Eight Companies to Watch in 2026
January 2026
Eric Rosenfeld
Nicole Schmidt, CEO Source
Of the hundreds of VC-backed growth companies with a presence in Oregon and Southern Washington that have raised capital over the past decade, which are poised to truly break out in 2026? Which ventures have the potential to lead their categories and create the most local jobs and wealth this year?
Within the Oregon Venture Fund portfolio, eight stand out as rocket ships with a real chance of reaching escape velocity in 2026. Each is generating at least $10M to $150M in ARR and growing more than 40% year over year. Given their momentum and potential economic impact, they deserve to be household names, at least in the Pacific NW.
ConductorOne – Delivers an AI-native identity security platform that automates access control for every human, non-human, and AI identity. In other words: a single, intuitive place to see exactly who has access to what, across all systems in an organization. Founded by serial entrepreneurs and former Okta executives Alex Bovee and Paul Querna, Portland-based ConductorOne tackles the explosion of identities in the enterprise – from AI agents and AI agents created by other agents, to service accounts and SaaS bots.
With 40 engineers in SE Portland and nearly 200 employees worldwide, ConductorOne tripled revenue in 2025 and plans to triple again in 2026, putting potential unicorn status within reach by year-end. Other participants in an $80M September 2025 financing include Accel, Greycroft, and CrowdStrike.
Conveyor – At his first startup, Aptible, founder Chas Ballew watched customers slog through multi-hundred‑question security questionnaires that routinely added weeks or months to sales cycles and soaked up security and sales teams’ time with copy‑and-paste drudgery. He later realized that advances in generative AI could be used to automatically answer security questionnaires and RFPs with high accuracy using a company’s existing security documentation, instead of forcing humans to re‑answer the same questions repeatedly. That insight led Camas-based Ballew to launch Conveyor, a SaaS platform that uses AI to automate customer security reviews, questionnaires, RFPs, and trust-center workflows for B2B vendors.
The 50-person team has consistently doubled revenue YoY. OVF’s co-investors in the most-recent $20M financing include SignalFire, Cervin, and Maverick Ventures.
Customer.io – A customer engagement and marketing automation platform that enables companies to send highly personalized, data-driven messages to users based on what they actually do in the product. The payoff: happier customers, lower churn, and more revenue. With a global team of 350, Portland-based Customer.io has blown past $100M in ARR. CEO Colin Nederkoorn started the company after experiencing firsthand how hard it was for growth-stage companies to turn raw user behavior data into timely, personalized outreach. At the time, analytics tools showed what users did but did not help companies act on that data automatically to influence behavior.
OVF’s board designee is George DeCarlo, and our primary co-investor is Spectrum Equity.
Eclypsium – Portland-based Eclypsium was founded by former Intel security threat researchers Yuriy Bulygin and Alex Bazhaniuk. They recognized that attackers could persist in hardware by exploiting BIOS, UEFI, BMCs, and other firmware layers that sit beneath the operating system, often remaining invisible to conventional security products. Organizations lacked tools to continuously verify the integrity and provenance of firmware and device components.
Eclypsium has since become the leading trusted provider of firmware and hardware security. The rapid growth in data center server fleets, combined with rising cyberattacks on public and private computing infrastructure, is fueling demand for Eclypsium’s highly patented and difficult-to-replicate platform. Large health systems and financial services firms are also now meaningful segments of its customer base. With $35M raised to date, Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, Madrona, and Qualcomm Ventures are among the dozen-plus firms joining OVF in backing Eclypsium’s rapid growth.
GearUP – Sitting at the fertile crossroads of Washington County’s Silicon Forest and Nike, GearUP’s 175-person team blends lean supply chain expertise with world-class e-commerce, apparel design & production, and deep sports industry expertise. GearUP partners with Nike and other major brands to outfit youth sports leagues and clubs with high-quality, custom team uniforms and fan apparel. They do this via online “team shops” where families order and pay directly, and orders are then shipped straight to each athlete or fan within days. Before GearUP, no one had solved this mass-customization challenge at scale.
The company is valued at well over $100M. Under CEO Mac Lavier’s leadership, nearly a million athletes will soon receive their uniforms “on time for game time.”
Hydrolix – Marty Kagan started Hydrolix to solve the cost and scalability pain he and his co‑founder had lived through trying to store and analyze massive observability and log datasets. They founded the company to “change the economics of big data” by creating a streaming data lake that combines real‑time and historical analytics on log‑intensive workloads while radically reducing storage and query costs.
Hydrolix has become a timely and valuable solution for industries generating unfathomable amounts of data that must be monitored and analyzed in real time, including media/entertainment, adtech, security, financial services, retail/e-commerce, and ridesharing/transportation. With more than 200 employees, greater than 100% YoY growth, and $80M on the balance sheet, Portland-based Hydrolix is on track to surpass a $1 billion valuation. It's only a matter of time before Marty Kagan – rather than Marty Supreme – is staring at us from the cover of a Wheaties box.
Source – As a commercial interior designer and later a manufacturer sales rep, Nicole Schmidt [pictured] repeatedly watched projects stall due to opaque pricing, manual workflows, and the absence of a single “source of truth” for interior products and finishes. She saw a commercial real estate and construction sector that remained “stubbornly offline,” with no collaborative digital environment for product selection, samples, approvals, and purchasing, even as project complexity and budgets grew.
Nicole founded Source to digitize and streamline commercial projects on a single cloud platform, spanning budgeting, materials selection, coordination with reps, and purchasing. Today, designers, developers, and operators of hotels, hospitals, apartment buildings, and workplaces collaborate in Source’s fully digital workflow, reducing risk and waste while preserving design intent. Headquartered in Portland with a team of 50+, Source has already processed $7 billion in purchases for more than a thousand projects, driving consistent 100%+ annual revenue growth.
Wayfinder – When students feel connected to their values and see purpose in their learning, they’re more likely to attend school, stay engaged, and succeed academically. When that connection is missing, students check out and outcomes erode. Wayfinder, led by Patrick Cook-Deegan, exists to stop that slide before it starts.
A spinout of Stanford’s d.school and operating out of Bend, Wayfinder provides K-12 schools with an online platform, curriculum, and assessments that prepare students for life beyond school by building durable, “future-ready” skills, such as self-awareness, goal setting, problem solving, adaptability, perseverance, collaboration, and empathy. Today, over a million students at 2,600 schools nationwide benefit from Wayfinder. Certainly, one to watch.