The Math on the Page – by Angel Medina – Between Courses

I built República the same way I built the coffee shops. And I built the coffee shops the same way I built this idea — long before it had a name. I built all of it as proof. Proof that I could build something real. Proof that I understood how this works.

High earners race ahead on AI as workplace divide widens

The highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others, in a divide that risks widening inequality as the technology spreads through the workplace.

Our newsroom AI policy – Ars Technica

Our approach comes from two convictions: that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity, and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work. From those starting points, it was always clear what we wouldn’t allow. AI would not become the author, the illustrator, or the videographer. These tools are best used by professionals in the service of their profession, not as a clever end run around it, and certainly not as a path to eventually replacing it.

Fragments: April 2

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health…

What we lose when artificial intelligence does our shopping

As scholars studying the intersection of law and technology, we have watched AI-assisted commerce expand rapidly. Our research finds that without updated legal measures, this shift toward automated commerce could quietly erode the economic, psychological and social benefits that people receive from shopping on their own terms.

The Writer-Researcher’s Guide to Claude Code

Over the past few months, I have been using Claude Code to explore these questions for myself. The result is a full-stack knowledge management system spanning multiple software products, internal systems, and a local model.

Raising a Series A in 2026. I have now gone through a proper… | by Daniel Aisen | Proof Reading | Mar, 2026 | Medium

I had fairly optimistic expectations from the onset, and both times we pretty much hit our targets on the nose, but both experiences were intense, challenging, and a rollercoaster of emotions.

A good AGENTS.md is a model upgrade. A bad one is worse than no docs at all. | Augment Code

We pulled dozens of AGENTS.md files from across our monorepo and measured their effect on code generation. The best ones gave our coding agent a quality jump equivalent to upgrading from Haiku to Opus. The worst ones made the output worse than having no AGENTS.md at all.

When LLMs Get Personal – by Joshua Budman

The more interesting question is whether the space of materially distinct answers is much smaller – and whether answers to the same question, across different users, tend to share a stable common core with variation concentrated more at the margins.

Business Insider Email Newsletters: Subscribe Now – Business Insider

That number has been notching up in recent years. As of October 2024, around a quarter of the company’s code was AI-generated, Google said at the time. Last fall, it said the number had risen to 50%.

How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)

Claude Code’s Head of Product on how AI is changing the PM role, building products before the model is ready, inside Claude Code’s launch room process, and why speed matters more than strategy now

World’s first 50 MW superhot geothermal plant eyes 2030 launch

Quaise Energy said it is moving ahead with plans to build what it describes as the world’s first power plant using superhot geothermal energy, with an initial 50-megawatt facility planned in Oregon.

UO’s Knight Campus fosters startup incubation, biomaterial printing

The newest addition to the University of Oregon will see labs refine bioengineered 3D printed biomedical tissue, serve as an incubator for startups and support the next generation of researchers.

Startup World Cup is a series of global startup conferences and competitions, powered by Pegasus Tech Ventures, consisting of 100+ regional startup competitions across six continents, leading up to the Grand Finale in Silicon Valley.

That Grand Finale is November 18-20, 2026, in San Francisco. And the grand prize? $1,000,000, awarded as a direct equity investment or convertible note depending on company size. That’s not a trophy. That’s not a handshake and a “congratulations, here’s some cloud credits.” That’s a million dollar check.

The Portland Regional judges include Dave Barcos of North Bank Innovations, Josh Carter of Upstart Collective, Chris Magaña of Pinnacle Wealth Advisors, Yalda Moshiri from OEN’s Angel Oregon program, Nick Triska of Greater Portland Inc, and Shanbo Zhang from Oregon Angel Partners, among others.

Interested in competing…? Cool. Applications close May 8, 2026. That gives you two weeks to procrastinate.

For more information, visit Startup World Cup Portland.

Eight. Thousand. Folks.

Now look. Are all 8000 of those people active on the Slack…? Ha. No. No they are not. Not even close. The word “zombie.” A staggering understatement. In fact, if you’re anything like many “members,” you signed up years ago, checked in once or twice, and haven’t opened it since.

But that’s okay. You’re still one of us.

And for those of you who ARE lurking around in there…? It’s kinda working right? Kinda keeping you connected? And engaged? Or something? And stuff?

If you haven’t joined yet, it’s free. It costs you nothing but a few minutes of your time. Come hang out with 8000 of your new best friends. Introduce yourself in #001_intro. And follow the Code of Conduct. Or just lurk. We’re not judging.

