The Monthly Beat - April '25 Edition

A recap of the most interesting Pittsburgh tech news from the past few weeks and upcoming local tech events.

The NanoFiche GLPH archive—small engravings containing humanity’s achievements that will soon be sent to the moon. Source: Astrobotic

Good morning!

I don’t know about all yinz, but I am exhausted. The national news cycle this past month (and this past week) has been rough. Between that and narrowly losing my company’s March Madness bracket challenge, my emotions have been all over the place. So it was refreshing for me to turn my eyes back towards what’s happening locally when building the usual post for you all. Hope this is refreshing for you to read as well, but if you also need a little encouragement from someone, take 15 minutes, close your laptop, and do something life-giving before continuing on!

What Happened This Past Month

The Big Story

San Francisco Continues Stealing Our Startups

Well, after their big month of funding and being highlighted in Fortune, AI healthcare transcription company Abridge is relocating their operations to San Francisco along with AI agent company Solstis, a recent CMU startup competition winner. To be fair, Abridge’s CEO plans to keep the Pittsburgh office open. But did you know they’re just the latest in a long-running trend of tech companies moving to San Francisco from Pittsburgh? Here’s a short list of Pittsburgh Tech Ex-pats in order of year founded. Some (which I’ve dubbed the Full Relocators) fully relocated their main HQs, but others (the Dualists) kept HQs and/or a heavy presence here in town.

Full Relocators

• BodyMedia (1999), A Wearable Health Tech Company

• GiftCards.com (1999), An Online Gift Card Platform

• ModCloth (2002), Online Fashion Retailer

• Wombat Security (2008), Cybersecurity and Phishing Awareness Training

• NoWait (2010), Restaurant Waitlist App

• Anki (2010), Consumer Robotics/AI

• Mach9 (2021), Geospatial Software/AI

Dualists

• Bossa Nova Robotics (2005), Robotics (obviously)

• ForAllSecure (Mayhem Security) (2012), Cybersecurity

• Petuum (2016), AI/Machine Learning

• Aurora Innovation (2017), Self-Driving Trucks

If Pittsburgh hopes to keep companies like these in town, we probably need to develop a better growth environment for them. The guys from PSN contend that “scaling to a multibillion-dollar status usually means relying on capital and talent from beyond the local ecosystem… Regional leaders must take more thoughtful, longer-term, and decisive steps to actively support high-growth companies.”

Still, there are some examples of local companies who shun the idea of moving to “the Valley,” including most notably Duolingo, which just opened a local center for early childhood bilingual education in an effort to show their commitment to the Pittsburgh community. This is also a luxury they can afford, though, as Duolingo had a lot of access to funding during critical periods of its growth despite not making the jump to a San Francisco office.

So what made Duolingo different from these other firms? Well, there are a few different factors at play here, but let’s just say it’s a little easier to make connections with potential investors when your CEO previously invented reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google.

Special thanks to Shawn Rancatore for helping me build this list. Anyone out there a current or former employee at any of these companies? Or do you know another company that made the jump from the Mon Valley to Silicon Valley? I would love to hear from you in the comments!

The Headlines

• Astrobotic is now partnering with Stamper Technology to send an engraved archive of humanity’s achievements to the moon. The archive, known as GLPH (Galactic Library Preserve Humanity), is engraved on a nickel-based surface “impervious to aging and deterioration” and contains some cool artistic and historical stuff. It also contains some really stupid stuff, in my opinion; for instance, blueprints for an AI-powered sustainable food system that will never actually exist, images from Burning Man, and a boring instrumental Coldplay song. But now I’m going to have to imprint this blog post on nickel and send it to the moon in order for future civilizations to know my opinions on this.

• Niche published their 2025 Best Places to Live Rankings, with Aspinwall taking the top spot for neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh area. The business, like many others, is also facing headwinds introduced by the current administration’s cuts to education funding, highlighted by CEO Luke Skurman recently on LinkedIn.

• Speaking of the aforementioned headwinds, folks are worried about grants for startups disappearing this September when the SBIR and STTR programs are set to expire. These programs have historically been super important for local tech startups to gain footing and compete with larger businesses. Local devs are also lamenting the slash and burn approach the administration is taking with various government entities like 18F, the team that built the U.S. Web Design System.

• The Brookings Institution is now projecting that 34.72% of Pittsburgh workers could see “at least half of their work tasks” significantly change because of AI technology. This is slightly above their 31.24% projection for the nation as a whole, but comparatively lower than most other metro areas in their sample size of 35 markets.

• Technical.ly announced their RealLIST Startups 2025, including one I’ve never heard of before, Moss, which is “an agtech startup with a mission to reduce labor-intensive farming using its AI-powered robotic sensor that analyzes crops to provide data-driven insights on farming practices.” Pretty neat!

• Last but not least, smart warehouse tech company Gather AI launched their new computer vision product, MHE vision. The product “integrates with Material Handling Equipment such as forklifts, auto pickers, pallet trucks, etc.” to track the movement of pallets throughout warehouses, “helping businesses identify bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and reduce unnecessary labor.”

For the Days Ahead

• It’s the last couple of weeks of Lent! Check out Code for Good’s super cool interactive fish fry map to get some tasty fish through Easter.

• AI@Work returns TOMORROW, April 10th. Word on the street is we’ll be talking a lot about MCP this time around. If you’re building things with AI and want to be there, request to join here.

• Inclusive coding group Code and Coffee is 1:30-3:30pm this Saturday, April 12th in Oakland. RSVP on Meetup.

• The Pittsburgh B2B Software Meetup is at Alloy26 on April 28th. RSVP on Meetup.

• PyCon, the Python programming language conference, is back in Pittsburgh May 14-27th. Register here.

• JuliaCon, the Julia programming language conference, will also be in Pittsburgh July 21–26th. Tickets are on sale here.

• Having trouble making time to learn that AI tool you’ve been meaning to try? Check out Confirmed, a locally owned and developed time manager/scheduler app. Plans start at $5/month for a single user, and you can get your first month free with offer code techbeat!

And that’s a wrap! A couple asides—if you’re one of the folks out there searching for a new job, my company’s hiring for several fully remote engineering roles. If you’re interested, message me on LinkedIn and we can talk about a referral. Hopefully I’ll have another local tech economics post coming your way soon, too.

Have a great Easter and a peaceful Spring!

—Austin