Founded & Funded

In this week's IA40 Spotlight Episode, Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Credo AI Founder and CEO Navrina Singh. Founded in 2020, Credo's intelligent responsible AI governance platform helps companies minimize AI-related risk by ensuring their AI is fair, compliant, secure, auditable, and human-centered. The company announced a $12.8M Series A last summer to continue its mission of empowering...

This week, we're excited to release a special live episode recorded during the community event portion of the Madrona 2023 annual meeting. Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks with Madrona Alumni and Acquired Podcast Hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. The three reflect on Acquired episode No. 28, which dove into the Amazon IPO with the late Madrona Co-founder and original Amazon Board Member...

Madrona Managing Director  Soma dives into the world of intelligent applications and generative AI with Common Room Co-founder and CTO Viraj Mody . Madrona first invested in Common Room in 2020 — and we had the pleasure of having the founders join us on Founded & Funded the following year. Common Room is an intelligent community growth platform that combines engagement data from platforms like Lin...

Get to know Madrona Managing Partner Matt McIlwain. Learn where he gets his spark to work with entrepreneurs, what he looks for in founders, where the opportunities lay for founders when it comes to generative AI, and what he enjoys doing outside the office.

In this episode of Founded & Funded, partner Aseem Datar talks with Leaf Logistics Co-founder and CEO Anshu Prasad. Leaf is applying AI to the complexities of the freight and transportation industry, connecting shippers, carriers, and partners to better plan, coordinate, and schedule transportation logistics. This enables network efficiencies and unlocks a forward view of tomorrow's transportation...

In this week's IA40 Spotlight Episode of Founded & Funded, Investor Elisa La Cava talks to Lexion Co-founder and CEO Gaurav Oberoi. Lexion was one of the first spinouts from AI2, and Madrona invested in the first round the company raised in 2019.  Like many companies that come from AI2 – Lexion is focused on applying AI to change an industry. Specifically, Lexion helps legal teams at enterprises m...

In this episode, investor Elisa La Cava talks with Josh Crossman, CEO of Magnify, which was incubated at Madrona Venture Labs. Josh was actually recruited by Madrona Venture Labs to help launch a business that would bring AI to the customer experience. He was quickly persuaded and signed on in 2021, spinning out of MVL in less than three months with a $6 million seed round. Josh and Elisa discusse...

This week on Founded & Funded, Partner Chris Picardo is talking with A-Alpha Bio Co-founder and CEO David Younger for our first Intelligent Application 40 Spotlight episode of 2023. We announced the 2022 IA40 winners in October, and A-Alpha was the first biotech company to make the list, which was no surprise to us. As one of our portfolio companies, we know the work David and his team are doing a...

In this week's IA40 Spotlight episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona partner Jon Turow talks with dbt Labs Founder and CEO Tristan Handy. Here at Madrona, we just announced our 2022 IA40 , and dbt Labs is one of our two-time winners. The company has positioned itself as the industry standard for data transformation in the cloud, and it raised $222 million at the beginning of the year, which was led...

In this week's episode which is leading up to our Intelligent Applications Summit on November 2nd, Soma speaks with Bob Muglia. Bob has thought deeply about the Modern Data Stack and they speak about it here - what is needed in the data stack to enable Intelligent Applications (or data driven apps as Bob calls them) and the opportunities for new companies to innovate.  Bob is also well known as th...

This week Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Fivetran Co-founder and CEO George Fraser. Fivetran is fundamentally a data replication company — that's how George explains it. But the company actually started out trying to solve a completely different problem when it was founded in 2012 and pivoted to strictly data integration in 2015 after multiple customers started asking for help. But in atta...

This week, Investor Aseem Datar is talking with Will Rush, co-founder and CEO of Stack , a teen crypto platform to educate a young crypto-curious generation — and their parents — about responsible investing. After working at a company, building a banking app for teens, Will took his decade-long experience in securities and finance and applied it to crypto and Web3. He saw the excitement and curios...

