News & Views

Today, Lexion announced a $4.2 million Series Seed funding round led by Madrona, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.

The business world is filled with and ruled by an ever-increasing mix of complex documents that need to be constantly managed – from customer and vendor contracts to insurance agreements… READ MORE

2018 was a busy year for Madrona and our portfolio companies. We raised our latest $300 million Fund VII, and we made 45 investments totaling ~$130 million.  We also had several successful up-rounds and company exits with a combined increase of over $800 million in fund value and over… READ MORE

Pictured in the Photo – L-R Andrew Allison, CRO; Hope Cochran, Venture Partner Madrona, Daniel Li, Senior Associate; Chris Brownridge, CEO; Tony Chong, CTO

Today we are excited to announce our investment in GawkBox. Over the last few years, we have closely followed the macro trends in live streaming,… READ MORE

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… 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

Suplari, which announced their $3.1 million funding round today, is our newest investment in an area we helped define – Intelligent Applications. Intelligent Apps combine data and machine learning to provide real-time, actionable insight into business and consumer applications. Going back 4-5 years, we were investing in more horizontal… READ MORE

Drones, Cars, Intelligent Apps, Virtual Reality and More – What to expect in 2017
There’s an age old saying that humans tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in one day, but underestimate what can be accomplished in one year. As 2016 comes to a close, it is a good… 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

Every decade, a set of major forces work together to change the way we think about “applications.” Until now, those changes were principally evolutions of software programming, networked communications and user interactions.

In the mid-1990s, Bill Gates’ famous “The Internet Tidal Wave” letter highlighted the rise of the… READ MORE

The 2016 Data Science Summit just wrapped up in San Francisco and it was bigger and better than ever.  With over 1,300 attendees over two days, the conference combines business and academic leaders in a broad mix of machine learning areas – bringing together the latest in research with… READ MORE

Trying to go to the moon, but today we’re at the top of a tree

You can hardly talk to a technology executive or developer today without talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning, or bots. Madrona recently hosted a conference on ML and AI bringing together some of the biggest… READ MORE

Today we interact with many intelligent applications like the Google and Bing search engines, Spotify and Netflix media services, and the Amazon shopping experience. The… READ MORE

Will a new crop of Seattle startups rise to world domination? Will virtual or augmented reality applications create the next powerhouse tech company?

Those are two of the overriding hopes and ambitions emerging from the Seattle segment of my informal cross-country survey of leading investors as I seek to unearth… READ MORE