Aluna Learning is an EdTech development, research, and consulting venture based in Eugene, Oregon. They specialize in early learning and partner with researchers, educators, small businesses, and funders to translate learning science into usable digital learning tools and field-ready evidence. 

Aluna is the sole developer and distributor of KinderTEK®, a digital early mathematics instructional system with embedded assessment and learning management tools. KinderTEK has been used by 100+ teachers and 5000+ students over a decade of federally funded research. They also support a Numberline Assessment app for researchers. 

Aluna’s consulting practice guides nonprofits, educational organizations, and community groups serving children and families through program refinement and strategic decision making, evaluation strategy and implementation, organizational learning, and research translation and dissemination.

Founded in 2001 to provide computer-adaptive language proficiency tests, Avant has expanded their offerings and now provides learning tools, assessments, and certifications.  Additionally, they help educators develop skills and track student progress with industry-leading reporting tools. These tools help language learners, educators, and employers prepare and succeed in workforce settings. Organizations trust Avant to deliver clear documentation of proficiency skills, data-driven learning, and excellent support.

Cascade Prodrug’s drug candidates are based on proprietary chemistry designed to temporarily block the active—and often toxic—form of a therapeutic agent until it encounters low-oxygen (hypoxic) conditions, which are commonly found in hyperproliferative diseases such as solid tumors. Under these conditions, the prodrug is selectively activated, enabling localized delivery of high concentrations of the active drug while reducing systemic toxicity and off-target side effects. 

In preclinical studies conducted to date, Cascade Prodrug has demonstrated meaningful therapeutic improvements relative to conventional treatment approaches. The company has also received FDA Orphan Drug Designation for one of its pancreatic cancer programs. More recently, Cascade Prodrug has launched an initiative to develop a first-in-class systemic therapy for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Current treatments for AMD are largely palliative; this program aims to explore a fundamentally new therapeutic approach with the potential to alter disease progression. 

EdImagine is an educational consulting organization focused on improving readiness for success in high school, college, careers and life. Their work is grounded in the research of David Conley, a nationally recognized thought leader in college and career readiness who defined and popularized the concept. The company partners with educational institutions, policymakers, and other organizations to help them refine their strategy to prepare students for real-world challenges and opportunities beyond traditional measures of academic ability. EdImagine’s approach emphasizes practical application of research on what it truly takes to be “ready,” and they produce resources and guidance to support improvements in educational systems and accountability. 

Founded in 1992, EGI became a cutting-edge neurotechnology company with its dense array electroencephalography (dEEG) systems and proprietary Geodesic Sensor Nets. The system provided high-resolution brain activity monitoring used in research and clinical applications. It has since been widely adopted for studying neurological conditions and advancing brain science. Development on the system continued after the acquisition by Philips in 2017 and remains influential in advancing brain monitoring capabilities. 

Insignia Health is a healthcare technology and services company that helps healthcare organizations improve patient outcomes by measuring and increasing “patient activation” — an individual’s knowledge, skills, and confidence to manage their own health and healthcare — using its scientifically validated Patient Activation Measure® (PAM®) and related tools.  

Anchored by the PAM survey and supported by decades of research, Insignia Health’s solutions enable providers, health systems, insurers, and government programs to segment populations by activation level, tailor care and support resources more effectively, and track changes over time to reduce preventable utilization, lower costs, and enhance self-management and overall health outcomes. 

KeyBiome Inc. is a biotechnology company spun out of research at the University of Oregon’s Institute of Molecular Biology, focused on developing novel therapies for immune and metabolic diseases based on discoveries from healthy microbiomes. The company leverages a zebrafish-based screening platform to identify microbial proteins that promote immune balance and metabolic health. Using this approach, KeyBiome discovered a new family of anti-inflammatory proteins, called Aeromonas immune modulators (Aim proteins), secreted by a gut symbiont. 

Aim proteins uniquely both suppress intestinal inflammation and restore microbiome balance. KeyBiome is advancing Aim protein as a first-in-class oral therapeutic for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a growing global health challenge driven by chronic inflammation and gut dysbiosis. Unlike current treatments that address symptoms and can have significant side effects, Aim proteins are designed to target the underlying causes of IBD by simultaneously reducing inflammation and correcting microbiome dysfunction. 

Ksana Health bridges the gap between academic research and clinical impact in behavioral health. Founded on more than ten years of NIH-funded research at the University of Oregon, the company has developed the leading research platform for objective behavioral measurement using smartphones and wearables. The company operates two platforms: EARS, a research solution used by 50+ universities, academic medical centers, and pharmaceutical companies globally to advance behavioral health science; and Vira, a clinical platform that delivers continuous remote patient monitoring, AI-driven insights and just-in-time interventions to healthcare providers and their patients. With 16+ active NIH grants and partnerships with major health systems, Ksana is translating innovation into tools that improve outcomes for depression, substance use disorders, and suicide risk—conditions affecting millions worldwide. 

MitoSciences was founded in Eugene, Oregon in 2004 as a biotech company spun out of the University of Oregon by professors Roderick Capaldi and Michael Marusich to advance mitochondrial research and support scientific discovery related to human diseases such as cancer, neurodegeneration, and metabolic disorders. The company specialized in developing and producing a broad range of high-performance mitochondrial antibodies, immunoassays, and related research products used by laboratories worldwide to study cellular metabolism, apoptosis, and mitochondrial function, building one of the largest catalogs of these tools for life sciences research. 

