PNW AI News

Welcome back after taking last week off! These last two weeks were (unsurprisingly) jam-packed with big AI news. Here we go…

• OpenAI acquired Bellevue startup Statsig for $1.1B, the same valuation it just raised its Series C from ICONIQ Capital earlier this year

  • CEO Vijaye Raji will become CTO of Apps at OpenAI, alongside former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo (Vijaye's colleague at Meta) who is now CEO of Apps, and the entire Statsig team will have offers to join OpenAI as well

• Coreweave acquired Seattle AI startup Openpipe, which provides reinforcement learning to help companies finetune AI agents, on undisclosed terms

• Microsoft just introduced MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, marking its first fully in-house AI models and coming after years of relying on OpenAI's technology in a turbulent partnershipMicrosoft just introduced MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, marking its first fully in-house AI models and coming after years of relying on OpenAI's technology in a turbulent partnership

• Microsoft unveiled new AI education commitments at the White House AI Education Task Force meeting, including free Copilot, educator grants, and LinkedIn AI courses

• AI2 announced Asta, an open-source agent platform aimed to assist scientists searching for new discoveries:

  • Asta agents: AI assistants that can find papers, analyze data, summarize literature, generate hypotheses, and cite their sources

  • AstaBench: a benchmark suite for testing and ranking scientific agents on real-world problems

  • Asta Resources: a developer toolkit for building scientific agents using Ai2’s open-source tools and data

• Lila Biologics, a startup that spun out of Nobel Laureate David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington, announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to develop therapies for treating solid tumors with AI

• Researchers at WSU have developed an AI-guided robot that combines soft silicone grippers and a fan that blows leaves aside for plucking ripe fruit like strawberries

Key AI Product/Research Updates:

• A16Z published the fifth edition of its ‘Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps’ list, analyzing overall usage:

• OpenAI announced that parents will gain oversight capabilities for teenage ChatGPT users within 30 days, with features such as account linking, content filtering, and alerts when the system detects signs of emotional distress

• Google has released Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (FKA Nano banana), its most capable AI image model to date, designed to fix two long-standing weaknesses in generative editing: prompt precision and subject fidelity

• OpenAI is developing its first in-house AI chip with Broadcom, slated for 2026 and fabricated at TSMC, in a bid to reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs and control spiraling compute costs

• Google launched EmbeddingGemma, a 308M-parameter model built on Gemma 3 and trained in 100+ languages, which is best-in-class for on-device RAG and semantic search, able to flex between speed and precision

• UCLA engineers just created a wearable brain-computer interface that uses AI to interpret EEG signals, enabling paralyzed users to control robotic arms using their thoughts without any invasive surgery

• OpenAI is building the "OpenAI Jobs Platform", an AI-driven hiring service to rival LinkedIn, which will use ML to match candidates with employers and includes a dedicated track for small businesses and governments

• OpenAI moved its Realtime API out of beta, also introducing a new gpt-realtime speech-to-speech model and new developer tools like image input and MCP server integrations

• Google Photos now lets US users turn still images into four-second silent clips with Veo 3, offering “Subtle movements” or random “I’m feeling lucky” effects

• DeepSeek is working on a new AI with advanced agentic capabilities, including executing multi-step tasks autonomously and self-improving, aiming for a release in Q4 2025

• Mistral AI expanded its Le Chat platform with over 20 new enterprise MCP connectors, also introducing “Memories” for persistent context and personalization

• MIT researchers created VaxSeer, an AI system that predicts which flu strains will dominate future seasons and identifies the most protective vaccine candidates months in advance

Key AI Business/Investment Updates:

• • They began 2025 at $1B in run-rate revenue and passed $5B just eight months later

• A federal judge just ruled that Google won't face a forced sale of Chrome or Android despite its search monopoly

  • Judge Amit Mehta wrote that "the emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case," saying ChatGPT and other AI now pose a threat to traditional search

• China is reportedly aiming to triple its production of AI chips in the next year to reduce the need for Nvidia chips in the wake of US export controls

• Perplexity just unveiled a new revenue-sharing initiative that allocates $42.5M to publishers whose content appears in AI search results

• Apple has struck a deal with Google to test a Gemini model to power web search tools within the AI-upgraded Siri

• Atlassian announced the acquisition of The Browser Company for $610M, with plans to expand its AI-driven Dia browser with enterprise-focused integrations and security

• CEO Marc Benioff revealed that Salesforce has reduced its support headcount by 45% this year, using AI agents to handle lead response and customer conversations

  • This includes a 93-FTE reduction of force in the Seattle office

• OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil unveiled "OpenAI for Science," a new initiative aimed at building AI-powered platforms to accelerate scientific discovery

• xAI CFO Mike Liberatore left the startup, becoming the latest in a wave of departures that includes co-founder Igor Babuschkin and general counsel Robert Keele

• Scale AI announced a new $99M contract from the US DoD, aiming to increase the adoption of AI across the U.S. Army

• Anthropic published a report analyzing 74K conversations from educators on Claude, discovering that professors are primarily using AI to automate administrative work, with using AI for grading a polarizing topic:

PNW AI/ML/CV Fundings:

• Orchard Robotics (Bellevue/Yakima, WA) raised $22M in Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Cpaital, joined by General Catalyst, Contrary Capital, Mythos, Valyrian, and Ravelin Capital

• • CV-guided camera systems mounted on tractors to gather images of fruits, that are then analyzed by Orchard Robotics’ AI to generate data on vines, trees and crops, which is then processed to track the growth, yield and health of crops - TFTD $25M

  • CEO: Charlie Wu

• Vouched (Seattle, WA) raised $17M in Series A funding led by Spring Rock Ventures, joined by Madrona

  • AI-powered identity verification platform that does KYC and KYA (Know Your Agent), mitigating fraud and boosting customer onboarding - TFTD $22M

  • CEO: Peter Horadan

• Fiveonefour (Portland, OR) raised $17M in Series A funding led by Dimension Capital, joined by Stage 2 Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Ridge Ventures, Tokyo Black, Vermillion Cliffs, and more

  • Helps automate data pipeline local development with AI, providing analytcis and developer tooling with MooseJS - TFTD $17M

  • CEO: Tim Delisle

• Aurelian (Seattle, WA) raised $14M in Series A funding led by NEA, joined by FUSE, Palm Drive Capital, and YC

  • Conversational AI that routes callers, triages emergencies, and creates calls for service like 911, all over the phone, in real time, freeing up human operators to handle the real emergencies - TFTD $16.5M

  • CEO: Max Keenan

• NewDays (Seattle, WA) raised $7M in Seed funding co-led by Madrona and General Catalyst

  • Using a GenAI therapy to treat people with mild dementia, consisting of video visits with a cognitive health clinician and conversational exercises with an AI companion - TFTD $7M

  • CEO: Babak Parviz