What did you build? Speaking to founders and business leaders at the inaugural Seattle Tech Week event

The fourth annual Seattle Tech Week kicked off in earnest Monday, with panels and parties bringing together thousands of people from across the state and beyond. The organizers of this week said that this week has more than 250 events and attracted more than 29,000 people who registered for the events.

We attended the Madrona kick-off event at Picklewood Paddle Club with one question for the founders, investors, and employees we met: What are you building? Here’s what we heard and learned.

Jagan Nemani

Building: An AI system that powers the game of cricket – flights, hotels, ground transportation, and daily schedules for players and staff, all handled through WhatsApp.

Nemani is the chief product officer for the Seattle Orcas, a Major League Cricket team now in its fourth season. For the first three, he ran the team the old-fashioned way: “I ran all the tasks using spreadsheets and people and processes,” he said. That meant tracking a steady stream of incoming flights, hotel blocks and car reservations during the season.

This year, he used Claude Code to build an AI agent backend that took about 80% of the work: booking flights, hotels and cars, dealing directly with hotels and transport vendors, and telling players and staff when their flight is arriving, which hotel they are at, and who is picking them up. It also handles daily schedules, right down to massage appointments.

To accommodate players and staff who were reluctant to use new technology tools, he built it to work on WhatsApp, the messaging app they already used every day.

Kim Wu

Building: A B2B tool that allows second-hand, vintage, and consignors to capture an item and get identification, pricing, and inventory details they’re currently manually assembling.

Vu is the founder and CEO of StyleOrigin. Finding a single vintage dress on the auction block is still a manual process that takes 30 to 45 minutes per item, he said. With StyleOrigin, a seller takes a single photo and AI analysis returns what they need to list and price. The company also provides retailers with data to guide inventory decisions.

He got himself a problem. Vu ran environmental, social and administrative work at Remitly until he resigned in 2023, then took a year off to start selling vintage clothing. He told himself that he was slow because he was new to it. “But it turned out that everyone was doing the same thing, so there wasn’t a good solution there.”

He taught himself to code and built the first version of the product. StyleOrigin has a working MVP but no revenue yet. More than 70 stores nationwide are on the waiting list, and Vu is about to bring in its first engineer.

Kenny Daniel

Building: Tools to collect, store, and analyze data for artificial intelligence systems – a record of what agents do, not just the code they send.

Daniel is the founder of Hyperparam, a Seattle-based startup, and previously founded Algorithmia, a Seattle-based machine learning company that was acquired by DataRobot in 2021.

Companies are spending a lot of money on AI without much sense of what they’re getting, he said. “AI is generating this wall of tokens. Companies are paying a lot of money to create all these tokens, but they’re not really visible in what these agents are doing.”

All tokens leave a trail, and Daniel said most companies ignore them. Mining would show them where AI works and where it wastes money.

“Where are the stupid models? Where do the rabbit holes go?” Old analytics tools can’t help, he said, because they’re built for numbers and clicks: “People weren’t really thinking about what you’re doing when most of the data generated in the world is text.”

Cleo Escarez

Building: Urban mining — recovers precious metals from jewelry and returns them to the clean technology supply chain.

Escarez is the founder of Redyoos, which GeekWire featured on Startup Radar last year. The jewelry industry accounts for 40 percent to 50 percent of the world’s supply of precious metals, he said — the same materials found in “anything with an on and off button,” from cell phones to watches.

Demand for those metals is increasing with AI and clean energy, and Escarez said projections point to a 700% resource shortage in the next few decades. “With statistics, we cannot solve this deficit,” he said, which is why he sees jewelry as a viable resource.

Redyoos collects jewelry, refines the precious metal content, and sells the recovered items to clean technology manufacturers.

Escarez, a former chief operating officer at Boma Silver Jewelry and product manager at Starbucks, founded the company, which has been alive for more than a year and is generating revenue. He is now proposing a pre-seed cycle.

