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Uncommon Thinkers 2025: Solar spacecraft, sci-fi biology, destroying PFAS, beyond AI chatbots, and better social media
On this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, recorded backstage at the GeekWire Gala at the Showbox Sodo, we sit down with five of the inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs selected as the Seattle region's 2025 Uncommon Thinkers, in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners. Jeff Thornburg spent years building rocket engines for Elon Musk at SpaceX and Paul Allen at Stratolaunch. Now, as CEO of Portal Space Systems, he's moved past chemical rockets to revive a concept NASA studied decades ago but never pursued — a spacecraft powered by focused sunlight. He calls it a "steam engine for space." Read the…
Seattle Startup MotherDuck Launches Serverless Analytics Platform With $47.5M Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz
Seattle-based startup MotherDuck, founded by Jordan Tigani, unveiled its serverless data analytics platform built on DuckDB and announced $47.5 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company aims to enable analysts to query data across multiple sources and plans a public beta release in March 2023.
Madrona Announces PitchBook Data Partnership for 2022 IA40 Ranking After IA40 Firms Raised $3B
Madrona, which has been investing in intelligent applications for over a decade, launched the IA40 list in 2021 and says IA40 companies have since raised over $3 billion; for the 2022 IA40 it has added a data partnership with PitchBook to enhance the ranking using PitchBook's private and public equity data.
