More than 84% of votes cast were in favor. The deal is expected to close November 4, 2026. It’s subject to closing conditions. And trading on Nasdaq is expected to start November 5, 2026, under the ticker AGLT.

At a special meeting held today, Churchill XI shareholders approved the business combination (the “Transaction”) and all related proposals. The Transaction received overwhelming support, with more than 84% of votes cast voting in favor.

As previously disclosed in the October 30 announcement, Agility’s gross capital raise in connection with the Transaction and related financings is expected to total approximately $465 million, before transaction expenses. This includes: (i) approximately $164 million from Churchill XI’s trust account; (ii) approximately $201 million from a common stock PIPE committed at $10 per share, led by Foxconn with participation from leading existing Agility stockholders and new institutional investors; and (iii) $100 million of equity funding already received following the announcement of the business combination.

In June, the expectation was roughly $620 million in gross proceeds, about $420 million of it from the trust. The trust piece is now about $164 million, because holders of roughly 61.5% of Class A shares redeemed, per the SEC 8-K.

Still a significant infusion of capital for an Oregon company.

For more, read the Agility press release and the SEC 8-K.

It’s a special episode from the Vancouver Tech Crawl, where Southwest Washington tech companies open their doors and the community walks from stop to stop through downtown Vancouver, WA. In this video: event vibes, company stops, conversations with local founders and builders, and honest takeaways on the Vancouver tech.

Oregon by the Numbers 2026 for Rural Small Business Owners

The Ford Family Foundation released the ninth edition of Oregon by the Numbers on Aug. 31, 2026. It includes a profile for each of the state’s 36 counties and measures of community well-being, with rural and urban comparisons wherever the data allows. It’s important to note that technically the report counts every city and town as rural except those inside six designated urban centers, and it puts Rural Oregon at 1,248,396 people out of 4,254,293 statewide. Also, it is a snapshot rather than a diagnostic tool.

Will AI Replace SDRs? Why Top AI Companies Are Hiring More

At a recent Madrona AMA for our portfolio’s sales leaders, my teammate Eric Wong and I hosted Sam Nelson, founder of SDRLeader.com. Sam was in the first group of SDRs at Outreach in Seattle and later became my top SDR leader. He now runs a community of more than 2,500 companies.

Paw Patrol creator awards UO students cash for startup ideas | Local | kezi.com

Harary visited Gilbert Plaza as part of a six-week college tour. For about two hours, students presented their business concepts in front of a customized Airstream trailer. If Harary liked an idea, he awarded the student $500 on the spot. He also gave them seven days to compete for one of 10 $25,000 prizes.

(2011) Portland Seed Fund stages inaugural Demo Day

It seems like it was only three months ago that the Portland Seed Fund revealed their first class of startups. Oh wait. It was only three months ago. And today, those startups emerged—some all growed up and some completely transformed—to take the stage at Ziba Design for the first Portland Seed Fund Demo Day.

Agents in Games · Labs

Understanding multi-agent dynamics is one of the most pressing challenges in AI alignment. Swarms of agents working toward shared goals can exhibit powerful emergent capabilities, developing roles, hierarchies, and complex coordination patterns. These can be extremely useful, as in the thousand-agent swarms that recently obliterated hundreds of open mathematical problems, and extremely dangerous, as in the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. Like biology, studying agent dynamics requires both formal models (to describe the range of possible behaviors) and empirical research (to see what behaviors arise in practice).

Work-In Wednesday: Session 02 | Partiful

Join us for another Work-In Wednesday, a casual coworking meetup for Portland locals looking to get some work done, meet new people, and build community.

For Early Stage VCs, Non-consensus is Too Risky, Consensus is Too Boring, but Pre-consensus May Be Just Right. | by Hunter Walk | Nov, 2026 | Medium

There are many venture capitalists embracing the notion of consensus investing right now, some with glee, others with a ‘it’s the game on the field’ shrug. Regardless, the incentives at an individual level are very much pushing in this direction.

AI adoption in 2026: use, spending, and returns

There is no single AI adoption rate. Asking whether a company uses AI, observing a payment, and measuring a financial return answer different questions. A useful comparison starts with who was measured, what counted as adoption, and when.

