Upskill Pavilion
AI is changing what "qualified" means faster than most people can keep up with. The Upskill Pavilion is where you close that gap — hands-on workshops, career coaching, and direct conversations with the organizations training the workforce for what's next. No lecture halls, no theory-only sessions: just practical skills you can walk away with and start using immediately.
The Upskill Pavilion is proudly sponsored by WGU, a nonprofit university that's spent over two decades building flexible, career-aligned education for working adults. This year, WGU has expanded deep into AI, launching a new B.S. in AI Engineering along with new certificates in AI and machine learning development, AI strategy for business, and AI for healthcare and K-12 education. Stop by their booth to see how you or your team can get started.
Featured Upskill Booths
Founder Cohort 14
Founder Cohort 14 is 21 Washington companies, from Spokane to Tacoma to Langley. Several are pre-revenue by design. Several are already selling into Providence, King County, and the Defense Innovation Unit. All of them are in the room.
7thGear (Bothell)
An AI digital assistant for account managers in post-sales and customer success, built so one manager can cover up to 10x more clients without losing service quality.
ABRI Labs (Seattle)
Human performance risk intelligence for aviation, giving pilots real-time support in the cockpit and airlines early warning on fatigue, stress, and crew dynamics.
Ahmi (Redmond)
A 4-in-1 AI hub for early childhood that replaces the fragmented nursery gadget stack with one purpose-built device for ages 0 to 6.
BulkShare.ai (Redmond)
A hyper-local peer-to-peer marketplace that lets neighbors in dense residential buildings pool bulk purchases and split costs, with no upfront spend or storage.
Citaria (Bothell)
AI qualitative research analysis for product teams, where every conclusion links back to the interview clip that supports it.
Credential Network (Spokane)
AI-native credentialing for hospitals, clinics, and credentialing service companies, covering the full lifecycle so providers get to work faster and billing does not stall.
Dork Labs (Seattle)
Financial infrastructure for people and AI agents, pairing digital asset lending and stablecoin rails with a consumer savings product and programmatic access for agents.
empathium (Tacoma)
AI simulation training that lets healthcare and social service teams practice and measure the high-stakes conversations that decide care outcomes.
Groforma (Seattle)
Turns a parcel and a landowner's priorities into a fundable development plan, opening multifamily projects to the small builders currently locked out by capital and complexity.
InsurPal (Bellevue)
An account intelligence engine for commercial property insurance producers that turns fragmented property and owner data into a clear next step before the submission starts.
Kednus (Seattle)
An API-first compliance and intelligence platform for institutional digital assets, monitoring risk and evidencing controls across 200+ blockchains.
Makko AI (Seattle)
An integrated development environment for video games where indie developers and hobbyists go from prompt to playable prototype in minutes.
Moe (Kirkland)
A mobile platform that turns physical goods into tradeable assets, with AI agents handling valuation, cross-marketplace listing, and negotiation on the seller's behalf.
Ngentix (Langley)
Self-healing integrations that detect API and schema drift and regenerate the connector automatically, so data keeps flowing without an engineering ticket.
Ocko Navigation (Seattle)
GPS-free navigation software for small drones, letting any platform fly autonomously in jammed or spoofed environments using commodity sensors and compute.
Qinsay (Issaquah)
An AI crisis tabletop exercise platform that replaces the slow annual preparedness drill with realistic scenarios a team can run inside a week.
Rhonda (Seattle)
A permitting platform for the AI era, starting with a pre-check tool that raises application quality and cuts the costly back-and-forth with reviewers.
Securim (Redmond)
Autonomous CMMC compliance for defense contractors, scanning a company's infrastructure and delivering an auditor-ready remediation roadmap in days instead of months.
SmartVerify (Bellevue)
Data-centric guardrails for AI that move access control down to the data layer, so enterprises write policy against data rather than code.
Somnistics Research Labs (Woodinville)
A 60-second closed-loop breathing platform that fits between surgical cases, turning burnout intervention from a wellness exercise into a clinical skill.
StackIQ (Seattle)
Maps a company's full tech stack, finds what overlaps and what is overpriced, then executes the migration so the savings land before the next renewal.