Much.

And while I’ve rattled off this answer in any number of ways, I’ve never really taken the time to write it down.

Until now.

Why now…? Well for one, I’m tired of repeating myself. But I’m also motivated to capture this because I’m fairly certain that this isn’t a problem that is unique to Portland. Or Oregon. I’m sure it’s similar in any number of other communities. And so I’m capturing it with the hopes that it does two things: 1) I hope it puts a finer point on the early stage capital dynamics around here for local founders and 2) I hope it helps other communities recognize that their early stage financing challenges are not unique.

Long story short, I’m hopeful that by committing this to a digital page, it at least gives us a starting point to discuss it, highlight opportunities to fix it, and look for ways to improve things around here. Rising water and all that.

(Maybe cue up The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. This could take a minute.)

Let’s get into it…

Local early stage funding is trapped in a vicious cycle. And you’re soaking in it.

tl;dr

Let’s start with the obvious: There isn’t a lot of — if any — local, risk-tolerant capital in Oregon. Never has been.

So when you start a company here — at the exact moment you’re most energized and passionate about what you’re building — you’re not building. You’re gallivanting. You’re tincupping around Seattle and the Bay Area, pitching investors who have never been to Portland. Trying to sell them on both the vision for your company as well as the reasoning as to why you’re building in Oregon.

You’re spending your best “early stage startup founder” energy and excitement on planes and in lobbies talking to potential investors instead of talking to potentiaal customers and building your product.

By the time you actually raise — if you raise — you’ve already lost some of that early founder energy. Some of that momentum. All of that time on the road. All of that searching and scraping together checks. The fire is most definitely dimmer than it was six months ago — or worse yet, a year ago — when you started looking for capital. And you’ve just signed up for another marathon sprint. Even though you’re still trying to catch your breath.

Even worse…? That slower start compounds. You grow more slowly. You hire more slowly. You get to market more slowly. It takes you much much longer to hit that inflection point. And to raise follow on.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Which means a liquidity event — if it happens at all — takes a lot longer too. We’re not talking five or seven years. We’re talking twelve to fifteen.

And here’s another wrinkle. Those exits? They’re usually acquisitions — not IPOs. Which means the capital gets distributed to a very limited group of folks — like founders and investors — rather than every employee. And most of those investors…? They’re out of state. They’re in Bay Area. They’re in Seattle. They’re back east.

The liquified capital doesn’t impact us here, by and large. It lands wherever the people writing the checks are sitting. It goes back to where that risk tolerant capital came from. Rather than recycling through our community.

And the founders? After fifteen years or more of grinding? They’re exhausted. They’re not looking at the ecosystem thinking “I can’t wait to do that again!” Instead, they’re questioning their role as a founder, “I don’t know if I have another fifteen years in me to do that again ”

So when they finally have wealth of their own — capital that could theoretically flow back into the ecosystem and fund the next generation of startups — they get extremely careful with it. They get risk averse. Some folks might say, “Stingy,” even. (I mean, I wouldn’t. But some folks might.) And honestly, who can blame them? The system nearly broke them. Why would they put their hard-won capital back into the machine that made it so difficult for them to succeed in the first place?

So they don’t invest in the next generation. Which means that generation of startups still doesn’t have early local capital. Which means the next founder is right back where the last one started — full of energy, no local capital, booking a flight to San Francisco.

Return capital doesn’t come back because exits are rare. Exits are rare because companies are underfunded. Companies are underfunded because return capital doesn’t come back.

Round and round and round.

Every once in a while, there’s a glimmer of hope

In December 2014, Tripwire got acquired for $710 million and New Relic went public — in the same week. I wrote at the time with hope that “maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a little bit of this wealth reinvested in the Portland startup scene.”

I was so hopeful. It felt like the cycle might actually break. New money, new talent, new ideas on the streets. That’s what’s supposed to happen after a liquidity event. That’s how the flywheel spins in the other direction.

And some of it did happen. But not enough. Not nearly enough to shift the structural reality. Because one week of exits — even a historic one — doesn’t fix a pipeline problem that’s been building for decades.

And then we took the opportunity to make the vicious cycle even more vicious

Which brings us to SB 1507 and the QSBS mess. You’ve heard me on this. At length. (At significant length. Ad nauseam. I know.) The governor signed it on April 9 — and yes, she said something that matters, so read that post — but the signing doesn’t fix the cycle.

