnotate, a data annotation platform for enterprises with humans in the loop to build accurate data pipelines. Its customers include Databricks and the women’s health app Flo Health.
Applications:
Maven AGI provides customer support for complex and high-compliance enterprise use cases, a potentially massive market. Lian projects customer experience overall will be a trillion-dollar market.
Series Entertainment, a GenAI platform for game development that aims to reduce deployment timelines from eight months to two weeks.
What’s next?
A major area of interest for Lian is advancements in voice AI, the day-to-day human interaction with a machine.
It’s hard to imagine that the transformer architecture is the last and final architecture, said Docter. The firm has made investments in companies creating different architectures in Cartesia, a leader in state-space model, which has a longer context window building a new reasoning model with a different architecture, initially focused on voice AI. DTC has also invested in Israeli-based AA-I Technologies, which is working on a new type of reasoning model architecture.
“Right now, the opportunity of AI is this big, but this ball keeps on exploding,” said Lian. “The contact area is getting bigger and bigger. And that’s the same for the data.”
Hyphen AI, a new Seattle-based startup using generative AI to help developers deploy cloud applications, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Unlock Venture Partners.
The company’s product, Hyphen Deploy, aims to make cloud infrastructure setup as simple as describing what an app should do.
The product automates complex DevOps processes — replacing YAML files, Dockerfiles, and Terraform modules with natural language prompts and business rules. Developers can describe service goals such as latency, scale, or compliance, and the platform automatically generates production-ready cloud infrastructure across providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare.
“Today infrastructure automation typically takes weeks to setup and configure and then monthly maintenance on those configurations — Deploy reduces it to minutes,” Jared Wray, CEO and founder at Hyphen AI, said in a statement.
Wray previously founded Tier 3, a Seattle-area enterprise cloud startup acquired by CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies) in 2013. He spent two years as an exec at CenturyLink and was later CTO at streaming company iStreamPlanet and clean tech startup Palmetto.
Hyphen joins a growing number of startups using generative AI to automate infrastructure work, including fellow Seattle startup Pulumi.
Unlock Ventures partner Andy Liu, who is based in Seattle, said the market “desperately needs” a “truly developer-first operations platform.”
“Deploy returns software development to the promise of developers leading the way with no infrastructure overhead, just focus on code,” Liu said in a statement.
Wray declined to disclose the company’s revenue metrics. He said customers have been using the platform for the past five months. Hyphen employs 10 people, including Jim Newkirk, who is serving as a fractional COO and was also an exec at CenturyLink and Tier3.
Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend also participated in the seed round.
Seattle-based Hest makes mattresses, pillows, bedding and more for car and tent campers. (Hest Photo)
Hest, the Seattle-based maker of sleeping gear for outdoor enthusiasts, raised $2.7 million in Series A funding this month as the company sees continued growth.
The initial close was backed by existing investors — Ascend, Cascade Seed Fund, Alliance of Angels, and a number of Seattle-area angel investors — and Hest is opening the round to new investors with a final close later this year.
Founder and CEO Aaron Ambuske told GeekWire that Hest continues to experience significant growth with a 50% increase in sales this year. The startup expects to turn an operating profit for the first time.
Hest founder and CEO Aaron Ambuske. (Photo via Ascend.vc)
Ambuske said the growth is driven by an expanded product line and an increase in sales at REI, where Hest is now in all stores. The company also has a partnership with electric vehicle maker Rivian.
The fresh cash will be used to support future growth opportunities.
“We are launching a new product category in 2026, expanding our partnership with Rivian and investing in new sales channels,” Ambuske said. “We recently launched in Japan and will continue to explore international options when they are a fit.”
He added that while tariffs imposed by the Trump administration “have been a lot to navigate,” over half of Hest’s cost of goods and final assembly are in the U.S., so the company has been “slightly insulated from the turbulence.”
Ambuske, who spent 18 years at K2 Sports, launched Hest in 2019 to satisfy his desire to bring a more comfortable sleeping experience to car and tent campers.
Based in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, Hest opened its first showroom this summer. The company employs 10 people.
Ring founder and Amazon exec Jamie Siminoff’s book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, is due out Nov. 10. (Courtesy Photo)
Jamie Siminoff has lived the American Dream in many ways — recovering from an unsuccessful appearance on Shark Tank to ultimately sell smart doorbell company Ring to Amazon for a reported $1 billion in 2018.
