Founded & Funded

This bonus episode of Founded & Funded is a follow-up to Madrona Partner Jon Turow's conversation with Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI and co-inventor of RAG. In this quick chat, they dive into: 1) Why storytelling—not just GTM—needs to be vertical 2) How to build a platform by showing what's possible 3) The tension between "doing one thing well" vs. building the whole stack 4) Multimodal conten...

​Microsoft Chairman & CEO Satya Nadella sat down with Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar at Madrona's 2025 Annual Meeting to discuss the key inflection points in his leadership journey, Microsoft's AI strategy, and the massive economic impact AI will have on the world. From redefining company culture to betting big on AI and OpenAI,Satya shares deep insights into Microsoft's transformation —...

What does it take to invent a foundational AI paradigm — and then build a company to bring it to the enterprise? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Jon Turow sits down with Douwe Kiela, co-founder and CEO of Contextual AI and the co-inventor of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). They dive into the origins of RAG, its misunderstood role in the enterprise, and how Contextual is...

The security industry has a math problem: 12 million job postings, only 7 million qualified professionals. The solution? AI. Edward Wu spent nearly a decade at ExtraHop, pioneering AI-driven security detection. But instead of just alerting security teams about potential threats, he saw a bigger opportunity — what if AI could act as an actual security analyst? That question led to Dropzone, a compa...

The biggest AI breakthroughs won't come from Ph. D. labs — they'll come from people solving real-world problems. So how do AI founders actually turn cutting-edge research into real products and scale them? In this week's episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Jon Turow sat down with Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks to talk about the shift from AI hype to real adoption — and...

Thinking about leaving Big Tech for a startup? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter sits down with Bhrighu Sareen, who took the leap from Microsoft to Highspot and has been leading AI-driven product innovation ever since. They talk about the realities of transitioning from a massive company to a high-growth startup, scaling AI-driven teams, and how Bhrighu's he...

What does it take to go from engineer to founder, from startup CEO to scale CEO? In this special live episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru sits down with Mohit Aron, founder of Nutanix and Cohesity, to uncover the lessons behind his success. Mohit shares his unique hiring strategy, how to identify product-market fit, and the power of balancing vision with execution...

Terray Therapeutics CEO Jacob Berlin returns to Founded & Funded after three years to share how the company has scaled from an ambitious startup to an industry leader in AI-driven biotech. Learn how Terray's proprietary hardware combined with the world's largest chemistry data set is powering new discoveries in small molecule drug development.  Jacob also discusses how the company's $120M Series B...

Imagine a future where healthcare isn't just reactive but deeply personalized — where every patient gets the right treatment at the right time based on a precise understanding of their biology. This is the future Ovation is building, and on this week's Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo dives into it all with Ovation CEO Curt Medeiros. From transforming underutilized clinical data int...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter and Jama Software CEO Marc Osofsky discuss the intentional strategies that fueled Jama's transformation from $20M ARR to a $1.2 billion acquisition by Francisco Partners. Marc shares his blueprint for scaling with purpose, challenging conventional wisdom, and embedding efficiency into the DNA of a company. Key Takeaways Incl...

What does it take to move from cutting-edge academic research to launching a biotech company that could transform medicine? In this week's episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo sat down with Jamie Lazarovitz, CEO and co-founder of Archon Biosciences, to uncover the story behind their groundbreaking protein-based biologics and their unique Antibody Cages (AbCs). From bootstrapp...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Brian Raymond, founder and CEO of 2024 IA40 winner Unstructured. Unstructured turns raw, messy, unstructured data into something AI tools can actually process — a typically expensive and time-consuming process for companies hoping to save money with the tools themselves. Brian and Karan explore some of the biggest...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter and Venture Partner Patrick Ennis host Chris Diorio, co-founder and CEO of Impinj, the pioneer and world leader in RFID technology. Patrick and Chris have known each other for more than 24 years — since Madrona and ARCH Venture Partners co-led Impinj's first round of financing in the summer of 2000. In this episode, these th...

In the latest episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter hosts Pradeep Rathinam, a seasoned software executive with over three decades of leadership experience. Paddy was the Founder and CEO of Madrona portfolio company AnswerIQ, which Madrona invested in back in 2017. It was one of the early machine learning applied to SaaS companies that Madrona invested in. Paddy sold Ans...

Today Madrona Managing Director Karan Mahandru and Scott Stephenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepgram, a foundational AI company building a voice AI platform providing APIs for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. From medical transcription to autonomous agents, Deepgram is the go-to for developers of voice AI experiences, and they're already working with over 500 companies, including NASA, Spotify, a...

Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar hosts Temporal Co-Founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev in studio. Temporal was founded in 2019 based on an open-source microservices orchestration engine project but is the result of a more than decade-long partnership between the two co-founders that spanned their time working on different iterations of the same thing at AWS, Microsoft, and Uber. In this...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, host Coral Garnick Ducken interviews Madrona Partner Chris Picardo for the latest Investor Spotlight. With degrees in math and English, Chris shares his unique journey into venture capital. Chris highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary skills in understanding and communicating complex concepts and what he looks for in founders, emphasizing unique worldv...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Venture Partner Len Jordan sits down with Sean Muller, Founder and CEO of iSpot, to talk about the company's evolution in measuring TV advertising for both conventional and streaming platforms. Sean delves into strategic partnerships, acquisitions, and the rise of ad-supported streaming. They discuss the impact of sports on advertising, challenges for m...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, host Coral Garnick Ducken interviews Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu for the latest Investor Spotlight. These two discuss Sabrina's transition from private equity to venture capital and the learnings that translate to building successful VC-backed startups, Sabrina's focus on intelligent applications , and the characteristics she looks for in founders — grit, authe...

Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami hosts Dev Rishi and Travis Addair, co-founders of 2023 IA40 Rising Star, Predibase. Predibase is a platform for developers to easily fine-tune and serve any open-source model. They recently released LoRA Land, a collection of 25 highly-performant open-source fine-tuned models, and launched open-source LoRA eXchange, or LoRAX, which allows users to pack hundreds of t...

In this episode, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain hosts David Shim, founder and CEO of Read AI. These two have known each other for over two decades, having worked together at Farecast and then Placed, which David founded in 2011. They came together again in 2021, when David started Read AI, which delivers AI solutions that make meetings, emails, and messages more valuable to teams with AI-...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Steve Singh and Christal Bemont, CEO of Direct Travel, Madrona's newest portfolio company, delve into the acquisition of Direct Travel and its pivotal role in revolutionizing the $1.4T corporate travel ecosystem, along with  @Spotnana  , Troop, and Center.   Full Transcript: https://bit.ly/3wxBFuT   (00:00) Intro (01:19) Direct Travel:...

In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Investor Paul Goel and Neon Co-founder & CEO Nikita Shamgunov dive into the database market and the importance of creating a killer developer experience while balancing that experience with performance and reliability. Nikita also shares just how bullish he is on AI, his excitement for AI agents like Devin, and advises founders to not wait on an idea th...

Investor Sabrina Wu hosts Bobsled Co-founder and CEO Jake Graham for the latest episode of Founded & Funded. Jake is revolutionizing data sharing across platforms, enabling customers to get to analysis faster directly in the platforms where they work. Madrona co-led Bobsled's $17 million series A last year, which put the company at an $87 million valuation. In this episode, Jake — who had stints a...

Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami hosts May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer, a 2023 IA40 winner. Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform for the enterprise. In this episode, May shares her perspective on founding a GenAI company before the ChatGPT craze, building an enterprise-grade product and go-to-market motion with 200% NRR, whether RAG and vector DBs even have a role in the enterprise...