Former Concur CEO Steve Singh’s latest acquisition is a step closer to the ‘perfect trip’

For three decades, former Concur CEO Steve Singh (above) has been trying to assemble the technologies and companies to give business travelers the “perfect trip,” from planning to booking to expense management. Today he took the next step, leading an investor group in the acquisition of Direct Travel Inc., a Colorado-based corporate travel management company, founded in 2011, with more than $300 million in annual revenue and 1,800 employees. Singh spoke with us about the deal and the vision, and hinted at what’s next. Read more.

How do you compete with AI giants on their own turf? Meeting summary startup Read AI’s strategy is to build useful tools that work across their platforms — adding a new feature that will summarize emails and messages by topic from Gmail, Outlook, Teams, and Slack. The Seattle-based startup released the “Readouts” as it announced $21 million in funding from Goodwater Capital and Madrona to fuel further growth. Read more.

• Related: See GeekWire’s regularly updated list of startup funding deals in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

We went inside the new Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, a collaboration between the Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington. Researchers will combine “academic creativity with startup-style industrial execution” and leverage DNA-based technology to measure biological activity over time. Read more.

In other life sciences news, the Providence health tech incubator has spun out a new startup called Praia Health that is backed by $20 million in funding. Praia’s platform powers patient portals that allow people to track appointments, tests results, medications and more. Read more.

Tableau ain’t easy. Mastering its data visualization tools takes real expertise and many hours of experience. Until now, maybe? The Salesforce-owned company released a new AI tool, Einstein Copilot in Tableau, that uses natural language prompts to make its advanced features more usable. We talked with Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay (above) about the rollout. Read more.

Vote for UX Design of the Year: The finalists in this GeekWire Awards category are helping end users across home building, investing, AI-generated speech, data analysis, and schedule and expense tracking for gig workers. Read more.

Walking back on Just Walk Out? According to a new report, Amazon’s senior VP of grocery stores says the next generation of Fresh stores will focus on Dash Carts rather than the company’s cashierless tech that relies on an array of cameras and sensors. Read more in The Information.

Hot Links:

• The new World Billionaires list from Forbes includes the top 10 in tech, those getting rich off AI, richest women and more. (Forbes)

• A massive collection of Star Trek memorabilia left behind by a Bremerton, Wash., man is believed to be among the largest if not the largest in the world. (The New York Times)

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pumped up about “Road House,” saying that the movie remake attracted more than 50 million Prime viewers, the biggest opening ever for a film produced by Amazon. (X)

• More than 200 musical artists, including Pearl Jam, penned a letter calling on developers and tech firms to stop using AI to “infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.” (Axios)

Thanks for subscribing to the GeekWire newsletter, and have a great day. — GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop, todd@geekwire.com, and GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser, kurt@geekwire.com.