Weekly Review: Show Your Work – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft

Welcome to this week’s edition of Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers. Thank you for being here. The thread running through this issue is evidence: Meta swaps review comments for failing tests that prove a bug, Google treats alignment results as a shipping bar, and an essay on benchmarks asks who checks the people keeping score. Along the way, small on-device models keep getting more capable, and new workspaces help you track many coding agents at once.

Featured Talk What If It All Works Out | CreativeMornings

An air of negativity seems to hang over our collective feelings about the future. Lisa Jikeli believes that imagination is the answer. Not as an escapist fantasy, but a core practice for getting through uncertain times. By imagining an ideal future state, we create a path to work towards it. Watch her talk for our Berlin chapter and ask yourself, “what if it all works out?”

The return of the full-stack app – B2BaCEO by Ashu Garg

The most interesting AI app companies we’ve met this year don’t look like typical app companies. They train their own models, decide which model handles each step of the work, and build the plumbing that keeps their agents running. In other words, they look more like infra companies.

Don’t Fear Your Competitors

Your competitor launched last week. They have a beautiful website, a slick demo video, and a press release announcing that they’re “revolutionizing” your space. You feel a knot in your stomach.

SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that’s a problem for America’s space agency – Ars Technica

The pendulum has swung so far now that SpaceX seems increasingly disinterested in the US government for most contracts outside of data services, such as Starshield for military communications and observations.

A proposal: how to hire junior engineers in the age of AI | Seldo.com

Since then I’ve been thinking about how, exactly, one could go about hiring junior engineers who would be good at the new way of doing things, specifically about how to interview them. This post is about my best idea so far.

Pile-ins, payouts, and pacing pressure: the investors behind the VCs open up | TechCrunch

That’s the typical playbook. But typical is out the window. OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s valuations have shot up so quickly that nearly everyone has piled into the same two companies on the way up, often inside the same venture firm, despite the long-standing venture convention of avoiding investments that conflict with one another. No one is complaining, either. The LPs I speak with seem unbothered by this big gamble, given the potential returns; they’re expecting a bonanza.

Filing: Chip startup Powerlattice raises $86M to ease AI’s power crunch – GeekWire

Powerlattice, a Vancouver, Wash.-based startup developing chips that cut the power demands of AI processors, has raised $86 million, according to an SEC filing on Friday. The new funding is nearly triple the $31 million the company had raised when it emerged from stealth last November with a $25 million Series A led by Playground Global and Celesta Capital. Board members include former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, a general partner at Playground, and Steve Fu of Celesta. The filing also lists Wen Hsieh, founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners, as a director.

“Many people think AI spending is like cloud spending, and in one way it is. Engineers can spend money without asking anyone,” said Jon Frisby, founding CTO of Sixty AI. “The business loses the chance to ask ‘do we need this?’ and the CFO loses the chance to ask ‘can we afford this?’ Neither can see what’s going on. But the similarities stop there. If cloud is the raw material, AI is the machinery that processes it, and it needs a very different approach to get the most from it.”

Tokematic shows teams what their AI subscriptions and usage are doing and what they cost. It tracks quotas, balances and reset times across Claude, Codex, Kimi, Antigravity, Z.ai, OpenRouter and Ollama, and warns before an allowance runs out. Session Map sizes each AI session by cost, and a git-style history traces a code change back to the AI sessions behind it. Managers get team summaries, and Finance gets cost by project, team or customer.

The beta is open now for macOS, Linux and iOS. Solo is free.

“It took 15 years for cloud spend to reach a trillion dollars a year,” said Mat Ellis, founder of Cloudability, founder and CEO of Sixty. “Even after the bubble has popped, AI will be much bigger much sooner. We need to move even quicker this time.”

For more information or to sign up for the public beta, visit Tokematic.

Nearly all the map data you need is open and free to use, but providers like Google and Mapbox still charge steep prices to access it.

Google charges $5.00 per 1,000 requests to geocode, and wants a card on file before you make one. Mapbox charges for every map load after the first 50,000 a month, and extra to store your results. Other providers sell monthly plans, so you pay a flat rate whether you use the requests or not.

