Nike, Inc. is the world's largest athletic footwear and apparel company, headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. Founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and his former runner Phil Knight, it was renamed Nike in 1971 after the Greek goddess of victory. Nike designs, markets and sells footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories under the Nike, Jordan and Converse brands, reaching consumers through wholesale partners and a growing direct-to-consumer business of retail stores, apps and Nike.com. With roughly $46.3 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue and about 80,000 employees, Nike sits at the center of global sport culture, backed by decades of athlete endorsements, the Swoosh logo and the 'Just Do It' slogan.
AheadComputing is a Beaverton, Oregon semiconductor startup founded in 2024 by four former Intel CPU architects who left to build high-performance 64-bit RISC-V processor cores from a clean slate. Betting that the future bottleneck in AI and data-center computing is the CPU rather than the GPU, the company is designing a 'Big Core' out-of-order engine that maximizes per-core performance without the legacy baggage of x86. Backed by roughly $53M in seed funding from Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, Cambium and legendary chip designer Jim Keller, AheadComputing wants to prove that an open instruction set can deliver top-tier performance.