Almost a decade ago, a shocking statistic put Katherine Sizov on a new career path.

Sizov was doing neuroscience research at the NIH but knew the role wasn’t right for her — she wanted to see a more immediate impact than is typically possible in academic research. Then she stumbled on an article saying 40% of food in the U.S. is spoiled or tossed.

Sizov wanted to learn more. She marched down to her local grocery store to pepper a woman stocking peaches with questions about food waste, which led to inquiries with players across the supply chain.

Food, she learned, is considered a commodity. “But it’s alive — it’s a living, breathing organism,” Sizov said. “And our supply chains aren’t designed for that. So as a result, we’re treating food like an iPhone or semiconductor.”

In 2019, Sizov launched Strella, a Seattle-based ag tech startup that uses sensor-based hardware to monitor produce as it’s shipped and stored en route to consumers.

Strella uses IoT devices to measure gases including ethylene, a plant hormone released by ripening fruit, as well as machine vision to examine the produce. Its software interprets the fruit’s real-time conditions plus data including country of origin, packing date and varietal type to let operators of packing houses and grocery store managers know the condition of their produce.

The 21-person company has raised $22 million from investors and is close to profitability. The business started by building an expertise in monitoring apples and pears from Washington state and expanded to 26 countries. It’s now adding citrus fruits and avocados to the lineup.

Keep reading to learn more about her journey, starting as a 22-year-old CEO and working to spark systemic change across the food system. Her quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

On launching a startup in pursuit of professional fulfillment: It’s been way harder than I thought — even though everyone tells you starting a company is hard. The hardest part about it is you have to get better yourself, personally. Your leadership style is a reflection of who you are and how you behave and stuff like that. And so I’ve just had to grow up.

Stepping into your first CEO role: It takes a degree either of ego or naivete to say, “Oh, as a 20-year-old, I want to be a CEO.” You can imagine the quality of the work when you first start out. And so it’s a constant pattern of tearing yourself down and trying to rebuild, but also teetering between the edge of not completely destroying yourself and your personality.

What keeps you going: I couldn’t work a job that was just purely profit motivated. If it didn’t feel useful to the world, I definitely couldn’t do this. The whole point of why I think I’m alive is to hopefully do something good for society.

I wanted to pick something that aligned with profitability, too, because I don’t think fighting an uphill battle is always the right answer. I wanted to pick something that people could sign off on in a capitalist way, but that also ended up creating the positive impact that I want to see, and that’s super important to me.

Thoughts on lasting impact or legacy: I definitely want to get our food system into a more 21st-century model. That involves a collaboration between technology and the way things have been done for a long time.

You can’t come in as a startup and be like, “We know everything you know.” A lot of the people we work with are 11th-generation growers and they know a lot. So it’s a collaboration between all of this knowledge that humans have, coupled with technology that leads to a better, more resilient supply chain.

On a smaller, individual level, I hope that people like working with me, working at my company, feel like they’re doing something that matters and want to come in every day.

The intersection of climate and tech solutions: These problems are really, really large, and they don’t necessarily impact one single organization. So in food, for example, you’ve got so many different — I call them guardian angels of food — as it passes from hand to hand. And the problem of waste is optimizing the whole thing.

One of the big challenges with climate is that you have dozens or hundreds of different stakeholders, and they might all have completely different interests. And the challenge is to figure out how to align everybody to this common, large goal.

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Aetheon, a new startup that helps job candidates map their real world capabilities into work opportunities, has raised $1.24 million as part of its seed round.

Founded last year, the company is building what it calls a “skills operating system” aimed at helping workers — particularly military veterans and recent graduates — translate their real-world experience into language employers can use.

“At a high level, we’re investing in becoming the trusted infrastructure layer for how skills are understood, validated, and mobilized in a rapidly changing workforce,” said co-founder and CEO Marie Gill.

The company aims to solve a problem that’s gotten worse in the age of AI-generated resumes: how do employers evaluate what candidates can actually do? Aetheon’s platform ingests data from more than 100 occupational sources and maps it against a proprietary taxonomy of more than 300 skills, generating verified profiles that workers own and can carry across job opportunities.

Aetheon is pre-revenue and is focusing on paid pilots for veteran, higher-ed, and employer populations. Gill said the company is seeing demand from both sides of the market — individuals who want clearer visibility into their skills, and organizations looking for better signal in a noisy hiring landscape.

Gill, who is based in the Seattle region, was an exec at Executive Networks, Concertus, and Modifi. She also leads the Green Apron Alliance of Starbucks alumni.

Her co-founders are Gina Jeneroux, a 37-year veteran of BMO Financial Group, and longtime entrepreneur and product leader Mark Wayman.

The team plans to use the funding to launch its beta, expand pilot programs with employers, nonprofits, and public-sector partners, and build out its underlying data and intelligence layer.

The company’s investors include Blue Ash Ventures, along with a France-based strategic investor and two senior HR leaders in Hong Kong.

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By all indications, Bungie’s revival of its Marathon franchise should not have worked out. Despite a CEO’s departure, an indefinite delay, several controversies, and targeting a saturated genre, Marathon came out earlier this month and has become one of this year’s unexpected successes.

Marathon, developed by Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie (Halo 2, Destiny), is a multiplayer online shooter and a follow-up to Bungie’s classic Marathon trilogy on the Mac. Originally announced in 2023, Marathon is also a competitive, player-vs-player “game as a service” (GaaS, or simply live-service), which is meant to be consistently updated so it can be played indefinitely.