But here’s the thing I didn’t say clearly enough in those posts: QSBS taxation doesn’t just add a new problem. It accelerates the vicious cycle. It takes the one remaining incentive for local investors to reinvest locally — the tax exclusion on gains from holding small business stock for five or more years — and removes it. But not for outside capital. Just for us. Just for Oregonians.

Talk about exacerbation. The vicious cycle isn’t just continuing. It got a legislative turbo boost.

But it has worked here. Once.

You know what’s even more maddening? We have proof that the cycle can break.

Oregon Venture Fund invested in a little company called Jama Software. Jama bootstrapped. They took about $1 million in angel funding, largely from OVF. They built. They were patient. And in March 2024, they were valued at $1.2 billion. A 60x return for OVF.

That’s what local, patient, long-horizon capital can produce. That’s the cycle running in reverse — local investment creates a local success, which generates returns, which can fund the next round of local companies.

It happened.

But it happened once. And once isn’t a pattern. Once is an anecdote. We need it to happen again and again and again until the cycle flips — until there’s enough local capital cycling back into the ecosystem that a founder starting a company in Portland has the same shot at early-stage funding as a founder in Seattle or Salt Lake or wherever.

But it’s going to take some pretty courageous investors to do that. And to break us out of this vicious cycle. For good.

Portland Surges to No. 1 in America’s Factory Startup Boom

Portland has quietly grabbed the top spot in a new national look at manufacturing startups, edging out both old-school industrial hubs and glossy tech metros. An analysis of five years of firm formation data shows the Portland metro logged about 2.47 manufacturing firms younger than five years per 10,000 residents, which works out to roughly 250 more new manufacturing firms than the national average would predict over the same period.

Cloudability Founder Mat Ellis Opens Fractional Executive Practice for Pacific Northwest SaaS and AI Companies

Mat Ellis, founder of Cloudability and Managing Partner of Sunny Ventures, has opened a fractional executive practice focused on Pacific Northwest SaaS, AI and infrastructure companies. Engagements include fractional CEO, fractional CxO and strategic advisory roles, with inquiries open through matellis.com.

Cascade Seed Fund rebrands to Long Way Ventures – Portland Business Journal

Long Way Ventures consists of Pease and venture partners Milena Morris, who is based in Bend, and Jim Clifton, who is based in Nashville. Clifton is the point person for potential deals in the Eastern U.S.

“Semiconductor Startups Head to Silicon Forest”… Gyeonggi Innovation Center Begins Full-Scale Expansion into Portland, U.S. – 벤처스퀘어

The Gyeonggi Center for Creative Economy and Innovation announced that it has selected nine semiconductor startups to participate in the ‘2026 Portland, USA Expansion Program’ and has commenced full-scale support for their global expansion, starting with an orientation. This program is operated in cooperation with Greater Portland Inc. (GPI), an economic promotion agency in Portland, Oregon, and aims to go beyond simple market exploration to facilitate practical business connections with local companies and investors.

The fall of the theorem economy – David Bessis

In the past few months, as I was grappling with the rapidly changing situation around AI and mathematics, I found myself more troubled than I ever expected to be. In theory, I should feel vindicated and happy. In practice, I am also puzzled, worried, and sad.

Startups Brag They Spend More Money on AI Than Human Employees

A new class of AI startups say they are taking money that would normally be used to hire people and are spending it on AI compute instead.

A Better Way To Fail: How This Platform Aims To Turn Startup Shutdowns Into Something Salvageable

Founder and CEO Dori Yona came up with the concept while building his previous company, after a board member asked him to produce a “shutdown analysis.” The process proved so complex and time-consuming that it sparked the idea for a software platform to automate and streamline company closures.

Software Eats Its Own – On my Om

Despite all the hoopla about AGI, and changing the course of human history (and it will), the fact remains that most of these big boys know one thing. Money is in automating software. Money gets the valuations. And valuations get the money.

Great companies are built in hackathons – by Ian Vanagas

When you think about hackathons, you picture a bunch of engineers huddled around laptops, coding up a storm. This is mostly what our hackathons look like with one difference: they’re not just for engineers.

I am an idiot – by Julie Zhuo – The Looking Glass

Surely there is a difference between an accomplished person saying they are an idiot, and actually being an idiot. After all, if you are accomplished, you must not be an idiot. But what is idiocy, really?

