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June 29, 2024 - 05:48 PM
Transcript: Here’s what Bill Gates told lawmakers in his recent Epstein testimony

Transcript: Here’s what Bill Gates told lawmakers in his recent Epstein testimony

June 24, 2026

Bill Gates speaks in Seattle in early 2020. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) The U.S. House Oversight Committee on Tuesday released the transcript of a closed-door interview in which Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates answered lawmakers’ questions about his ties to the late convicted sex...

Syndio bets on agentic AI with first acquisition in Seattle pay equity startup’s history

Syndio bets on agentic AI with first acquisition in Seattle pay equity startup’s history

June 24, 2026

Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio. (Syndio Photo) For the first time in its nine-year history, Syndio has made an acquisition. The Seattle-based pay equity startup announced Tuesday that it acquired Embrace.ai, an agentic AI startup whose founders and technology will help Syndio build out its...

General Fusion announces first steps to deploying its clean energy in Italy as tech uncertainty remains

General Fusion announces first steps to deploying its clean energy in Italy as tech uncertainty remains

June 24, 2026

General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26, its fusion demo device. (General Fusion Photo) British Columbia-based General Fusion announced Wednesday a partnership with energy infrastructure company Renexia to begin planning the deployment of a commercial version of its clean energy technology in...

‘Digit’ maker Agility Robotics to go public in $2.5B deal — here’s what the filings say about its finances

‘Digit’ maker Agility Robotics to go public in $2.5B deal — here’s what the filings say about its finances

June 24, 2026

Agility Robotics’ humanoid robot Digit carries a tote. (Agility Robotics Photo) Salem, Ore.-based Agility Robotics, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, beating its...

Microsoft says its data centers use 90% less water than its earliest facilities as public concern grows

Microsoft says its data centers use 90% less water than its earliest facilities as public concern grows

June 24, 2026

Aerial view of Microsoft data center campus in Wisconsin. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft announced Wednesday that over the past two decades, it has become dramatically more efficient in its use of water to cool data centers, slashing its consumption rate by 90% compared to levels when it opened its...

Moment of ‘Zen’: Another billionaire’s superyacht turns heads in Seattle

Moment of ‘Zen’: Another billionaire’s superyacht turns heads in Seattle

June 23, 2026

The superyacht Zen arrives in the Ballard Locks in Seattle on Tuesday evening. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) It’s 100 feet shorter and $100 million cheaper than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht, but another billionaire’s ship had no trouble drawing attention in Seattle on...

Seattle-area young entrepreneurs capture third-straight win in global TiE startup pitch contest

Seattle-area young entrepreneurs capture third-straight win in global TiE startup pitch contest

June 23, 2026

Team DuggAI, from left: Ashish Naik, Shaurya Duggal and Kruthik Ankam, hoist the championship trophy at the 2026 TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) Global Pitch Competition in Bellevue, Wash. (TYE Photo) A team of Seattle-area high school students won the 2026 TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) Global...

Lime rides World Cup fever in Seattle to single-day trip record during USA vs. Australia match

Lime rides World Cup fever in Seattle to single-day trip record during USA vs. Australia match

June 23, 2026

Seattle Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch, center, rides a Lime Glider in downtown Seattle during the march to the match ahead of the USA vs. Australia FIFA World Cup contest on Friday, June 19. (Seattle Department of Transportation Photo) Lime went full Beastmode for last Friday’s FIFA World Cup...

Microsoft’s next big thing for the cloud: an agent that keeps its cool when everything falls apart

Microsoft’s next big thing for the cloud: an agent that keeps its cool when everything falls apart

June 23, 2026

Brendan Burns, Microsoft technical fellow and a co-founder of Kubernetes. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft is promising relief to engineers who get woken up at 3 a.m. for outages and other cloud glitches: an agent informed by its years of experience running Azure, designed to diagnose whatever’s...

Tech Moves: Microsoft names exec; Remitly CPO/CTO departs; AWS veteran to head Synthesia in Seattle

Tech Moves: Microsoft names exec; Remitly CPO/CTO departs; AWS veteran to head Synthesia in Seattle

June 23, 2026

Mike Jackson. (LinkedIn Photo) — Mike Jackson has been promoted to chief digital safety officer at Microsoft, a role within the company’s Trusted Technology Group that includes oversight of children’s safety, tech responsibility and international regulatory work. In a LinkedIn post, he called...

This 3-foot-tall robot wants to be your kid’s classroom buddy and your mom’s new friend

This 3-foot-tall robot wants to be your kid’s classroom buddy and your mom’s new friend

June 23, 2026

A prototype of Codey, a humanoid social robot developed by Seattle-area startup Mind Children Robotics. (Mind Children Photos) At a recent robotics event in New York, a young girl hid behind her mother when she first saw Codey. The robot broke the ice by complimenting the girl’s shirt, and 45...

Surprise: Valve’s new Steam Machine is here, but the price is the real shocker

Surprise: Valve’s new Steam Machine is here, but the price is the real shocker

June 22, 2026

The Steam Machine 2026: a full gaming PC in a six-inch black cube. (Valve Software press image) Valve Software abruptly opened reservations for its latest Steam Machine on Monday, but due to the ongoing PC component shortage, did so at a significantly higher price than expected. The company,...

