Starlink
Facts
- HQ
- March 2026
- Sectors
- Satellite communications, Broadband, Space
Elon Musk's Starlink swagger, SpaceX vs. the cloud giants, and Seattle’s tech universe revisited
This week: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world's internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company's data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets. Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe posters into the studio, 17 years apart. The 2009 original turns up gems including Boeing's unlikely connection to Classmates.com, a 1990s forerunner to Facebook. The 2009 poster also brings back memories of Teledesic, the Craig McCaw venture backed by Bill Gates that tried…
Ascend series: Seattle’s ‘Third Act’ — physical AI startups on Lake Union signal a shift toward software-enabled hardware
The piece reports from Lake Union to argue Seattle is entering a third industrial era—'physical AI'—where hardware-enabled intelligent machines mix with legacy maritime and aerospace industries, exemplified by startups like Overland, Anduril, Brinc, and Endurance Energy. The authors say Seattle has the talent, infrastructure, and institutions to lead but needs more risk-taking, investor capital for hardware, and pro-innovation policy to fully capitalize on this shift.
BRINC Raises $125 Million Led by Motorola to Put Autonomous 911 Drones on U.S. Police and Fire Station Roofs
BRINC raised $125 million in a round led by Motorola Solutions to deploy autonomous 911 response drones on U.S. police and fire station roofs and expand U.S. manufacturing. The Seattle startup, founded in 2019 by Blake Resnick, plans to scale production, grow staff, integrate drones with 911 dispatch and move into a larger 60,000-sq-ft facility.
