— Amitabha “Guppy” Gupta, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center associate director who helps researchers translate their work to broader audiences, is leaving after 14 years to join Amazon. Starting Nov. 16, he will be a strategic advisor for nonprofit research and advanced AI with AWS’ Global Nonprofit Business.
Gupta said technology was often an obstacle to scientific breakthroughs at Fred Hutch.
“It’s the infrastructure, data, and tools standing between a scientist and an answer,” he wrote on LinkedIn. In his new role, “I’ll work with researchers and research institutions on using cloud, high-performance computing, and AI to remove those barriers.”
— Microsoft board member Emma Walmsley has been appointed CEO of HP, effective Jan. 4. Walmsley, who led the pharmaceutical giant GSK until December 2025, succeeds Bruce Broussard. Reuters notes that her seven years serving on the Microsoft board “are her closest brush with the tech sector” prior to taking the top job at the PC maker.
— Bas Nijholt, senior staff engineer at IonQ‘s Seattle-area facility, has resigned after three years to join an AI startup that’s still in stealth mode. At IonQ, the theoretical quantum mechanics expert built MindRoom, an open-source collaboration and knowledge-sharing platform that he calls “a company brain.”
“With this new opportunity, I get to keep building and turbocharging MindRoom with a team of people who are just as excited about AI as I am,” Nijholt said, adding that the tool will remain freely available.
Before IonQ, Nijholt spent nearly four years at Microsoft.
— Bellevue, Wash., startup Temporal, whose software keeps AI agents running reliably, has named Sean Heneghan as vice president of sales for the Americas. The company ranks No. 1 on the GeekWire 200, a list of the top Pacific Northwest startups. In September it raised $550 million, putting its valuation at $12.55 billion.
Temporal is fully remote, and Heneghan is based in the Chicago area. He joins the company from MongoDB.
— Doug Heimburger, a 26-year Amazon veteran, has changed roles, shifting from chief financial officer and vice president of Worldwide Operations to CFO/VP of Worldwide Stores. In the new position, Heimburger said he’ll help oversee efforts to improve delivery speed, reduce costs and increase growth of the Stores business. His first role at the company was data mining analyst.
— Seattle startup Augmodo has named Capri Brixey as head of retail sales. The company, which sells AI-powered wearable devices with cameras, raised $21 million in July to expand from in-store applications that let workers passively track inventory into automotive, warehouse and hospital settings. Augmodo ranks No. 122 on the GeekWire 200.
Ross Finman, founder and CEO of Augmodo, called Brixey “the right leader to accelerate our expansion” given her experience selling to both retail and warehouse operations. Her past roles include leadership positions at Coca-Cola and Kroger.
— Meaghan Davison Praznik was named vice president of marketing for Neuralwatt, a Seattle-based startup that built a tool for calculating, in real time, the carbon emissions of individual AI requests. Her former employers include Clif Bar, AllTrails and Merino Energy.
Because the carbon intensity of grid power varies throughout the day and across regions, Neuralwatt’s technology can help customers run compute-intensive operations when clean energy is more abundant.
— BuyWander, an auction-based online marketplace for returned and overstocked retail items, has named Chris Holm as senior director of product. Holm spent nine years at Amazon, leaving in 2024 after managing last-mile and same-day delivery technology and working on Amazon Fresh delivery. He has since served as a consultant for carbon removal startup Lithos Carbon and as a founder-in-residence at the startup studio Foundations.
In August, BuyWander moved its headquarters across Washington from Spokane to Kent. The company announced $21 million in new funding in September.
— T-Mobile’s Kevin Lau has joined the advisory board at the University of Washington’s College of Engineering. Lau has been with the telecom giant for 22 years over two stints and serves as VP of digital experience engineering. He holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the UW.
— Christian Smith, an Issaquah, Wash.-based tech leader, has been named president of revenue for Cloudflare, which provides security and speed services for websites and online applications. He will oversee worldwide go-to-market operations. Smith previously served as chief revenue officer for Splunk and Nintex.
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