Every so often, we all get pulled into the shiny trap of a listicle. You know the kind: “Top 10 Startups to Watch,” “The Hottest New Companies in Your City,” “The Next Unicorns You Need to Know.” These lists are designed to make you feel informed, to give you a quick snapshot of the innovation happening around you, and to spark a little civic pride. They’re also, if we’re being honest, great for clicks and social media engagement. So when Microsoft-owned LinkedIn released its latest ranking, titled “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle,” it was natural that it would catch some attention. But here at GeekWire, where we cover the Pacific Northwest startup scene like it’s our own backyard, the list grabbed our attention for all the wrong reasons. Let’s just say: We know a thing or two about Seattle-area startups around here. And so we had to do a little fact-checking. What we found was less a celebration of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem and more of a masterclass in geographic confusion. It’s the kind of list that makes you wonder whether the people who put it together have ever actually looked at a map of the region—or maybe just relied on a very loose definition of “Seattle” that includes half the West Coast and a good chunk of Texas.
Now, before we dive into the specifics, let’s be clear about what makes this so frustrating. The list isn’t just slightly off; it’s wildly, almost impressively, detached from reality. Four of the ten companies featured are not even headquartered in the Seattle area. That’s 40 percent of the list. It’s as if someone made a list of the best pizza places in New York and included a few famous Chicago deep-dish spots because they have a small takeout window in Manhattan. The biggest offender is Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI powerhouse, which LinkedIn ranked as the number one startup on the rise in Seattle. Yes, Anthropic has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, and they’ve been hiring plenty of talented local folks. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his leadership team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of artificial intelligence over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination bigger than most AI models could create. Anthropic is a San Francisco company, through and through. Its headquarters, its core identity, its executive brain trust—all of that lives in California. Having a satellite office in Seattle doesn’t make it a Seattle startup, no matter how many engineers they park in South Lake Union.
And it only gets more bizarre from there. The number two slot on LinkedIn’s Seattle list goes to Auger, an AI logistics startup co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark. Auger is an interesting company, no doubt, but it is not headquartered in the Seattle area. In fact, the company moved its headquarters to Dallas back in August. It does maintain a Bellevue engineering center, which is presumably why it showed up on LinkedIn’s radar, but Bellevue is not Dallas, and an engineering center is not a headquarters. Then there’s Whatnot, the heavily funded video-based shopping startup, which LinkedIn ranked third on its Seattle list. Whatnot set up an engineering center in Seattle last year, which is a real investment in the local tech talent pool, but the company is clearly headquartered in the Los Angeles area. Calling Whatnot a Seattle startup because it has engineers here is like calling a band a Seattle band because they rehearsed in a studio in Ballard for a few months. Finally, ranked ninth on the list is Armada, a data center upstart that, according to its own LinkedIn profile, is based in San Francisco. So just to summarize: three of the top ten Seattle startups, according to LinkedIn, have their headquarters in California, and one has its headquarters in Texas. The list is less a reflection of Seattle’s startup scene and more of a map of places that happen to employ some people in Seattle.
The reaction from people who actually know the region was swift and sharp. GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald called the whole effort “half-assed,” which is probably the most polite way to describe it. Fitzgerald, who has deep roots in the local tech community, pointed out the obvious flaws in the list and wondered how a Microsoft-owned company could have such a poor understanding of where Seattle is actually located. And he’s right. Microsoft, of course, is based in Redmond, a stone’s throw from Seattle. The company has thousands of employees in the region. You would think that LinkedIn, with all its data and all its resources, would have better insight into the geography of its own parent company’s backyard. But apparently not. To be fair, the list does include some companies that are actually based in the Seattle area. Making the top ten are Bellevue-based Truveta at number four, Seattle-based Yoodli at number five, Redmond-based Worldscape at number six, Seattle-based Overland AI at number seven, Seattle-based Gradial at number eight, and Kent-based Stoke Space at number ten. Those are legitimate local companies, and we’re happy to see them get some recognition. All of those companies, with the exception of Worldscape, are listed on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top 200 privately held startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. The other four companies—Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot, and Armada—appear on our engineering center list, which is a very different thing from a list of local startups.
Perhaps even more telling is who is missing from LinkedIn’s list. Notably absent is Chainguard, a cybersecurity startup that is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington. Chainguard is not some tiny, obscure company that slipped under the radar; it ranked number 42 on LinkedIn’s accompanying report on the top 50 startups in the United States. That’s a national ranking. It’s a big deal. But when it came to the Seattle-specific list, Chainguard was nowhere to be found. The likely reason is that Chainguard is a fully remote company. LinkedIn’s Seattle ranking apparently counts only employees and hiring in the city itself, which means a company can be headquartered in Kirkland, have its co-founders and core team deeply rooted in the Seattle area, and still not make the cut because its employees are scattered across the country. That’s a pretty narrow and, frankly, outdated way to evaluate a startup scene, especially in a post-pandemic world where remote work has become the norm for so many tech companies. For our purposes, given that one of the co-founders of Chainguard calls the Seattle area home, we claim it as a Seattle-area startup. We’re happy to embrace the fuzzy edges of regional identity. But LinkedIn seems to have applied a rigid and arbitrary metric that excludes a legitimate local success story while simultaneously including companies that have almost nothing to do with Seattle.
In its defense, LinkedIn describes a Seattle startup a bit differently than we do here at GeekWire. According to its methodology, the ranking weighs four factors: employment growth, engagement with company pages, interest in job openings, and the ability to recruit talent from LinkedIn’s list of top companies. The data covers July 2025 through June 2026. That sounds data-driven and sophisticated, but the devil is in the details. LinkedIn requires companies to be headquartered in the United States to qualify for its U.S. rankings, but it does not require them to be headquartered in the Seattle area to make the Seattle list. All of which explains how a startup can make a list of Seattle’s top startups without actually being based in Seattle. The methodology is measuring something, sure, but it’s not measuring what most people would call “Seattle startups.” It’s measuring which companies have a growing presence in the city, which companies are attracting engagement from local LinkedIn users, and which companies are recruiting Seattle talent. That’s an interesting metric, but it’s not the same thing as a ranking of the top startups in the region. It’s more like a ranking of the top employers that are hiring in Seattle, regardless of where their home base is. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s labeled honestly. But calling it “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle” is misleading. It implies these companies are part of the local ecosystem, when in reality many of them are just big fish from elsewhere that have decided to dip their fins into the Puget Sound.
We have to admit, this is a new one on us. In all our years of covering the Pacific Northwest startup community, we’ve seen our fair share of questionable rankings and dubious metrics. But this list takes the cake. It manages to be both overly broad and strangely narrow at the same time. It’s broad enough to include companies from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Dallas, but narrow enough to exclude a Kirkland-based company that happens to be remote-first. It’s the kind of list that makes you question the entire premise of these rankings. Are they meant to celebrate local innovation? Are they meant to help job seekers find opportunities? Are they just a marketing tool to drive engagement on LinkedIn? The answer, probably, is a little bit of all three. But if you’re going to publish a list with a city in the title, you should probably make sure the companies on it are actually from that city. As GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop noted, “What the heck is going on, LinkedIn?” It’s a fair question. The list, for all its data and methodology, ends up being less useful than a simple search of Seattle-based companies on LinkedIn itself. We hope that next year, the folks at LinkedIn will take a step back, maybe look at a map, and consider what actually makes a startup a Seattle startup. It’s not just about where the employees sit. It’s about where the roots are, where the decisions are made, where the founders live and work, and where the company’s identity is anchored. Until then, we’ll keep our own list, thank you very much, and we’ll keep calling out the ones that get it wrong.