Building a ‘digital twin’ 10,000 feet underground: PNNL, Nvidia and Fervo team up on geothermal AI

Building a ‘digital twin’ 10,000 feet underground: PNNL, Nvidia and Fervo team up on geothermal AI

June 22, 2026

Fervo Energy’s Cape Station geothermal energy plant in Utah should start producing power this year. (Fervo Photo) The idea is so simple: generating power from the heat trapped beneath the Earth’s crust. It’s clean, renewable and potentially abundant. The challenge is how to map what lies beneath...

Amazon MGM Studios drops film about Sam Altman months after tech giant’s $50B OpenAI deal

Amazon MGM Studios drops film about Sam Altman months after tech giant’s $50B OpenAI deal

June 22, 2026

Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon’s latest film drama isn’t a movie that it’s producing or streaming, but rather the situation surrounding a project it has dropped. Amazon MGM Studios has backed away from “Artificial,” a nearly...

Riding the clean energy waves: How Sila’s Gene Berdichevsky built a next-gen battery powerhouse

Riding the clean energy waves: How Sila’s Gene Berdichevsky built a next-gen battery powerhouse

June 22, 2026

Sila CEO and co-founder Gene Berdichevsky, left, and Chris Dougher, Sila’s VP of operations, at the startup’s Moses Lake facility. (Sila Photo) Sila raised its first round of funding in September 2011 — the same month solar power manufacturer Solyndra went bankrupt, sullying the sustainability...

Etzioni on AI: What the World Cup tells us about the best roles for humans and machines

Etzioni on AI: What the World Cup tells us about the best roles for humans and machines

June 21, 2026

Pregame ceremonies in Seattle on June 19, 2026, before the U.S.-Australia World Cup Group D match. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook) In soccer, a single blown offside call can decide who advances and who goes home. But what can you do? Referees are only human. Well, the 2026 World Cup has put...

Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 14, 2026

Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 14, 2026

June 21, 2026

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 14, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...

Anthropic, Amazon, and the Fable shutdown; AI-powered school arrives; World Cup tech

Anthropic, Amazon, and the Fable shutdown; AI-powered school arrives; World Cup tech

June 20, 2026

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Anthropic takes its most powerful models offline after a U.S. order, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly contributing to the concerns that helped trigger it. We talk about what it was like to use one of those models, Claude Fable, while it was available, and...

Worlds collide at Amazon Spheres as pro-Palestinian group protests cloud giant’s Israel contracts

Worlds collide at Amazon Spheres as pro-Palestinian group protests cloud giant’s Israel contracts

June 19, 2026

Protesters outside the Spheres on Amazon’s Seattle campus Thursday evening. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Carrying bullhorns and signs depicting Amazon executives as war criminals, about two dozen people protested outside the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Thursday evening, calling on the company...

Amazon employees file civil rights complaint over company probe into data center testimony

Amazon employees file civil rights complaint over company probe into data center testimony

June 18, 2026

GeekWire File Photo An employee group filed a civil rights complaint against Amazon with the City of Seattle on Thursday on behalf of three engineers who allege that the company is wrongly investigating them for testifying before the Seattle City Council in favor of regulating data centers....

No billboard needed: This Seattle startup scored World Cup airtime with a scrappy cardboard sign

No billboard needed: This Seattle startup scored World Cup airtime with a scrappy cardboard sign

June 18, 2026

A Yoodli.ai cardboard sign is visible at right during Fox’s FIFA World Cup broadcast on Thursday from Seattle, featuring, from left, Rob Stone, Stu Holden, Clint Dempsey, and Alexi Lalas. (Screen grab via Fox Sports) When a startup town turns into a soccer town attracting worldwide attention,...

This startup wants to move kidney care out of the fax-machine era

This startup wants to move kidney care out of the fax-machine era

June 18, 2026

Apacendo Health co-founders Chong Sun, left, and Jonathan Lin. (Apacendo Health Photo) Each year, more than 130,000 people reach kidney failure. It’s the most advanced and expensive stage of a disease that affects 37 million Americans, 90% of whom don’t know they have it. The tools being used...

Tech Moves: Seattle tech exec Brian Hall joins Mistral; Amazon departures; new Dropzone AI leader

Tech Moves: Seattle tech exec Brian Hall joins Mistral; Amazon departures; new Dropzone AI leader

June 18, 2026

Brian Hall (LinkedIn Photo) — Former Microsoft, Amazon and Google exec Brian Hall is now chief marketing officer for Mistral — and he’s bullish on the move. “I think this could be the most interesting marketing job in the world,” Hall said on LinkedIn. Mistral is a Paris-based enterprise AI...

Seattle’s AI2 Incubator rebrands as AI House, and adds key investor as managing director

Seattle’s AI2 Incubator rebrands as AI House, and adds key investor as managing director

June 18, 2026

The managing directors of Seattle’s AI House, from left: Yifan Zhang, Jacob Colker, and Sri Chandrasekar. (AI House Photo) AI2 Incubator has spent the past 12 years building AI companies in Seattle. Now it’s taking the name of the community it built around that work, rebranding today as AI House...

