Month: March 2026

You know what’s fun about blogging about the same community for nearly two decades? You’ve got receipts. A lot of them. Like more than 6,000 posts worth of receipts. So I’ve started doing something with all of those receipts. Every day — or at least most days — I’m posting a “On this Day in Portland Startup History” on the Portland Startups Slack.

Speaking of startup accelerators, our friends at Oregon AI Accelerator — the inaugural startup accelerator program for AI focused startups — is holding its first ever demo day on May 14, 2026. And you’re invited. Or, I mean, at least I’m inviting you. It may be sold out by now. But still… give it a shot.

While I was researching the top 10 Silicon Florist posts for Q1 2026, something dawned on me: The Oregon AI Accelerator revealing its inaugural cohort was the second most-read story of the quarter. And there’s talk of a new accelerator program joining the Portland startup community, soon. As well as a couple of new PIE experiments that have popped up out of nowhere. Which all collided in my brain and got me to wondering: How many incubators and accelerators has Portland actually tried over the years? And perhaps a distant second: How many of them had I covered over the past two decades…?

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

Lytics founder’s new startup is Antfly, AI-powered search – Portland Business Journal

“Our idea was like, ‘Hey, people need access to this kind of dark data, this multimodal data,’” McDermott said. “(And) we should build all these capabilities into the database. So let’s make one kind of unified system to index and retrieve all this information that your (AI) agent will need to make a good answer. And let’s build an entirely new system that’s designed natively for these AI use cases.”

Don’t look now, but we’re already a quarter of the way through 2026. (How does this keep happening, year after year…?) So much activity. Time flying so fast. And all of us just trying to do our startuppy stuff as effectively as possible. I’ll bet that you probably haven’t even had a single spare moment to think about all of the things that have happened in 2026. Right…? Well, with that in mind, I thought it might be useful for all of us if we simply took a breath and paused for a moment to look back at what folks actually clicked on over the past three months. If only so I could actually remember all of this stuff, too.

Well. This is interesting timing. Business Oregon just put out an RFP seeking a consultant to evaluate and update Oregon’s 10-Year Innovation Plan, a plan originally produced by a consultancy out of Ohio — a nearly 100-page document from that was supposed to serve as the statewide roadmap for strengthening innovation-based industries, growing high-wage jobs, and attracting investment.

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

Amazon acquires 1,300 acres for potential data center in Oregon

“Amazon recently purchased land in Boardman, Oregon. Development plans are not final, and Amazon is performing our normal due diligence process as we develop new locations based on customer demand,” a company spokesperson told GeekWire via email.

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

New Census Data Shows Oregon Is Losing Residents in Their Prime Earning Years — Oregon Journalism Project

“A lot of what I’ve seen in terms of the dynamics and population really do have to do with affordability,” says former state economist Mark McMullen, now with the Common Sense Institute Oregon. “The places people are moving to are much less expensive than where they’re moving from.”