Facts
- HQ
- Madrona
- Sectors
- Financial Services
- Founded
- 1995
- Employees
- 135
- Stage
- Seed
- Last fund
- MADRONA VENTURE FUND X, L.P. · $489.6M · 2025 SEC Form D
- Funds raised
- 10 funds SEC Form D filings
- Total capital
- $1.7B SEC Form D filings
Madrona Leads Buywander’s Series A to Turn $900B in U.S. Retail Returns into Discounted Deals for Value-Shopping Consumers
Madrona led Buywander’s Series A because the company repackages retail returns into discounted discoveries for value-focused shoppers, addressing a growing structural market driven by rising returns and affordability-driven consumer behavior.
Highspot closes multi‑billion‑dollar merger with Seismic on August 18 after regulatory approval
Highspot completed its multi-billion-dollar merger with Seismic on August 18 after regulatory approval, capping a journey since 2012 that built a leading AI-driven sales enablement platform used by over a million users and 1,000 customers.
Madrona report: 74% of enterprises will expand AI budgets but 83% converted fewer than half of AI pilots to production
Madrona released a new research report, based on a survey of 150 senior enterprise decision-makers and additional data, showing strong planned AI budget growth but low pilot-to-production conversion rates in enterprise AI. The report finds integration complexity, security/privacy/compliance, and ROI scrutiny are the top reasons pilots fail, not product performance.
Seattle Tech Week 2026 Draws ~250 Events Over Five Days, Showcasing City’s Tech Talent and Innovation
Seattle Tech Week 2026 ran five days with roughly 250 events across diverse venues, celebrating Seattle’s dense tech talent and community connections while highlighting themes from founders, investors, and academics. Organizers view the event as a community-led showcase that reinforced Seattle’s historic and ongoing contributions to cloud, AI, and other innovations.
Madrona Leads Faye’s Series C; Chris (Madrona) Joins Board as Faye Reimagines Travel Insurance
Madrona is leading Faye’s Series C investment because Faye has built a better, autonomous traveler care platform and improved whole-trip travel insurance that addresses slow, confusing incumbent products. The firm highlights travel’s growing disruptions and says Faye’s product delivers faster, more usable protection and better claims experiences for modern travelers.
Madrona celebrates Impinj’s 10th IPO anniversary, remembering founders Carver Mead and Chris Diorio and their low-power transistor breakthrough
Impinj marked the 10th anniversary of its IPO, and Madrona celebrates its long partnership with the company dating back to its founding in 2000 by Carver Mead and Chris Diorio. The piece highlights Mead's influential contributions to semiconductor industry and neuromorphic computing and explains that Impinj originated from their work on low-power, low-cost field-tunable transistors.
Madrona Ventures Invests in Thira, Reuniting Founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer to Build AI-Native Systems for CIOs
Madrona announced a new investment in Thira, led by founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer, reuniting experienced enterprise builders to tackle CIO-focused AI-native systems. The firm argues Thira’s team and product strategy will help CIOs deploy AI-driven systems of execution and drive measurable returns on technology and AI investments.
Gradial, founded by ex‑SpaceX Starlink leaders, raises Series C after scaling to tens of millions serving Amazon, T‑Mobile and other Fortune 500s
Gradial, founded by former SpaceX Starlink leaders Doug Tallmadge and Deip Kumar with co‑founders Anup, Anish and Vikas, builds an AI-native system for enterprise marketing execution and has grown to tens of millions in revenue serving Fortune 500 clients. The company expands from website content workflows to multi‑channel campaign orchestration using agentic content infrastructure aimed at delivering scalable ROI for large enterprises.
Kubernetes Co-creators Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie of Stacklok Say AI Agents Need New Identity, Permissions and Governance Layers
Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, co-creators of Kubernetes and now leading Stacklok, discuss in Madrona’s Founded & Funded episode how enterprises face identity, permissions, and security challenges with AI agents similar to early container days and are building governance and controlled-access tools to speed safe adoption. They explain why existing enterprise governance is ill-suited for agents, argue developer posture must precede broad deployment, describe MCP and FDE models, and warn that current architectural choices can create hard-to-reverse consequences.
Madrona and Wing Lead $40M Series A in Gray Swan to Secure Agentic AI, Investors Include Snowflake Ventures and Samsung Next
Madrona co-led a $40 million Series A in Gray Swan, a startup founded by Carnegie Mellon researchers Zico Kolter and Matt Fredrikson to build security and safety infrastructure for agentic AI in the enterprise. Gray Swan aims to create frameworks for agent identity, runtime protection, and adversarial testing to unlock wide enterprise deployment of AI agents.
Madrona Hires Roxy Hoffman to Bay Area Talent Team to Advise Founders on Executive and AI Hiring
Madrona announced Roxy Hoffman has joined its Bay Area talent team to help founders recruit transformative executives and advise on long-term talent strategy, particularly for AI roles. Hoffman brings experience from Daversa, B Capital, and Sapphire and will work alongside Matt Witt to support portfolio companies.
