seattle-startup
(18)
Gabriel Jones
Gabriel Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Proprio, a Seattle medtech company building AI-powered surgical navigation. Its FDA-cleared Paradigm platform combines light-field imaging, real-time AI, and 3D visualization to give surgeons dynamic spatial awareness during spine procedures. Jones took an unusual path to medtech - engineering study in Japan, civil engineering at Taisei, Wall Street M&A, and work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - before co-founding Proprio in 2016 with a neurosurgeon, a robotics professor, and a computer vision specialist. He frames the mission around a single question: is it possible to do well and do good?
Elizabeth Liu
Elizabeth Liu is the CEO of Crowd Cow, the Seattle-based online marketplace that connects independent farms and fisheries directly with people who want to know where their meat and seafood comes from. She has been with the company since its earliest days, rising from category and operations roles to VP of Marketing before taking the top job in February 2023 when co-founder Joe Heitzeberg stepped down. Before Crowd Cow she spent roughly 15 years in direct-to-consumer and marketplace commerce, including marketing director at Wayfair, payments product manager at Amazon, and business development at Zulily. She holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and mentors early-stage founders through Techstars.
Jason Kowalski
Jason Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of ProductWind, an influencer technology platform built for brands that sell on online retailers like Amazon and Walmart. A former Amazon product lead who built the retailer's self-service marketing platform, Kowalski started ProductWind in 2020 on a contrarian idea: brands should market to retail algorithms, not just shoppers. The company coordinates thousands of micro-influencers to move e-commerce metrics that matter to those algorithms - sales velocity, reviews, organic placement, and Best Seller Rank - rather than chasing likes and reach. Bootstrapped and profitable from day one, ProductWind grew revenue tenfold before raising a total of roughly $5.17M in seed funding.
Alejandro Castellano
Alejandro Castellano is the co-founder and CEO of Caddi, a Seattle AI startup that turns a screen recording of someone doing their job into working, API-driven automation - a method the company calls 'record-to-code' or 'automation by demonstration.' Born in Lima, Peru, where he wanted to be an inventor, he started his first company at 19, learned to scale businesses inside a family office he calls his 'on-the-streets MBA,' then earned a master's at Cornell Tech focused on computer vision and machine learning. Caddi emerged from the AI2 Incubator and raised a $5M seed round in 2025 to free lawyers, accountants and financial advisors from repetitive back-office work.
Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
Andrew Fritts
Andrew Fritts is the CEO of Augment AI, a Seattle seed-stage startup building a 'Relationship Operating System' that pulls meetings, calls, notes, CRM data, Slack threads and buyer resources into a shared Decision Site so deals stop living in someone's inbox. A Dartmouth English and Government grad with 25-plus years running sales teams at firms like Accenture and N3, he's the rare sales lifer arguing that the salesperson should stop being the hero. His pitch, repeated across CustomerThink and SalesTechStar columns, is to flip B2B into 'Business with Business' (BwB): elevate the buyer, organize the chaos, and let AI handle the busywork so trust does the selling.
Benji Barash
Benji Barash is the co-founder and CEO of Roboto AI, a Seattle startup building an analytics platform for robotics and physical AI. A former engineering leader on Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery program, he spent his Amazon days writing throwaway scripts to wrangle sensor logs - and turned that frustration into a company. After more than six years at Amazon and a year as entrepreneur-in-residence at the Allen Institute for AI, he and CTO Yves Albers-Schoenberg launched Roboto out of stealth in 2023 with a $4.8M seed round, on the conviction that robotics doesn't have an algorithm problem, it has a data problem.
David Aronchick
David Aronchick is the co-founder and CEO of Expanso, the Seattle company commercializing Bacalhau, an open-source platform that moves computation to where data already lives instead of hauling data to the cloud. A 4x founder, he helped launch Google Kubernetes Engine, co-founded the Kubeflow machine learning project, led open source ML strategy at Microsoft Azure, and ran Compute over Data at Protocol Labs. His through-line is a stubborn belief that technology is not neutral and that distributed systems should make computing cheaper, more private, and more useful at the edge.
Emily Choi-Greene
Emily Choi-Greene is the co-founder and CEO of Clearly AI, a Y Combinator (S24) startup in Seattle that automates the slow, paperwork-heavy security and privacy reviews enterprises dread. She spent five years at Amazon leading Alexa AI Security and later owned data security and privacy at Moveworks, performing hundreds of reviews by hand before building the tool she wished she had. A Dartmouth computer scientist who graduated with High Honors, she runs the company alongside her husband and CTO Joe Choi-Greene, whom she met in 2019 over an Alexa security review. Clearly AI has raised roughly $8.4M and counts Fortune 500s and global brands among its early users.
