Silicon Florist links arrangement for October 7, 2026

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

Launch NY’s Marnie LaVigne on helping founders get to the next thing faster

Launch NY’s first limited partner fund has already begun returning capital to investors. Its $15.775 million LP Fund II is actively deploying capital. Its Investor Network has grown to more than 400 accredited investors. And its portfolio includes companies such as Dimensional Energy, Ognomy, HelixIntel and Exostellar that have gone on to raise significant outside capital or achieve exits.

AI founders for hire: Startup hub Foundations launches service to connect businesses with builders – GeekWire

The service, called Foundations Design and Engineering, is designed in part to give those founders a new way to pay their bills as early-stage investment gets harder to raise. It also reflects how AI is changing tech, making software easier to build and leading some startups to act more like services firms, customizing their work for individual customers.

Lake Oswego-based Rule42 acquires 64 Analytics platform – Portland Business Journal

Rule42 is an AI-powered technology platform that connects athletes in youth sports with scouts and coaches. It was founded by former Intel President Renée James. She later founded semiconductor designer Ampere, which was acquired by SoftBank for $6.5 billion in 2025.

Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have | Dead Parrot BBS

From a user’s point of view, the important part is simpler: the file contains the text itself without requiring a particular application to make sense of it. I can create a text file on Linux, copy it to a Windows machine, put it on a web server, open it in a terminal, search it with command-line tools, edit it with any number of programs, or send it to somebody using an entirely different system. Very little about the file depends on how it was created.

What the AI boom is doing for Americans – by Noah Smith

Now that doesn’t mean data centers are necessarily good for a city or state on net. There are real costs, too — electric power demands that put strain on the grid, nuisance noise, and so on. But the benefits are real, and they don’t come in the form of job creation.

(2009) Nothing ventured, nothing gained: 5 Portland tech startups to pitch Venture Northwest crowd

And there’s no better place to pitch a room full of potential shareholders than Venture Northwest, the annual gathering of institutional investors, investment bankers, and some of the most promising startups in the Pacific Northwest.

Sharing AI progress in mathematics | OpenAI

As we look to improve how we share results with the math community, we’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study⁠(opens in a new window) to develop best practices, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations⁠(opens in a new window) to inform how we release these results.

Boston Dynamics Appoints Rohit Prasad as Chief Executive Officer | Boston Dynamics

Prior to joining Boston Dynamics, Prasad served as Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon. During his 12 years at Amazon, he was instrumental in building Alexa from its earliest days into a pioneering large-scale consumer AI service used in hundreds of millions of households worldwide. More recently, he led the development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family used by enterprises.

North America’s Startup Funding Falls In Q3 As AI Giants Eye The Public Markets

Funding to North American startups declined sequentially in the third quarter and came in well below the all-time peak. However, the dip is largely due to the absence of new megarounds for OpenAI and Anthropic and doesn’t appear to reflect any broad weakening in the venture investment climate.

(2014) louisgray.com: The Myth of the Billion Dollar Startup

But while the meme of “yet another billion dollar startup” is a fun one, the reality is that these are instead highly valued private companies who operate like public companies, and have the same kind of deep resources that most public companies have, but haven’t yet taken that leap to the retail trading markets – supported by changes in the venture funding process and new rules that make being a public company harder.

AmyriAD Therapeutics Acquires Recognify Life Sciences, Expanding Its Clinical-Stage Cognition Pipeline with RL-007 (Inidascamine)

AMSTERDAM and SHERWOOD, Ore., Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — AmyriAD Therapeutics B.V. (“AmyriAD”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on cognition in central nervous system disorders, today announced the acquisition of Recognify Life Sciences, Inc. (“Recognify”) and its lead clinical-stage program, RL-007 (inidascamine). The acquisition expands AmyriAD’s cognition pipeline while preserving Ismidenon (AD-101) as the company’s lead Alzheimer’s disease program.

ATProto PDX

We had a great time hanging out with @pfrazee.com tonight!

Crunchbase Data Shows AI’s Most Active Startups Are Becoming Serial Acquirers

The buying spree has pushed acquisitions of AI startups by other venture-backed AI companies to 195 through Sept. 29, according to Crunchbase data — 14% more than in all of 2025. Yet the number of buyers grew just 2%, indicating that increasingly active acquirers are driving much of the increase.

