News & Views

Plan C Is a Silver Lining in Cloud City

A few months ago we all had a pretty good Plan A, and those of us feeling extra clever had a good Plan B in our collective back pockets.

And then COVID-19 hit. Things are crazy right now for companies and… READ MORE

Photo: Luis Ceze

OctoML on Octomizing/Optimizing ML Models and Helping Chips, Servers and Devices Run Them Faster; Madrona doubles down on the Series A funding

Today OctoML announced the close of their $15 million Series A round led by Amplify Partners.  Madrona led the seed (with Amplify participating) and we are… READ MORE

What a change we have all experienced in these last few weeks.  Everything has been shifting at an incredibly rapid pace and we have all had to adjust both our personal and professional lives.  For those of us that can, we are primarily working at home, amongst our dogs,… READ MORE

These are certainly uncertain times.  The only certain thing is that the world has changed.  As these CEOs shifted to working from home and managing distributed teams, they got on a conference call with managing director, Steve Singh, to share how they have been addressing moving their business forward. … READ MORE

This week we are publishing a non-covid related podcast – recorded before Seattle was hit hard. We hope it provides some relief! We are also prepping some great podcasts that deal directly with how founders and people are managing through this time – and looking to the future. Stay… READ MORE

David Shim, founder of Placed, now CEO of Foursquare has some invaluable advice for founders.  He built Placed over six years from an idea incubated at Madrona into the industry standard for brands and advertising agencies – and an acquisition by Snap. This conversation with Matt McIwain, managing director,… READ MORE

Madrona is excited to welcome Ishani Ummat as our new Associate. Ishani hails from the Seattle area and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington with a degree in Finance and concentrations in Global Health and the Comparative History of Ideas.

As her… READ MORE

In our third episode of Season Two, Tim Porter connects with serial founder and seasoned fundraiser, Kristen Hamilton. Kristen co-founded early e-commerce highflier, Onvia (so much so that the company received an early cease and desist letter from Amazon about Onvia’s ‘superstore’ tagline). Onvia went public 10 days before… READ MORE

Today, Madrona Venture Group announced that we’ve led the $7.6M Series A investment in Esper, an investment that Tim Porter and I spearheaded for the firm. Esper is a devops platform for Android IOT devices.

As everything around us becomes smart and connected, developers of devices have many new challenges. We are… READ MORE

We first met the Snowflake team three years and three months ago. At the time, Snowflake was at a sub-$10M revenue run rate, and we were skeptical that the world needed another data warehouse, given the number of other data warehouses from both the cloud providers and… READ MORE