The Monthly Beat - October '25 Edition
A recap of the most interesting Pittsburgh tech news from the past few weeks, upcoming local tech events, and extras for the days ahead.
Good morning!
Hope you all are having a pleasantly spooky October so far. Two author’s notes before we jump into this month’s issue:
I’ll have one or two more long-form articles for you all over the next few weeks, but after that I’m taking a break from writing for the holiday season to recharge. I’ll be back and refreshed in the New Year!
Starting with this month’s issue, I’m omitting “The Big Story” in favor of posting separate, more in-depth pieces outside this monthly summary. I hope to produce some more unique, locally-sourced content that you all will enjoy. Please let me know any thoughts you might have on the format change!
With that said, let’s get into it.
What’s Been Up This Past Month
How about a big ole dose of metropolitan news to start us off? Pittsburgh International Airport renovations are finally almost done (94% complete, to be exact), and a lot of new tech is now at play. Skild is deploying robot dogs for security patrols, and Carnegie Mellon robots are scrubbing floors with UV rays. But perhaps most exciting are the new scanners they’ll have at security (pictured above), which are on track to go live right around now, drastically reducing wait times!
The City of Pittsburgh seems to be getting into the business of social media surveillance. The city plans to start monitoring social media and tie individual users to their comments as part of their expansion of a new Salesforce-based 311 system. I tend to agree with Council Member Charland, who said, “I would rather us stick to picking up the trash and figure out how to do that and get that part right before we talk at all about expanding into any of these kinds of troubling capabilities.”
The Sheetz on Freeport Road along Interstate 76 (Exit 48) now has a particularly significant EV charging station. It’s PA’s 20th EV charging station, putting the state in 1st place for stations built through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding program. Since the program’s inception, PA’s stations have delivered 30,000+ charging sessions, powered 3.5M+ miles of driving, and reduced CO2 by 1.7M+ pounds. Sheetz also announced a partnership to deploy even more charging stations across all of its locations in an effort to solidify its position as the favorite haunt of EV drivers.
Speaking of cars and charging things, Honda and Astrobotic have teamed up to develop power systems to last through nights on the Moon. Astrobotic will be integrating Honda’s regenerative fuel cell system, which stores solar power as hydrogen during the lunar day and converts it to electricity during the 2-week lunar night, with Astrobotic’s own LunaGrid power service and Vertical Solar Array Technology. Whether lunar power will be cheaper than Duquesne Light’s AI data center-related price hikes remains to be seen.
Rockets and EVs aren’t the only things moving around here, with KEF Robotics moving to East Liberty and pricing analytics company Green Cabbage moving to Warrandale. KEF’s new crib has those SCIFs I mentioned a couple of months back, which they hope to leverage for more Department of Defense work. Both companies plan to hire new employees to fill their respective new spaces.
While KEF hopes to get more federal funding, CMU was forced to lay off 75 of its Software Engineering Institute (SEI) employees due to Trump Administration funding cuts. SEI is a federally-funded research center focused on AI/cybersecurity for the Department of Defense. This latest move, unrelated to the government shutdown, follows earlier layoffs of over a dozen computer science staff in August, which were also due to Trump Admin funding cuts.
In AI news, conversation turned to AI brainrot at the locally-hosted Eradicate Hate Global Summit. The summit has been held every year since the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, which claimed the lives of 11 people in 2018 in the deadliest antisemitic attack in our nation’s history. Public Source’s piece shares how one particular panel at the summit discussed “how AI is being used to promote extremism and violence — and how it can be used to stop it.”
Commentary was also buzzing around AI investment in Pittsburgh this past month. Carta shared data showing that 85.5% of software startup capital in Pittsburgh went to AI, which is the highest in the nation. Meanwhile, NEXTPittsburgh published a great piece in the wake of the AI Horizons summit, questioning if there will be any actual benefit to Pittsburgh for becoming an AI hub. Last but not least, at Technical.ly’s RealLIST Connectors event, leaders said Pittsburgh should focus on physical AI (hardware/robots), not just software.
Ok, last AI thing I swear—if you’re a software engineer, SRE/DevOps, AI builder, or just one of my more technical readers and haven’t seen it yet, go check out my friend and fellow Pittsburgher Robbie McKinstry’s guest post from this past month on agentic site reliability engineering! It’s such a good breakdown of what’s on the market and what people should be aiming for with these tools. Link below.
Now for some quick hits. Niche published their 2026 Best Schools and Districts in America Rankings. Three Pittsburgh districts cracked the Top 100: North Allegheny (#25), Mt. Lebanon (#68), and Fox Chapel (#69) (nice).
Technical.ly posted a great analysis piece highlighting the disconnect between job posting numbers and the difficult reality of finding a tech job locally. Hang in there, folks.
Schell Games launched a new competitive skydiving game called Project Freefall. Players fight for a sole parachute before hitting the ground, and you can have up to 8 players at one time, either on PC or VR.
Also in games, Mega Cat Studios founder James Deighan shared answers to 10 questions on Pittsburgh Startup News. Had no idea they now have over 800 remote team members! Wild.
Lastly, Wabtec is sending its trains and train technology to Kazakhstan. The $4.2B order from the country is the largest in company history and aims to strengthen Kazakhstan as a transit hub between Europe and Asia.
For the Days Ahead
TONIGHT at 6pm! PyData Pittsburgh is hosting their October event, Driving Materials Innovation with Data: The MDS-Rely Center for Industry-Academic Partnerships. Sign up here.
Looking for a weekly hangout with other folks who are interested in technology and entrepreneurship? Technically Coffee is a great one, 8am every Friday at Bakery Square. Sign up here.
The next Code & Supply Build Night is October 27th at 6pm. Build Night is an impromptu co-working space where you can work on a project, pair, learn, and mingle. Sign up here.
Pittsburgh Tech Week is November 3rd to 8th. The website is still pretty badly designed, but you can view the events for that week and sign up to sponsor or host an event there.
Probably the most exciting of that week’s events is Pittsburgh Robotics Network’s Robotics & AI Discovery Day 2025 on November 5th at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. This year’s discovery day will be focused on the integration of AI into robotics systems. Register to attend here.
Feeling like you want to take a break from things around the holidays, too? Schedule your time away with 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!
As mentioned previously, keep an eye out for one or two more posts before my holiday hiatus. Till then, have a great autumn!
—Austin