There’s a moment in every growing company’s life when the office starts to feel less like a home and more like a collection of leased floors connected by elevators and Wi-Fi. For Outreach, a Seattle sales technology company with roughly 800 employees, that moment has arrived. The company confirmed plans to leave its current headquarters in Interbay and move to the city’s Fremont neighborhood early next year, returning to a part of Seattle that once housed its early team. The move is small in distance—just across the city—but symbolically significant. Outreach is joining a campus that has been anchored by Adobe for nearly three decades, stepping into a space that carries the history of Seattle’s software industry while also representing a fresh chapter for a company navigating growth, hybrid work, and the ambitions of artificial intelligence.
The new home is at 701 N. 34th St., a four-story building that sits next door to Adobe’s longtime Seattle office in the Fremont Lake Union Center. The campus is a three-building, roughly 424,000-square-foot complex on North 34th Street owned by Kilroy Realty. Outreach will take one floor there, a significant reduction from the space it currently occupies in Interbay. Since 2018, the company has operated out of 333 Elliott, a Martin Selig Real Estate building where Outreach leased the top three floors during a period of more bullish expansion. In the years since, the company has pulled back, reducing its footprint to two floors, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. The move to Fremont is part of a broader strategic shift. Outreach’s CEO, Abhijit Mitra, said the relocation would bring employees closer together for face-to-face collaboration—a quietly powerful reason in an era when many tech companies have given up on physical proximity altogether, choosing instead to redesign their real estate as flexible spaces, desk hoteling, and remote-first policies.
For Outreach, though, Fremont is not an unfamiliar destination. The company began in 2014, and before it moved to Interbay, it occupied about 26,000 square feet in Fremont, subleased from Tableau at the time. That earlier chapter was one of startup hunger and borrowed space, a time when the company was just beginning to find its identity. The move back to Fremont feels less like a fresh start and more like a homecoming—an acknowledgment that the neighborhood’s particular mix of industrial charm, waterfront views, and tech-worker density has a gravitational pull. Fremont has long been a kind of accidental tech hub: bridges, houseboats, and cranes, but also a surprising concentration of companies that build software for other businesses. Outreach’s return is a sign that even after a company scales, after it reaches a valuation of more than $4.4 billion and signs customers like Zoom, Siemens, and Snowflake, the memory of where it once fit—and where it wants to fit again—still matters.
The campus itself tells the story of how Seattle’s tech geography has shifted over the decades. Adobe established its presence in the city by acquiring Aldus, the maker of PageMaker, in 1994. Four years later, Adobe moved from Pioneer Square to this Fremont property, becoming the anchor tenant of what was then called Quadrant Lake Union Center. That was a significant moment for the neighborhood, a signal that a global software company believed in the potential of an industrial district alongside the northern end of Lake Union. Adobe renewed and extended its lease on 163,000 square feet in 2018, maintaining a presence that has become a defining feature of the block. But the campus has also seen more change in recent years. Salesforce-owned Tableau left the 837 N. 34th St. building in 2024, opening up space for a different kind of tenant: Kiln, a co-working company, is preparing to open its first Washington location in that building, with doors expected to open late this year. Meanwhile, Tableau remains in Fremont, having renewed its lease in July on roughly 114,000 square feet at its Data 1 building at 744 N. 34th St. The result is a campus where continuity and transition coexist—old tenants, new tenants, and companies like Outreach arriving at different stages of their life cycles.
The broader neighborhood is evolving as well, in ways that reflect the ebb and flow of Seattle’s major tech employers. Google, which has maintained a longtime presence in Fremont, eventually plans to leave its offices there and consolidate its Seattle employees in South Lake Union, as GeekWire reported last year. That shift, along with Tableau’s consolidation and the arrival of co-working operators, creates a fascinating scene: one of Seattle’s most storied tech districts is being reshaped not by a sudden collapse, but by a steady re-sorting of who belongs where. For Outreach, moving into this environment is a statement about the future of work. The company makes AI tools that help sales teams research prospects, take notes during meetings, coach representatives in real time, and update customer relationship management systems. It is, in a sense, a technology company whose products are designed to make human interactions more effective and more informed. And now its leadership has decided that the best way to build those products is to bring its own people into a shared space, to let them overhear conversations, run into each other in the hallway, and feel the energy that comes from being physically present together.
The leadership transition at Outreach also gives the move a deeper meaning. Co-founder Manny Medina stepped down as CEO in 2024, handing the role to Abhijit Mitra, who joined the company in 2023 as president of product and technology. A change in leadership often brings a change in culture, and a new CEO’s decisions about where a company works can reveal a lot about how they intend to manage it. Mitra’s emphasis on face-to-face collaboration suggests a leader who wants to pull the organization closer, to encourage serendipity and spontaneous problem-solving rather than relying solely on asynchronous communication tools and video calls. That is a humanizing stance in an increasingly automated world, especially for a company that sells AI-driven sales tools. For all the talk of artificial intelligence, Outreach’s move is ultimately about people—about the belief that the best ideas don’t always come from a perfectly optimized dashboard, but from two colleagues standing at a kitchen counter, sketching out an idea on a whiteboard. As Outreach prepares to make the short journey across Seattle, it is carrying with it a lesson that the industry is learning and relearning: offices are never just square footage. They are places where relationships are built, where culture is strengthened, and where a team decides, together, what it wants to become. In returning to Fremont, Outreach is not just changing its address. It is choosing a neighborhood with a deep history of software ingenuity, a campus with strong roots, and a future that rewards connection.
