Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Volunteer, non-profit? Whoever, join us! You’ll get a chance to meet other technologists, hear about active projects and what we’ve learned so far. We’re more than halfway through our digital sprint. The beauty of PDX Digital Corps isn’t just the volunteering, it’s learning how to scale an effort like this in real-time, and sharing those learnings with other interested groups that might want to model this in their own communities.
Recorded live at the 2025 GeekWire Awards in Seattle, this episode of the GeekWire Podcast features industry leaders pursuing innovation and building community in a shifting tech and political landscape.
For those of you who are still here, maybe you don’t know, but I’ve been the owner of a non-alcoholic brewery called Heck for the last few years. I started it with my business partner Justin Miller, who previously worked at Hopworks and Imperial Yeast. I don’t really know how I found myself as the owner of a non-alcoholic brewery either, but I love working with Justin, and he makes exceptional non-alcoholic beer that people really love, and I guess there’s no time like the present (just don’t look at the news / economy!) so we’re making a go of it!
Pundits and politicians alike talk incessantly about the flood of cheap Chinese goods into America. But overall, this is a small percent of what we buy. The U.S. is actually an unusually closed-off economy; as a fraction of GDP, imports are much lower than in most rich countries, and lower even than China…
Tonight’s the night! Don’t miss Westside Pitch, Washington County’s premier startup competition, where five standout founders will take the stage to share their bold ideas—and compete for investment, prizes, and a place in Oregon’s innovation spotlight.
Startup investment has doubled over the past 10 years to roughly $300 billion globally per annum, Crunchbase data shows. Now the question remains: As the AI wave plays out, creating more value over the next decade, could that figure double or more again?
TrueLark, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., is a pioneering AI-powered front-desk automation platform that serves thousands of healthcare, beauty, and wellness businesses. The platform uses advanced conversational AI to handle tasks like appointment scheduling, rescheduling, and answering common questions—reducing staff workload while improving customer engagement and retention.
While it’s not unusual for those two firms to lead the pack, it is unusual for so many other big-name firms to spend a month on the sidelines. Regardless, let’s dive into the most-active U.S. startup investing firms last month.
”I think that a lot of business needs more heart and more imagination, and that is what everyone in this room can provide. And so I would just encourage designers to have a nerve. I would encourage them to know that you can design the world that you wanna live in,”
Multnomah County will pay up to $250,000 for an outside contractor to draft the government’s new strategic plan after budgeting out over $1.1 million last year to form a five-member internal team to complete the same work.
At first glance, software seems like a straightforward engineering practice. After all, it exists within a fully known universe – the computer – of our own making. This is in stark contrast to disciplines that are more obviously science, like biology or physics, which exist within domains that we did not create and do not fully understand. Unlike computers, which are fully understood, those disciplines are in large part about the search for understanding. Science, in other words, is often occupied with the process of discovering how something works – which we don’t need to do with computers.
Traditionally with software you could kind of make plans. Even then development was notorious for being unpredictable. Now add in the fact that training the LLMs themselves is an unreliable process. The data mix used, the methods used, the sequence of methods used, the scaffolding you use around the LLMs you trained, the way you prompt, they all directly affect whether you’ll be successful.
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, PIng is your community.
More Portland startup news
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