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

If you were on the fence about attending the Silicon Forest Tech Summit because you weren’t sure you’d have time to make the journey out to Hillsboro, get ready to be happy. The event is 10 days away — and now it’s relocated to Portland. So you should just get off of the fence and go.

While we’re still in the afterglow… Great event last night for the sold out 2025 Kickoff for the Portland startup community. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it out and hang out with folks. It was great to have all of the people and all of the energy around all of the things.

While it’s rare for VC-funded Portland startups to get into the realm of “strategic investors” — those VC funds run by corporate entities that are designed to fund strategic endeavors that benefit both the startup and the corporation — there has been collaboration from time to time with Intel Capital, the capital arm of Intel. Well, amid massive rethinking and restructuring at the company, Intel Capital is being spun out.

While Oregon startups raised a significant amount of capital in 2024, the metrics for the year look far more like a decade ago than the $2.7 billion raised in 2021. According to The Oregonian, 2024 marks a seven year low for VC in the region.

In the early days of my engagement with the open source tech communities, one of the clear issues was the plethora of event scheduling and management tools that everyone used to organize events. To get a firm handle on what was happening on any given day, you had to check a whole bunch of different sites — including individual organization blogs. That was the pain point that resulted in the development of an open source project that became Calagator.

If you’re going to have your stealthy startup revealed, having the CEO of the company you’re building tooling for — in this case Bluesky — is probably the best way to have that go down. Even if you’re not quite ready. But things in startups change quickly. And now Portland startup Graze is officially revealing its offering to the world.