“I never set out to write a book, but after a decade of chaos, failure, wins, and everything in between, I realized this is a story worth telling,” Siminoff said in the announcement, describing Ding Dong as the “raw, true story” of building Ring, including nearly running out of money multiple times.
He added, “My hope is that it gives anyone out there chasing something big a little more fuel to keep going. Because sometimes being ‘too dumb to fail’ is exactly what gets you through.”
Siminoff rejoined the Seattle tech giant earlier this year after stepping away in 2023. He’s now vice president of product, overseeing the company’s home security camera business and related devices including Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Amazon Sidewalk.
Members of the Silkline team in Seattle, from left: Pearce Burkett, founding account executive; David Tomczyk, founding engineer; Brent Shulman, co-founder and CTO; Isaac Chambers, co-founder and CEO; Jack Zeiders, founding engineer. (Silkline Photo)
Silkline, a Seattle startup using AI to help advanced manufacturing companies manage their supply chains, raised $4 million in seed funding, the company announced Wednesday.
Founded in 2023, Silkline aims to reduce production delays by simplifying and lowering the cost of sourcing materials from multiple suppliers. AI-enabled requests for quotes and purchase orders are among its recently released features.
The fresh cash will help Silkline accelerate its development of AI-powered capabilities.
Silkline customers include manufacturers in aerospace, energy, defense and robotics, including Starfish Space (Tukwila) and Portal Space (Bothell), as well as Vast, Castelion, H3X, K2 Space, Antares Industries, and Machina Labs.
In July, Silkline projected it would triple revenue in 2025. Since then, the company says revenue has grown fivefold year-over-year.
The company says its growth is being driven in part by a “network effect,” in which 20% of new customers are suppliers who received an RFQ generated by the Silkline platform.
“Supply chain teams in advanced manufacturing are struggling with missed production deadlines, RFQ to order management, and increasing demands from their customers,” Isaac Chambers, co-founder and CEO of Silkline, said in a statement. “This round of funding helps Silkline deliver more AI capabilities and reach further into the advanced manufacturing market so all modern hardware companies can experience a fully connected supply chain.”
Silkline currently employs five people.
The funding round was led by Origin Ventures with participation from Forward Deployed VC, 25madison, Matchstick Ventures, Barrel Ventures, and Plow Ventures.
As startup valuations reset and venture capital firms hunt for unconventional deals, one investor is looking to the bankruptcy courts. Bambu Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, last month agreed to acquire telemedicine company Lemonaid Health — once a $400 million bet by 23andMe — for just $10 million.
The transaction is more than a bargain buy. It’s also an intriguing deal that illustrates how an early-stage VC firm can operate by a private-equity playbook to revive a distressed asset.
DNA testing company 23andMe acquired Lemonaid for $400 million in 2021. Lemonaid operated as a division of 23andMe until the parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year.
Last month, New York-based Bambu made a deal with Chrome Holding Co. — the rebranded former parent company 23andMe Holding — in which the venture firm agreed to buy Lemonaid for a staggering 40x less than the DNA company had originally paid for the telehealth brand.
Kyle Pretsch, COO of Lemonaid SPV Inc.
So why did Bambu Ventures make a play for Lemonaid? Just how did it win the bid? And what are its plans for the asset? Crunchbase News recently spoke with Kyle Pretsch, COO of Lemonaid SPV Inc. and general partner at Bambu Ventures, to discuss all this and more. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
This is not your typical startup purchase. What prompted you to buy Lemonaid? Are you going to operate as an independent startup?
Lemonaid wasn’t just a company. It was a vision. It was an incredibly exciting team. It’s an incredible, exciting market, and it’s a mission that we can all feel good about, which is increasing accessibility to healthcare. Obviously, there’s a phenomenal market for that, but at the end of the day, we are working to provide improved transparency, the ability to improve your lifestyle at an affordable cost, and do it in a nice, systemic fashion, to reach more people.
23andMe has been an incredible custodian of this company and so we didn’t just see it as a company. We saw something much, much more. We plan to operate it independently. We like the fact that this is a space we’re familiar with. This is a space we have other holdings in.
We expect there will be opportunities along the way to use those contributions to help grow Lemonaid.
