Founded & Funded

In this week’s IA40 Spotlight Episode, Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Credo AI Founder and CEO Navrina Singh. Founded in 2020, Credo’s intelligent responsible AI governance platform helps companies minimize AI-related risk by ensuring their AI is fair, compliant, secure, auditable, and human-centered. The company announced a $12.8M Series A last summer to continue its mission of empowering every organization in the world to create AI with the highest ethical standards. Navrina and Sabrina dive into this world of governance and risk assessment and why navrina wanted to make governance front and center rather than an afterthought in the quickly evolving world of AI. Navrina is not why about what she thinks we should all be worried about when it comes to the abilities of LLM and generative AI and her passion for an “AI-first, ethics-forward" approach to Artificial intelligence. These two discuss the different compliance and guardrail needs for companies within the generative AI ecosystem and so much more.

This week, we’re excited to release a special live episode recorded during the community event portion of the Madrona 2023 annual meeting. Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks with Madrona Alumni and Acquired Podcast Hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. The three reflect on Acquired episode No. 28, which dove into the Amazon IPO with the late Madrona Co-founder and original Amazon Board Member Tom Alberg, and the early days getting the show off the ground from the Madrona offices.

Madrona Managing Director Soma dives into the world of intelligent applications and generative AI with Common Room Co-founder and CTO Viraj Mody. Madrona first invested in Common Room in 2020 — and we had the pleasure of having the founders join us on Founded & Funded the following year. Common Room is an intelligent community growth platform that combines engagement data from platforms like LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, and others with product usage and CRM data to surface insights from across an organization’s entire user community. Customers like Figma, OpenAI, and Grafana Labs use Common Room to better understand their users and quickly identify the people, problems, and conversations that should matter most to those organizations. Soma and Viraj dive into the importance of deeply understanding the problem you’re trying to solve as a startup — and how that will feed into your product iterations — why organizations need a 360-degree profile of their user base, how Common Room has utilized foundation models to build intelligence — not just generative intelligence — into its platform — and so much more.

Get to know Madrona Managing Partner Matt McIlwain. Learn where he gets his spark to work with entrepreneurs, what he looks for in founders, where the opportunities lay for founders when it comes to generative AI, and what he enjoys doing outside the office.

In this episode of Founded & Funded, partner Aseem Datar talks with Leaf Logistics Co-founder and CEO Anshu Prasad. Leaf is applying AI to the complexities of the freight and transportation industry, connecting shippers, carriers, and partners to better plan, coordinate, and schedule transportation logistics. This enables network efficiencies and unlocks a forward view of tomorrow’s transportation market while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions. Leaf Logistics was founded in 2017, and Madrona joined Leaf's $37 million series B in early 2022. From the beginning, Leaf has been fighting the one-load-at-a-time way that trucking has historically been conducted. The company analyzes shipping patterns to make sure that when a truck is unloaded at its destination, another load is located to return to the city of origin. Identifying these patterns allows Leaf to coordinate shipments across shippers at 1000x the efficiency and effectiveness typical in the industry. Aseem and Anshu dive into the story behind Leaf, what makes logistics so complex, and how AI can continue to improve it. And Anshu offers up great advice for founders that he's learned on his own journey.

In this week's IA40 Spotlight Episode of Founded & Funded, Investor Elisa La Cava talks to Lexion Co-founder and CEO Gaurav Oberoi. Lexion was one of the first spinouts from AI2, and Madrona invested in the first round the company raised in 2019.  Like many companies that come from AI2 – Lexion is focused on applying AI to change an industry. Specifically, Lexion helps legal teams at enterprises manage contracts – and they are one of the companies that have added features using OpenAI’s GPT technology. 

In this episode, investor Elisa La Cava talks with Josh Crossman, CEO of Magnify, which was incubated at Madrona Venture Labs. Josh was actually recruited by Madrona Venture Labs to help launch a business that would bring AI to the customer experience. He was quickly persuaded and signed on in 2021, spinning out of MVL in less than three months with a $6 million seed round. Josh and Elisa discussed the incubation process and how Magnify's intelligent application to improve customer retention, expansion, and adoption is solving one of the biggest pain points of the customer experience — focusing on and understanding the needs of every single user. They also dive into finding product market fit and the importance of incorporating AI/ML into a product from the very beginning. I'll go ahead and hand it over to Elisa to dive into all this and so much more.

This week on Founded & Funded, Partner Chris Picardo is talking with A-Alpha Bio Co-founder and CEO David Younger for our first Intelligent Application 40 Spotlight episode of 2023. We announced the 2022 IA40 winners in October, and A-Alpha was the first biotech company to make the list, which was no surprise to us. As one of our portfolio companies, we know the work David and his team are doing at the intersections of biological and data/computer sciences will change the world — but having a group of judges agree with us makes us all the more certain. Protein interactions govern just about all of biology and A-Alpha uses synthetic biology and machine learning to measure and engineer protein-protein interactions, speeding up a traditionally slow wet lab process. The company's proprietary platform — AlphaSeq — uses genetically engineered cells to experimentally measure millions of protein-protein interactions simultaneously, generating enormous amounts of data to inform the discovery and development of therapeutics. It is within that enormous amount of data that the company is adding to every day that so many answers will start to be found as the company is able to use machine learning to train predictive models and begin predicting new antibody sequences that could be effective against different viruses and diseases — improving the way that we are able to discover drugs. Chris and David dive into that future that A-Alpha is working toward and so much more — the power of data engineering, building business models around data, building cross-functional teams, having both tech and biotech-focused investors. It is an episode you won't want to miss.

In this week's IA40 Spotlight episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona partner Jon Turow talks with dbt Labs Founder and CEO Tristan Handy. Here at Madrona, we just announced our 2022 IA40, and dbt Labs is one of our two-time winners. The company has positioned itself as the industry standard for data transformation in the cloud, and it raised $222 million at the beginning of the year, which was led by Altimeter, but Databricks and Snowflakes both participated in the round, further solidifying dbt's place and the modern data stack. Jon and Tristan dive into the concept of epistemic truth, how the modern data stack has significantly improved the frontier of what's possible in data, the collaboration that needs to happen between data analysts, analytics engineers, and data scientists, the right way to use partnerships, and how the best way to try and create a community around your product is to not try and create a community, but you'll have to listen to Tristan's explanation.

In this week's episode which is leading up to our Intelligent Applications Summit on November 2nd, Soma speaks with Bob Muglia. Bob has thought deeply about the Modern Data Stack and they speak about it here - what is needed in the data stack to enable Intelligent Applications (or data driven apps as Bob calls them) and the opportunities for new companies to innovate.  Bob is also well known as the CEO that took Snowflake from a promising application for the public cloud to success by focusing on the problem of scaling a data warehouse in the cloud,  and building product and sales teams that could win the hearts and minds of their loyal customers. Bob talks here about the early days after he joined Snowflake and what he did to get a product to market, how partnering with the big public cloud providers worked- and had it's challenging moments.   It's a great view into how both Soma and Bob are thinking about the future of enterprise data and intelligent applications.