Boulder Care, a US addiction medicine provider, has appointed Dr Ayesha Appa as Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs. Dr Appa will lead clinical strategy, quality and research as the company expands its services nationwide. Dr Appa is triple board-certified in Addiction Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine. She previously directed San Francisco General Hospital's Health Access Point clinic and serves as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2024, she received the National Institute on Drug Abuse Avenir Award. Boulder Care has supported 35,000 patients through smartphone-based outpatient addiction treatment. The company reports patients are three times more likely to remain in recovery compared to industry benchmarks, with health plan partners seeing 40–50% cost savings through reduced emergency department and inpatient treatment use.

We’re back with another update to the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top privately held technology startups in Seattle and the rest of the Pacific Northwest.The list provides a snapshot of the region’s robust startup landscape and highlights companies that are gaining traction on their respective industries.The ranking is grounded in both publicly available data — including LinkedIn employee counts, Facebook followers, and Moz domain authority — as well as editorial judgment from the GeekWire news team, based on factors including recent fundings and layoffs, and our own insights from covering the region’s technology startups.Companies founded 15 years ago and beyond are not included, given that they are no longer “startups” based on our parameters.A number of startups moved up the list with our latest update.Chainguard zoomed up to the No. 18 slot after the cybersecurity company raised $140 million and reached a $1.1 billion valuation last month.zoomed up to the No. 18 slot after the cybersecurity company raised $140 million and reached a $1.1 billion valuation last month. Others that recently raised funding to fuel growth — including cybersecurity startup Protect AI (No. 41); e-commerce delivery software startup Pandion (No. 62); and addiction care company Boulder Care (No

Christian Luscher, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva, presenting on addiction at the Allen Institute. (Allen Insitute Photo / Erik Dinnel)Christian Luscher has spent years trying to figure out why people chase a fix that comes at such a high cost. Luscher, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva, explained the biology of addiction in a talk at the Allen Institute last week. The event took place just blocks from downtown Seattle, where an increasing amount of overdoses are occuring, driven in part by synthetic drugs such as fentanyl. Luscher said fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine. “The onset of action is very fast,” he said