Karan Mehandru
Karan Mehandru is a managing director at Madrona, which he joined in 2022 to open its Palo Alto office, investing across stages in SaaS, data infrastructure, security, cloud and intelligent applications. He previously led venture investing at Steadfast Capital, was a general partner at Trinity Ventures for a decade, and worked at Scale Venture Partners. His past investments include Zapier, Klaviyo, Auth0, Cohesity and Outreach.
Madrona Leads Investment in Vinci’s $250M Series B to Build a Foundation Model for Physics
Madrona is investing in Vinci’s $250M Series B because Vinci is building a ‘foundation model for physics’ to speed and lower the cost of hardware design by enabling faster, continuous simulation, validation, and optimization across physical domains.
Madrona joins $40M Series A in Jack & Jill as paired AI agents book 25,000 interviews and 380,000 candidate conversations
Madrona invested in Jack & Jill’s $40M Series A because the startup uses paired AI agents—Jack for candidates and Jill for employers—to match talent and hiring teams without traditional applications, having driven 25,000 interviews and 380,000 candidate conversations. The approach automates tedious tasks while preserving human agency, arranging about 5,000 interviews monthly for companies like Ramp and Attio.
Madrona and Altimeter co-lead $38M seed in Mohit Aron’s SciFin to unify fragmented GTM tools
Madrona and Altimeter co-led a $38 million seed round in SciFin, founded by Mohit Aron, to build a unified layer that consolidates fragmented GTM/revenue tooling and surfaces a single source of truth for sales and forecasting.
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.
Zapier Has More AI Agents Than Employees. Here's How That Happened
Zapier is doing hundreds of millions in ARR, has 800 employees, and has more AI agents than people. That ratio isn't an accident. Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, built one of the most capital-efficient software companies in history on less than $1 million in venture funding. When GPT-4 launched in March 2023, he called a company-wide "code red" (a term he'd never used before) and stopped the entire company for a week-long hackathon. What happened next reshaped how Zapier hires, operates, prices its product, and thinks about the future of software. In this episode of Founded & Funded…
Madrona’s 2025 CEO Summit: Leaders from GitHub, Snowflake, Databricks and more on reinventing companies for AI-driven hypergrowth
Madrona’s 2025 CEO Summit gathered leaders from portfolio companies and industry veterans to discuss how AI-driven investment and rapid scaling force repeated organizational reinvention, highlighting themes like shifting go-to-market models and the need for a growth mindset.
From $1M to $10M ARR in 6 Months: How Fyxer is Winning AI Productivity
Fyxer.ai is an AI-powered assistant that helps users reclaim hours of their day by managing their inboxes, writing replies, and taking meeting notes. But Fyxer didn't start with AI. It started with a decade-long executive assistant agency that gave them a treasure trove of data and insight that became the foundation for integrating AI. Fyxer CEO and Co-Founder Rich Hollingsworth joins Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru on this episode of Founded & Funded to share how Fyxer went from $1M to $10M ARR in six months with just 30 employees. In this episode, Rich shares: Why great startups start with…
5 Non-Negotiables for AI Startups: Data Moats, Embedded Services, and Dual-Wedge Growth
The article outlines five essential strategies AI startups must adopt to become category-defining companies: build data defensibility, embed services into workflows, expand addressable markets by serving both expert and non-technical users, and create irresistible, hard-to-replicate value. Founders should focus on ownership of workflows, delightful user experiences, and urgency in execution to raise the ceiling of product capabilities and lower the floor for adoption.
Serial Entrepreneur Mohit Aron on Founding, Scaling, and Leading Category-Leading Companies
What does it take to go from engineer to founder, from startup CEO to scale CEO? In this special live episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru sits down with Mohit Aron, founder of Nutanix and Cohesity, to uncover the lessons behind his success. Mohit shares his unique hiring strategy, how to identify product-market fit, and the power of balancing vision with execution. Whether you're navigating your first company or scaling your third, Mohit's advice is a masterclass in resilience, grit, and building a legacy. Full Transcript: https://bit.ly/42xnyD9 Chapters: (00:00) Introduction (02:04) Traits of Successful Founders (05:03)…
Beyond the Model: Taking AI From Prototype to Production with Unstructured's Brian Raymond
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Brian Raymond, founder and CEO of 2024 IA40 winner Unstructured. Unstructured turns raw, messy, unstructured data into something AI tools can actually process — a typically expensive and time-consuming process for companies hoping to save money with the tools themselves. Brian and Karan explore some of the biggest trends in AI, including moving from prototype to production, the rise and fall of vertical applications, the shift toward powerful horizontal solutions, whether the ROI will be there on all this capital investment into AI, and the trough of…
From Dark Matter to Voice AI with Deepgram Founder Scott Stephenson
Today Madrona Managing Director Karan Mahandru and Scott Stephenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepgram, a foundational AI company building a voice AI platform providing APIs for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. From medical transcription to autonomous agents, Deepgram is the go-to for developers of voice AI experiences, and they're already working with over 500 companies, including NASA, Spotify, and Twilio. Today, Scott and Karan dive into the realities of building a foundational AI company, meaning they're building models and modalities from scratch. They discuss the challenges of moving from prototype to production, how startups need to out-fox the hyperscalers while also partnering…
Karan Mehandru & Anna Baird on Go-To-Market Strategy, and Navigating Sales, Growth, and Leadership
This week, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Madrona Operating Partner Anna Baird. The operating partner role is a new one for Madrona, and we're excited to have her on the team to advise our founders. Before transitioning to board positions in the last couple of years, Anna was most recently the CRO at Outreach. Before that, she was the COO at Outreach, and before that, she was the CFO at several companies. That trifecta of C-Suite experience gives Anna a unique perspective to help founders navigate any blind spots they may have. Anna and Karan, who is on the…
Madrona Adds Wei Gao as Venture Partner and Anna Baird as Operating Partner to Bolster Portfolio Support
Madrona announces two new partners: Wei Gao joins as a venture partner to source deals and advise portfolio companies leveraging 20+ years at Amazon and Hopin, and Anna Baird joins as an operating partner to advise go-to-market and growth-stage firms drawing on roles as CRO of Outreach.io, CFO of Livongo, and other senior positions.
Madrona Hires Vivek Ramaswami as Investment Partner in Palo Alto to Lead Enterprise Software and Fintech Investing
Madrona welcomes Vivek Ramaswami as an investment partner in its Palo Alto office; he joins from Steadfast Capital with prior roles at Redpoint Ventures and Goldman Sachs and will focus on enterprise software and fintech.
Organizations
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Madrona Managing Director · current
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Trinity Ventures current
