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Founded and Funded: The Whys and Hows of (Diverse) Team Building with Founder Justin Beals of Strike Graph
- Erika Shaffer

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
I’m excited to welcome SeekOut to our portfolio. SeekOut is a game-changing solution for recruiters and hiring managers to identify and connect with high performers who have a demonstrated track record of solving problems that are relevant to their needs.
In our capacity as the Talent Team at Madrona,… READ MORE
Intelligent Applications have been and continue to be a focus of our investing. These apps sit on top of the infrastructure a company chooses, the data they collect and curate, the machine learning they apply to the data and the continuous learning system they build. In this deep dive we… 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
It’s been an exciting time since we announced the Innovate.AI startup competition with our partners at Microsoft Ventures last October. What started as an idea we shared with our friends there, evolved into a global competition generating interest from some of the most innovative companies in the ML/AI… READ MORE
Veteran Tech Talent Executive Shannon Anderson Joins as Director of Talent, Luis Ceze, a leader in computer systems architecture, machine learning, and DNA data storage joins as Venture Partner; Daniel Li is promoted to Principal
We are so excited to announce today some great additions to the Madrona Team. Each… READ MORE
At Madrona, we like to invest in the best entrepreneurs in the Pacific NW attacking the biggest technology markets in the world. Beyond this, we love when we find a founding team that understands and is addressing an acute customer pain point in a way that aligns with our… 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
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
New Role Brings Deeper Level of Technology Expertise to Madrona Venture Labs Team
We are thrilled to announce that Jay Bartot has joined our Madrona Venture Labs team as Chief Technology Officer. Jay has been the cofounder of four successful startups, each of which leveraged big data and machine learning… 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
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
The Seattle Times 5/11/16 – Chances are the entity managing your favorite smartphone app or Internet service isn’t a person.
Algorithms are setting the price of your airline ticket and hailing your Uber driver. They’re placing the vast majority of stock-market trades.
And we’re only at the beginning of a transition that is… READ MORE