GeekWire Awards 2021: Learn about the 5 finalists for Innovation of the Year – GeekWire

Posted on April 18, 2021 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

Innovators across the Seattle area are tackling problems big and small with a variety of breakthroughs and technologies.

Whether it’s improved battery performance, better vaccines, an easier way to purchase clean energy, tiny tech for tracking scary insects, or management of a company’s cloud infrastructure, the five finalists for GeekWire’s Innovation of the Year are looking to change the way we live and do business.

Community voting is now underway across 13 GeekWire Awards categories in our 13th annual celebration of Pacific Northwest tech. Community voting, which closes on April 30, will be factored in with feedback from more than 20 judges. On May 20 we will announce the winners live at the virtual GeekWire Awards, presented by Wave Business.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory won the Innovation of the Year award in 2020 for its VaporID technology.

Submit your votes below, grab your tickets, and keep scrolling for descriptions of each Innovation of the Year finalist.

Icosavax creates computer-designed, virus-like particles that are used in vaccines to trigger immune responses. The Seattle-based biotech company is a spinout from the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design and the technology was invented by Neil King, who serves as chair of the startup’s scientific advisory board. Icosavax is working on a COVID-19 vaccine, as well as vaccines to prevent less well known diseases. It recently raised $100 million.

Bellevue, Wash.-based CoreStack helps companies across various industries manage the cost, compliance, consumption, and other aspects of their cloud infrastructure. Its software provides “automated guardrails” that help with proactive policy enforcement, retrospective action, automated post provisioning action, and resource consistency. CEO Ezhilarasan Natarajan previously noted that average revenue per customer had more than doubled in recent deals, and the trend was expected to continue as the startup is seeing tailwinds from the pandemic as more companies shift their processes into the cloud.

A big thanks to our longtime awards presenting partner, Wave Business, for supporting this fun community event. Also, thanks to gold and category sponsors: Blink UX, WSGR, JLL, EY, Premera, Dreambox Learning, BECU, WestRiver Group, ALLtech and First Tech Federal Credit Union. And to our silver sponsors BCRA and Kingston Marketing Group. If interested in sponsoring a category or another component of the GeekWire Awards, please contact us at [email protected].