Mapricot’s own pitch is that it’s “the most affordable map and geocoding API.” The first 250,000 requests every 30 days are free. With no card needed to sign up. After that, it’s $0.10 per 1,000 requests, drawn from prepaid credits in $25 increments. No contract. No subscription. And map tiles are free.

There are official SDKs for JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Go.

For more information or to sign up, visit Mapricot.

Monday (Nov 2)

• Code & Coffee – Beaverton — 9:00am
• Go Karts with Engineers — 7:00pm

Tuesday (Nov 3)

• CORAL Chats: Community Organization Roundtable – Ask A Lawyer — 12:00pm
• WEBINAR: Stop the Scroll: Content That Cuts Through the Noise — 12:00pm
• Better Futures Club — 1:30pm
• Powering the Future: How Avangrid Leaders Are Using AI in Renewable Energy — 5:00pm
• Portland Geek Dinner – Beaverton! — 5:30pm
• Coding Club — 6:00pm

Wednesday (Nov 4)

• Startup Cafe — 9:00am
• Work-in Wednesday — 9:00am
• Learning With a Porpoise: The Legal Side of the AI Boom — 12:00pm
• TechConnect: Global Virtual Job & Networking Event for Data, AI, and Tech Pros — 4:00pm
• Heart and Mind in Balance with Meredith James (Hybrid) — 5:00pm
• From Data to Decisions: Integrating Machine Learning and AI into Power BI — 5:30pm
• Portland Marketing Meetup (Exit Five Portland Chapter) — 5:30pm
• Portland Devtools / B2B Marketing Meetup — 5:30pm
• Government Edition Meetup — 5:30pm
• PDXWIT Organizer Roundup — 6:00pm
• Exploit Workshop — 6:30pm

Thursday (Nov 5)

• Portland SIMposium 2026 — 7:30am
• November Entrepreneur Mixer: Vancouver — 8:30am
• Tax Basics for Creatives — 12:00pm
• Thursday Professional Networking Happy Hour — 4:30pm
• Build Your Best Team Through Better Hiring Today — 5:30pm
• 11-5-26 Accelerate Biotech Happy Hour — 5:30pm
• HackerX – Portland (November) — 6:00pm
• Vancouver Veteran Meetup — 6:00pm
• Digital Creatives “Drink-N-Draw” at Rose City Book Pub! — 6:30pm
• Portland Linux/Unix Group General Monthly Meeting: Tmux, with Peat Bakke — 7:00pm

Friday (Nov 6)

• PNW CoffeeOps — 8:00am
• AnalyticsCLUB JobExpo Virtual Business, Data & Technology Job Expo — 11:00am
• Friday Happy Hour at Beermongers — 12:00pm
• Tech Talk: AI in Practice with Bethany Janos — 1:00pm
• Brand Storytelling for Creative Founders — 1:00pm
• Coding Club — 6:00pm
• Silicon Florist watch party — 9:00pm

Saturday (Nov 7)

• PNW Day of Data 2026 — 8:00am
• Backend & Systems Guild: Designing Data-Intensive Applications — 10:00am
• Mentorship Saturdays @ Roseline Cafe & Online — 10:00am
• Work Party+Open House — 12:00pm
• G.A.T.H.E.R. (formerly Beginner Friendly App Building for Innovators) — 1:00pm
• Home Assistant Community Day — 2:00pm
• FULL SPECTRUM Immersive Art Exhibition: Opening Night Party! — 6:00pm

Sunday (Nov 8)

• Digital Creatives and Coffee! (drop-in social) — 9:00am
• Aaron Swartz at 40: The Internet’s Own Boy — 2:00pm
• The Final Frontier: Star Trek Night! — 5:00pm

We take a final look at the Oregon governor race through the lens of our local startup community.

This episode examines the intersection of policy and innovation, highlighting what the gubernatorial candidates mean for the future of Portland entrepreneurs. We provide context on how federal programs like SBIR impact regional growth and discuss the broader implications for those building tech companies in our area.