Axiom’s Carina Hong: Formal Mathematical Reasoning Is Key to AGI as Axiom Prover Scores 120/120 Putnam and 98.93% on Lean Benchmark
Carina Hong, founder of Axiom, argues that formal mathematical reasoning is essential for AGI; Axiom's prover achieved top Putnam scores and 98.93% on a Lean verification benchmark, far outperforming alternatives.
Hyperscalers to Spend Up to $700 Billion on AI Infrastructure in 2026, Opening Startup Opportunities Beyond Core Models
Despite massive investment in AI infrastructure by hyperscalers projected to reach $650-700 billion in 2026, early founders have significant opportunities to build valuable, defensible systems on top of commoditized AI models. As AI capabilities become infrastructure, the focus shifts from the models themselves to innovative applications and systems leveraging these models.
AI Compute Scarcity Drives Price Surges and Limits Growth Amid Resource Constraints Through 2028
The article discusses the current scarcity in AI computing resources, such as GPU clusters and memory, leading to rising costs and operational constraints. It warns that although companies benefiting from this scarcity are thriving now, history shows these resource bottlenecks eventually break, reshaping the industry landscape.
Madrona Announces 2026 Intelligent Applications 40 as AI Market Shifts to Enterprise ROI; Cites Cursor $60B, Wiz $32B, OpenRouter ~$7B, Hugging Face $12.9B
Madrona released its 6th annual Intelligent Applications 40 list highlighting a shift from AI experimentation to enterprise-ready products that deliver measurable ROI, noting recent big acquisitions (SpaceX–Cursor $60B, Google–Wiz $32B, OpenRouter ~$7B, Nvidia–HuggingFace $12.9B). The list emphasizes value creation in harnesses and aggregation layers—agentic systems, routing, hosting, and inference services—rather than models alone.
Seattle Tech Week 2024 Draws ~75 Events, Organizers Thank JP Morgan, Ascend, Google Cloud and Sarah Studer
Seattle Tech Week 2024 featured about 75 events that brought together founders, investors, and startups, showcasing Seattle as a vibrant tech hub. Organizers thanked hosts, sponsors (including JP Morgan, Ascend, Google Cloud), community builder Sarah Studer, and noted the program expanded from last year with spillover weekend activities and large community turnout.
Madrona, Point72 and Madrona Venture Labs make day-one investment in Tektonic to build GenAI agents for sales and revenue operations
Madrona announces a day-one investment in Tektonic alongside Point72 and Madrona Venture Labs; Tektonic builds GenAI agents to automate business operations, initially targeting sales and revenue tasks like quoting, renewals, services, and data quality.
Madrona Leads Series Seed in Codified to Deliver AI-Powered Policy-Driven Data Governance
Madrona led a Series Seed investment in Codified, an AI-powered, policy-driven data governance platform founded by Yatharth Gupta, aiming to provide seamless, secure, least-privilege access to data amid rising privacy and security concerns.
MotherDuck’s Jordan Tigani and DuckDB’s Hannes Mühleisen describe partnering to commercialize DuckDB into MotherDuck
This article presents a conversation with DuckDB creator Hannes Mühleisen and MotherDuck founder Jordan Tigani about their partnership that commercializes the DuckDB open-source project into a serverless analytics company, MotherDuck. It traces their meeting, collaboration strategy, and how they balance building a scalable business while supporting the open-source community.
Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi on Using OpenAI GPT to Power Enterprise Contract Management
Lexion, an AI2 spinout and 2022 IA40 winner, builds AI-powered contract-management tools for enterprise legal teams and has integrated features using OpenAI’s GPT. Madrona investor Elisa La Cava interviews Lexion CEO and co-founder Gaurav Oberoi about his founding journey and the company’s use of AI.
Tom Alberg, Madrona Founder and Seattle Mentor, Passes Away
Tom Alberg, founder of Madrona and a mentor who contributed significantly to Seattle's growth and startup community, has passed away. The Madrona team shared a remembrance honoring his impact and support for entrepreneurs.
Snorkel CEO Alex Ratner on data-centric AI, programmatic labeling and $135M raised to scale Snorkel Flow
Snorkel AI CEO Alex Ratner discusses data-centric AI, programmatic data labeling, and Snorkel's Snorkel Flow platform, which aims to speed up and automate data labeling for enterprise ML. The company spun out in 2019 and has raised $135 million to expand its data-centric programmatic workflow and tackle barriers to AI adoption caused by manual labeling.
Madrona’s Aseem Datar and Sabrina Wu Interview UW Robotics Professor Sidd Srinivasa on Trends and Founder Opportunities
Madrona investors Aseem Datar and Sabrina Wu interview UW Professor Sidd Srinivasa about technological and sociological trends driving robotics innovation, opportunities for founders, and why now is a pivotal time for the field.
Madrona Announces PitchBook Data Partnership for 2022 IA40 Ranking After IA40 Firms Raised $3B
Madrona, which has been investing in intelligent applications for over a decade, launched the IA40 list in 2021 and says IA40 companies have since raised over $3 billion; for the 2022 IA40 it has added a data partnership with PitchBook to enhance the ranking using PitchBook's private and public equity data.
Fund History
People
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Bill Ruckelshaus Founder, Founder and Strategic Director
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Paul Goodrich Founder
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Steve Singh Founder, Co-founder of Concur and Managing Director
