Month: January 2025

While Oregon startups raised a significant amount of capital in 2024, the metrics for the year look far more like a decade ago than the $2.7 billion raised in 2021. According to The Oregonian, 2024 marks a seven year low for VC in the region.

In the early days of my engagement with the open source tech communities, one of the clear issues was the plethora of event scheduling and management tools that everyone used to organize events. To get a firm handle on what was happening on any given day, you had to check a whole bunch of different sites — including individual organization blogs. That was the pain point that resulted in the development of an open source project that became Calagator.

If you’re going to have your stealthy startup revealed, having the CEO of the company you’re building tooling for — in this case Bluesky — is probably the best way to have that go down. Even if you’re not quite ready. But things in startups change quickly. And now Portland startup Graze is officially revealing its offering to the world.

“Maybe it would interesting to throw a little networking event to kickoff the year,” I thought. “We could probably get a few folks to show up.” Welp. We’ve officially hit capacity for the 2025 Kickoff event for the Portland startup community on January 14, 2025. This means two things…

While they’ve kept a relatively low profile in the Portland startup community, Lytics has continued to make waves in the Consumer Data Platform category — a category they basically defined. Today, those waves have a new owner. Lytics has been acquired by Contentstack.

Sometimes, Portland has challenges importing other event formats for our community. But apparently, we don’t have that same issue with exporting them. founder.coffee — which began as Coffee w/ Co-Founders — had expanded to Bend in 2024. Now, it’s jumping the pond. With founder.coffee Barcelona.