Agents with Taste

With enough experience, you can not only tell what feels better, but also why. By then you’ve not only built your taste, but also the ability to articulate it.

How personal finance advice is getting political, thanks to ‘finfluencers’

While most Americans over 64 say they turn to professional financial planners for guidance, a 2025 Gallup poll found that 42% of 18- to 29-year-olds seek financial advice on social media. That’s almost double the share among those ages 30 to 49.

How data centers could play a role in the midterm elections : NPR

“It has become a kitchen table issue, and it has become a very relevant political issue,” said Christabel Randolph, associate director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a technology nonprofit that promotes fairness and accountability.

Market of Choice Celebrates 10 Years of Powering Food Innovation

Long before “local” became a trend, Oregon’s largest independent, family-owned grocer Market of Choice opened doors and cleared pathways for emerging Oregon makers through collaborative relationships with influential incubators and its signature MOJO program. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Market of Choice’s MOJO program has provided hundreds of local makers and thousands of products with a critical path to market, addressing historical barriers for small businesses and guiding them to success with product development consulting, distribution support, and promotions.

Bootstrapped Startups Don’t Win More Often; You’re Reading the Data Wrong | by Paul O’Brien | Apr, 2026 | Medium

Let me encourage you look at three reasons that no one articulates; this is the difference between giving a founder useful capital strategy advice and dooming them to a slow death because their advisor confused ideology with math.

Cascade Seed Fund rebrands to Long Way Ventures – Portland Business Journal

The newest iteration further reflects the shifting investment landscape where the definition of seed round has grown to include bigger checks and more mature companies, Pease said.

A More Intuitive OURA App | The Webby Awards

Portland digital agency Instrument won three Webbys for their work on the Oura app. 

Expensify shareholders evaluate stock split amid Nasdaq warning – Portland Business Journal

In addition to the building in downtown Portland, the company has also invested in an extensive remodel of a nearby food cart pod. The company leased the space where the Midtown Beer Garden is located, 431 S.W. Harvey Milk St., through 2030, according to its annual report. The company works with the ChefStable restaurant group to manage the pod.

The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next 2026 | TechCrunch

The most significant is that the tech giant has earmarked a new $750 million budget to help its Cloud partners sell more AI agents to enterprises. This funding is available to partners ranging from startups to the big consulting firms. It can be used for costs like Gemini proof-of-concept projects, Google forward-deployed engineers, cloud credits, and deployment rebates.

ATProto 101 + Hangout with your favorite ATmosphere nerds!

Come join your fellow idealists, builders, and shitposters for another meetup about the atmosphere! Together, we’re doing our part to create a more social web so the internet belongs to The People and not the oligarchs.

Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

It’s the nature of business that the eulogy for a chief executive doesn’t happen when they die, but when they retire, or, in the case of Apple CEO Tim Cook, announce that they will step up to the role of Executive Chairman on September 1. The one morbid exception is when a CEO dies on the job — or quits because they are dying — and the truth of the matter is that that is where any honest recounting of Cook’s incredibly successful tenure as Apple CEO, particularly from a financial perspective, has to begin.

Fewer Oregonians are enrolling in marketplace plans because of federal uncertainty • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Reduced subsidies and tighter eligibility requirements are leading to less Oregonians enrolling in Oregon Health Insurance Marketplace plans

Mayor Wilson focuses on resilience and grit in proposed budget

Facing a record shortfall in the general fund of more than $160 million, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson today proposed an $8.5 billion city budget for fiscal year 2026-27 that makes major cuts, while maintaining critical resources like police officers, fire stations, parks, community centers, and affordable housing.

The New Unicorn Count Reached A 4-Year High In March, Led By Robotics, Frontier Labs And AI Infrastructure 

A total of 37 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in March, the highest monthly count in close to four years, Crunchbase data shows. The robotics sector led unicorn creation last month, with six new billion-dollar startups, including three from China. Frontier labs added four new unicorns, including two that are building models for robotics.

Data centers don’t have to be a burden on local communities – and can even support them by generating power and repurposing waste heat

Many consumers – and state policymakers and even utility companies – are worried about the possibility of large numbers of data centers raising electricity demand and power prices. Those are real concerns, but our engineering research finds that if designed, constructed and operated carefully, data centers can actually help the communities that host them.

PSU Awarded $1 Million Grant to Expand Semiconductor Career Pathways | Portland State University

The grant supports Portland State’s involvement in Frontiers of Advanced Semiconductor Technology (FAST), a group of 95 organizations including higher education institutions, government agencies, nonprofits and industry partners working to promote innovation and economic growth in the state.

