Jon Turow
Jon Turow joined Madrona as a partner in 2022 and moved to a venture partner role in 2026; he is now a member of the technical team at Anthropic. He previously spent more than a decade at AWS, leading product for computer vision AI services such as Amazon Textract and Amazon Rekognition and writing the original plans for AWS IoT and Greengrass. Before Amazon he co-founded a cloud telephony startup.
Former Madrona VC Investor Joins Anthropic, Retains Venture Partner Role at Madrona
After four years as a venture capital investor at Madrona, the author is transitioning to a new role at Anthropic while maintaining a Venture Partner relationship with Madrona.
Former Madrona VC Investor Joins Anthropic, Maintains Role as Madrona Venture Partner
After four years as a venture capital investor at Madrona, the author is transitioning to a new role at Anthropic while maintaining a Venture Partner position at Madrona.
Madrona Backs Nekuda to Build Payment Rails and Trust Layer for AI Agents’ Autonomous Commerce
Madrona announces its investment in Nekuda, a startup building a dedicated payment and trust infrastructure for AI agents to enable secure, scalable autonomous commerce by handling permissions, payments, and other agent-specific requirements.
Unscripted: What Happened After the Mic Went Off with Douwe Kiela
This bonus episode of Founded & Funded is a follow-up to Madrona Partner Jon Turow's conversation with Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI and co-inventor of RAG. In this quick chat, they dive into: 1) Why storytelling—not just GTM—needs to be vertical 2) How to build a platform by showing what's possible 3) The tension between "doing one thing well" vs. building the whole stack 4) Multimodal content moderation at Meta & what it taught Douwe This 10-minute post-show chat is a must-listen for founders thinking deeply about where to plant your flag — and when to break the rules.
RAG Inventor Talks Agents, Grounded AI, and Enterprise Impact
What does it take to invent a foundational AI paradigm — and then build a company to bring it to the enterprise? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Jon Turow sits down with Douwe Kiela, co-founder and CEO of Contextual AI and the co-inventor of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). They dive into the origins of RAG, its misunderstood role in the enterprise, and how Contextual is redefining what production-grade AI systems can do. Douwe shares what most companies get wrong about RAG, why chunking shouldn't matter, how to think about hallucinations, and what founders need to know…
AI Agents Drive New Infrastructure Stack: Tools, Data, and Orchestration Power Rapid, Lean Startup Scaling
The piece argues that AI agents are enabling rapid, lean startup growth and are driving a fundamental shift in software infrastructure, creating demand for new AI-native layers across tools, data, and orchestration that founders must build or adopt to stay competitive.
Cohere's Ivan Zhang on Foundation Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Feedback Loops
In this episode, Madrona Partner Jon Turow and Cohere CTO and Co-founder Ivan Zhang dive into the world of foundation models for the enterprise. Cohere was founded in 2019 — a time when even the most passionate believers did not realize how soon the world would be struck by the capabilities of foundation models. The company announced a $270 million raise in June – which put it at an over $2 billion valuation — and — Ivan's co-founder Aidan Gomez was a co-author of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need," which actually introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind…
MotherDuck's Jordan Tigani and DuckDB's Hannes Mühleisen on partnerships and commercializing open-source projects
This week, Madrona Partner Jon Turow brings us a story about a great partnership forming between two people, who had never even met, when they each find themselves on a mission to focus on what it is they do best. You'll hear from Hannes Mühleisen, creator of the DuckDB open-source project, and Jordan Tigani, the database leader who saw an opportunity to commercialize it, about the lightning-bolt moment that led to one of them flying halfway around the world to meet — how does this happen and how do they set their partnership up to be the foundation of a…
Madrona invests in Fixie to simplify building LLM-based apps using reusable agents
Madrona is investing in Fixie, a platform that helps developers build LLM-based applications by packaging LLMs into reusable "agents" that combine reasoning with memory, data-source and API access to simplify building scalable, secure, and differentiated apps.
Madrona leads $7.5M seed round in XetHub to give developers GitHub-style workflows for data
Madrona led a $7.5 million seed round in XetHub, a startup that brings GitHub-like workflows to data to help developers more easily access and work with large datasets. XetHub’s founders, including Yucheng Low, Rajat Arya, and Ajit Banerjee, previously built data systems at Apple and have roots with the Turi team Madrona backed earlier.
Madrona and Felicis Join Investors in RunwayML’s $50M Series C to Fuel AI-Powered Creative Suite
Madrona led an investment in RunwayML’s $50M Series C alongside Felicis and others, backing Runway’s AI-powered creative suite that uses ML and natural language interfaces to speed content creation and collaboration for creators.
Madrona doubles down on MotherDuck in Series A to commercialize DuckDB-based serverless analytics
Madrona announces a follow-on Series A investment in MotherDuck, a team building a serverless, enterprise-focused analytics platform that extends the open-source DuckDB to provide scalable, fast, cost-effective, and collaborative cloud analytics for businesses.
Organizations
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Anthropic Technical Staff · current
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Madrona Venture Partner · current
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Substack Newsletter Author · current
Education
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The Wharton School BS, Finance, Strategic Management
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Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management MBA, Strategy, Entrepreneurship
