Due Cucina co-founders Filippo Fiori (left) and Davide Macchi. (Due Cucina Photo) Key Takeaways Seattle-based fast casual pasta chain Due Cucina raised $2.5 million to expand beyond Washington state and open three restaurants in Texas. The company is led by two best friends who grew up in Italy. Its CEO is a former Amazon senior project manager. The startup uses technology and a vertically integrated supply chain to power its business. Scrolling through the Dué Cucina menu one even ...read more

UW Medical Data Science Symposium keynote speaker Atul Butte, director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. (GeekWire Photo / Charlotte Schubert) There’s a new institute brewing at the University of Washington at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning and healthcare. The Institute for Medical Data Science launched publicly this week at the 2023 UW Medical Data Science Symposium. “The UW has very sig ...read more

TechSpot is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. In brief: We've heard lots of speculation and rumors about Nintendo's next console. According to a new report, fans will be waiting a while before it arrives: late 2024. Whether it will be a Switch 2, a Switch Pro, or something else remains unknown. The Nintendo Switch has been a phenomenal success since it launched in 2017. In less than six years, it has sold over 122 million units, ...read more

Former Facebook exec turned VC Chamath Palihapitiya has long been a controversial figure in the investing world. Both brilliant and combative, Palihapitiya came to be known most widely by ushering in the era of special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, beginning in the fall of 2019, when he helped Virgin Galactic become a publicly traded company through a SPAC he formed. Palihapitiya went on to take five more companies public via SPACs before the boom ended abruptly last year, and while ...read more

Austin-based venture firm 8VC, led by controversial Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, has raised $880 million in its fifth fund. In a blog post published today, Lonsdale — who serves as 8VC’s general partner — said that his firm’s mission is “to fix a broken world.” While he did not specify which industries the new fund would target or average check size, Lonsdale did reveal that 8VC now manages “over $6 billion in committed capital” and that it plans to invest “at every ...read more

TechSpot is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. WTF?! Long-distance relationships often fail due to the lack of intimacy between couples. But a new device from China tries to address this issue (somewhat) by allowing people to send simulated kisses to each other – or total strangers. And yes, it is very weird. Designed by a group of students from the Changzhou Vocational Institute of Mechatronic Technology in eastern China's Jian ...read more

As 2023 IEEE president, it is my goal to work with all members—particularly our students, young professionals, and affinity committee members—to make IEEE a more successful and resilient global technical organization and for there to be global recognition of IEEE as a force for change. For more than 40 years, IEEE has been an integral part of my pursuit of excellence in my professional life. It has given me the opportunity to speak at more than 200 IEEE events, where I have had the plea ...read more

Koji, the link-in-bio platform that gives creators a digital storefront on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, launched a new e-book tool that lets users sell e-books and audiobooks, the company announced yesterday. The new tool is essentially a template that creators can use to sell any e-book or audiobook from within social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitch, among others) and anywhere else on the web. Koji also allows creators to make custom add-ons and sha ...read more

To call ChatGPT, the free text-generating AI developed by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, a hit is a massive understatement. As of December, ChatGPT had an estimated more than 100 million monthly active users. It’s attracted major media attention and spawned countless memes on social media. It’s been used to write hundreds of e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store. And it’s credited with co-authoring at least one scientific paper. But OpenAI, being a business — albeit a capped-profit o ...read more

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Feb. 19, 2023. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Redfin and Zillow Group financial reports reveal broader housing market trends The latest financial reports from Zillow Group and Redfin demonstrate ongoing wariness within the U.S. … Re ...read more