LinkedIn just released its list of the top 10 Seattle startups – GeekWire

by John Cook on Oct 14, 2026 at 2:42 pm October 14, 2026 at 2:42 pm Image via LinkedIn Every so often, we get sucked into a list touting the top regional startups or the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystems. Well, a startup list released today from Microsoft-owned LinkedIn — titled “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle” — grabbed our attention, for all of 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. First of all, four of the companies on LinkedIn’s list — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are not even headquartered in the Seattle area. San Francisco-based Anthropic — ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s Seattle startup list — has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of AI over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination bigger than most AI models could create. If the LinkedIn team were studying GeekWire’s coverage, they’d also realize that #2 on their list, Auger, is not headquartered in the Seattle
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