portland-oregon
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The Agency That Bet on the Work Everyone Else Avoided
In Portland, a 1979 communications shop found its edge in complicated, controversial assignments. Forty-seven years later, its most revealing product is not an ad or a website - it is institutional trust.
Lara Media and the People Who Never Come to the Meeting
For 25 years, the Portland firm has treated listening as fieldwork - finding the people public meetings miss, then turning what they say into decisions institutions can use.
Triple Oak Power’s 8-Gigawatt Bet: Turn the Messy Middle of Clean Energy Into Something Banks Can Back
Triple Oak Power does not sell turbines. It sells uncertainty reduction - the patient work that turns wind, land, grid access and local consent into financeable power projects.
How Free Pizza Became a Weapon Against Long Voting Lines
It began as a weekend lark before the 2016 election. Four cycles later, Pizza to the Polls has fed voters at thousands of polling places in all 50 states - and turned the misery of a long line into something people actually share.
The Ski Bum Who Put NASA's Coldest Material Into Your Winter Boots
Michael Markesbery took $10,000 from an astronaut scholarship and a material NASA uses to insulate spacecraft, and spent a decade figuring out how to make it bend. Now Solarcore® sells that trick to boot brands, the Air Force, and battery makers.
The Company That Turned a Kitchen Trash Can Into a Spreadsheet
For 20 years, Leanpath has bet that you cannot fix what you refuse to weigh. The payoff: kitchens that cut food waste in half, one logged banana peel at a time.
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.
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.
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.