News & Views

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

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

Pictured l-r S. Somasegar, Ted Kummert, Chris Picardo, Barry Wark (seated) Winston Brasor

We are excited to announce today our investment in Ovation.io, a company that is building the next-generation suite of cloud-based clinical informatics tools for the genomic and molecular testing industry…. 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

Today, we are thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Polly, a company we believe is going to significantly impact how enterprises get work done and measure success.  We led this $7 million round and were joined with the existing seed investors Amplify Partners, Fathom… READ MORE

At Madrona, we look for exceptional founders attacking big markets.  Today, we are thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Eclypsium, the industry’s first enterprise firmware and hardware security platform. We couldn’t be more excited to lead another investment in a phenomenal Oregon-based team and join forces… READ MORE

We are excited to announce today our Series A investment in Shyft.

Since investing in Shyft’s seed round nearly two years ago, we have watched Brett Patrontasch (CEO) and team continue to make impressive progress against their goal of reinventing the way hourly workers manage their shifts and the… READ MORE

I am excited to announce our Series A investment in Crowd Cow, a curated online marketplace for high quality craft meats sourced from independent farmers. This is our third collaboration with Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry, the co-founders of Crowd Cow. Both Joe and Ethan worked on Poppy,… READ MORE

Bringing innovation to the $18B sports apparel market

After a year in development at Madrona Labs, our fifth company, Rep the Squad, launched yesterday. The response was enthusiastic (ESPN, USA Today, Geekwire) – as the company aims to power sports passion throughout the country and build community… READ MORE

As the cloud increases its footprint in the enterprise, and ‘cloud native’ (aka serverless) development scales up, Madrona is continuing to uncover opportunities that make it easier to innovate and work in this new environment. Today we are proud to announce our seed investment in IOpipe. We co-… 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

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

Photo  – The Xnor.ai Team

Today we announced our funding of Xnor.ai. We are excited to be working with Ali Farhadi, Mohammad Rastegari and their team on this new company. We are also looking forward to working with Paul Allen’s team at the Allen Institute for AI and… READ MORE

In 2011, Marc Andreesen famously wrote a Wall Street Journal essay declaring that “software is eating the world.” Five years later, the five largest companies in the world by market capitalization are all software companies.

However, in today’s information economy, Apple, Alphabet,… READ MORE

We could not be more excited to be investing in Heptio.  Heptio is aiming to become the Kubernetes company and is founded by two of the creators of Kubernetes at Google, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda.  Specifically, Kubernetes is the leading open source cluster manager for containers; but,… READ MORE

World-class teams, compelling problems to solve and sustainably differentiated solutions. These are ingredients for a promising venture investment. At Madrona, we usually focus on early-stage companies that are differentiated through information technology and based in the Pacific Northwest. We believe, now more than ever, our strategy will help build… READ MORE

It is exciting and super fun for me to announce our seed investment in Shyft and to welcome the team to our Madrona family.

Shyft serves the huge market of shift workers worldwide – from retail to food service and beyond.  They make it very easy for these hourly… READ MORE

I am incredibly excited to be working with Ed and his team at Wrench and today we are announcing an investment in their Series Seed fundraise.  I have known Ed for awhile and we started talking early about his vision and conviction for changing a big market… READ MORE