Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community

New year. New space. And now, a new Demolicious champion. That’s what happened last night at the new UpStart Collective Westside location as they hosted the first Demolicious of 2025. A number of startups took the stage and pitched their solutions, but when the audience votes were tabulated, it was Zing Drone Solutions — an alum of the Oregon UAS Accelerator — hoisting the championship belt.

Portland Business Journal is reporting that Act-On Software — one of the remaining “before times” software startups — is being acquired for $53 million by Seattle’s Banzai International.

Oregon Startup Center — which you may have encountered under its previous moniker, the Oregon Technology Business Center (OTBC) — has highlighted upcoming change in leadership: current Executive Director Jim McCreight will be stepping down by the end of June 2025. They’re starting a search for new leadership immediately.

I can already see you scrunching up your face. “How can I get my brand in front of a targeted Bluesky audience when Bluesky offers neither ads nor targeting…?” That’s true. But you can still unscrunch your face. Because Portland startup Graze enables that kind of functionality within Bluesky. And they’d love you to help test drive it.

I can’t believe that it’s already time for the first Demolicious of the year. And the first champion to add to the Champion of Champions competition at the end of the year. All of that takes place Thursday, January 23, 2025, at the new UpStart Collective Westside. The event is free to attend.

While we’re lucky to have tons of one-off sort of events for the startups community, it’s rare for us to have a day dedicated to Portland startups. But that’s exactly what’s happening next Thursday, January 23, 2025, on the Portland State University campus. What’s on the docket…? I’m glad you asked.

When the platform you’re targeting is moving fast, you have to move fast, too. So it comes as little surprise to me that Graze is continuing to push the envelope — and share the metrics — on their Bluesky tooling designed to assist with the creation of custom feeds and enable paid placement of content within those feed. (What does surprise me is how good they are at documenting these activities.)