I understand that you’re paying about $10 million for Lemonaid when 23andMe paid $400 million to acquire it just a few years ago. Do you view this as an incredible opportunity?
Yes. We don’t believe the value of the asset has eroded since 2021.
Regeneron is buying the rest of 23andMe. How did you end up with Lemonaid?
Regeneron actually didn’t bid for Lemonade. It excluded it from their purchase. And technically Regeneron didn’t win 23andMe, either.
At one point, it had been identified as the winning bidder, but an organization called TTAM Research Institute, which was a research institute founded in part by Anne Wojcicki, the original founder of 23andMe, ended up prevailing in the repurchasing of the assets out of bankruptcy.
It, too, excluded Lemonaid from its bid. So both organizations put forth what’s called a stalking horse bid, which is if no one else bids, they would absorb the asset for a certain amount. And we ended up bidding in excess of that.
This feels very similar to a private-equity play. Do you think this sort of transaction is becoming more common? Are you going to do it more often?
This is a really unique situation, and for so many reasons I don’t think venture capital is going to find itself stalking the bankruptcy courts.
Nor do I think this was a standard bankruptcy case. But I do think our firm specifically brings a very PE style to venture capital. That’s what we do as a firm. And I think this was an exceptional opportunity where you have a venture-like company with PE idealism and process that can go ahead and reconstitute its growth track. We expect venture growth with PE discipline, and we’re happy to marry the two.
The fact that we identified it in bankruptcy court is a huge testament to our firm, how we worked and how we adapted to chase after a vision that we really, really, found meaningful. I believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
So it’s not something you’ve done before?
I have some experience in this space, but this is not a situation that I’ve ever come across. We’ve looked at things in bankruptcy before, but I think if you talk to anybody involved in this particular case, they would say: “Never has anything like this existed” for 10 different reasons.
How do you distinguish yourselves as a VC firm, and did Bambu Ventures actually conduct this acquisition?
Bambu Ventures is an operating firm for a variety of venture capital funds. Specifically, our key fund right now is a $50 million to $100 million fund, and Lemonaid is not being purchased from the fund.
We offer co-investments and sometimes pursue side deals, and this was something that I think the fund will have some participation in, but this is an act outside of that fund.
The same principles, however exist, which is, as a firm we believe in finding the companies that are being given these low values, or are being sometimes overshadowed or overlooked, and then bringing our team to it, and bringing discipline and execution to it, and reinvigorating growth — overlooked assets, plus PE discipline in well-known environments. And that, plus our team, is a formula for our success.
The purchasing entity is actually Lemonaid SPV. Bambu Ventures is a guarantor, because that’s a new company.
How is this transaction similar or different from a PE-type acquisition?
The mechanics are a little bit different in that it’s not being owned by a fund or an LP. It’s owned by an SPV. This is very similar to any kind of corporate transaction. We have a cap table. We have set up what we think is an incredible list of investors. We’ve taken some fund money from other VC funds to help instill that it has a list of interested LPs and parties.
So I would say this is very, very similar. The only key difference is we’re investing in a different company … From an organizational governance perspective, we went ahead and moved the investor funds directly into a top, or holding, company with its own cap table, versus a fund.
What will you do differently with Lemonaid?
The 23andMe team have been great stewards to this company, they’ve been great partners in transition and have really set this transaction up for success. I think there are immediate opportunities to advance within patient care, and that’s adding product and reaching more patients.
We plan on investing in marketing spend. Obviously 23andMe, through its process, had reduced that marketing spend heavily.
Will you be competing with companies such as Ro and Hims & Hers?
There is more than enough white space that we can all operate within our own moats and in our own domains without this warriors’ battle.
I will say that we do have visions of incredible growth, and we do have visions of creating a holistic offering that serves more and creates an improved consumer experience.
Presight has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the UAE Cyber Security Council (CSC). As a part of this collaboration, the CyberE71 program, operated by the Council, will officially join Presight’s AI-Startup Accelerator as a partner, reinforcing the program’s mission to scale impactful AI-driven innovation in the UAE and beyond.
