Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
It’s hard to believe but I’ve now been writing Silicon Florist for 15 years. That’s weird. I mean, really. I’ve somehow managed to write consistently from one downturn right into another. For nearly a third of my life. So at least that’s something. And now, I’ve got this celebratory tweet to show for it.
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While it wasn’t a key part of my coverage area when I started this blog, these days I try to make it a regular habit of paying attention to Bend, Oregon. Because it seems more often than not, there are as many interesting startup stories coming out of Central Oregon as the metro region, as of late. Like this one: Bend’s Shape, an advertising management platform, has been acquired by digital marketing management company NinjaCat.
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Part of the ebb and flow of the Portland startup community — or any startup community for that matter — is a regular cadence of companies being founded, funded, and acquired. We’ve seen a great deal of the founding and funding over the past few years. And now, there’s another acquisition in our midst. PIE and Techstars Seattle alum Caravel has been acquired by Commsor.
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I may have mentioned a time or ten that my first experience in Portland startups was with a digital healthcare company that was building some wacky new thing called Electronic Medical Records for physicians near the end of the last century. And while it’s been a couple of decades since I was active in that realm, I still think that digital health startups have potential around here.
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While the frothiness of the NFT world has subsided a bit due to larger dynamics within the industry, there are still any number of folks who are bullish on the concept and continuing to explore the potential of tokens in rethinking how we’ve done things in the past. One of those companies is Portland based Alchemon, which was an early player in the NFT based videogame space. And they’re not the only ones with optimism. They just raised $1 million from a group of investors, according to Fortune.
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Anyone familiar with Eugene knows that it’s a significant hub in terms of game development. And one of the primary players in that community has been Pipeworks, a studio founded at the turn of the century that boasts titles like Madden NFL and the update to Terraria among their work. Now, they’ve become the first acquisition of Jagex, which is perhaps best known for RuneScape.
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A local company with an experienced founding team and customers that include the UK government has garnered financial support to foster their work ensuring that the software that’s being built is accessible. Assitiv Labs has raised a $1 million pre-seed round.
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The pandemic has inspired any number of new features and products — and sometimes whole new companies. One of those pivots hit really close to home as a hometown favorite for finding and researching alternative workspaces, Workfrom, suddenly had an entire user base working from home. But from that pain came inspiration. In the form of Virtual Cafes.
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Portland media startup A Kids Company About started with books. And then expanded into podcasts and educational content. Heck, they’ve even done stuff with LeVar Burton. Now, they’re partnering with one of the biggest names in youth entertainment to produce TV shows about the same types of tough issues they’ve tackled in other media.
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It’s a common question. How much data is necessary to get value out of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence…? Well, Portland startup Synaptiq posed that question at a recent event. And Dr. Tim Oates provided a response.