Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community

[Editor: I’ve had a bunch of conversations about this. Time to write it down. Especially given the article in The New York Times I just caught.] In previous startup eras around here, anytime that the Bay Area returns to “epicenter” status of a technology era — or any other gold rush for that matter — the rising prices often cause creative intelligent folks to start looking for other more affordable places to call home. The past couple of times, Portland has been among those choices. I’m not sure it’s well positioned to be among those choices this time around. But it definitely could be.

At some point, all good things come to an end. And in my estimation, this whole “burn billions of tokens for pennies to fix typos” era is well on its way to winding down. I mean, burning cash is fine for startups. But for public companies…? Not so much. So when OpenAI and Anthropic make it to the street, you can expect that tokens are going to get a tad more expensive. To get ready for that impending upending, you might want to look at TokenJam.

If you’re a designer in the modern age, you’ve likely been there. You design something — every spacing decision, every color, every state, all carefully considered — and then it gets handed off to be rebuilt in code. Maybe by you. Maybe by someone else. But somewhere in that handoff — inevitably — something quietly disappears. Or breaks. That’s the problem Scamp is built to fix.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age – The Atlantic

In some sense this is normal. Every time some new labor-saving technology is introduced, there are experts (the ones who know a lot about technology but not much about psychology) who predict that people will use the technology to make life easier. Soon we’ll all be enjoying 15-hour workweeks! Instead, many people use the technology to make their life more frenetic and full. Planes, trains, and automobiles are technologies that save time and effort by making travel faster. They also enable people to take a lot more trips.

Our friends at Portland Business Journal caught that Platformr, the Bend CloudOps startup, has raised a new round. An earlier Seed Round was comprised of Oregon money backing an Oregon company, this round widens the circle. And most importantly, provides more runway for the — ahem — platform that helps you spin up and manage your own software inside AWS.

Our friends in Pendleton opened applications for their Fall 2026 cohort a while back, and you now have until July 19, 2026, to get yours submitted. So if you’ve got a prototype, an MVP, or even just some early validation, this is your nudge to stop reading and start applying.

It’s that time of year. “Hot enough to fry an egg on this sidewalk” will be being bandied about here and there. It’s summer. It happens. But you know what’s hot all year round…? Geothermal energy. And it’s hot enough to do any number of things. Which is why Quaise Energy has garnered $144 million in venture funding to explore it. And they’re exploring that potential in Central Oregon at Newberry Volcano.

You know the file. It’s that same file. Over and over and over. You just seem to have saved in that one spot that you always forget. Every time you want to use it you have to go dig it up again. And again. And again. If only you had a remote control for your Mac that took you right to that file immediately. Download Droplet to your iPhone and you will.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

North American Startup Funding Shattered Records In First Half Of 2026, Driven By AI

Overall, investment in U.S. and Canadian startups totaled a staggering $392 billion for the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase data, dwarfing anything we’ve seen before.