This week, Investor Maria Gilfoyle talks to Brad Van Vugt, founder and CEO of Battlesnake, a multiplayer programming game for experienced web developers where your code is your controller. Battlesnake builds games for programmers that encourage self-directed learning and are challenging to master. In this episode, Maria and Brad dive into where the idea for the game came from, how they get the dev...

In this IA40 spotlight episode, Managing Director Hope Cochran talks with Tesorio Co-founders Carlos Vega and Fabio Fleitas about getting finance teams out of the world of manual, error-prone and inefficient spreadsheets and equipping them with intelligent applications more common in other parts of a company. That's where Tesorio comes in — they offer automation solutions designed to help companie...

We've all struggled with call center experiences. Madrona's Ishani Ummat talks with Cresta Co-founder and CEO Zayd Enam about the unique angle Cresta takes to leverage AI to drive a better customer experience in real time. The two dive into the important topic of how AI can be used to help empower people to be more productive. we hear the story of why Zayd dropped out of his Ph. D. program to purs...

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Managing Director Scott Jacobson is talking with CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan. CommerceIQ is a retail e-commerce management platform that automates and unifies category analytics, retail media management, and sales and operations all under one roof. The company secured $115 million in funding in March and just made its first acquisition — e-fundamentals — to...

In this episode of Founded and Funded, we stray a little from our typical format to answer some questions that often come up in discussions between founders and our investors. Madrona Managing Director Matt McILwain talks with one of our Limited Partners — or the partners of ours that are not the day-to-day investors — Top Tier Capital Partners Founder and Managing Director David York . They explo...

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo dives into the world of crypto and Web3 with Sila Co-Founder and CEO Shamir Karkal . Sila is a FinTech platform that provides payment infrastructure as a service and sits at the intersection of crypto rails and traditional financial services infrastructure — because as much as some people want to get away from the traditional fin...

In this episode of Founded and Funded, we spotlight IIA40 winner Snorkel AI. Managing Director Tim Porter not only talks with Snorkel Co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner all about data-centric AI and programmatic data labeling and development, but they also dive into the importance of culture — especially now — and how to take advantage of what Alex calls "one of the most historic opportunities for gro...

In this episode of Founded and Funded Madrona Investors Aseem Datar and Sabrina Wu sit down with robotics expert and University of Washington Professor Sidd Srinivasa to talk about the technology and sociological trends that are leading to innovation in the robotics space, where Sidd sees opportunities for founders, and why now it is a time to pay attention to what's happening in the space.  Sidd...

Madrona investor, Ishani Ummat, speaks with PitchBook Data leader, Daniel Cook, about bringing machine intelligence to the IA40 list.  Their new algorithm takes many data points and creates a company score to predict company outcome probability.  They previewed this work by analyzing last year's IA40 list and found that late stage companies were 60% more likely to IPO.  Listen as Ishani and Daniel...

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winner – SeekOut . Investor Ishani Ummat talks to SeekOut Co-founder and CEO Anoop Gupta and VP of People Jenny Armstrong-Owen about their AI-powered intelligence platform, the importance of not only finding and recruiting new hires but also developing and retaining employees within a company, and maintaining SeekOut's own culture while s...

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winners – Hugging Face and OctoML . Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks to Hugging Face Co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue and OctoML Co-founder and CEO Luis Ceze all about foundation models, diving deep into the importance of detecting biases in the data being used to train models as well the importance of transparency and the ability fo...

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winner – Starburst Data . Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks to co-founder and CEO Justin Borgman about h ow launching his first company was like getting a Ph. D. in entrepreneurship, and then they dive into the customer problem Justin saw that made him believe the time was right to launch his second — Starburst. The two discuss open-s...

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona is launching a special series to highlight some of its IA40 winners, starting with RunwayML , which offers web-based video editing tools that utilize machine learning to automate what used to take video editors hours if not days to accomplish. Madrona Investor Ishani Ummat speaks with Co-founder and CEO Cristobal Valenzuela all about where the idea ca...