“Humanoid robots are a critical driver of American technology leadership and the future of global industry,” said CEO Peggy Johnson. “With category-defining commercially deployed humanoid robots operating in real customer environments today, Agility is at the forefront of a new era where safety-first, AI-powered technology can reliably work alongside people to bridge labor shortages, increase productivity, and strengthen the resilience of our supply chains. We believe humanoids are at a meaningful inflection point in commercial adoption, and we are focused on meeting growing customer demand, expanding deployments, and advancing our roadmap across robotics, physical AI, safety systems, and enterprise software. As adoption accelerates, we believe Agility is positioned to address a market opportunity across manufacturing, distribution, and logistics environments in the United States that is estimated by management to be approximately $1 trillion.”

The deal is expected to bring in roughly $620 million in gross proceeds — about $420 million from the Churchill trust plus another $200 million or so in a PIPE led by Foxconn at $10 a share. It’s expected to close sometime in 2026, pending the usual shareholder vote and SEC review.

And according to GeekWire, this will be a first:

Salem, Ore.-based Agility Robotics, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, beating its Silicon Valley and East Coast rivals to Wall Street.

The company says its Digit robots have logged more than 65,000 operating hours across nine customer facilities, working for the likes of Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. There’s a reported pipeline of 30-plus customers and more than $300 million in multi-year orders for the latest Digit v5. All built right here at RoboFab, a facility designed to crank out as many as 10,000 robots a year with roughly 75% U.S.-sourced components.

“Churchill Capital is proud to partner with companies that are shaping the future of technology and commerce,” said Michael Klein, Chairman and CEO of Churchill Capital Corp XI. “Agility is a humanoid first mover with proven technology, real-world deployments, and the trust of some of the world’s most demanding enterprises. We are excited to support Peggy, Jonathan, and the Agility team as they scale deployment of Digit, extend their leadership in physical AI, and create enduring value for shareholders.”

And while going public via a SPAC can be dicey at best, I’m really trying to stay focused on the significant infusion of capital here. The kind of capital that can change the trajectory of a local company.

For more, read “Agility Robotics goes public at a $2.5B valuation.”

Menlo Turns 50 and Announces $3B in Fresh Capital to Go ALL IN on AI | Menlo Ventures

Fifty years ago, Menlo made its first bet on a future that had not yet arrived. In 1976, venture capital was still more craft than industry, but that didn’t stop our founding partner, H. DuBose Montgomery, a 27-year-old electrical engineer fresh from Bell Labs, from opening a new firm on Sand Hill Road. He had a simple belief: The most impactful companies often start building long before the market knows how to value them.

See How Sam Altman’s Personal Investments Benefit From Ties to OpenAI – WSJ

Sam Altman said at an event three years ago that he had roughly 400 active startup investments. The Journal identified more than 80, based on publicly-available materials and reporting, many of which date back to his time running the venture firm Y Combinator.

Why American data centers can’t plug in

The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity. But this doesn’t mean there is an energy shortage. Instead, the constraint is connecting the flood of new data centers and the plants to power them to the electric grid. Before any new piece of infrastructure can be connected, grid operators must study how it will change power flows around the grid and determine whether upgrades to the system are required. That process is significantly backlogged. Though the median power plant in 2005 waited less than 20 months for interconnection, this had jumped to 55 months by 2023.

2026 Developer Survey | Stack Overflow

This is the 16th Annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the longest-running and most comprehensive study of technologists and developers worldwide.

Desperate AI Startup Now Cleaning Messy Apartments for Free

As the BBC reports, an AI company called Micro AGI is sending college-educated Silicon Valley types, loaded with cameras, to scrub filthy New York City apartments for free as part of an initiative called Shift. The hope is that the resulting footage will be worth more to the robotics and AI industries in the form of training data than what residents would pay for the service.

Positioning, Placement, Profit: Scaling Secrets from Steven Smith Teamaker CEO Darren Marshall

I recently attended the 2026 Angel Oregon Consumer Packaged Goods (AOCPG) Investment Announcement Mixer. Aside from the great energy in the room, the highlight for me was hearing Darren Marshall, CEO of Steven Smith Teamaker, speak about what it actually takes for small businesses to survive and thrive right now.

