Articles from Madrona

Madrona today announced the closing of Fund X and Acceleration Fund IV which will be deployed in the next several years in new companies and support them through their life cycle. These funds come at the start of Madrona’s 30th year of helping innovative founders build transformational companies in a broad range of technology areas including Applied AI, Developer Tools, Cloud, and AI-Enabled Biology across enterprise and consumer audiences. At $770 million, the new funds are the largest raised by the firm and enable the team to continue to build the greater Seattle ecosystem while expanding its presence in Silicon Valley.

Madrona today announced the Intelligent Applications 40, a list of the top 40 private companies building applications and infrastructure leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. This year, the winning companies were selected by venture investors, from 380 nominations from more than 54 top-tier venture and corporate investment firms. Pitchbook’s data and algorithm-driven scoring helped to determine the final 40 winners and 5 rising stars.

Madrona today announced the Intelligent Applications Top 40, a list of the top 40 private companies building applications and infrastructure leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. The winning companies were selected by venture investors across 50 top-tier venture firms and leading corporate venture teams actively investing in this space. This year, the team also voted on 5 Rising Star companies.

Madrona today announced the appointment of three venture partners to its team of committed, knowledgeable, and accomplished investors. As venture partners, Loren Alhadeff, Mark Nelson, and Ted Kummert support Madrona’s portfolio companies as they build, scale, and navigate pivotal points in a company’s growth. Venture partners also work with the investment team on new companies and technologies.

Madrona awarded the 15th Annual Madrona Prize last night to the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering team working on the VOCAL system. VOCAL (Video Organization and Interactive Compositional AnaLytics) system enables users to extract semantic information from large quantities of unlabeled data without pre-trained models. VOCAL helps users organize their data, build domain-specific models as they go, and then search for interesting events. Ph.D. students Maureen Daum, Enhao Zhang, and Dong He worked together on the two VOCAL sub-projects that received the prize: Video Organization and Exploration and video search technology called Interactive Video Analytics for Compositional Queries. They were co-advised by Professor and Director Magda Balazinsk and Professor Ranjay Krishna, and they also worked with a collaborator (and Allen School graduate) from Microsoft, Brandon Haynes.

Madrona today announced the appointments of a deep bench of successful, experienced operational and investor team members who will work with portfolio companies on strategy and execution. Wei Gao joins as venture partner, Anna Baird as operating partner and Vivek Ramaswami as partner.

Madrona, the largest Seattle-based venture firm, today announced it raised $690 million across two oversubscribed funds for technology startups based in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. With more than 25 years of experience building companies with founders from pre-seed onward, 100% of existing institutional investors supported the firm’s new funds —$430 million Madrona Fund 9 and $260 million Acceleration Fund 3. These funds represent an almost 40% increase from the $500 million Madrona raised in 2020, and the firm will continue to initially invest in technology startups at pre-seed through Series C stages.

Madrona Venture Group today announced that Karan Mehandru is joining the firm’s investment team as a Managing Director. With fifteen years of experience as a venture investor and board member for rapidly scaling private businesses, Karan brings a wealth of experience working closely with founders, their teams, and partners to build lasting and exceptional companies. This full-stack approach at all stages of company growth mirrors the Madrona philosophy of venture investing.

Madrona, a leading venture investor in artificial intelligence and machine learning companies, today announced a partnership with PitchBook to power the 2022 Intelligent Applications 40, #IA40, and released data based on the 2021 list. Leveraging PitchBook’s industry-leading data as well as a new machine learning model, PitchBook and Madrona provide differentiated analysis on the market outlook for intelligent applications.