Andy Liu

Building: A team of engineers within a venture capital firm, which automates the investment process.

Liu is a partner at Unlock Venture Partners, which he helped launch in 2018 to back early-stage startups in Seattle and Los Angeles, and which raised a second fund of $60 million in 2022. A longtime Seattle entrepreneur and angel investor with stakes in close to 100 companies, he was previously CEO of BuddyTV, which was acquired by Viziver by Conanti, Viviver.

“We actually have an engineering team that’s trying to do a lot of what we do in VC,” Liu said, “and we’re trying to make sure that we can grow our business like our portfolio companies.”

This work includes memos and due diligence on prospective investments, as well as tools for dealing with the firm’s investors and gathering updates on portfolio companies.

The point, he said, is better decisions: “How can we be smarter as VCs?”

Mary Jesse

Building: Private AI — allows people to own their own data and context, use any major language model, and can be tracked or trained.

Jesse is the founder and CEO of ACME Brains, whose first product, nexie, is in beta. GeekWire wrote about the origin of the company last year: after the death of her husband, she turned to ChatGPT and found real comfort in it, then she ran into its limits – she could not carry the content of their conversations, and she had concerns about the privacy of what she told you.

nexie stores user notes, journals, and conversations in what the company calls a personal content engine, and manages that context across AI services instead of leaving it scattered across different chat histories.

The privacy of trading free services goes back to the early Internet, he said, but AI is driving the exchange. The chatbot pulls information from the person in the conversation, and combines it with everything that is already known about them. “AIs can tell you about your data,” he said.

An electrical engineer with more than a dozen patents who spent decades in wireless at McCaw Cellular and AT&T Wireless, Jesse said many people don’t understand how AI actually behaves, leaving them exposed — especially the elderly. “You need people who understand you to help protect people who don’t understand you.” Its founders are Alan Caplan, Amazon’s first general counsel, and patent attorney and engineer Bob Bergstrom.

Emily Rapp

Building: Voice AI that allows bar and restaurant staff to count the menu out loud instead of writing it down by hand.

Rapp is the founder and CEO of Köniva. A typical hotel lounge spends 12 hours and four people in inventory, he said; with Köniva it’s two people and 3 and a half hours, and it’s more accurate. Workers download the app and wear a lapel microphone — you want to be free with both hands on the ladder — and count out loud the way they always have.

He came to the crisis after a career in big tech and ad tech. Not wanting to build an industry he had never worked in, he took a part-time job at Canlis after training as a sommelier.

When he got injured, the wine director let him help with inventory and gave him a clipboard for handwritten numbers and a login to the restaurant’s inventory software. He asked why they were still using paper and pencil when the entire engineering team had developed the software for this project. The wine director’s answer: it was fast.

Köniva has 10 customers. At high-end hotels and restaurants, Rapp said, employees put an app on their credit cards to start using it, then help him set up checkouts — an unusual approach in an industry he says has been burned by technology.

“It’s crazy how bad technology has become for them,” she said.

Henry Arias

Building: A growth equity firm that invests in the intersection of food products and food technology.

Arias is the founder and managing partner of Altelan Capital, a Seattle firm he started last year. It underwrites companies around the A tier, typically, which provide growth capital and strategic support.

He came from the industry himself, leading finance in restaurants and bars and most recently running business development and financial planning for Seattle Hospitality Group. That operational lens, he said, is what he brings to investing in and training founders through growth. He has been an investor since 2015.

Arias calls Altelan an AI-native investment fund, using AI tools to get ahead of the industry and test ideas about a business’s ability to scale and where the risk lies. He has a common interest where technology is absent and simplicity is the best way: “AI is great, but it may not be the right tool for the job.”

The biggest shift he’s looking at is food and digitization. The industry has traditionally used the “proverbial clipboard and notepad,” he said, and the pandemic accelerated the migration of technology throughout the supply chain. “There are many things that technology uses in food,” she said, “and it’s what keeps us strong and happy every day.”