Elad Gil: Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier

I was originally going to write a long articulate post for each of the below, with lots of fancy graphic, charts, and detailed analysis. Then realized it is too much work. Instead, here is some human idea slop & random thoughts. Enjoy!

The BCI User Experience: Living With Brain Implants – IEEE Spectrum

More people have gone to space than have received advanced brain-computer interfaces (BCI) like his. But a growing number of companies are now attempting to move the devices out of neuroscience labs and into mainstream medical care, where they could help millions of people with paralysis and other neurological conditions. Some companies even hope that BCIs will eventually become a consumer technology.

Our best event yet… and we barely scratched the surface

Most of the night wasn’t scripted content, it was questions from the room. People dug into data privacy, who gets left behind in AI adoption, physician burnout, the limits of population-level medicine, and what personalized care could actually look like.

Women Entrepreneurs Tell Their Stories: A WSN Launch Evening, Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 3:00 PM | Meetup

WSN is a storytelling platform amplifying the voices and leadership of women across cultures and communities. Professionals, creatives, changemakers — if you believe that whose voices are heard matters, this is your room.

OEN May PubTalk: John Day

OEN’s May PubTalk is taking us to John Day, in partnership with Mid Oregon Credit Union and the Oregon Frontier Innovation Hub. These moments – when we gather outside of Portland and connect with founders across the state – are some of the most important ways we build a truly statewide innovation ecosystem.

7 AI Tools I Use Every Day as an AI-Native Founder (Claude, Codex, Hermes, and More)

So here’s the honest list. Not an evergreen “best AI tools of 2026” post. Just what’s on my machine right now, what I reach for, what’s changed in the last month.

Panic’s mail-in program was inspired by an old promotional program in the 1980s from game publisher Activision. Long before it was making Call of Duty or Tony Hawk games, Activision was producing Pitfall, Kaboom and River Raid. And it was offering to send players special patches for their jacket or bag, if they sent the publisher photographic proof of their achievements in specific games.

“It’s neat that they built that connection with players,” Panic cofounder Cabel Sasser said. “And what a cool feeling that, when you beat a game, there’s a little something extra that you get.”

Read more about the program in “The amazing mail sent to a video game publisher.”

Vercel April 2026 security incident

We’ve identified a security incident that involved unauthorized access to certain internal Vercel systems. We are actively investigating, and we have engaged incident response experts to help investigate and remediate. We have notified law enforcement and will update this page as the investigation progresses.

AI is entering the Skynet debate moment in the social media hype circles – Digital Trends

The rise of AI-focused fear narratives comes at a time when companies are rapidly advancing the capabilities of large language models and autonomous systems. These tools are already reshaping industries, automating tasks, and influencing decision-making at scale.

Who Is Blake Whiting? – The American Scholar

AI projects designed to pose as real researchers, set in motion by unethical humans, with the cooperation of a powerful corporation, are now capable of fooling even careful bibliophiles. This is not the ChatGPT of 2022. “It reads beautifully and is accurate,” Cline says ruefully of 1177 BC Revisited.

Enterprise AI Sales in 2026: Landing the Deal Is Easy. Staying In Is Everything

Every founder remembers their first Fortune 500 customer. The logo alone opens doors: a new tier of prospects, a stronger sell deck, a credible answer to “who else is using this?” But beyond the commercial lift, there’s something more personal at stake. After months or years of building in relative obscurity, wondering whether the product will ever find its market, that first big customer validates something a founder has been carrying for a long time.

Forbes 2026 AI 50 List | Top Artificial Intelligence Companies

This year, Forbes launched its first ever AI 50 Brink list to highlight 20 up-and-coming early stage AI startups. For more, see our full package of coverage, including a detailed explanation of the list methodology, videos and analyses on trends in AI.

The most in-demand startup roles right now – next play

And so I thought it could be useful to put together a list of some of the “hottest roles” we’re seeing right now. These are the jobs we receive emails every week from great companies looking to fill. Hopefully this list helps you uncover an interesting opportunity.

How to hire people who are better than you

Ask yourself this: If they instead went to work for your competitor, would that worry you? Do you think: Uh oh, now we’re dead? Or do you think: I’m not sure what they would do for that competitor?