Beyond the election, we cover the latest Portland Oregon startup news, including recent developments in the regional ecosystem. Understanding these shifts is vital for anyone looking to navigate the current business climate and identify new opportunities for collaboration.

What It Takes To Go from 0 to 1: The Big Picture (Part I) – Pear VC

Now, all these numbers are not to discourage you as a founder! We simply want you to know the reality of just how hard this journey is before you embark on it. We think you should know exactly what you’re getting into.

Power Bills That Jump 36% Are a Volcano Startup’s Sales Pitch

Seattle startup Endurance Energy ran the first subsea geothermal power plant at Axial Seamount, an active underwater volcano about 300 miles off Oregon, and got 8.7 seconds of net-positive electricity before a software fault and a failed cable ended the test. The physics held. The business it is chasing, a 2-megawatt unit off Tonga by the end of 2027, competes with imported diesel, and that contract will be priced on reliability and fuel risk, not on heat.

PDX Infra After Hours · Luma

Infra After Hours is a private event series in PDX for builders and leaders in developer tools, data, AI, security, and other infrastructure software. Join…

Intel (INTC) Q3 earnings report 2026

Intel shares plummeted more than 20% in extended trading on Thursday after the chipmaker issued a weak fourth-quarter forecast, citing continued softness in the global PC market.

As search traffic dries up, Reddit announces it’s shifting to a logged-in experience | TechCrunch

The move is designed to protect its data from AI scraping, allowing the company to instead forge lucrative licensing deals with model providers. But just as important, such a shift could help Reddit to increase its revenue even as it faces daily active user declines in its largest market, the U.S.

&Truth Emerges From Stealth — &Truth

&Truth, a public benefit corporation, is establishing a foundational standard for provably safe code. The company is building a universal verification machine to read code in any programming language and mathematically prove that it is safe, secure, and correct, with proofs that anyone can independently check.

American views of higher ed decline, once again | Bryan Alexander

United States attitudes towards higher education soured yet again, according to a new Gallup poll.  The main question asked this time was “How important is a college education today — very important, fairly important or not too important?”  It’s one Gallup has asked regularly for decades.

The world needs more whimsy

One article I read about the regatta said that the first years of it had only a small turnout of a few dozen onlookers. By year four, two thousand people came out to watch. Now the event regularly brings in twenty thousand people, crowded around a tiny lake, to watch. “This is the best sporting event I’ve ever been to,” I told my boyfriend halfway through the first race.

Just Noting That Your Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions – The Atlantic

If this fact alarms you—or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared—I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as “confectioner’s glaze.” This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

What We Fund | NSF SBIR

Between fiscal years 2016 and 2024, America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF made 4,000+ awards to startups and small businesses. Each year, we fund roughly 400 companies across nearly all technology areas and market sectors (with the exception of clinical trials and schedule I controlled substances). Select a topic area below to read more about the topic, see featured Phase I and Phase II success stories.

You Won’t Raise Venture Capital Until You Learn This One Simple Lesson About Investors

Well, it turns out a good fundraising pitch is a helpful way to start a conversation. It provides the setup and the context and the basic information about whether a conversation is even worth an investor’s time, which are all important things. But they’re not the things that raise capital. The conversation is what raises capital, which means the true purpose of a fundraising pitch is to start those conversations.

The Economics of Intelligence: How and when does AGI lead to economic transformation?

How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this essay, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, as a function of how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes.

(2018) All this startup stuff is cool. But democracy is cooler. Please vote.

I know that, at times, startups and capitalism and consumerism can seem superficial. I get it. But the underlying system of government that has borne this whole startup thing is pretty darn cool. Especially considering that we’ve been iterating on it for more than 240 years or so. But it only works if you take part. So please vote.

What one person can actually operate – Leon Becker’s Blog

I don’t think this is the right architecture for a company with an operations team. It’s the architecture I can actually run, and I’d rather have a system I understand completely than one that’s theoretically better and practically opaque.

The Sane Asylum

I know we say this every time a breakthrough technology emerges, but there has never been a better time in history to build a highly profitable business with significant scale without raising or hiring a ton. As I study these companies, I am learning that you can operate at the exciting forefront without going insane.