Through this MoU, Presight and the Cyber Security Council will collaborate to empower AI startups to innovate responsibly and securely. The partnership brings national cybersecurity expertise and strategic mentorship into the Presight AI-Startup Accelerator, exploring a joint framework for research, technical enablement, and capacity-building initiatives. Together, they will drive collaboration across government, academia, and the private sector, embedding cybersecurity into the foundation of AI development and reinforcing the UAE’s position as a global leader in digital innovation and resilience.
The agreement was signed during Expand North Star 2025 between His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cyber Security For UAE government, and Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Presight.
H.E. Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti said: “Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are twin pillars of the UAE’s digital transformation journey. Our collaboration with Presight reflects a shared commitment to fostering responsible innovation and ensuring that emerging technologies are developed with security at their core. As a national AI champion, Presight brings the infrastructure, scale, and vision needed to accelerate startup success while maintaining trust and resilience. Together, with the CyberE71 Program and Presight AI Accelerator Program, we will help empower a new generation of entrepreneurs to create transformative, secure technologies that advance the UAE’s position as a trusted global hub for digital innovation.”
Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Presight, said: “Presight and the UAE Cyber Security Council have enjoyed a long history of collaboration, and I share my deepest gratitude to His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti for extending our partnership to now include the Presight AI-Startup Accelerator. Our collaboration with the UAE Cyber Security Council will unite Presight’s strengths in artificial intelligence with the Council’s national leadership in cyber resilience. Together, we are enabling startups to scale securely and responsibly, driving technologies that deliver transformation while safeguarding the trust that underpins every digital interaction.”
By integrating cybersecurity principles into every stage of AI development, the collaboration between Presight and the UAE Cyber Security Council demonstrates the country’s forward-looking approach to building a technology ecosystem where innovation and security evolve together. It reinforces the UAE’s ambition to lead globally in ethical, responsible, and resilient digital transformation.
The Cyber Security Council joins a growing network of strategic partners supporting the Presight AI-Startup Accelerator, including Microsoft, MBZUAI and Shorooq. Together, these partnerships form a dynamic ecosystem that equips startups with the mentorship, infrastructure, market access, and policy alignment needed to build transformative AI solutions at scale.
A new Seattle startup is betting that artificial intelligence can take marketing off the plate of small business owners.
Omada.ai, founded earlier this year by longtime tech entrepreneur Pete Christothoulou, officially launched Tuesday with what it describes as an “AI marketing team” designed to handle the day-to-day digital marketing tasks for small and midsize business owners.
Backed by Crosslink Capital, HubSpot Ventures, and Seattle-based firm Ascend, the startup says its platform can plan, create, and optimize marketing campaigns automatically for less than $9 per day.
Instead of developing a single marketing “copilot” or dashboard, Omada’s approach is a set of coordinated AI agents — a marketing assistant, social media manager, designer, video producer, and more — that collaborate like a virtual team. Users interact through a simple chat interface, and the system handles tasks such as posting content, running ads, responding to customers, and tracking performance.
“Their agent-based architecture delivers a truly autonomous and proactive system that gives small business owners the access to capabilities and marketing expertise they’ve never had access to before,” Adam Coccari, managing director at HubSpot Ventures, said in a statement.
Omada’s pitch is that it acts less like another app and more like a full-service team — a “do-it-for-me” model rather than “do-it-yourself.” Its agents are built on proprietary infrastructure that coordinates specialized AI models for language, vision, and audio tasks. The company says the system learns each business’s tone and goals over time, continuously optimizing campaigns.
Omada enters an increasingly competitive space. A growing number of startups use generative AI to help businesses create content and automate tasks — including Seattle-area companies Gradial, Adora, and Forum3. Larger companies such as HubSpot, Canva, and Adobe have also embedded AI marketing tools into their small business offerings.
Christothoulou co-founded Omada with Siva Muthukumarasamy, a longtime engineering leader who was CTO at Peel Technologies, as well as Andrew Miller, a veteran marketing exec who worked at Xembly as head of user acquisition.
Omada marks Christothoulou’s latest foray into applying automation and data intelligence to the marketing world. He previously co-founded and ran Marchex, a Seattle-based advertising analytics company that went public in 2004 and helped pioneer digital call tracking for marketers.
Christothoulou served as CEO at Marchex until 2016 and later launched Xembly, a Seattle startup that developed an “AI chief of staff” to automate productivity tasks. The company shut down its consumer service last year.