Playground

Introducing Playground, an experimental gaming platform where you can create custom games in minutes, no coding required.

A Eulogy to Liquid Death – by Ross Gardiner – Sub Optimal

Folks, the Liquid Death joke now appears to be in its terminal phase. I’m diagnosing it with Stage 4 Brand Confusion, which has tragically spread from its source in the water aisle to every area of the supermarket. So gather round, call in the priest: your beloved brand is succumbing to a sad, hype-induced delirium, derailed from its absurdist roots by its ill-begotten riches, and the predictable fact that the joke—the single solitary joke—just isn’t funny anymore.

At raucous rally, Portland parents, teachers and students protest school closures – oregonlive.com

Hundreds of infuriated parents and staff members descended on Portland Public Schools’ headquarters Tuesday night to protest far-reaching proposals to close up to 14 schools, shift grade configurations and programs and redraw attendance boundaries.

Jeff Swickard Is Collecting Downtown Towers. He Says He Has No Plan.

Since opening his first dealership 12 years ago in Wilsonville, Swickard has grown his auto network, the Swickard Group, to 54 dealerships on the West Coast and in Alaska and Hawaii. He’s done incredibly well in the current, roaring stock market, and over the past two years, he’s moved especially fast acquiring Portland real estate, much of it Class A office space.

Claude now works with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides | Claude by Anthropic

Teams that run on Google Workspace can now bring Claude into their files or work on their files directly from Claude, with our new add-on and Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides connectors (in beta).

Digicity: City Builder — Games app | Shipaton Showcase

Digicity is a city builder for iPhone, iPad and Mac. You get a 128×128 map, a handful of tools, and a clock that starts in 1900. Zone land as residential, commercial or industrial, at light, medium or heavy density — then watch what you zoned decide for itself whether to grow. Nothing appears because you placed it. Buildings arrive when the demand is there, the power reaches, the water arrives and the land is worth building on, and they stall when it is not.

Everyone is building the same thing

Today, tech is still evolving too fast for there to be any canonical AI-native stack. There will be, but it’s not here yet. And until it arrives, it’s going to be too easy for us all to confuse table-stakes with differentiation.

What to Do When a Competitor Raises Millions: 7-Day Plan

That’s the first thing to understand about the raise. It is not a war chest. It’s a clock. From today, your competitor has around two years to grow roughly 3x, and every decision they make- hiring, pricing, which segment to chase- is now shaped by that clock.

The state of the tech industry in 2026 – by Gergely Orosz

People in tech are more than used to change; seeing the internet go from zero to everywhere, the arrival of mobile communications and smartphones exploding in popularity, cloud computing rising from a niche concern, and the development of programming languages like Go and Rust, and frameworks like React (web) and Jetpack Compose (Android). Despite this, the scale and pace of the impact AI is having at present is still without precedent.

Silicon Valley’s AI wunderkind launches Underdog, the most private Instinct/Muse competitor yet | TechCrunch

While there, he hacked and coded alongside other people who would become the biggest names in AI, like Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI researcher Noam Brown. He tested early versions of AI tools that would later become well known, including a chatbot shared by Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann that would become Claude, an image generator from David Holz that would become Midjourney, and what would become OpenAI’s GPT-3 and the image generator Stable Diffusion. Prominent investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant hired him for Airchat, Ravikant’s now-defunct rival to the Clubhouse social network.

Microsoft plays the Windows card in the AI game, with help from Nvidia – GeekWire

Running AI models on the PC reduces the usage charges that come with AI in the cloud. Nadella wrote on X that Microsoft is bringing “unmetered intelligence to every desk and every home,” echoing the company’s original mission of “a computer on every desk and in every home.” A slide in the presentation said local models would run tasks on the PC “at no extra cost.”

Central Coast Food Web shares $904,000 in Thriving Entrepreneurs grants | News | newportnewstimes.com

For Nora and Oscar Villasenor, Built Oregon’s farmers market program helped them test products in different markets and gather immediate customer feedback. Through the organization’s Market Access Program, they connected with grocery buyers, sharpened their sales pitch and secured placement in Market of Choice and later New Seasons. After participating in Built Oregon’s Accelerator Program, they refined their strategy and expanded their reach.