How to Shut Down a Startup (and Still Get Backed Again)

That probably sounds backwards. It makes complete sense once you understand how venture math works and why hanging on costs everybody more than the loss does.

A golden age of science is coming – by Noah Smith

It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture

We Won’t “Just Hang Out”

I met a lot of my friends by writing open-source code, and participating in the community of software engineers. AI is dissolving that community by making human contributions superfluous. If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects or my technical blog posts.

You can just ask AI to do things

One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency: being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for what you build, but it’s also true for how you build. AI models are improving so quickly that most of us are bottlenecked1 on noticing that AI agents can help automate particular tasks. Here are some examples of that from my daily work.

On AI Safety | Jasper Croome

TL;DR – AI is not going to kill us all. There is a non-zero chance it ends up being disruptive and damaging to society, but total human annihilation is not on the table.

Key Decisions and Keystone Projects – by Charlie Gilkey

It’s the time of the year where I start reminding my readers that November is a three work-week month and December is a two work-week month for many of us in the US. Please send a lot of goodwill and patience for folks who work in retail, hospitality, and travel, for it’s their peak season and they often have to deal with us on our worst behavior.

Azenta has also acquired SynPlexity, adding pooled gene assembly technology that provides thousands of full-length gene variants in a single library. These capabilities address the increasing scale of biological design by enabling researchers to efficiently build and test large numbers of candidates, including AI-generated designs.

The deal is part of what Azenta calls strategic investments in its GENEWIZ business, alongside an exclusive license with Elegen. Terms weren’t disclosed. Azenta says more details are coming on its fourth quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call.

For more, read the announcement from Azenta.

CAVEAT: Same as always. I am not a political correspondent. I’m a guy with a blog and an unhealthy attachment to the Oregon startup community. So please watch these yourself.

I’m embedding both below so you can watch, assess, and decide. Here’s Medford, from the KOBI-TV NBC5 studios with Southern Oregon University. (The debate starts around the 44 minute mark.)

And here’s Bend, from the KTVZ studios.

Medford was the quieter of the two. For me, anyway. No “startup.” No “venture.” No “entrepreneur.” Not once.

But both candidates did point at the same council. Drazan said “the governor’s Prosperity Council has made some recommendations which I look forward to working across the aisle to implement.” And when taxes came up, Kotek said “my Prosperity Council mentioned some things that we need to take up and I have asked legislative leaders to start working on those issues.”

Drazan’s rebuttal opened with “I will lower taxes.” But here’s the thing. That Prosperity Council report is the one that, by my read, includes reconnecting QSBS. So both of them pointed at a council whose report, again by my read, includes our issue.

Neither of them said our issue.

Then came the jobs credit question. The Source asked about the “tax credit of $1,000 per net new job capped at $10,000 per employer for certain industries, including forestry, wood products, manufacturing, and technology.” And whether that’s enough to change business decisions in central and eastern Oregon.

Drazan said “No, I do not believe that that nominal tax credit is going to do anything to move the needle.” Kotek said the credit “is only one piece of the puzzle and it was in a larger tax package that my opponent voted against…”

Neither of them named the bill. But as best I can tell, that larger tax package is SB 1507. The same bill that created the jobs credit. And the same bill that disconnected Oregon from the federal QSBS exclusion. The one Kotek signed in April with a letter promising to “propose legislation for the 2027 session that would address the QSBS exemption issue specifically.”

And Drazan got even closer. She seemed to be talking about the same bill when she called it “a slap in the face what that legislation did to founders in our state.” Founders. Out loud. On a debate stage. Which leaves the questions I’d have loved to hear asked. What does a slap in the face cost a founder at exit? And what does either of them plan to do about it in 2027?

One small fact check, because these numbers get repeated. Drazan said SB 1507 “increased taxes by $330 million.” The Legislative Revenue Office estimate is about $311 million this biennium. And her own caucus’s release said $311 million in the headline.

So that’s the series. The QSBS question never got asked. It got close. Twice. In Bend.

Watch both debates. Go read Kotek’s plan and Drazan’s plan. Election day is November 3.

Please do your own research. Make your own decisions. And then vote.