NEWS

LauncherOne lights up its rocket engine after its release from a carrier airplane. (Virgin Orbit Photo) Eight months after an unsuccessful first attempt, Virgin Orbit finally lived up to its name today and used an innovative air-launch system to put 10 satellites in orbit. With backing from British...

Shuffle co-founders Chris Watts (left) and Mathew Lee. (David Rzegocki Photo) Two years ago, while Matthew Lee was on a sabbatical between jobs, he reflected on his career highlights. “There are certain jobs that I had that I really loved, and some were just a job,” Lee said. “The key component was...

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 Jan. 10, 2021. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...

(Vrbo homepage image) Update: This story has been updated with new details from Expedia. See below. Vrbo, the vacation rental platform run by Seattle-based Expedia Group, is getting some blowback online for not following the lead of competitor Airbnb, which announced this week that it was blocking...

Raghu Gollamudi. (Included Photo) Five years ago, when data privacy was just emerging as one of the most challenging business risks, Raghu Gollamudi spotted a trend. With new rules for tighter consumer privacy protection looming, freshly appointed chief privacy officers often lacked tools to manage...

President Donald Trump in Texas on Tuesday, boarding Air Force One en route to Maryland. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Flickr.) Twitter didn’t set out to ban Donald Trump. The president gave it no choice. That’s the assessment from Mike Davidson, a Seattle-based tech and...

Employees from the Armoire team, before social distancing. (Armoire Photo) Like many tech startups, when the pandemic hit the U.S., Armoire braced for impact. Its clothing subscription rental business had its best month in February, but suddenly faced several headwinds. People no longer needed new...

Seattle’s economy is now ranked 10th in the U.S. by GDP. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) The Seattle region continues to boom. The regional economy — encompassing Tacoma, Everett, Seattle, Redmond and Bellevue — boasts a gross domestic product of $383 billion, according to an analysis by Greater...

Gemma Labs CEO Allison Harr. (Gemma Labs Photo) Gemma Labs is raising cash to support increasing demand for its Gemmist custom shampoo service. The Seattle startup reeled in a $2.75 million round from PSL Ventures and other investors. Gemma Labs spun out of Pioneer Square Labs’ startup studio more...

Bill Gates during a talk in Seattle last year. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) A new report on the largest holders of private farmland in the United States reveals that Bill and Melinda Gates are atop the list, with the billionaire Seattle couple amassing 242,000 acres of land. According to The Land...

Matt Ehrlichman, Porch founder and CEO. (Porch Group Photo) Three weeks after its stock market debut, Seattle-based home services technology company Porch Group announced four acquisitions, including an agreement to buy Irving, Texas-based insurance company Homeowners of America for $100 million in...

3X4 Genetics co-founders Jason Haddock, left, and Yael Joffe. (3X4 Genetics Photo) Jason Haddock had big plans for the rollout of his health tech startup in the U.S. The CEO of 3X4 Genetics, a South African genetic testing company, had attracted an investor with sizable funding and developed a...

A cockpit view shows the Blue Angels conducting a training flight with F/A-18 Super Hornets. (U.S. Navy Photo / Cody Hendrix) The U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels had to pass up their traditional Seafair air show in Seattle last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, but assuming the all-clear is given, they...

Valerie Daggett, founder and CEO of AltPep. (UW Photo) AltPep, a Seattle-based biotech startup tackling amyloid protein disorders, has raised $23.1 million in a Series A funding round. The venture spun out the University of Washington in March 2019. Its founder and CEO is Valerie Daggett, a...

Raj Singh, CEO of Accolade, speaks at the GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong) Seattle-based Accolade announced Thursday that it will pay $460 million to acquire 2nd.MD, a Houston, Texas-based company that helps patients get expert medical opinions by video or phone. (2nd.MD...

Steam’s user community broke a lot of records during the socially-quarantined year of 2020. (Valve Software image) Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software posted its latest year in review for Steam, its online gaming storefront. It provides a look back on 2020, as well as a roadmap for what’s coming...

Keith McCall. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong) Keith McCall is diving deeper into the intersection of wine and tech. The Seattle tech vet recently acquired and took over operations at everyvine, an 8-year-old site that is used by vineyards to market and sell their wine grapes and products. McCall...

Roshanak Roshandel, former chair of Seattle University’s Computer Science and Software Engineering Department. (Yosef Kalinko / Seattle University Photo) Amazon is making a significant donation to Seattle University to create an endowed chair to lead its Computer Science Department, a move that...

Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship ascends from its West Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture put the New Shepard spaceship that’s destined to fly people on suborbital trips through its first uncrewed test flight today — and by all...

The Worksphere platform enables employees and organizations to manage and automate tasks related to scheduling, office capacity and more. (Worksphere Image) If and when workers return to offices in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new Seattle startup called Worksphere is looking to make the...

iSpot CEO Sean Muller. (iSpot Photo) Seattle-area startup iSpot is beefing up its technology platform that measures TV advertisement performance with the acquisition of Los Angeles-based Ace Metrix. The two companies are similar, both offering software to help brands figure out the effectiveness of...

When the pandemic hit the U.S. earlier this year and tech companies began laying off thousands of employees, analysts warned of a bumpy ride ahead for startups and venture capital investment. To say the industry stabilized would be an understatement. New Q4 numbers from the latest PitchBook-NVCA...

(PATH screenshot) Say you’re a health ministry staffer for a small country in the developing world or a health department leader in a tiny American county. Your boss has just assigned you to evaluate the more than 1,000 COVID-19 diagnostic tests available worldwide and make a recommendation on...

Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule is designed to send up to six people to the edge of space and back. (Blue Origin Photoillustration) Update: The uncrewed test flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship has been rescheduled for launch at 10:57 a.m. CT (8:57 a.m. PT). Previously:...

Former Amazon Books VP Jennifer Cast stands inside Amazon’s first physical retail location in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) If you follow Amazon, you know the company operates not just with a customer focus, but with a customer obsession. Indeed, customer obsession is the first of Amazon’s 14...

(GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Costco announced Wednesday that it will no longer operate photo departments at its stores, bowing to the rise of smartphones, social media and digital photo sharing. The Washington-based warehouse-style retailer, which operates more than 500 U.S. stores, said in an...

OwnTrails co-founders Kt McBratney (left) and Rebekah Bastian. Bastian has proposed a new term for capturing an emerging tech business model called “authentech.” (OwnTrails Photo) The world of tech loves innovation and thinking outside of the box. Except, perhaps, when it comes to fundraising. As...

Sana CEO Steve Harr (Sana photo) Less than three years after it was founded and with no revenue on the books, Sana Biotechnology filed to go public on Wednesday in what would be the latest Seattle biotech company to test the waters on Wall Street. It plans to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SANA,...

The 2015 GeekWire “Future Innovators” during 2020 Zoom calls, clockwise from top left, Tanner, Rebecca, Marcus and Annabelle. (GeekWire Photos) Five years ago, budding 11-year-old Seattle scientist Rebecca Yeung was launching a homemade spacecraft high above Earth. The exploits with her sister...

Secure co-founders Devin Miller (left) and Bassam Saliba. (Secure Photos) Investors are betting on Secure, a new Seattle-area startup riding a trend of increased interest in emergency savings accounts amid the pandemic. The company raised a $3.5 million seed round led by SeaChange Fund; other...

(BigStock Photo) Update: Parler on Wednesday filed its response to Amazon’s brief. The company claims it was blindsided by Amazon’s suspension and asks the court to grant its request for a temporary restraining order. See the full response here. Original story: Amazon defended its decision to...

Michael “Luni” Libes, founder of Fledge. (Fledge Photo) Folks curious about making angel investments in promising startups can sign up for online training through the new Angel Accelerator program. The training is offered through Fledge, a Seattle-based worldwide network of accelerators, investors...

Skip Battle. (Global Ventures Photo) — George “Skip” Battle, the former CEO of AskJeeves, has resigned from Expedia Group’s board of directors. He originally joined the travel company’s board in 2005. Battle is a longtime board member at Netflix, LinkedIn and OpenTable. He is a senior fellow at the...

Insitu built the ScanEagle drone for long-duration U.S. Navy missions. (Insitu Photo) Bingen, Wash.-based Insitu, a Boeing subsidiary, has agreed to pay $25 million to settle allegations that it used recycled parts rather than new parts in military drones, the Justice Department announced...

Dr. Joshua Schiffer (third from left) and E. Fabian Cardozo-Ojeda (far right) led research published on Tuesday that provides mathematical models on strategies for optimizing treatment for HIV. (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Photo) In the nearly four decades since HIV was discovered, only...