Max Sim
Max Jai Sim is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow AI, a Seattle startup that uses multimodal AI - computer vision, natural language, and operational data - to give restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical locations and to automate the manual 'secret shopper' audits chains still run by hand. A Harvard-trained applied physicist, he previously co-founded the home-closing startup Modus, acquired by Compass in 2020, and earlier worked at T-Mobile and the lunch-delivery startup Peach. Meadow emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $6M raised, including a $4.5M seed round, and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Samuel Adeyemo
Samuel Adeyemo is the co-founder and CEO of Duranta, a Seattle software company building AI tools that help landscapers and lawn care businesses measure properties, design projects, and win contracts. Born in Nairobi and trained in finance at JP Morgan before pivoting to climate tech, he previously co-founded Aurora Solar, the solar design platform that grew to a reported $2 billion valuation and powers a large share of the U.S. residential solar market. In 2025 he raised a $7 million seed round for Duranta, backed by Base10 Partners, Pear, and angels including GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. His through-line is taking the unglamorous back-office work of physical-world trades and turning it into software.
Yunhao Jiao
Yunhao Jiao is the co-founder and CEO of TestSprite, a Seattle startup building an autonomous AI testing agent that aims to be the verification layer for AI-generated code. A competitive programmer turned AWS engineer, he left a five-year run at Amazon after a single production regression on an on-call shift convinced him that verification, not generation, had become software's weakest link. Since founding TestSprite in 2023 with Shawnie Shan and Rui Li, he has grown it to roughly 100,000 developers and raised about $8.1 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, led most recently by Trilogy Equity Partners.
Zheqing (Bill) Zhu
Zheqing (Bill) Zhu is the founder and CEO of Pokee AI, a Bellevue, Washington startup building foundation AI agents that plan, reason, and use thousands of tools to execute real online workflows. A Stanford PhD in reinforcement learning, he previously led the Applied Reinforcement Learning team at Meta AI, where he shipped the open-source Pearl platform and RL systems credited with over $500M in annual revenue impact. In 2025 Pokee AI raised a $12M seed round, 3x oversubscribed, led by Point72 Ventures with backing from Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and angels including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Atai Barkai
Atai Barkai is the co-founder and CEO of CopilotKit, the Seattle-based open-source company building the interface layer between humans and AI agents. He and his brother Uli created AG-UI, an open protocol now adopted by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and major AI frameworks, with millions of weekly downloads. A physicist by training who pivoted into developer infrastructure at Meta and Doximity, Barkai bet early - during the GPT-3.5 era - that humans and agents would build software together, and is now turning that bet into the standard for how AI agents talk to the apps people actually use.
Doug Tallmadge
Doug Tallmadge is the co-founder and CEO of Gradial, a Seattle enterprise-AI company building agentic tools that automate the unglamorous middle of marketing - the approvals, tagging, compliance checks, and publishing that sit between a finished idea and a live campaign. Before Gradial, he spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a software engineering manager, where he helped scale the Starlink network from zero to more than 500,000 customers. A Dartmouth physics graduate who also passed through Lockheed Martin and Bridgewater Associates, he started Gradial in 2023 with three Dartmouth classmates and has since raised roughly $53M across seed, Series A, and a $35M Series B led by VMG Partners.
Edward Wu
Edward Wu is the founder and CEO of Dropzone AI, a Seattle company building autonomous AI agents that investigate security alerts like a tier-1 SOC analyst. After eight years at ExtraHop Networks leading AI/ML detection engineering and dropping out of a computer science Ph.D. at the University of Washington, he started Dropzone in 2023 to attack what he calls the defender's dilemma. The company raised a $37 million Series B in July 2025 led by Theory Ventures, serves more than 100 enterprises, and counts UiPath, Zapier and Pipe among its customers. Wu holds more than 30 patents in machine learning and cybersecurity and contributes to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Luke Arrigoni
Luke Arrigoni is the founder and CEO of Loti, a Seattle startup that hunts the internet for deepfakes, impersonators, and unauthorized images of its users and gets them taken down - usually within 17 hours. A mathematics graduate turned data scientist, he spent over a decade running the AI consultancy Arricor for clients like Getty Images and AT&T before co-founding Loti in 2022 with his wife Rebekah Arrigoni. The company scans roughly 100 million images and videos a day, has captured a large share of the A-list celebrity market, raised a $16.2M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, and now offers free likeness protection to everyday people.
Xiao Wang
Xiao Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Boundless Immigration, a Seattle-based legal-technology company that has helped more than 100,000 families file for green cards, visas, and citizenship at roughly a third of the cost of a traditional attorney. He came to the U.S. from Nanjing, China at age 3 and watched his parents pour months of rent into immigration paperwork - a memory that, decades later and mid-career at Amazon Go, he couldn't shake. He left to build the company in 2017. Trained at Stanford and Harvard, seasoned at McKinsey and Amazon, he runs Boundless on what he openly calls a 'black licorice' culture: love it or hate it, no middle ground.