Special Teams’ founder and CEO, Clara Sekowski, discusses a hardware mockup build with teammates in the loading bay of their new 7,400-square-foot facility in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood. (Special Teams Photo)
Nine years ago, Clara Sekowski was part of the engineering team at Planetary Resources, a Seattle-area startup that planned to mine precious metals on asteroids. Six years ago, she joined other veterans from Planetary Resources at First Mode, another trailblazing startup that focused on clean energy for industrial applications. Now she’s the CEO of Special Teams, a consulting firm founded with fellow engineers from First Mode.
“Third time’s the charm, right?” she says.
Both of those earlier startups attracted high-profile backers for their ambitious plans, only to face setbacks as reality set in. Special Teams is starting smaller, but it’s gaining traction: The bootstrapped venture and its team of just over 10 engineers recently moved into a 7,400-square-foot office and workshop facility in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood — and it’s already exceeding its revenue target.
“In our first year, we’re almost at $2 million, which is above and beyond a goal we had set for Year One,” she told GeekWire.
The Special Teams roster includes engineers with experience in aerospace, software development, and even the gaming industry.
“We use systems engineering to bridge the gap between innovation on paper and operational deployment,” Sekowski said. “We design and build prototypes and custom simulations to prove that concepts can work in real-world conditions.”
Special Teams’ to-do list includes helping BHP lay the groundwork for deep-mining automation; working on a confidential nuclear project; and advising Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, a high-performance car company, on its plan to create a hydrogen-powered pickup truck.
“I have worked for decades with top engineering and design companies around the world … on highly complex and challenging projects,” Jesse Glickenhaus, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus’ CEO, said in an emailed statement. “SpecTeams is by far the most incredible team I have worked with when doing something new and technologically challenging needs to be paired with significant safety and environmental concerns.”
Some of the engineers who left Planetary Resources started up First Mode. Initially, the engineering consulting firm played a supporting role in a variety of space projects, including NASA’s Artemis moon program and the Perseverance rover mission on Mars.
As time went on, First Mode tightened its focus to concentrate on clean-tech power systems. It established a proving ground for those systems at a former coal mine in Centralia, Wash. Then, in 2023, the Anglo American mining conglomerate took a majority interest in First Mode and accelerated its drive to develop hydrogen-fueled and hybrid powertrains for heavy trucks.
In February 2024, First Mode CEO Julian Soles wielded a giant scissors at a factory ribbon-cutting ceremony with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to the right and Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, to the left. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Molly Puga, First Mode’s general manager, said the company is continuing to pursue its decarbonization mission as part of the Cummins Power Systems global network.
“Since the acquisition of First Mode, Cummins has been hard at work bringing hybrid solutions for mining to reality,” Puga said in an emailed statement. “We have announced a partnership with Komatsu to scale our hybrid solution, received a grant from TransAlta to support operations at our proving grounds in Centralia, and have shipped product to South America to be commissioned at a mine in the next several months. First Mode continues to employ about 70 employees globally, with the majority of them based in Seattle.”
Special Teams has also been hard at work at its new SoDo facility.
“We are excited to be in the space that we have. It’s a great mix of space where we can build hardware and have a forklift and move around and make noise, and office space where we can get the rest of our work done,” Sekowski said. “SoDo is a great spot for that, because this is really the only area where you can have hybrid spaces. We are going to be here until our hardware doesn’t fit in the building anymore.”
Startups sparked, lessons learned
Special Teams isn’t the only startup founded by First Mode alumni: Last year, former CEO Chris Voorhees and former chief operating officer Rhae Adams established a think tank called Sol Zero Group to support new engineering ventures — including Special Teams.
Civic Forge, which advises businesses on government affairs and public policy strategies, is another venture in Sol Zero’s family of companies. It was founded last year by Conor Duggan, First Mode’s former director of government affairs; and Adam Day, who previously served as First Mode’s senior government affairs manager.
This year, Duggan took on a new role at a clean-tech startup called Vaulted Deep, and Day took charge as Civic Forge’s CEO.
“Civic Forge works alongside Special Teams when a challenge has both policy and technical dimensions,” Day told GeekWire via email. “Together, we pair engineering with policy, which helps clients de-risk designs, win public support and hit milestones faster. Our combined goal is simple: Help organizations move faster across dimensions so they can focus on building.”
