Rarely in life do great people, customer needs, and opportunities for innovation come together at the perfect moment. The formation of Thira and Madrona’s commitment to partnering again with Sunny Gupta, Kurt Shintaffer, and an incredible team is one of those moments.
Sunny and I met 25 years ago and have now worked closely together in one form or another on six different companies. Most notably, we started working respectively on iConclude and then Apptio at day one. Throughout our company building journeys together, Sunny has epitomized founder-market fit for the most important problems faced by the office of the CIO and their enterprise organizations. As enterprise IT transformed with virtualization and then with the cloud, those companies were ready to solve important customer challenges. He is a true entrepreneur who continues to stay curious with humility, triangulate complex market needs, and exhibit a bias toward action. He also has an incredible ability to attract talented people, including Thira’s co-founder Kurt Shintaffer, with whom he has worked for twenty years. They are also adding terrific leaders like Mudit Goel, who is working with them for the first time. More generally, Thira is assembling the perfect blend of proven enterprise product builders and AI-native innovators to help CIOs and their teams lead successfully in the era of applied enterprise AI.
AI systems of execution are core to the enterprise journey over the next decade, and the office of the CIO requires an AI-native approach to building such a transformative system. Sunny, Kurt, and the Thira team have earned the trust of CIOs over two decades by delivering on IT automation and the system of record for technology spend. Madrona believes deeply in this future, where systems of execution help functional leaders like CIOs create rapid and responsible change in the enterprise. CIOs need systems that deliver a strong return on AI investment (ROI on AI). And they need to support other organizational functions and cross-functional workflow owners in delivering strong ROI as well. With continued advances across the AI stack (agents, models, tools, and harnesses), Thira is building the system that will help CIOs capture the value of AI for their companies.
Sunny and the team only got started on Thira a few months back, and they already have 10 lighthouse partners helping them design and build their solution at AI-speed and quality. This is my third time starting and building a company with Sunny (and we partner in other ways too, including serving together on the board of Gradial). iConclude was acquired by Opsware (Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s company) in 2007, and Opsware was acquired by HP later that year. Apptio grew to be a public company with a $2 billion market cap and was ultimately sold to IBM for $4.6 billion in 2023. Thira’s opportunity to be the agentic and secure system of execution for the enterprise is by far the largest we have pursued together. Today, Thira announced its $21 million seed round, led by Madrona. Once again, the whole Madrona team is already rolling up our sleeves to help this amazing team realize their full potential.
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