Xcelerate Westside Summer Social

Join Xcelerate Women and Collective Market for our Westside Summer Social — a relaxed evening of good conversation, genuine connection, and community. Whether you’re a longtime member or discovering us for the first time, you’re welcome here. We’re especially hoping to connect with women business owners across Washington County — so if that’s you, come as you are and bring a friend!

College Innovators from Across Oregon Compete at OSU-Cascades in 2026 InventOR Finals – The Source – Bend, Oregon

Finalist projects tackle challenges in sustainability, healthcare, technology, outdoor innovation and community impact. Teams represent 15 universities and community colleges in the state, including OSU-Cascades and OSU in Corvallis.

AI models that can take down governments and business months away, rare Five Eyes statement warns | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.

Sector Snapshot: Robotics Startups On Fire As Venture Funding Surges To Record Numbers In 2026

The impressive rise in funding reflects a marked shift in perception among venture investors about the robotics sector, which was traditionally considered an expensive, asset-heavy hardware gamble. In particular, investors appear to be drawn to startups working on embodied AI, or artificial intelligence with a physical body that interacts with the real world in real time.

The Fake Traction Problem – by Martyn Eeles – HealthVC

One of the most dangerous moments in fundraising is when a founder starts to believe their own traction before the market has fully validated it. This happens more often than most founders realise, especially in health, where early signals can feel incredibly promising long before they become commercially meaningful.

Before it was obvious

Each founder started with a non consensus belief about where the world was heading and then spent years building before that future became obvious to everyone else. The luck was being attached to powerful tailwinds. 

The New Rules of Media | Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz | The a16z Show

The conversation explores the shift from legacy media to creator-led platforms, why authenticity has become a competitive advantage, and how founders can build audiences by communicating directly with customers, employees, and the public. They discuss podcasts, social media, storytelling, corporate communications, and the changing relationship between companies, journalists, and audiences.

Weekly Review: Around the Model – by Sam Keen

One pattern runs through this issue: as models get cheaper, more open, and easier to swap, the hard part moves to everything around them. Bayer’s context discipline, two new agent harnesses, and three editorials on review and judgment all point the same way. The edge is in the scaffolding, not the core.

Mayor’s Home-Sharing Pilot Program Receives Five Applications in Four Months

The program—in which the city writes a $1,000 check to Portland homeowners who list spare bedrooms for rent on particular platforms, including the Atlanta-based PadSplit—has so far received just five applications in four months.

Portland | Claude Code Meetup for Devs · Luma

We’ll be showcasing winners from the Claude Hackathon (March 28) and giving attendees a chance to hear what they built, how they approached the challenge, and what they learned along the way. Expect live conversations around AI-assisted coding, product building, experimentation, and the future of developer tooling.

Politicians Don’t Understand Innovation – Andrew Maxwell

We keep treating innovation as if it were a policy design challenge: write the strategy, announce the program, allocate the funding, define the milestones, and measure whether the activities were delivered. But innovation is not the execution of a predetermined plan. It is the disciplined management of uncertainty. That distinction matters.

Five years in, new analysis links Seattle’s ‘JumpStart’ tax to downtown decline – GeekWire

The report, released Monday afternoon, finds that downtown Seattle has lost about 30,000 jobs since 2020 and that the taxable value of its office buildings has fallen 48% — even as Bellevue, which has no comparable tax, added jobs and saw commercial values rise 7%.

Combine a National VC with a Regional VC – David Cummings on Startups

Last month, I was talking to an entrepreneur about his upcoming fundraising round, and he shared an approach that I hadn’t heard before. His ultimate goal for the funding round was to secure a lead VC from a national, brand-name firm combined with a strong regional fund. My curiosity piqued, so I asked him why. He told me it comes down to getting the best of both worlds.

devopsdays Portland, OR 2026

Devopsdays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Each event is run by volunteers from the local area. Most devopsdays events feature a combination of curated talks (see open Calls for Proposals) and self organized open space content. Topics often include automation, testing, security, and organizational culture.

