Tag: Funding

Welcome SmartAssist To The Madrona Family

It is exciting for me to announce our investment in SmartAssist and to welcome the team to our Madrona family. SmartAssist is applying AI to the business of customer support and is already assisting customers of brands you know including MailChimp and Twilio.

Application development and applications the last 10 years were primarily defined by movement to the cloud, SaaS delivery and touch as an interface. Looking ahead, we strongly believe that applications are going to be defined as intelligent applications with a broader set of natural user interfaces including voice/speech and vision. In our opinion, any application of consequence that is getting built now is an intelligent application. What differentiates the intelligent applications is the use of ML/AI and other techniques to apply on the ever-increasing data sets that enable applications to continuously learn and deliver more relevant and appropriate experience for the customers.

Applying ML/AI to intelligently automate use cases and workflows in enterprises is an area where we see a tremendous amount of opportunity and some of our recent investments reflect that investment thesis. As we think about beachhead use cases of ML/AI within enterprises, customer support stands out as one of the most tangible areas that could be fundamentally disrupted through technology.

By using intelligent routing, automated responses, and predictive modeling, SmartAssist helps enterprises significantly increase the efficiency and quality of services while decreasing customer service costs. The company is based on the platform developed by Wise.io which was acquired by GE in 2016. The team of Pradeep Rathinam and Prashant Luthra had a passion for this business and are taking that core business and building it into SmartAssist. Already they have secured some name brand customers. GE has an interest in the company and we expect to work with them as the company grows.

Another big reason for why we are excited about this investment is the entrepreneurial strength of the founding team. Both Pradeep and Prashant have led and been a part of successful start-ups in the past. Their focus and passion to make a difference in this space makes it a delight to partner with them.

We are thrilled to back the compelling vision of this leadership team and be part of a Seattle area start-up that is focused on driving customer success using ML/AI. All of us at Madrona are jazzed at the potential of what is possible here.

Looking forward to helping realize the potential with the SmartAssist team!

M87 – A New Wireless Infrastructure Company Comes to Seattle

The wireless infrastructure industry in the Pacific NW has a long history – from McCaw to AT&T Wireless to T-Mobile. Madrona is very excited to be announcing our investment in M87 which provides better connectivity over existing infrastructure to wireless consumers, infrastructure providers and app developers. This company brings together technology that is crucial as data on our wireless infrastructure increases 50% annually, with a team that is deep on technology and business leadership. Cole Brodman, who has over 25 years of wireless experience, much of it right here at T-Mobile, is also joining the company today as CEO. Cole is someone we have worked with over the last several years and we are excited to be backing a company he is behind.

M87’s technology focuses on the edge of the network. The idea of ‘edge networks’ is not new, early content distribution networks (CDNs) like Akamai started putting edge nodes at internet points of presence in 1998 in order to move content closer to end-users. We built a related system of audio/video streaming splitters in the same era at RealNetworks to exploit the multiplier effect of shared infrastructure and improve network performance.

Today’s mobile devices offer the ability to move the ‘edge of the network’ all the way to the end-user. Technologies such as Wifi Direct and LTE, which the majority of the world’s 4B+ mobile phones use, enable end points to redistribute content back into the network. M87’s technology taps into this ability and liberates an incredible array of new applications around industrial and consumer IoT, messaging and retail, presence awareness and instant connectivity. Two thirds of all US internet traffic is now mobile. Outside the US, the dominance of mobile networks, rather than terrestrial based internet, creates even more opportunity to improve networks and applications as emerging markets invest in new ways to expand coverage.

I’m most excited about the team and Seattle story M87 represents. Vidur Bhargava founded the company based on his research at the University of Texas and he partnered early with David Hampton who has terrific public wifi experience from his leadership of Wayport. They share Texas roots with M87 CEO Cole Brodman who moved to Seattle 21 years ago as an early product leader for Western Wireless. As CTO Cole led what became T-Mobile to more than 30M subscribers. Collectively, the m87 team has an exciting blend of experience and capabilities and we are fortunate that they are moving the company to Seattle. We will struggle to compete with their famous ‘BBQ’ but let’s welcome them to the world of coffee, a little rain and a great startup ecosystem.

And as a note the company’s name, M87, refers to one of the largest galaxies in our universe, Messier 87 that is one of the brightest sources of radio waves.

Why We Invested in Integris.io

Today at Madrona we are excited to announce our seed investment in Integris, a data risk intelligence solution that enables companies to discover, classify and control how they’re using their customers’ data. This control enables companies to protect customer data and more easily comply with the complex set of privacy and consumer data regulations around the globe.

From our first conversations with Kristina, her vision resonated strongly and immediately with us. The ability to collect, store and analyze huge amounts of data from customers is immeasurably important to companies across every industry, but is being met with a wave of new (and frequently changing) regulations. The legal, customer-privacy, financial, and reputational risk of failing to meet this set of ever-evolving and complex regulations are dire, and companies experience significant challenges (and spend a lot of time, money, and resources) trying to keep up. It’s early days for Integris, but the team is building a powerful data risk intelligence solution that uniquely addresses this precise challenge for big companies in a proactive, automated, and continuous way.

We were so compelled by this team, the overall vision, and their progress, that we issued a term sheet before the company had even officially incorporated. When you encounter a team – and opportunity – like Integris’ and have the chance to back them even before “Day One”, you simply take it.

Following her stint as a highly respected Group PM at Microsoft, Integris’ CEO and co-founder Kristina Bergman became an all-star investor at Ignition, where she has been a principal for the past several years. On a personal note, there obviously aren’t too many women investors at institutional VC funds (much less in Seattle), so for years Kristina and I have always made a point of getting together at a regular cadence to exchange notes and ideas. I have profound respect for Kristina and for the way she both thinks and leads. Kristina spent late evenings and weekends over the past year and a half developing Integris, and it was energizing to spend time with her on the concept as it developed. It’s a delight today to officially partner with her as she and her talented co-founders – Uma Raghavan and Frank Martinez – bring Integris to life. We discussed with Kristina from the get-go the idea of creating a diverse syndicate for a seed round with complementary sets of experiences and networks; we’re very excited to partner up with Amplify, with Ignition, and such strong angel investors. It has been exciting to have our regular meetups evolve from two VCs chatting over interesting companies… to entrepreneur and board-member spending our time together on just one.

It’s just the beginning for Integris, but this is a world-class team taking a huge swing at a massive enterprise challenge. We’re all excited here at Madrona to get behind them.