Ah summer! Birds are singing. The sun is shining. People are out and about. And apparently the accelerators are pulling together a whole new crop of awesome startups from the Portland startup scene. This week, two startup reveals happened. PIE announced their current class. And the Startup PDX Challenge solicited your input on potential startups for their program—before Friday, August 8.
Wait what? Work to do? Let’s start with that.
Startup PDX Challenge 2014
Meet the 19 semi-finalists in the Portland Development Commission’s Startup PDX Challenge, a competition to identify six top startups with diverse founding teams and the ambition to scale to a national or international market.
Cast your vote below for up to 6 of your favorite teams. You can vote for more than one company but only one vote per company allowed.
So who’s in the mix?
- Aquadrop
- Carehubs
- Design+Culture
- Flipcause
- Genki-Su
- Graph Alchemist
- GRASP
- ICOM
- NoAppFee.com
- RAFTsyrups
- Science Girls
- Scrumpt
- Society Nine
- Soulbe
- Sugarlump Factory
- Switchboard
- Talisha’s Secret
- Tique Box
- VDO Interpreters
Get more details on the finalists and then cast your vote.
PIE Class of 2014
The following companies are in the midst of the current class of PIE. They’re rapidly sprinting toward Demo Day on October 24, 2014.. (Mark your calendars!)
- BlkDot: Social Commerce Platform allows online store owners to easily post shoppable content to social media networks and provide analytics, comparables and performance insights by channel.
- Droplr: File and screen-shot sharing made simple.
- Krumplr: At Krumplr we believe you should be able to use one, simple interface to review, organize, prioritize, schedule, and close your tasks across multiple systems no matter whether you are on the go or at your desk.
- Outdoor Project: Combining inspiration, resources and social community to create the most dynamic marketplace for outdoor adventure.
- Read the Docs: Read the Docs builds and hosts documentation for software projects, creating usable, searchable, and up to date docs for your users.
- Supportland: Supportland is a technology company with a social mission that enables independent businesses to create stronger local economies, enhance customer loyalty and increase revenue with a flexible, measurable tool.
PIE Experiment: Solo-founders
We’ve learned that solo founders have a difficult time going through the traditional PIE accelerator, so we’re working to create an alternative track to support this growing population of entrepreneurs. The solo-founders who jumped on board with this experiment are:
Some of these names sound familiar? Malia Spencer at The Portland Business Journal tells you why.
No voting necessary here. But if you’re in a voting mood, head on over to the Startup PDX Challenge before end of day Friday, August 8.
[Full disclosure: I am the cofounder and general manager of PIE. And I help PDC where I can with the Startup PDX Challenge.]