Homebuyer Education Seminar Tickets, Wednesday, July 29  •  5:30 PM – 7 PM | Eventbrite

Join us for this educational and interactive evening that will help set you on the path to owning a home. Whether you are a first time buyer or repeat homeowner, this event will equip you with meaningful information to take that next step in the homebuying journey. Engage with financial planners, credit repair specialists, title company and insurance representatives, Realtors, mortgage lenders, and more to help you create your own personalized roadmap to buying a home.

Celebrating Juneteenth and Black Music Month

At 1803 Fund, we believe culture is infrastructure. Music, storytelling, and gathering are essential for how our community remembers who we are and imagines what comes next. As we celebrate and share more about this month of culture, we offer a gift: a playlist of music that grounds our team in power and purpose.

Siri AI Automators meetup (Portland) · Luma

This event was previously held during Apple’s WWDC25 and WWDC26 week as part of CommunityKit, the alternative conference for Apple developers – and titled “Apple Intelligence Automators.” ​Now, the meetup has a new name and it’s on tour with the first stop in Portland, OR – hometown of host Matthew Cassinelli, former member of the Workflow team (the app that Apple acquired and turned into Shortcuts).

Self-improving Memory for Agents

A popular mental model in AI is to think of an agent as a worker. A new capability might be equivalent to “a recent college graduate,” or “a second-year analyst.” This is not the best way to think about AI capabilities, but it does illustrate a critical concept of AI at work: whenever you hire any worker, you expect them to learn and develop on the job. AI agents should do the same.  This begs a closer look at what “memory” really means in AI.

I Sold My AI Startup Before Revenue: Here’s What Investors Missed — And Founders Shouldn’t

Do not build to look fundable this quarter. Build something that the whole stack will depend on in the future. Hire the best team you can find to do it, and solve the hard, foundational problem while it is still unfashionable.

Juneteenth reminds us of Black Americans’ long struggle for education following end of slavery • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Juneteenth made clear that freedom was not just confined to someone’s physical enslavement, but mental enslavement as well, bound in the laws that barred enslaved people from receiving an education in Southern states.

America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek – The Atlantic

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans.

The 11 standout startups from YC’s Demo Day, according to VCs | TechCrunch

TechCrunch spoke to eight investors to determine which ones were the hottest companies in this batch — both the ones they were watching and the startups they heard other VCs couldn’t get enough of. This list consists primarily of companies that had been flagged by at least two investors as the buzziest in the batch.

Unsolicited Advice To My Grandchildren – Horan MediaTech Advisors

The biggest lesson I have learned in more than seventy years of life is that every generation believes its challenges are unprecedented. Then, people adapt. They always do. Compared to a world war, the Black Death, or the Great Depression, this is all a short-term inconvenience.

RuntimeWire — Weekly Report. Week 3 metrics still strong | by Ryan Merket | Unsupervised Times | Jun, 2026 | Medium

A personal note. This was a hard week away from the keyboard. Joshua Baer — Capital Factory founder, and a friend — died in a plane crash in Laredo. I’m still in shock over his loss. RuntimeWire covered his passing (it became the third most-read story of the week), but this one isn’t a metric to me. I’ll have more to share on Josh soon. — A short In Memoriam is at the end of this report.

President Obama and Mrs. Obama’s Remarks at the Opening of the Obama Presidential Center | by Barack Obama | Jun, 2026 | Medium

I learned that leadership has less to do with titles or rank or chasing attention than with helping others find their voice, reaching their potential. And sitting around people’s kitchen tables or on their back porches, spending time in church basements, in barber shops, I was reminded that everyone has a story to tell, if you just care to listen, sacred stories full of courage and humor and grace, and that each of those stories in some way connected to my own.

There Are No Instances in atproto — overreacted

In atproto, every app is a projection of the whole Atmosphere, just like Feedly and Google Reader are projections of the entire Blogosphere. You mostly “decentralize” by swapping your hosting, and/or by making and trying new apps. Running many full copies of the Bluesky database server is possible, but it’s not any more useful than running many copies of Google Reader.

