Good news comes for pair of Oregon companies seeking to entrench themselves in their respective industries.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Good news comes for pair of Oregon companies seeking to entrench themselves in their respective industries.
Bend-based Amplion Inc. secured $1 million of seed funding from Seven Peaks Ventures, Portland Seed Fund and Cascade, according to a story in the Portland Business Journal.
“We have been fortunate to develop early customer relationships with leading pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies, which not only validated our key value propositions, but continue to inform our product development priorities,” Amplion CEO John Audette said in a statement.
Amplion is developing technology to make it easier for drug and diagnostic developers to access and analyze information about clinical biomarkers, which allow for personalized medicine. Biomarkers are forecast to make up a $40 billion market within three years, according to Amplion, which cites MarketsandMarkets.
In the Willamette Valley, a business is also seeing an uptick in good news, but Marathon Coach — a Coburg RV manufacturer — is no startup.
In a story by the Register Guard, the company’s owner and president Steve Schoellhorn said he plans on hiring 50 people after revenue in 2014 nearly doubled from the year prior.
The 50 new hires would raise Marathon’s employee count to about 230. Employment there peaked at about 350 before the recession, then bottomed out at fewer than 70 in 2010. The company’s reversal of fortune comes after years of depressed sales led to pent-up demand for the RVs, Schoellhorn said.
“The recession came so hard and so fast, and there was a great deal of fear in the RV industry,” he said. Many RV owners who might have bought new models instead chose to maintain their older vehicles,” he said. “But with the stock market improving and people more comfortable with their finances, frankly a lot of (customers) have been waiting on the sidelines, and they’re getting back in the market now,” he said.
