News & Views

Sometimes you find a team and a technology that is just poised to take off.  Snowflake was at that point when we invested in Snowflake in the very early part of 2017.  Snowflake did not look like other companies we had invested in up to that time – it… 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

Today, we’re excited to announce that Madrona has led the $16M Series A investment in TwinStrand Biosciences, a Seattle genomics company with the potential to profoundly impact all of us. TwinStrand’s technology will help detect cancer earlier when it can be most… READ MORE

We are excited to announce today our investment in Knock, a company that is building a modern marketing cloud for the multifamily property market. The company was founded by Tom Petry and Demetri Themelis, Seattle natives and University of Washington graduates who moved to New York… READ MORE

Enterprise infrastructure has been one of the foundational investment themes here at Madrona since the inception of the firm. From the likes of Isilon to Qumulo, Igneous, Tier 3, and to READ MORE

We are thrilled for Heptio’s acquisition by VMware!  This transaction is another resounding reinforcement that Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for infrastructure across clouds.  It is also a tremendous validation of Heptio’s team, vision and execution.

Deciding “when to sell” is one of the toughest decisions faced by… READ MORE

The progression over the last 20 years from on-premise servers, to virtualization, to containerization, to microservices, to event-driven functions and now to serverless computing is allowing software development… READ MORE

Today I am very excited to announce our investment in Pulumi.

Pulumi aims to fundamentally improve the way people build, manage, and interact with cloud-native applications, services, and infrastructure.

There is a massive movement to the cloud among enterprise customers around the world. As that trend continues to gather and… READ MORE

Today we are excited to welcome Sudip Chakrabarti to Madrona as a Partner on the Investment Team.

Sudip is the kind of team member we look for – someone who shares our passion for helping entrepreneurs build their companies from day one. When we first met, Sudip was an investor… READ MORE

Pictured in photo:  From left to right, Nate Miller, S. Somasegar, Brian Saab & Amy Hutchins.

Welcome Unearth to Madrona!

It is always a happy occasion to welcome a family member back into the household.

With Madrona’s investment in Unearth Technologies, we are excited to be working again with Brian Saab (CEO/Co-Founder)… READ MORE

Early last year, we invested in Snowflake, which is quickly becoming the leader for data warehousing in the cloud. Now, less than a year later they have raised a substantial round of $263M that underscores their phenomenal success in building a solution that speaks to a real business… READ MORE

Ever since the advent of virtualization technology in the early 2000s, software has become increasingly abstracted from its underlying hardware. The ability to “write once, run anywhere” has led to the runaway success of technologies like containers, which package software in a format that can run in isolation on… READ MORE

AWS is another year older, bigger and more diverse and so will be the 6th Annual Re:Invent conference. Over 40,000 attendees are expected to attend the event reflecting the success of AWS and the cloud movement that the company kick-started. If AWS was a standalone company, it would be… READ MORE

It was the spring of 2006.  Professor Hank Levy, incoming Chair of the University of Washington Computer Science Department (now the Paul G. Allen School) and I were catching up.  Hank and I had previously worked together on a successful start-up that he and his grad students co-founded… READ MORE

Today we are announcing our investment in Snowflake. Snowflake is a cloud native data warehouse. Data warehouses have been used for years to store and analyze, not surprisingly, huge amounts of data. Over the past 5-10 years with the explosion of data and the rise of analytics & insights… READ MORE

Every year in March, Madrona wraps up what happened in 2016 and we sit down with our investors to talk about our business – the business of finding and growing the next big Seattle companies. First and foremost, our strategy is to back the best entrepreneurs in the Pacific… READ MORE

The momentum continues to build and scale in leaps and bounds. That’s the overwhelming observation and feeling at the end of the 5th annual conference that Amazon hosted in Las Vegas last week for AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Here are some of the key take-aways that we think will have the… READ MORE

The 5th Annual AWS re:Invent is a week away and I am expecting big things. At the first ever re: Invent in 2012, plenty of start-ups and developers could be found, but barely any national media or venture capitalists attended. That has all changed and today, re:Invent rivals the… READ MORE