Back in 2011, a Portland Startup Weekend project called CPUsage chased precisely that — I described it at the time as “kind of like AirBnB or Second Porch for your latent processing power.” They built it into a going concern. And it was a genuinely lovely win-win sort of magnanimous idea. So much so that they made the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Unfortunately, the CPUsage crew ran out of runway in 2014. Because this turns out to be a very, very hard thing to build. Which is exactly why I keep rooting for the next person who tries.

But it’s still an interesting problem.

That’s why, a decade after the CPUsage demise, I told you about CoCore, Devin Gaffney‘s “Airbnb for compute” — a co-operative cloud share where friends with spare compute lend it to friends who need it. Same fifteen-year-old Portland instinct, new decade. Devin called it the “galactic optimist-communist hypercloud where we all cooperate amongst ourselves to yeet margins from huge companies.”

Now that hypercloud has leveled up. CoCore has been rebuilt on the AT Protocol. (Yes, the same plumbing underneath that newish cool kids social network, Bluesky.)

So what does that actually mean…? Well, it means that you bring your own identity. You sign in with your Bluesky handle. And you can start publishing compute jobs to the network.

Requesters want compute done — an LLM inference, a render job, a training step. They sign in with their AT Protocol identity (Bluesky handle, normally) and publish dev.cocore.compute.job records on their own PDS.

Which is a fancy way of saying that the jobs live on your corner of the network, not locked inside CoCore’s box. And that’s kind of the whole point. It’s distributed computing. Like meshy stuff that’s note messy. Anyone, including some future competing exchange, could index those records and offer a different settlement model. No moat. No lock-in. On purpose.

Honestly, the part that makes this very very Portland, though…? The economics.

Compute gets traded through a mutual-credit token economy — where one token roughly equals one model token — and the design is rooted in honest-to-goodness cooperative economics. The Rochdale tradition. Patronage dividends. A treasury, weekly token refreshes, the whole co-op lineage. It’s not crypto cosplay. It’s the food co-op model, pointed at GPUs.

Is it a business…? Still isn’t entirely sure. (But that was always remains part of the charm with Portland startups.) And there are two new design posts laying out exactly how the thing works — one on the architecture, one on the token market. And they’re a genuinely fun read if you like watching someone think out loud about a friendlier cloud.

Fifteen years on, the dream persists. And honestly, the fact that it’s hard is the best argument for cheering on the folks stubborn enough to try it again — cooperatively, out loud, on open rails.

Got a Bluesky handle and some compute curiosity…? Go poke around the CoCore console and read the design posts. See if this is the hypercloud for you.

The web can be annoyingly difficult from time to time. You make a thing — a little HTML page, a one-off microsite, a thing about a thing — and then you smack straight into the part that has nothing to do with the thing you actually made… Where does this thing actually even live so that people can get to it?

Suddenly you’re knee-deep in build steps and hosting dashboards and DNS records and a server you’ll have to babysit forever, all to get a single page onto the internet.

Well not anymore. Now there’s Quickish.

Quickish gives any folder of HTML a live URL and skips every last bit of that — no build step, no server to run, no hosting to set up. Drop a folder, a .zip, or a single file, and it’s live in seconds with a clean URL.

That’s it. Bingo bango bongo.

I know it works because I just used it. (You see, Silicon Florist turns twenty in 2027 — August 7th, for those of you who like to mark a calendar a year and a half out — and I made a little countdown to mark the occasion. Inspired by the Demo Day countdown clock for PIE. But then I needed somewhere to put it. So I dropped the folder into Quickish and, well, there it is. Live. In roughly the time it took to write this sentence.)

And there’s more under the hood than a place to park static pages. There’s a CLI if you live in the terminal (npm i -g quickish && quickish), you can publish straight from ChatGPT or Claude, and if you want to get ambitious there’s a whole zero-config backend hiding back there. A lot actually. Like a document store, a SQL database, realtime updates, file uploads, even sign-in.

It’s free for one live page, or $7.99 a month if you want unlimited.

So if you’ve got a folder of HTML gathering dust because standing up an actual website always felt like more trouble than the thing was worth, this is the fix. Go drop something in it.