News & Views

(Pictured Micah Baldwin, S. Somasegar, Scott Jacobson) 

I am excited to announce that Micah Baldwin has joined us as Executive Director of the founder-focused innovation center we will be opening later this summer. In the spring, we shared that Madrona signed a ten-year lease for the 33^rd… 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

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

Today we are very excited to welcome The Riveter into the Madrona family. Founded by Amy Nelson just 10 months ago, The Riveter has quickly grown into a premier female forward work and community space.

The Riveter has their first two locations up and running in Seattle, but they are… 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

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

(Jason LeeKeenan and Russell Wilson of TraceMe)

At Madrona we meet many outstanding entrepreneurs and innovators. Sometimes we meet them when they are starting a company, like Sujal Patel from Isilon or Jesse Rothstein from Extrahop. Other times, like Aaron Easterly from Rover or David Shim from Placed, we got… 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

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

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

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

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

By Taylor Soper, Geekwire.

For an NFL player, there is a lot more to life than what goes on in between the sidelines on Sundays. Sure, competing in the world’s premier football league is a remarkable achievement. But being a professional athlete also provides numerous business-related opportunities for both current… READ MORE

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… READ MORE

This week, Madrona, Apptio and Smartsheet each hosted classes of students from Renton High School and Lindbergh High School from the Renton School District.  This was part of Challenge Seattle’s support of DiscoverU – a week during which schools around Washington state focus… READ MORE

Note: As part of The Road Map Project’s DiscoverU Campaign to get high school students to think about higher education, Madrona hosted more than 30 students from Renton High School to learn about jobs in the startup world. Tom Alberg shares this post as his thoughts for students who… READ MORE

As recent entrants into the Venture Capital world, we continue to be positively surprised by the vibrancy of the start-up activity, the quality of tech talent and the richness of the innovation ecosystem in Seattle.  Neither of us are new to the technology scene. Soma has been with Microsoft… 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