Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
“Portland has long been a hub for thoughtful, purpose-led design — a place where creativity, sustainability, and innovation intersect. It’s home to world-class agencies, dynamic startups, global brands, and a deep culture of craft and experimentation,” said Fleischer. “For iF Design, Portland represents exactly the kind of community we want to engage: one that values impact even more than aesthetics, and design as a tool for solving real-world problems.”
Startup Cafe… is a space for workshops, networking, and conversation! This is the great opportunity for founders and startup partners to connect, learn, and level up.
Harvard’s newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter’s handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians.
Welcome back to Week in Review! We have lots for you this week, including what came out of WWDC 2025; The Browser Company’s AI browser; OpenAI’s partnership with Mattel; and updates to your iPad.
The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products, and its cultivated salmon is now available to order from one Portland restaurant.
The recent decadelong market boom propelled venture capital’s cultural status, luring droves of young finance workers whose jobs the industry can no longer afford. Over two years on, as liquidity remains elusive, more and more junior investors are seeing the writing on the wall and exploring new directions for their careers.
It’s a dry pellet about the size of a stack of four nickels. Add a squirt of water and — voila — it transforms into an 8-by-11-inch durable personal cleansing towelette made of super-soft, biodegradable bamboo infused with essential oils. The innovative product is the brainchild of Cassandra Davis — and it recently earned her a $100,000 investment from Oregon Angel Food (OregonAF) Investors to help scale her growing business, Functional Botanicals, an Ashland startup with a half-dozen employees.
Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the Navy’s innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path from prototype to production. “Your granddaddy’s government had a spaghetti chart for how to get in,” Fanelli said. “Now it’s a funnel, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to designate you as an enterprise service.”
I’ve been playing around with all sorts of reframing of work, lately thinking about “deterrence” as a practice alongside design, product, and engineering—as a proactive way to think about repair work. All the red-teaming in the world, no matter how much “trust & safety” you have nibbling around the edges, what we lack is still internal thinking around the management of fixing what needs fixing.
This time around, we identified four areas where seed investment is trending this year. These include: longevity, defense, waste reduction and spacetech.
Over the past half-century we have filled offices and pockets with ever-faster computers, yet labour-productivity growth in advanced economies has slowed from roughly 2 per cent a year in the 1990s to about 0.8 per cent in the past decade. Even China’s once-soaring output per worker has stalled.
“New Yorkers want technology to make their lives better and easier, not put their health and safety at risk. My RAISE Act ensures AI can flourish while requiring the largest companies to have a safety plan so their products aren’t used to hurt people. It’s exactly the type of reasonable, commonsense safeguard we’d expect of any company working on a potentially dangerous product, and it ensures no one has an incentive to cut corners or put profits over safety. The RAISE Act is a step into the future we all want and deserve.”
Oregon Community Foundation is expanding its presence in Eastern Oregon with a new regional office in Baker City, deepening its long-term commitment to Oregon’s rural communities.
Rock Paper Coin built software to digitize payments and contract management for the wedding industry. The platform can bring together three parties — the wedding planning team, the couple and a vendor — into one system to manage contracts and invoices.
The “Great Resignation” is well and truly over, with the number of Oregonians quitting their jobs down to the lowest point in more than four years.
The slow vanishing of Oregon-based companies may be picking up speed. A January 2025 report by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research & Engagement found that Oregon businesses are routinely recruited to expand outside the state, leading to a loss of “thousands of potential jobs and billions of potential private investments in the past five years.”
Portland has no shortage of events to celebrate Juneteenth this week, which commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned they had been freed.
AI is transforming how we build software, and Portland engineers are at the forefront of this revolution. Whether you’re integrating LLMs into production systems or just starting to explore AI capabilities in your personal projects, Portland AI Engineers is your community. Our meetings bring together developers passionate about practical AI applications that solve real-world problems. Come ready to learn, share, and connect with fellow engineers.
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