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

I know you’re hard at work, finishing up your Bend Venture Conference 2026 application to share your startup story on stage at one of the largest startup pitch competitions on the west coast. Good on you. But did you know that content you’re creating can be repurposed for one of the largest startup pitch competitions in the world…? It’s true. So why not take that content and plop it into your application for SXSW Pitch 2027…?

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

No, local models will not win

Local models are never going to be as powerful. I think this point should be obvious: all of the current frontier models (closed and open-weights) are far too big to run on anything but a full GPU cluster in a datacenter. Of course, smaller models are getting more intelligent over time. In a year you might be able to run something about as strong as GPT-5.6-Sol on your laptop. But by then, you’ll think of GPT-5.6-Sol as too weak to be useful.

While everyone clearly knows that Portland was built upon an ancient unicorn burial ground, few people realize that the “P” in “Portland” actually stands for “procrastination.” But “Procrastinationortland” was too long for print at the time. Although that now probably seems obvious, doesn’t it…? Because you still haven’t submitted your application to Bend Venture Conference yet. Have you…?

If you’ve ever talked to anyone about drones around here, inevitably Insitu comes up. And with good reason. The drone startup was acquired by Boeing nearly two decades ago. But it’s been steadfastly focused on continuing to innovate within the drone and AI arena. Now, they’ll simply being doing that work under a new entity. Archer has acquired Insitu from Boeing.

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

Your August dispatch from the Office of Small Business

The Office of Small Business would like to invite you to attend the rescheduled Show Up for Small Business event, which will take place on Thursday, August 13 at 5:00pm at the ModHaus food cart pod (3829 SE Division St, Portland, OR 97202).

Not sure if you’ve heard, but Portland Startup Week is no more. Lead organizer Josh Carter has decided that it’s time to shut it down. I hear you. “What…? Right now…?!!? It was having a total resurgence following the pandemic. How could this happen…?” Well turn that frown upside down, gentle reader. This seemingly bad news has a distinctly silver lining. Meet Oregon Startup Week.