Month: June 2025

In a town full of aggressively humble entrepreneurs, you have to get creative in helping folks realize how awesome some of the startup founders are around here. And Oregon Venture Fund is doing just that. By highlighting companies from their portfolio at Portland International Airport (PDX).

Oregon Venture Fund took part in a Series B round for Conveyor, a distributed startup headquartered in the Bay Area. It doesn’t reflect a Pacific Northwest presence by way of LinkedIn, but I have to assume some folks are here. (Feel free to let me know if you know.) The CEO lives in Camas, Washington. As a new company for OVF, they’re not listed on their portfolio page just yet.

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

TikTok’s biggest star was detained by ICE, with help from another influencer | TechCrunch

Khaby Lame, currently the world’s top TikTok creator, was recently detained by U.S. immigration officials in Las Vegas and has since left the country, The New York Times reports. According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Lame, an Italian Senegalese influencer known for his silent, deadpan reactions to viral clips, overstayed the terms of his visa after arriving in April. He was reportedly granted voluntary departure and is now abroad.

This one kind of snuck up on me. I mean, I knew about it. But when I first heard about it I was like “That’s a long ways off.” Well, that might have been true then. But it’s not now. Oregon Startup Conference is next week.

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

Takeaways from the AI Engineer World’s Fair: The startup playbook is being rewritten in real-time – GeekWire

I just spent four days at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco with 3,000 other founders/engineers building on the frontier of AI. I also passionately debated ideas with 12 Seattle-based founder friends from Foundations, over our dinners and walks to the conference.

Curious what university students are up to with startups, these days…? There’s no better place to get up-to-speed on academic innovation than Invent Oregon, Oregon’s statewide invention competition for university students. And it’s coming up, Friday, June 27, 2025, at the University of Portland.

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

Land-based sea urchin ranchers are kelp forest crusaders and sushi entrepreneurs – Responsible Seafood Advocate

“We are pulling overpopulated sea urchins out of the southern Oregon reefs,” CEO Aaron Huang told the Advocate. “We are bringing those empty, starved urchins onto a land-based ranch, fattening them up and selling them regionally and hopefully nationally and globally over the next few years.”