Justin Farris, a longtime product leader at Zillow and GitLab, joined Seattle startup Read AI as vice president of product.
Farris spent more than five years in a similar role at GitLab, the publicly traded DevOps company, and was director of product development at Zillow.
Founded in 2021, Read AI got its start with a meeting notetaker and has added various other enterprise productivity tools. It raised a $50 million Series B round last year.
In a press release, Farris called Read AI the “Cursor for productivity.”
“Just as GitLab is the go-to place for the entire software development process, Read AI is the go-to place where work comes together,” he said. “I saw first-hand what’s happening in the developer tools space, and see even larger opportunities in the productivity and AI assistant category.”
Read AI on Wednesday rolled out a new “Agentic Workflow Suite.” The company is led by David Shim, who won CEO of the Year honors at the GeekWire Awards in May.
— Lisa Gurry is stepping down from Seattle health data startup Truveta.
Gurry spent more than 23 years at Microsoft before helping launch Truveta as its chief marketing officer in 2020. She later served as chief operating officer and chief growth officer.
“I embraced my role as the only female co-founder and worked hard to create a successful company and a positive experience for all Truvetans,” Gurry wrote on LinkedIn.
Gurry said that she is “so excited for my next grand adventure” but didn’t reveal more details.
Truveta reached unicorn status earlier this year after raising $320 million. The company aims to aggregate medical records data from partner institutions to link treatments with outcomes and underlying health. It is led by CEO Terry Myerson, a former Microsoft executive vice president.
— Hossein Nowbar, chief legal officer at Microsoft, is stepping down after nearly three decades at the Redmond tech giant.
Nowbar graduated from the University of Washington in 1993, worked at Davis Wright Tremaine for four years, and then joined Microsoft in 1997.
He was named chief legal officer in 2023.
“I helped clear antitrust hurdles for transformative acquisitions like Nuance and Activision Blizzard King, supported product and service launches that reshaped the way we work, and introduced the Customer Copyright Commitment to help our customers realize the promise of AI,” Nowbar wrote on LinkedIn.
Nowbar didn’t share details of his next gig. Jonathan Palmer, a corporate vice president and 15-year veteran of Microsoft, will serve as the company’s new chief legal officer.
— Edwin Miller, CEO of Seattle-based Marchex, is stepping down after two years leading the publicly traded call and conversation analytics company. Marchex also announced a series of other exec changes:
- Troy Hartless, chief revenue officer, is also now president
- Francis Feeney, chief corporate and legal affairs officer, is also now chief operating officer
- Brian Nagle, senior vice president, controller, is now chief financial officer
Miller will serve as a senior advisor to Russell Horowitz, chairman at Marchex.
— Bridget Frey, a longtime leader at Seattle-based Redfin, is taking on the chief data officer role at Rocket after the mortgage giant completed its acquisition of Redfin in July.
Frey, who joined Redfin in 2011, will continue her role as chief technology officer at Redfin, where she helped launch the machine learning team.
“With Bridget guiding our combined data vision, we are set up to create a homeownership experience that feels genuinely connected end-to-end,” Rocket CTO Shawn Malhotra said on LinkedIn.
— Amazon Web Services has brought on two senior executives, according to a report from Business Insider.
- David Richardson, who was at Stripe and previously spent 16 years at AWS, is back at the company as vice president of AgentCore.
- Joe Hellerstein, a professor at UC Berkeley, is joining as vice president and distinguished scientist, according to Business Insider.
— Ty Wolfe-Jones joined Seattle-based EV charging startup Juicer Energy as head of operations. Wolfe-Jones was a director at Assurance, a COO at Wrench, and manager at both DoorDash and Uber.
Juicer, led by OfferUp co-founder Nick Huzar, recently started rolling out its EV charging infrastructure at apartment buildings and other properties.
“It is rare that you find big, real-world, ‘right now’ problems being dealt with in truly innovative ways, and with such a strong team,” Wolfe-Jones said in a statement. “So when you do, you have to jump at it.”
— Bryan Copley, a Seattle-based entrepreneur and founder of real estate data startup CityBldr, joined Blue Fern Development as chief product officer. Blue Fern, a Redmond, Wash.-based real estate development and construction firm, acquired CityBldr, according to Copley.
“I’m particularly excited about the opportunity to work with the team to pioneer combined learning in real estate development, fusing AI insights and human judgment to unlock greater productivity, which from this point forward will be measured in more homes,” he said on LinkedIn.
— Sarah Strobhar joined Seattle startup Upbound as chief revenue officer. Strobhar spent more than five years at AWS as a go-to-market leader and was also head of sales at Onera.
Founded in 2017, Upbound helps enterprise customers streamline their infrastructure workflow in the cloud. The company, founded and led by Bassam Tabbara, raised $60 million in 2021.
— Jennifer Adair, a longtime researcher at Seattle-based cancer center Fred Hutch, joined the UMass Chan Medical School as a professor and vice chair in the new Department of Genetic and Cellular Medicine. Adair spent 17 years at Fred Hutch, where she helped lead work on gene therapies at the Adair Lab. She was also an associate professor at Fred Hutch and a research associate professor at the University of Washington.
— Pablo Brown-Rodriguez, a former general manager at Amazon Health, launched a new Seattle-based firm called Operative Partners that acquires and leads mid-market healthcare businesses. “The goal is to find a great healthcare business and protect legacy, culture, and people with a long-term, operator-led approach,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
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