Special Teams CEO Clara Sekowski runs a workshop focused on modeling the carbon footprint of a mining customer. (Special Teams Photo)
Sekowski said that she gets “so much joy” from seeing former colleagues do well, at First Mode and at new ventures. “I think that’s part of the legacy,” she said. “It’s not just Special Teams, but it’s all of us, taking what we learned there and putting it into the next things that we do.”
She’s grateful for the experience she gained at First Mode. “Some of the things I learned at First Mode are important to us here as well,” she said. “Doing work in a broad domain, not just in space, but across energy and other industries, helps us do better work. And so that’s something that we’ll continue.”
Sekowski is even grateful for the setbacks she and her teammates encountered along the way. “I learned so much through the process of being a part of Planetary Resources, and then what was a strong correction to some of the funding issues there with First Mode, and now getting to put some of those lessons together to build this team,” she said. “You don’t get a lot of chances to grow in that way. … We’ve got the battle scars. We know where we want to go, what we don’t want to do, and how to get there.”
In a competitive hiring environment, the ability to find exceptional talent that isn’t necessarily knocking down your door is hugely desired and not always easy to attain. That’s why so many companies these days are turning to AI-powered talent acquisition and management startups to help them mine for exceptional candidates.
One such startup, Findem, has secured $51 million in equity and debt funding, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
The raise includes a $36 million Series C led by SLW (Silver Lake Waterman) with participation from Wing Venture Capital, Harmony Capital and Four Rivers Group, as well as $15 million in growth financing from JP Morgan. The financing brings Findem’s total funding since its 2019 inception to $105 million, with $90 million of that being equity, per the company.
Redwood City, California-based Findem’s mission is simple, even if its methods are not. It aims to transform how businesses “identify, attract and engage top talent.”
The startup uses what it calls 3D talent data (out of a dataset developed out of 1.6 trillion data points) that it combines with AI to automate “key parts of the talent lifecycle.” And those parts include building “top-of-funnel” pipelines of interested candidates, executive search and analyzing workforce and labor markets.
In an interview with Crunchbase News, co-founder and CEO Hari Kolam said that Findem’s user base surged by “about 100x” in the last 12 months and that the company is experiencing 3x year-over-year growth. Its enterprise customer base increased by 3x over the last year.
Currently, Findem operates under a SaaS business model, charging per seat. As it expands its agentic abilities, the company plans to add an outcome-based model as well, according to Kolam. It is not yet profitable.
Findem is just one of more than a dozen startups at the intersection of AI and recruitment globally that have raised venture capital in 2025. As of early September, global startup investment for startups in the HR, recruitment and employment categories totaled around $2.3 billion, per Crunchbase data. That puts funding on track for a year-over-year gain, even as investment remains at a fraction of the levels hit during the market peak, as charted below.
How it works
Watching Findem’s platform in action provides better insight into just how it helps companies zero in on the specific talent for which they’re searching.
Say a startup wants to hire a software engineer who has worked at a company from its early days until it raised a Series C funding round. But it also wants that engineer to have a GitHub profile that it can view. Or, say a company wants to hire competitive coders who have seen a successful exit, or a CFOs who drove a company from a negative operating margin to a positive one.
Findem’s software will allow you to filter for all those desired attributes.
The startup says it’s able to help companies recruit so specifically because its 3D data combines people and company data over time into a format suitable for AI analysis. It claims that the “continuously enhanced” 3D dataset is “exponentially larger and more factual” than traditional sources of candidate data, making it a powerful tool for deep insights and automated workflows.
Using the combination of the data and AI, Findem creates 3D profiles, also dubbed “enriched” profiles, for every candidate it helps surface. The goal of the profiles is to provide “a detailed and factual view” of an individual’s “professional journey and impact,”
So just where does all this data come from? Findem says it continuously leverages a language model to generate that 3D data from more than 100,000 sources that are chronologically gathered (from earliest to latest).
Those sources include LinkedIn, GitHub, Doximity, WordPress, personal websites, the U.S. Census Bureau, company funding announcements and IPO details, business models, more than 300 million patents and publications, over 5 million open datasets and ML projects, and over 200 million open source code repositories.
