New AI startup incubator is making waves on Seattle's waterfront

It may sound like the premise for a new reality TV show: 15 startup founders move their companies into a charming pier on Seattle's waterfront.

Occasionally they're visited by investors, who wander through like Heidi Klum, providing advice and looking for the next big thing.

But it's not reality television: It's AI House, a startup incubator with robust academic, political, and financial support, and run by the influential Allen Institute spinoff, AI2.

AI House is on Pier 70, just south of the Olympic Sculpture Park. That’s the same pier that once housed a reality TV show called "The Real World" about strangers living together.

Unlike reality television, the people working at AI House aren’t under surveillance. But they are being scrutinized carefully by venture capitalists looking for places to put their money.

Sonu Aggarwal is one of those investors. He says what makes AI House special is the organization running it: AI2.

“I see AI2 as the center of gravity for AI innovation across the world, over the decade to come," Aggarwal said.

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Before it opened this space, AI2 had already incubated 40 companies — worth over $1 billion today.

One of the latest startups funded partly by AI2 is Signify. At AI House, founder Martín Ramírez pulls up an image on his computer of the label on the back of a stick of deodorant. It's covered with fine print.

Most of that text is required by a wide variety of laws.

"There is a whole process all the way from sourcing of the ingredients, the formulation, and the manufacturing of those process that has to be vetted from a compliance perspective," Ramírez said.

He says his program uses AI to make sure that the labels and certifications are compliant with every regulation in every market where that deodorant is sold.

Ramírez represents the depth of AI talent in the region. He moved to the Northwest from Puerto Rico for a job with Microsoft after graduating college 18 years ago. Now, he's a company founder — and there's nowhere else he'd rather found his company than Seattle.

“In terms of access to human capital, advisors, resources to build businesses, this is the epicenter at the moment," he said. "I like to say that I moved here for the weather. But I'm from the Caribbean, so that would be a lie."

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Ramírez works alongside Kristina Hloptsidis, a startup veteran who first entered the tech world through her background in regulatory compliance for Seattle-based aerospace companies Spaceflight and BlackSky.

"I'm somebody who's always done regulatory compliance in the aerospace world very manually, right?" Hloptsidis said. "I was using workbooks, reading pages and pages of regulation, asking, 'How does this requirement actually apply to my product, or the work that I'm going to do?'"

Hloptsidis began speaking with Ramírez about how to automate that process — and Signify was born.

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Other startups in AI House aim to reduce convenience store theft or reduce the time it takes for homebuilders to get building permits. Most are built on top of large-language models and use deep knowledge of some other industry to specialize AI to a workflow in that industry.

This is the secret recipe for many startups at AI2, according to Yifan Zhang, who is in charge of AI House: pair a subject-matter expert with an AI expert.

“By combining like someone who really understands mortgage, or convenience stores, or health care, with an AI expert, that’s where I think the most powerful solutions are built, that solve real problems,” she said.

AI companies simplifying workflows means eliminating some jobs and creating others. The question is whether people whose jobs get eliminated will have access to new jobs at better pay.

That's true of programmers, whose knowledge of coding language is increasingly being replaced by AI large-language models that can generate code as easily as they can complete a high-school essay.

That trend has caught the attention of Tina-Marie Gulley, CEO of Ada Developers Academy, which trains new coders from marginalized communities.

Gulley says Ada Developers Academy has evolved its curriculum to focus on AI skills.

"It's about ensuring that a single mom in Rainier Valley, a refugee in South Seattle, or non-binary adult in Capitol Hill can see themselves not as casualties of progress, but as creators," she told a crowd assembled to celebrate the opening of AI House.

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Ada Developers Academy partnered with AI2 to build and run AI House so that graduates of ADA's core program, who Gulley refers to as "Adies," can help these startups grow.

AI House plans to expand from the smaller third floor of Pier 70 to the much larger second floor. That would allow the incubator to increase its seating capacity from around 100 to close to 1,000, Yifan Zhang says.