There is no pivot – by Benn Stancil – benn.substack

Nobody would accuse an ice cream shop of pivoting. Launching a new flavor every week is something between a constant experiment and a marketing campaign. The weekly “pivot” isn’t a change in direction; it’s the entire strategy.

Inside Notion – Colossus

We wanted to understand the culture that turned the key on all this. For most companies, any history before 2022 feels like a liability. Notion’s pre-GenAI past, instead, feels like deep roots—a shared worldview that ensures a certain standard, even as the team sheds old rules, features, people, and ways of working.

AI Startups Face 12-Month Survival Window as Foundation Models Close In | The Tech Buzz

The math is brutal for founders. Raise a seed round, sprint to product-market fit, scale to meaningful revenue, and establish defensibility before Google decides your vertical is worth a 10-person team’s attention. That’s the 12-month window investors are now explicitly pricing into their models. Some startups won’t make it. Many already haven’t.

GetWhys Raises $5.2M Round to Close the Research-to-Outcome Gap for B2B GTM Teams

GetWhys today announced $5.2M in an oversubscribed funding round to accelerate the growth of its Insight-Driven GTM Platform, which converts buyer insights into the GTM work that drives revenue. The round was led by EPIC Ventures, with participation from CEAS Investments, the Portland Seed Fund, and existing investors Next Frontier Capital, Tuesday Capital, and Capital Eleven. This round brings GetWhys’ total funding to $8.5M, and will be used to accelerate go-to-market, product development, and advancing the company’s proprietary dataset.

International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) Duty Refunds | U.S. Customs and Border Protection

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is developing the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) functionality within the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) to streamline the submission and processing of valid refund requests for duties imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), as authorized by court order or applicable law. CAPE is designed to consolidate refunds of IEEPA duties including interest rather than processing refunds on an entry-by-entry basis. CBP plans to implement CAPE through a phased development approach, adding more functionality in subsequent phases for more complicated scenarios.

Why I Hope I’m Wrong When I Pass on Investing in a Startup | by Hunter Walk | Apr, 2026 | Medium

The number of founders who I truly am excited about as people is so much greater than total investments we make each year (~15) — we leave many pitch meetings honestly hoping they build something meaningful, regardless of whether we’re able to participate in that outcome.

Startup founders come to D.C. calling for expanded capital access policies 

This week, startup founders from across the country came to Capitol Hill to meet with policymakers, highlighting the barriers they face accessing capital and sharing how current policy frameworks shape their ability to grow their businesses. Access to capital remains the first and one of the most significant barriers startup founders face, and policymakers must take a multi-pronged approach to addressing it by expanding the pool of eligible investors, supporting exit opportunities, and making federal grants more accessible and sustainable.

“This cohort raised the bar,” said executive director Joseph Wyno. “Every one of these 12 companies has put in the work — 12 weeks of investor readiness training, pitch development, and access to one of the nation’s premier UAS test ranges. What they’ve built, and what they’ll present on April 22, reflects the full potential of Oregon’s innovation ecosystem in uncrewed systems and autonomy.”

So who are the startups taking the stage…? I’m glad you asked.

• American Tenet — Ultra-low-cost drone decoy systems
• Ether Form — Distributed drone defense with software-guided interceptors
• FlyX Technologies — Swarm drones monitoring power grids and pipelines
• Ganaio — Electromagnetic suspension systems for vehicles
• Haast Autonomous — Autonomous VTOL aircraft for medical supply delivery between hospitals
• HumanKind Homes — Carbon-negative concrete blocks designed for drone assembly (yep, drones building houses)
• Lorica Technologies — Autonomous maritime defense for commercial vessels
• MAV Unlimited — Next-generation 3D printing via volumetric manufacturing
• Osprey cUAS — Backpack-portable counter-drone detection
• Outer Rim Exploration — Muon imaging for critical mineral discovery
• PrairieSchooner — Autonomous military command and control
• SeaStereo — Automated aerial fish counting for aquaculture

Drone decoys. Muon imaging. Drones that build houses. Autonomous fish counting. I mean… this is clearly not your average pitch competition. (And a couple of familiar faces in there — MAV Unlimited is a Portland Seed Fund portfolio company. And HumanKind Homes is a Techstars alum that’s been through PIE.)

The startups will be pitching April 22, 2026, at Hamley’s Slickfork Saloon in Pendleton as part of the AUVSI Cascade Spring Symposium. First session at 8:30AM. Second at 1:05PM.

For more information, visit Oregon UAS Accelerator.