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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaders in the Pacific Northwest are largely bullish on the region’s continued economic success — but one threat to the region’s fiscal progress worries them in particular.

“What always strikes me, whether I’m in City Hall in Vancouver or Seattle or Portland, is that everybody talks about the same thing — the high cost of housing,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith at this week’s Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle.

“It’s become an enormous barrier, not just for attracting new talent, but for enabling teachers and police officers and nurses and firefighters to live in the communities in which they serve,” he added.

Dr. Tom Lynch, president and director of Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center, was more succinct.

“My people can’t find places to live,” Lynch said during a Tuesday panel at the same event.

Those concerns are bolstered by research in a new report on the economic viability of the corridor running from Vancouver, B.C., through Seattle to Portland.

Housing costs were cited as one of the top threats to the region’s success, noting that Vancouver’s housing-cost-to-income-ratio disparity is among the worst in the world, while in Seattle median home prices relative to wages have doubled in the past 15 years. Portland reports a net out-migration as workers move to more affordable areas.

Other concerns include rising business costs and regulations, declining numbers of skilled workers and new restrictions on foreign talent immigrating to the U.S., and clean energy shortages.

“We’ve got to find ways to be able to increase the density of our housing, come up with creative solutions for allowing more families to be able to live close to where the jobs are,” Lynch said.

Smith agreed, adding, “The only way to dig ourselves out of this is to harness the power of the market through public-private partnerships, to recognize that zoning and permitting needs to be put to work to accelerate investment.”

Area tech giants have been pursuing those partnerships to tackle the challenge.

In 2019, Microsoft pledged $750 million to boost the affordable housing inventory and has helped build or retain 12,000 units in the region. Amazon in recent years has committed $3.4 billion for housing across three hubs nationally where it has large operations. The company in September celebrated a milestone of building or preserving 10,000 units in the Seattle area.

Despite the efforts, Smith said the shortage keeps worsening and in 2025, new construction starts are expected to be the lowest since before the Great Recession.

The city of Seattle, for one, is looking to sweeten a property-tax exemption deal for developers that could encourage construction and it’s also applying AI to permitting process in an effort to speed up projects.

Smith also promoted the long-held vision of a high-speed rail line in the Pacific Northwest that would make commutes much faster between growing urban hubs. But a panel Wednesday cautioned that dream is still many years out.

An outage on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services Wednesday morning disrupted operations for customers worldwide including Alaska Airlines, Xbox users and Microsoft 365 subscribers.

The incident came just ahead of Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call today and follows last week’s outage at Amazon Web Services and a failure of Alaska Airlines’ own data center technology.

The latest outage struck at 9 a.m. PT, according to Microsoft, when the system “began experiencing Azure Front Door (AFD) issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue.

“We are taking several concurrent actions: Firstly, where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services, this includes customer configuration changes as well. At the same time, we are rolling back our AFD configuration to our last known good state,” the company stated. “As we rollback we want to ensure that the problematic configuration doesn’t re-initiate upon recovery.”

Alaska Airlines posted on X at 10:33 a.m., explaining that the Azure outage was disrupting systems including their website function. Passengers flying on Alaska and Hawaiian airlines who were unable to check-in online were directed to airline agents to receive their boarding passes.

“We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we navigate this issue,” the post said.

Microsoft did not indicate when the outage would be resolved.

“We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update,” the company posted at 10:51 a.m.

UPDATE: At 12:22 p.m. the company shared an update stating it had deployed the “last known good” configuration of the impacted system and customers should start seeing improvements. “[W]e anticipate full mitigation within the next four hours as we continue to recover nodes …. We will provide another update on our progress within two hours, or sooner if warranted,” Microsoft added.

Days after its outage last week, AWS offered a detailed explanation of the event, which was caused by a cascading failure triggered by a rare software bug in one of the company’s most critical systems. The disruption impacted sites and online services around the world.

Alaska Airlines attributed its recent outage to a failure at its primary data center. The company operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms. The incident disrupted travel for more than 49,000 passengers.

It’s rare for a tech executive to cue up a video mocking themselves — but that’s just what Microsoft President Brad Smith did on Tuesday at the Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle. Smith played a clip from The Daily Show in which comedian Jon Stewart lampooned his and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s interviews about AI’s impact on jobs.

The segment poked fun at the idea that displaced workers might become “prompt engineers” — a new job Stewart rebranded as “types questions guy.”

It was a self-aware feature of a talk that balanced enthusiasm for artificial intelligence’s potential with sober reflections on its hype and potential pitfalls.

The Microsoft leader called AI the “next great general purpose technology” on par with electricity. He said AI will transform sectors including health, education, biotech, aerospace, agriculture, climate and others.

That was a theme during Tuesday’s event. Former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, who leads the Cascadia Innovation Corridor group, kicked off the day by calling AI “a defining technology of our generation.”

Smith, who in his three decades at Microsoft has witnessed tech bubbles and bursts, also offered a “breadth of perspective” on AI that he hinted might be lacking in Silicon Valley.

“In so many ways, the sky is the limit,” Smith said. “That is exciting, but I don’t want to just be another tech bro who says, ‘Hey, great, here it comes. Get ready, get out your wallet.'”

AI-driven employment threats are becoming increasingly real in the tech sector and beyond. Amazon on Tuesday announced a huge round of layoffs, slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs. Earlier this year Microsoft laid off 15,000 employees worldwide. The cuts aren’t all tied to AI, but many executives are talking about worker efficiency gains thanks to the tech.

Despite the recent layoffs, many industry and elected leaders in the Cascadia region, which stretches from Vancouver, B.C., through Seattle and down to Portland, see AI as a promising economic engine that can build on the area’s strong tech foundation. That includes Microsoft and Amazon as well as a growing slate of AI startups, plus institutions such as the University of Washington, University of British Columbia, Allen Institute for AI and others.

But Smith — who manages to strike a persona blending tech evangelist, politician and favorite uncle — also acknowledged concerns about disparities in AI access, whether looking locally at rural versus urban divides, or the gap between AI use in affluent and low-income countries that lack widespread electricity and internet connections.

He also tackled the meta questions around the responsible use of AI and encouraged society to get out in front of the technology with appropriate guardrails.

“What are we trying to do as an industry, as a region, as a planet, as a species? Are we trying to build machines that are better than people? Are we trying to build machines that will help people become smarter and better?” he asked.

“If the experience that we’ve all had with social media over the last 15 years teaches us anything at all,” Smith continued, “it is that the best time to ask these questions and to debate them is before technology answers them for us.”

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