Seattle’s startup ecosystem has its own strengths, and the city is a global AI hub. But for some tech entrepreneurs, the gravity of San Francisco is hard to resist — especially during the AI boom.
We met with startup founders who recently moved from Seattle to San Francisco — a move similar to earlier times when entrepreneurs with local roots eventually built significant companies elsewhere.
In this case, the founders say the pull is about being inside the “AI capital of the world” as a way to supercharge their startups.
“I knew that moving to SF – where the largest concentration of startups – would be the best step to increase our success,” said Avi Agola, founder of the recruitment platform Talunt.
Before arriving at the University of Washington this past fall, Agola focused on Seattle’s early career. He worked at Seattle founder hub Foundations, launched his own company, and sold it last year to another Seattle founder.
Agola credits the Seattle startup community with helping him develop credibility and understand what it takes to run a company.
But when he got rid of Talunt, Agola packed his bags and went to San Francisco. Part of the decision was practical: Investors encouraged the move, and many of Talunt’s first customers were from the Bay Area.
Aviel Ginzburg, a Seattle venture capitalist who runs Foundations, said he understands this strategy.
“I think anyone in their 20s who wants to build a startup should be sitting down right now, just to build a network to get lucky,” he said.
That was part of the reason Nour Gajial, CEO of MathGPT, and moved from Seattle to San Francisco.
After leaving Cornell to pursue his AI education full-time, Gajial returned home to the Seattle area. You’ve found a supportive, close-knit tech community and a comfortable place to build.
But as MathGPT gained momentum, Gajial and his co-founder began moving to San Francisco. They noticed a lot of startup events, young inventors, and regular people-to-people connections building and funding AI companies.
“There’s always some new AI research going on, or an event that will open your eyes to something,” Gajial said. “I don’t see this energy in Seattle.”
Gajial said he was grateful to meet “really cool founders” in Seattle. MathGPT founder Yanni Kouloumbis praised the region’s talent pool. But they felt that being in Silicon Valley gave them better opportunities to make it big.
“We want to put ourselves in the best possible position for these good things to happen to us,” said Kouloumbis.
Nistha Mitra spent three years in Seattlewhere he worked at Oracle. He later launched Neuramill, an early stage manufacturing software company, and saw a stark contrast between Seattle’s corporate tech culture and startup life.
“I don’t think our community in the Big Tech world was aware of startups and how startups work,” said Mitra.
Mitra moved to San Francisco six months ago. “In SF, everybody knows what’s going on, no matter who they are,” he said.
You described a hard-charging situation where it’s common practice to work 15-hour days on your start-up days. Being in that place “really changes the way you act,” says Mitra.
When he worked long days in Seattle, friends worried about him. “I feel like in SF, it’s the norm, that’s the way of life,” she said.
The same calculus is at play for experienced techies.
Vik Korrapati, a Seattle-based inventor who spent nearly a decade at AWS, recently announced that his AI startup Moodream is moving from Seattle to San Francisco. He made a decision about the scale and urgency of the present moment of AI.
Artificial intelligence, Korrapati wrote in an online post, is “the biggest platform change we’ll see in our working lives,” and the move was about being “in the right place, with the right people” as his company builds high-performance vision models.
Korrapati said the move wasn’t driven by a lack of talent in Seattle, but rather a difference in risk tolerance and a more spontaneous attitude. “The issue is not skill. It’s default settings,” he wrote, describing a culture in which many developers favor stability and incremental progress over the uncertainty of startup work.
In San Francisco, he said, he found a lot of people who had left Big Tech roles and were willing to make a startup jump. “Stuttle has been good to me,” Korrapati said. “I learned how big systems work here. I got space to investigate Moodream here. I don’t get angry.”
Ethan Byrd, a former engineer at AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, helped launch the Seattle Actual AI software in 2024. Now he’s working at a new startup called MyMX — and he’s seriously considering a move.
Seattle isn’t a bad place to build a startup, Byrd says, and he likes the city. But San Francisco is on a different level when it comes to business.
“Everything is easy: hiring, talking to customers, raising money, managing events,” he said. At the end of the day, as he tries to grow his new startup, Byrd said a move to Silicon Valley “seems inevitable.”
But not all Seattle founders are headed south.
“There’s really good talent right now, especially with the unfortunate layoffs,” said Ankit Dhawan, CEO of Seattle-based startup BluePill. “We don’t see the need to leave here.”
Silicon Valley is great at fundraising and networking. “But there comes a moment when there’s too much noise,” said Alejandro Castellano, CEO of Seattle AI startup Caddi. “You just need a place to focus on work.”
And if a trip to the Bay Area is necessary — some of Caddi’s investors are based there — it’s a short flight away. “You can come back the same day,” said Castellano.
Many Silicon Valley investors also make the trip to Seattle. Earlier this week, Sunil Nagaraj, managing partner of Palo Alto-based Ubiquity Ventures, hosted the inaugural event at Seattle’s AI House. During an interview with Auth0 founder Eugenio Pace, he called out various Seattle-based founders in the crowd that he supports. “Ubiquity Ventures ❤️ Seattle!!” Nagaraj wrote on LinkedIn.
Yifan Zhang, founder of AI House and managing director at AI2 Incubator, said he wants to get more out-of-town investors connected to the Seattle region.
Zhang built his first startup in San Francisco. For certain types of founders, he said, Silicon Valley is a better place to create sweet relationships that could lead to a funding round or a big customer.
“But it’s also easy to get lost in the mix, or get distracted by the hype,” Zhang noted. “It depends on who you are, but no matter where you’re based, founders still need to do the hard work of selling and building an incredible product and growing it.”
Seattle still attracts many out-of-town innovators. Real estate startup RentSpree moved here from Los Angeles last year, attracted by the tech talent pool and the focus on other real estate and proptech companies.
“Seattle is great for talent that balances both dynamic growth, but also builds companies that are sustainable over time,” RentSpree CEO and founder Michael Lucarelli told GeekWire in December.
Drone startup Brinc is another transplant from Las Vegas. The company, now ranked 7th on the GeekWire 200, raised $75 million last year and employs more than 100 people. CEO Blake Resnick cited the engineering and technology talent pool in Seattle for his decision to relocate.
The city’s tech anchors — including Microsoft, Amazon, and the University of Washington — also continue to bring in talent. Overland AI CEO Byron Boots came to UW’s computer science school in 2019 as an associate professor, and later helped launch a Seattle-based autonomous driving startup that recently raised $100 million.
Ginzburg said that with other founders moving to San Francisco, it’s important to continue building community in Seattle. He pointed out that Agola, for example, is still tied to Seattle through the Foundations network.
Agola said he will consider returning to Seattle at some point as his new startup grows.
“I don’t think Bay is the long-term growth leader when it comes to Series B,” he said. “Moving to Seattle would be the best play to keep talent at the forefront while reducing overhead costs.”
WHAT: ‘The hustle factor is real’: Why this fast-growing Seattle startup is packing its bags for Palo Alto
