portland-oregon
(10)The $4.5 Billion HVAC Empire Two Guys Named Johnson and Stone Never Saw Coming
It started as one refrigeration shop in Portland with a name stitched from its two founders. Seventy years later it moves heat pumps, compressors and thermostats through 450-plus branches - and the contractors who buy from it once owned the whole thing.
KEEN
KEEN is a privately held American outdoor footwear and accessories brand founded in 2003 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Best known for the toe-protecting Newport hybrid sandal, KEEN designs hiking boots, sandals, casual shoes and safety work footwear (KEEN Utility) that blend outdoor performance with a durability-first, low-impact ethos it calls 'Consciously Created.' The company has been PFAS-free since 2018, uses recycled and agricultural-waste materials, manufactures part of its line in the U.S., and channels giving through The KEEN Effect. It sells direct-to-consumer online and through retail partners worldwide.
MacCoy Merkley
MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.
OpenSesame
OpenSesame is a Portland, Oregon-based e-learning company that runs an online marketplace of curated corporate training courses. Founded in 2011, it aggregates content from hundreds of publishers into a single catalog of tens of thousands of courses spanning business skills, compliance, safety, leadership, technology and wellness, and integrates that content directly into a customer's existing learning management system. The company sells to enterprise and mid-market employers who want to buy, curate and deliver workforce training without stitching together dozens of separate vendors.
Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Sparrow Pharmaceuticals is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing clofutriben, an oral, once-daily HSD-1 inhibitor that lowers active cortisol inside specific tissues rather than shutting down the body's steroid system entirely. Founded in 2013 by scientist David Katz, the company has raised roughly $145 million across Series A and Series B rounds and is running the Phase 2b CAPTAIN-T2D trial in patients with type 2 diabetes and elevated cortisol, alongside programs in Cushing's syndrome and autonomous cortisol secretion.
Oath Surgical
Oath Surgical is a Portland, Oregon-based healthtech company building a full-stack, AI-native system for outpatient surgery. It owns and operates its own ambulatory surgical centers while developing OathOS, an ambient clinical intelligence platform that analyzes surgical video, audio and operational data in real time to reduce administrative burden and support value-based, surgeon-led care. Founded by physician and former Intuitive Ventures head Oliver Keown, the company has raised roughly $35M and partners with NVIDIA, McKesson Ventures and FPV Ventures.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson
Garth Sheldon-Coulson is the co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, a Portland, Oregon company building free-floating, wave-powered nodes that generate clean electricity in the open ocean and pair it with onsite AI computing. A Harvard-trained lawyer with an MIT master's and a Bridgewater investing background, he pivoted from finance to spend nearly a decade inventing marine energy hardware. In May 2026 Panthalassa raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel, pushing its valuation near $1 billion, on a bet that the open ocean is one of only three energy sources on Earth with tens of terawatts of untapped capacity.
Walt Weyler
Walt Weyler is a Portland, Oregon entrepreneur and chemical engineer who turned a career running factories into a second act buying, fixing, and building industrial companies. He is President and CEO of SequenceUSA, a private holding and lending company that backs Pacific Northwest manufacturing and technology firms, and President and Managing Director of Clarus LLC (Clarus Water Solutions), a water-filtration and stormwater venture spun from his work at Crystal Clear Technologies. Before founding his own companies he co-owned Kinetics, a metal-injection-molding shop he grew from a struggling $3M operation to roughly 100 employees and sold to mining giant Phelps Dodge. He sits on the Supply Chain & Logistics Management Advisory Council at Oregon State University's College of Business.
Panthalassa
Panthalassa is a Portland, Oregon public-benefit corporation building autonomous, mass-produced floating nodes that harvest wave energy in the open ocean and use it on the spot to run AI compute, beaming inference results back to land by satellite. Founded in 2016, the company raised a $140M Series B in May 2026 led by Peter Thiel to finish its pilot manufacturing facility and deploy its Ocean-3 node series.
Justin Lehrbaum
Justin Lehrbaum is an Area Vice President at Adobe leading Customer Experience Orchestration, based in Portland, Oregon. Over 14 years in enterprise B2B sales, he climbed from a sports-industry account executive role to senior VP territory leadership at one of the world's most recognized software companies, spanning Bizible, Marketo, and multiple Adobe business units. A five-time President's Club achiever, he oversees Adobe's data-driven customer journey solutions that help enterprise brands orchestrate personalized experiences at scale.