In 2011, MitoSciences was acquired by UK-based Abcam plc, a global provider of protein research and detection tools, in a deal that expanded Abcam’s portfolio in mitochondrial research tools while allowing the Eugene operations and product lines to continue under the MitoSciences brand. Under Abcam’s ownership, MitoSciences’ products remain available to researchers globally, supporting work in drug discovery, toxicity screening, and fundamental studies of mitochondrial biology.  

NPS helps keep families together and addresses the youth mental health crisis by providing wide-scale access to a flexible, cost-effective, technology-supported mental health intervention. For schools, it reduces the burden of managing mental health and behavior challenges by helping families address concerns at home. For healthcare systems, it provides mental health support that can reduce emergency room utilization. For the mental health system, it maximizes limited staffing resources through a brief, flexible, family-focused intervention. For the child welfare system, it helps reduce trauma and disruption by supporting family preservation and successful reunification. Together, these impacts improve quality of life for families, lower society-wide costs, and offer implementing agencies solutions that integrate with existing programs and workflows. 

Nuwohm is developing high-performance bipolar membranes for utilization in electrochemical applications. Through the integration of cutting-edge polymers and catalysts, Nuwohm is able to lift the engineering parameters preventing the adoption of advanced electrochemical systems that could not only alter our reliance on fossil fuels, but reduce water waste and pollution for a range of industries. The technology offers a drop-in preplacement to existing bipolar membranes that allows for up to 10x improvement in system energy efficiency, while maintaining industrially relevant lifespans and product purity. They strive to develop the manufacturing of these membranes in the state of Oregon, allowing for a US based supply of bipolar membranes. This will introduce advanced manufacturing jobs to the state and reduce the overall cost of these membranes, addressing another large hurdle for electrochemical system adoption. 
 

ParaTools, Inc. is an HPC-AI company specializing in software stacks and performance engineering solutions on AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google, and IBM cloud platforms. ParaTools Pro for E4STM is a hardened Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) distribution for commercial clouds that delivers a turnkey HPC and AI/ML platform with over 100 tools managed by Spack, including tuned proprietary MVAPICH MPI for low-latency, high-throughput communication. It provides pre-configured HPC applications (e.g., OpenFOAM, LAMMPS, CP2K, Quantum Espresso), Python-based AI/ML frameworks (e.g., Google ADK, VLLM, TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, Sckit-Learn, NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA BioNeMo), and Jupyter/Codium environments, and integrated batch scheduling (SLURM, Torque) so users can rapidly develop and deploy cloud HPC and generative AI workloads. It features a GPU accelerated performant Remote Desktop based with a multi-user cluster on cloud platforms. It includes tools such as the TAU Performance System® for evaluating the performance of and optimizing AI and HPC workflows. ParaTools, Inc. provides performance engineering services to improve the utilization and energy efficiency of supercomputers and cloud systems. 

Penderia Technologies, headquartered in Eugene, Oregon, is a privately held medical device startup founded in 2020 to commercialize technology from the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon. Penderia’s device utilizes an anchor, compatible with current surgical techniques, that is embedded with patented wireless sensing technology to remotely measure graft tension in knee, shoulder, and ankle procedures. This direct feedback does not exist elsewhere and has the potential to improve clinical care and enable consistent outcomes. 

Penderia’s anchor is not commercially available at this time but has successfully demonstrated feasibility of its technology in cadaver and benchtop studies with funding from the National Institute of Health, Business Oregon, Launch Oregon, and private investors. In 2025, Penderia's system received a breakthrough designation from the FDA and is currently on the path to a regulatory submission. 

In 2021, Plasmidsaurus pioneered Whole Plasmid Sequencing to give scientists insight into what was happening in their cloning workflows, with fast sequencing and instant analyses with our bioinformatics tools. Since then Plasmidsaurus has expanded to 10 labs across the globe with more than 1000 sample drop boxes at leading research universities and biotechnology companies. They are obsessed with making lightning-fast sequencing services that fit into the flow of experimental science, eliminating processes that add hassle to your day so you can focus on your science. 

SupraSensor Technologies was an agtech company founded in 2012 that developed advanced, in-field sensors for directly detecting nitrate levels in soil using innovations rooted in supramolecular chemistry. Its technology was designed to overcome limitations of traditional nitrate measurement tools by enabling accurate, wireless sensing in intermittently dry soil without the need for extraction solutions, aimed at helping growers make more informed fertigation decisions and improve sustainability by reducing excess fertilizer use and environmental runoff. 

In 2016 the company was acquired by The Climate Corporation (Monsanto’s digital agriculture division, now part of Bayer Crop Science) as part of its effort to build an in-field sensor network feeding into its Climate FieldView platform. Under Climate, SupraSensor’s nitrate sensor prototypes have been further tested and refined, integrated into broader R&D work to generate higher-quality nitrogen data for modeling and decision tools that support farmers’ nitrogen management and operational insights.  

SynPlexity is transforming how genes are designed, built, and deployed for modern biological research. Their platform enables large scale, multiplexed gene pools that dramatically increase experimental throughput while reducing cost and cycle time, unlocking new classes of experiments that are not feasible with traditional one gene at a time synthesis approaches. They work in hand with high throughput screening workflows, supporting the full arc from discovery through validation. By providing the scale, diversity, and precision required for modern screening and modeling, SynPlexity helps advance AI enabled biology, protein engineering, and synthetic biology toward faster learning and better outcomes.