This comprehensive data pull is what helps set Findem apart, in Kolam’s view. Some other hiring tools rely on one-dimensional data from resumes or LinkedIn profiles, which, he argues, “give only a snapshot of someone’s career … without the context that reveals true potential.” Kolam contends that it takes “extensive manual effort” to verify and interpret the data.
“Just looking at a resume on paper really doesn’t come close to telling the whole story of how really qualified a candidate could be, or if they can really fit the criteria that a particular employer is looking for,” Kolam maintains.
Findem is primarily focused on North American customers who have users across the globe. It’s also expanding into Europe. The company has a second headquarters in Bangalore, India.
Kolam declined to reveal Findem’s valuation, saying only that it was “a significant up round and more than 2x” compared to its valuation when it raised a $17 million-plus Series B extension in December 2023.
Shawn O’Neill, managing partner at SLW, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm first got to know Kolam before Findem raised its Series B and then “tracked the company’s trajectory for some time.”
‘’What drew us to Findem wasn’t just the technology, it was the traction,” he said. “The team has achieved strong commercial momentum while tackling one of the most persistent challenges in HR — connecting data, insight and human potential in a way that actually drives business outcomes.”
But the technology didn’t hurt.
In O’Neill’s view, Findem’s main differentiator is its “data advantage … in a market where most companies are simply wrapping LLMs.”
“The depth and breadth of their 3D profiles and web-scale dataset are unlike anything else in the market,” he said. “The UX is excellent, but the magic is really in how the platform leverages that data — it makes finding and understanding people effortless. We use it ourselves and see the power firsthand.”
After the 2024-25 job cuts at Google, Amazon and other tech companies, the second wave of tech layoffs is rewriting the startup labor market.
Skilled professionals are suddenly available, creating both opportunity and pressure for founders and workers alike. Startups now compete for talent that once seemed untouchable, while employees face longer job hunts and rethink how and where they work.
Higher expectations, more side gigs
Pavel Shynkarenko
With talent flooding the market, candidates are demanding more flexibility and clearer growth paths, even as many accept contract work or lower pay to stay employed. The typical job search now stretches six to seven months, even longer for those needing visas or relocation. That uncertainty has fueled a surge in freelancing and side projects.
Bankrate reports that 36% of American adults now have a side gig, with more than half of them having started in the past two years. While many professionals didn’t plan to freelance, they turned to it because they had no other choice. For some, it has proved liberating, with confidence and job satisfaction rising compared with corporate roles, according to our internal data.
Despite all the buzz in the media and even on Reddit, overemployment — the trend of holding two jobs — remains a niche phenomenon, affecting roughly 5% of workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The more common pattern is a mix of contract work and short-term projects, which gives startups a chance to hire A-level talent for fractional roles they couldn’t have afforded before.
Smaller, sharper teams
Payroll is every startup’s biggest cost, and founders are trimming teams while raising output per employee. The examples are striking. Midjourney reports about $200 million in ARR with a staff of only 11.
This lean approach is spreading beyond early-stage ventures. Around 90% of tech executives say they are open to hiring freelancers during peak workloads; more than 28% already integrate them into daily operations. As this makes clear, smaller core teams, supplemented by trusted project-based workers, can move faster and spend less.
Opportunity on both sides
For workers, the takeaway is that startups may now be the safer bet. Mid-sized firms that once promised stability are cutting jobs, while startups are candid about their risks and can reward performance with equity or future roles. A short contract can become a long-term stake.
On the other hand, for founders, today’s market is a chance to recruit top engineers, designers and operators at terms that were impossible two years ago. It also demands a new mindset involving compensation flexibility, project-based roles and hiring processes built for speed.
All in all, the second wave of layoffs has changed expectations and shifted supply and demand in the job market. Workers are blending traditional jobs with side gigs, and startups are proving that small, focused teams can out-execute much larger competitors.
On both sides, adaptability is now the ultimate advantage; companies that remain nimble will win.
Pavel Shynkarenko, founder and CEO of Mellow, is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience, and a freelance economy pioneer who aims to transform how companies engage with contractors. In 2014, Shynkarenko launched his first HR tech company, Solar Staff, a fintech payroll company for freelancers, which showed $10 million-plus in revenue for 2022 and 2023. In early 2024, responding to the growing demand for specialized solutions for long-term interaction with contractors, Solar Staff, as a global company, pivoted to Mellow ($1 million MRR).
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