Gradial raises $65M as startup sees rapid growth around agentic tools for enterprise marketing

Gradial raises $65M as startup sees rapid growth around agentic tools for enterprise marketing

June 18, 2026

Gradial co-founders, from left: Anish Chadalavada, Deip Kumar, Doug Tallmadge, and Anup Chamrajnagar. (Gradial Photo) Seattle startup Gradial continued its hot funding streak, raising another $65 million for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing. The Series C round was...

Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis exits Microsoft to launch stealth startup aiming to reinvent AI supply chain

Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis exits Microsoft to launch stealth startup aiming to reinvent AI supply chain

June 18, 2026

Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of Convoy, is launching a stealth AI startup after leaving Microsoft. (GeekWire File Photo) Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of the online freight marketplace Convoy, has left Microsoft to start a new company focused on one of the most expensive problems...

Devplan raises $2.5M to take on the product coordination work that AI coding is leaving behind

Devplan raises $2.5M to take on the product coordination work that AI coding is leaving behind

June 18, 2026

Devplan co-founders Chris Bee, CEO, left, and Anton Safonov, CTO. (Devplan Photo) Devplan, a Seattle startup trying to automate away the meetings and status reports that eat up a product team’s week, is coming out of stealth Thursday with $2.5 million in seed funding. The company, founded by...

Loss of another Seattle-area billionaire? Valve’s Gabe Newell is reported buyer of Florida estate

Loss of another Seattle-area billionaire? Valve’s Gabe Newell is reported buyer of Florida estate

June 17, 2026

Is video-game industry leader Gabe Newell getting ready to vacate the Seattle area for sunny South Florida like some of his billionaire contemporaries? Reports of a luxury property purchase raise the question. According to The Wall Street Journal, Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve Corp.,...

Seattle biotech heavy-hitters emerge from stealth with $46M for next-gen migraine treatments

Seattle biotech heavy-hitters emerge from stealth with $46M for next-gen migraine treatments

June 17, 2026

Vedana’s lealdership team, from left: Dr. Rob Lenz, board chair; Leon Garcia, co-founder and chief scientific officer; Anurag Agarwal, co-founder and CEO; and Dr. Ernesto Aycardi, chief medical officer. (Vedana Photo) Vedana Therapeutics, a Seattle-based startup aiming to prevent migraine...

Amazon unveils new AI agents, trying to thread the needle between autonomy and human control

Amazon unveils new AI agents, trying to thread the needle between autonomy and human control

June 17, 2026

Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, shows the Amazon Quick knowledge graph at the AWS Summit in New York. (Screenshot via live stream) Amazon Web Services is announcing a new set of AI agents for businesses, developers, and individual users, capable of everything from fixing security...

Selling sunshine from Seattle: Solius raises $23M to launch new at-home light-therapy device

Selling sunshine from Seattle: Solius raises $23M to launch new at-home light-therapy device

June 17, 2026

The Solius Pro hangs on a wall, scans a user’s skin and directs appropriate UVB light therapy. (Solius Photo) A Seattle-area startup that once asked people to step inside a glowing kiosk for light therapy is now bringing that same technology into the home. Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based...

Not just for coders: UW’s upcoming AI minor will reach beyond the computer science school

Not just for coders: UW’s upcoming AI minor will reach beyond the computer science school

June 17, 2026

Magda Balazinska, director of the UW Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, at an event last year. (GeekWire Photo) As students, teachers and employers wrestle with the demands of an increasingly AI-powered world, the University of Washington has a new proposition: an interdisciplinary...

Why startup vet Robbie Cape chose insurance — a tough VC, a trillion-dollar market and the money

Why startup vet Robbie Cape chose insurance — a tough VC, a trillion-dollar market and the money

June 16, 2026

Robbie Cape, then CEO of virtual primary care startup 98point6, accepts the award for Health Innovation of the Year at the GeekWire Awards in 2019. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Robbie Cape has been hinting for months that something was coming. Now he’s ready to say what it is. The...

Egypt and Belgium tied, but drones grab a World Cup win over Seattle with lighted scoreboard

Egypt and Belgium tied, but drones grab a World Cup win over Seattle with lighted scoreboard

June 16, 2026

The flags of Belgium, left, and Egypt are represented in the night sky near the Space Needle in Seattle after the teams tied 1-1 in a FIFA World Cup match on Monday. (Roman Yuferev Photo) Egypt and Belgium played to a 1-1 draw in a FIFA World Cup matchup in Seattle on Monday. Fans who looked to...

Next-gen nuclear company TerraPower plants flag in UK

Next-gen nuclear company TerraPower plants flag in UK

June 16, 2026

TerraPower’s lab tests the equipment and processes for next-generation nuclear reactors. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) TerraPower, the Bellevue, Wash.-based nuclear energy company, announced Tuesday the opening of a subsidiary office in the United Kingdom as it pursues its first...

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