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 area, either. The AI logistics startup, co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark, moved its headquarters to Dallas in August, although it maintains a Bellevue engineering center.
It keeps getting more bizarre from there. The #3 company on LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Whatnot, the heavily funded video-based shopping startup that set up an engineering center in Seattle last year, but is clearly headquartered in the Los Angeles area.
Finally, ranked #9 on the Seattle list is data center upstart Armada — a company that, according to its own LinkedIn profile, is based in San Francisco.
So, just to summarize: Three of the top Seattle startups (according to LinkedIn) have their headquarters in California, and one has its headquarters in Texas.
GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald pointed out the flaws in the list, calling it a “half-assed” effort. “For a Microsoft-owned company, you’d think they’d have better insight into where Seattle is actually located,” Fitzgerald said.
The list does include some companies that are actually based in the Seattle area.
Making the top 10 are: Bellevue-based Truveta (#4); Seattle-based Yoodli (#5); Redmond-based Worldscape (#6); Seattle-based Overland AI (#7); Seattle-based Gradial (#8); and Kent-based Stoke Space (#10).
All of those companies (except for Worldscape) are listed on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top 200 privately held startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. The other companies — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are listed on our engineering center list.
Notably absent from LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Chainguard, which ranked #42 on LinkedIn’s accompanying report on the top 50 startups in the U.S. Chainguard is headquartered in Kirkland but is a fully remote company. The Seattle ranking counts only employees and hiring in the city, which may explain why a remote company like Chainguard didn’t make the cut.
For our purposes, given that one of the co-founders of the cybersecurity startup calls the Seattle area home, we claim it as a Seattle-area startup.
In its defense, LinkedIn describes a Seattle startup a bit differently than we do here at GeekWire.
According to its methodology, the ranking weighs four factors: employment growth, engagement with company pages, interest in job openings, and the ability to recruit talent from LinkedIn’s list of top companies. The data covers July 2025 through June 2026.
LinkedIn requires companies to be headquartered in the United States to qualify for its U.S. rankings, but doesn’t require them to be headquartered in the Seattle area to make the Seattle list. All of which explains how a startup can make a list of Seattle’s top startups without actually being based in Seattle.
We have to admit, this is a new one on us.
As GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop notes: What the heck is going on, LinkedIn?