That was the first warning sign. As a GaaS, Marathon was up against heavy competition from the moment it debuted, both from other online shooters such as Fortnite and Call of Duty and other “forever games” like World of Warcraft and Dead by Daylight.

A successful GaaS can be a license to print money for its publisher, which has led to many game studios adopting the model in the last few years. Bungie itself was purchased by Sony Entertainment in 2022 as part of a plan by Sony to shift its internal game development to emphasize GaaS, owing largely to Bungie’s expertise running the Destiny series.

However, that same widespread publisher interest has flooded the market, especially in the last few years. The problem with a game that’s meant to last forever is that once it gets its hooks into a player, it’s rare for them to switch away from it, due to time investments, community ties, and — let’s face it — the sunk cost fallacy. Many live-service games are even designed to reward players who consistently log in every day, so a player who uses some of their finite leisure time to check out a competitor’s product can actively harm their overall experience.

As a result, anyone who wants to launch any kind of GaaS (or really, any video game at all) in 2026 has an uphill battle ahead of them in order to find an audience. They not only have to reach interested consumers, but they often have to implicitly convince them to stop playing something else.

If you’re trying to market a “hero shooter,” for example, you have to be aware that almost all of your prospective players are already heavily invested in Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, or Valorant. It’s not enough to offer them a good game. You have to give them a reason to switch.

It’s a tall order. Even major publishers working with famous licenses have had difficulty getting into this market sector, which has created a bloodbath. There’s already an entire virtual graveyard for recently discontinued live-service games, featuring releases such as Anthem, Multiversus, Rumbleverse, and most recently Highguard, which was infamously shut down less than 50 days after its launch in late Jan.

It didn’t help that Marathon in particular kept racking up warning signs. It was indefinitely delayed last summer, which followed several waves of layoffs at Bungie; longtime CEO Pete Parsons departed the company in Aug. 2025; Marathon’s publisher Sony abruptly abandoned another GaaS, Concord, in Oct. 2024, which seemed to suggest it was backing off of its bets on live-service gaming; and there was a controversy, since resolved, regarding visuals used in Marathon that had been stolen from a Scottish freelance artist. It initially looked like Marathon was headed into disaster.

Instead, Marathon has taken off. At time of writing, it has a Very Positive rating on Steam with over 33,500 simultaneous players, as well as a respectable 79 on Metacritic. Against the odds, Bungie appears to have a solid hit on its hands.

Marathon is a revival of one of Bungie’s earliest franchises. The first three Marathon games were some of the first and only exclusive games for the Mac back in the ‘90s, and can be seen as a spiritual precursor to Halo: Combat Evolved. (Both games are first-person shooters about a cyborg in power armor following an AI’s orders while they fight aliens. The finer strokes are different, but there’s some connective tissue.)

2026’s Marathon is an interquel set 99 years after the events of the first game, on the planet Tau Ceti IV. It’s been several hundred years since the UESC Marathon left Earth’s solar system on a mission to establish an offworld colony and subsequently vanished. In 2893, Earth finally receives a distress signal from the ship.

Earth reacts by sending a squad of “runners,” humans who’ve digitized their minds and can download them into cybernetic shells, to Tau Ceti IV. Once there, the runners are thrown into an ongoing struggle between UESC forces, alien invaders, rogue AIs, and each other. Each individual runner is a wild card, who can opt to work for multiple factions from both on- and offworld.

Marathon, as a game, is what’s often called an “extraction shooter.” Players team up in groups of one to three to infiltrate various locations throughout Tau Ceti IV and must take on both computer-controlled and human enemies in order to grab whatever they can find. If you’re able to survive your mission and successfully evacuate the area, you can keep what you’ve found and use those salvaged resources to improve your equipment for your next run.

That gives Marathon, and other extraction shooters such as Escape from Tarkov, a unique tension compared to more typical PVP action games. Your survival actually matters, as opposed to another shooter where you might die 6 times in a good match, and you have something to lose.

Marathon combines that with strange dreamlike visuals that are reminiscent of ‘90s cyberpunk, particularly Ghost in the Shell. Tau Ceti’s abandoned facilities are all colorful mazes, full of strange sights and narrow corridors, and all your fellow runners are barely humanoid robots. The whole game has a feel like it’s set inside a half-corrupted archive of experimental digital artwork, all the way down to its font choices and complicated menu structure. It’s a deliberate blend of the 1990s’ vision of the future with cutting-edge 2026 graphics, and looks like nothing else that’s currently on store shelves.

That also means that it’s got a couple of different learning curves. After spending a weekend with the game, I don’t feel like I’ve got a handle on it yet, either as a shooter or as an audiovisual experience. Marathon’s menus are a deliberate riot, and while its basic mechanics will be comfortably familiar if you’ve played other recent extraction shooters, it’s a little harder to navigate them than it needs to be.

For right now, my biggest takeaway from Marathon is that it’s beaten the odds. I wouldn’t have guessed at this time last year that Marathon would have a successful launch, between Bungie’s issues and current market forces, but it seems like there’s still at least a little room for this kind of FPS in the modern market.

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The move comes just weeks after social aggregator Digg, which once aimed to rival Reddit, shut down its app, citing an inability to control a surge of bots. Reddit, by contrast, appears determined to tackle the problem head-on.
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