13 Hot Portland Startups That You Need To Watch

The Clymb, a company that sells outdoor gear and adventure travel packages, is oh-so Portland, and oh-so cool.

On The Clymb's community-based website (you need an invitation to join) you can buy name-brand outdoor accessories at enormous discounts. Plus, the site sells "human-powered" trips (like kayacking in Alaska or mountain biking through Ecudaor).

It was voted one of Outdoor Magazine's best places to work in 2012 and 2013.

Simple started when CEO Josh Reich realized that too often banks make money by keeping customers confused.

So he swore that his online-only banking system, Simple, would never blast users with surprise fees and would make make it easier for users to set goals, save money, and track their spending.

Simple launched in 2012 and by and had processed more than $1 billion in transactions by summer 2013.

If you're a developer, you not only want users to download your app, but then continue to use it on a regular basis. That means sometimes you have to give them a little reminder.

Enter: Push notifications.

Urban Airship helps companies deploy push notifications, use location-based targeting, and understand related analytics. It enables 5.5 billion messages to be sent per month.

Earlier this year, Urban Airship raised a hefty $25 million.

CPUsage asks the question, "What could you build if you had dead-simple access to nearly unlimited computer processing power?"

A use-case example from CPUsage's website: Researches from a big pharmaceutical corporation would usually spend months analyzing molecule data on 1,000 virtual computers, with the supervision of several IT staff members. Instead, the company could set up on CPUsage's platform and save time, money, and effort.

"Hashtags are the new URL,” according to Chirpify founder Chris Teso.

The company's tech makes it possible for brands to sell things like VIP concert tickets to people through Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter using hashtags. For example, you could respond to an offer from a company with #buy to make a purchase directly from social media.

Adidas, MasterCard, Greenday, and Tim McGraw all use Chirpify.

When Janrain raised a $33 million funding round earlier this year, it really helped put the Portland startup scene on the map.

The company works with brands like Dr. Pepper, Whole Foods, MTV, Avis, and Fox to increase, optimize, and measure their social Web presence. For example, Janrain launched a one-click Facebook sharing mechanism which companies can use on their pages to give users more control over their sharing behaviors.

Jama is a product delivery platform that facilitates easy, open communication between all the members of an organization through real-time chat, a comprehensive dashboard for each project, and more. The company has been around since 2007, but raised a $13 million round of funding in August.

Some of Jama's big-name clients?

SpaceX, The Department of Defense, Time Warner, GE, United Healthcare, and Amazon.com. Not too shabby.

Only founded this year, Wildfang stands out for its unique approach to women's clothing in the over-saturated e-commerce space.

Co-founder Emma Mcgilroy previously worked for Nike, which is another huge company with offices in Portland.

"The city is just at the heart of who we are," Wildfang's other founder, Julia Parsley told Vice. "We really love this city and we’re proud to show it off."

CoPatient, founded by Rebecca Palm and Katie Vahle in 2012, analyzes your medical bills to spot mistakes and negotiate fairer rates if it finds that you're being billed above the normal amount for a service.

The company was based in Boston before moving west.

"Portland has a terrific culture and a wealth of talent to offer for startups," co-founder Rebecca Palm told Boston.com.

Paul Berg worked as a water systems engineer in Uganda and was overwhelmed by the number of people forced to drink unsafe, contaminated water.

So he decided to do something about it.

Berg has created a pedal-powered water treatment system that allows users to turn dirty water into a serving of treated, safe drinking water through only one minute of cycling. The company he co-founded, Safi Water Works, wants to bring this product to the people that need it most.

Panic creates software for Macs, iPhones, and iPads, including file transfer services and a clean dashboard app.

Debatable whether Panic should still technically be classified as a "startup" as it released its first, successful product in 1998, but it's undeniable that it's one of the coolest tech companies in Portland.

This year, Panic received an Apple Design Award for their work on a web-editor app called Coda 2.

At this point, using the cloud for either storage or computing is a pretty mainstream practice for companies of all sizes.

Cloudability helps those companies make sure they're not wasting money by tracking their cloud spending and analyzing where they could be spending less. Both Slideshare and Adobe use Cloudability, and video library MediaCore says that if it had started using the company's service sooner, it could have saved $20,000 in overage fees.

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