Startup Radar: Meet Seattle founders building software for coding, music technology, video editing, and more.

We’re back with our latest spotlight on Seattle-area startups. This category includes developer software for video editing, music rendering, AI conversations, SaaS deployments, coding and AI agents, and personalization.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — and a pitch assessment from “Mean VC,” a GPT-sponsored critic who offers a mix of encouragement and constructive feedback.

Check out the Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies and startup stories.

The gate is closed

Established: 2026

Business: A music technology platform that helps artists securely share unreleased tracks while building direct relationships with fans. Since launching in January, the bootstrapped startup has signed up dozens of artists and started converting early trial users to paid plans for $49 a year.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Jasen Samford spent ten years at DistroKid, a music technology company that helps artists get their work into the broadcast and video platforms.

VC said: “You face a clear need in terms of pre-release security and direct fan engagement, and early paid conversions raise the product’s marketability. I will focus on demonstrating consistent artist retention, measurable fan engagement metrics, and a rapid acquisition strategy that shows this can grow beyond startups without relying on high impact.”

HYV Social

Established: 2025

Business: A mobile app designed to help remote and busy professionals turn spontaneous interest into real-world connections. The bootstrapped startup, which launched a beta in Seattle at the end of last year, uses geo-location and permission-based signals to show who’s nearby and is open to meeting at the moment, aiming to reduce social skepticism and discomfort for busy professionals.

Leadership: Founder Jason Lee is a long-time security leader who spent nearly 14 years at Microsoft and was CISO at both Zoom and Splunk. Co-founder Brandon Sene also worked in security at Microsoft, and co-founder Cody Cronberger was a software engineer at Amazon.

VC said: “There is something compelling about making the passing moments of ‘I have to go out’ work, especially for time-delayed professionals. But this only works if you can create critical mass and a clear reason to open the application again and again – so I will focus more on retention, security, and proving strong engagement in one place before expanding.”

PrimeOrbit

Established: 2024

Business: An effective conversational AI framework focuses on converting conversation-based interactions into completed actions and workflows across channels. The bootstrapped company aims to help AI-driven brands increase growth and engagement by closing the loop after the conversation ends.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Mahadev Alladi spent 17 years at Microsoft, where he helped lead teams working in advertising technology.

VC said: “This addresses a real problem – AI discussions rarely translate into completed actions – and closing that loop may drive the logical rise of AI products. The priority should be to reduce high-value workflows and prove a measurable impact, as the deployment of extensive infrastructure will be difficult in a crowded market.”

SageOx

Established: 2026

Business: Native AI team tools where humans and coding agents work together. The company describes its product as an “agent hivemind” designed to capture shared context and keep human developers and AI agents aligned as software evolves with minimal human intervention.

Leadership: CEO Ajit Banerjee has previously founded three startups and was recently at Hugging Face. Its founders include Milkana Brace, who founded Jargon (which was acquired by Remitly), and Ryan Snodgrass, who spent 15 years at Amazon.

VC said: “The idea is timely – native AI teams need better collaboration between humans and agents – and a shared context may be as important as autonomous coding scales. The danger is speculation: focus on concrete workflows where disagreement hurts today and prove clear productivity benefits, or the ‘agent hivemind’ will sound more rational than necessary.”

StackIQ

Established: 2025

Business: A decision intelligence platform to help businesses figure out which SaaS and AI tools they really need – and which don’t. StackIQ works with early stage customers and design partners, and expands the circle of friends and family.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Jana Schuster has held leadership roles at Groupon, Sears, Amazon’s Fridge, Visibly, Amazon, The Honest Company, and most recently Vice.

VC said: “You’re going after a real and growing pain point – SaaS and AI sprawl is expensive and chaotic – and if you can spend more consistently, your value to companies is clear and in line with the budget. To make this investment, you need to prove a strong ROI with specific numbers and show how you’re going to embed it in the procurement or IT application so you don’t get into an analytical position.”

Wow

Established: 2025

Business: The bootstrapped startup is working with early pilot customers on an “agent video workspace” for marketing and growth teams who already have videos but need help getting them into motion video streaming. Teams upload real campaign assets, and Vivu writes many customizable variables – including hooks, cuts, captions, and formats – to speed up production without relying on full AI-generated content.

Leadership: Founder Shawn Neal was an executive at Google and Microsoft, and most recently the product that led to the introduction of AI video.

VC said: “This is a realistic idea – marketing teams are sitting on untapped video care in terms of maximizing productivity without being completely automated, and the planning variable is tailored to how the teams actually work. The key will be proving that you can deliver faster production cycles or more efficient creative than in-house teams and existing AI tools, or you risk getting bogged down in a crowded video tools market.”