Founded & Funded

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.

This week Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Fivetran Co-founder and CEO George Fraser. Fivetran is fundamentally a data replication company — that’s how George explains it. But the company actually started out trying to solve a completely different problem when it was founded in 2012 and pivoted to strictly data integration in 2015 after multiple customers started asking for help. But in attacking that problem differently than it had ever been done before — by only focusing on replicating people’s data into the desired destination w/o getting sucked into any of the workflows that the user intended to do on the other side — they’ve come out as a leader in the space. Fivetran landed a $565M series D last year and made two acquisitions. And – it was named one of our top 40 Intelligent Applications in 2021. In this IA40 spotlight episode, Sabrina and George not only dive into the story behind Fivetran and how it has taken time and patience to get to where they are now. But Sabrina also gets some hot takes on the modern data stack, reverse ETL, query federation and why Fivetran doesn’t open source. He also has some great advice about coming up with a company name, but you’ll have to listen to get it, so I’ll hand it over to Sabrina to dive in.

This week, Investor Aseem Datar is talking with Will Rush, co-founder and CEO of Stack, a teen crypto platform to educate a young crypto-curious generation — and their parents — about responsible investing. After working at a company, building a banking app for teens, Will took his decade-long experience in securities and finance and applied it to crypto and Web3. He saw the excitement and curiosity that teens had for crypto and knew he could apply his experience to create a world of responsible teen crypto investing. Stack has managed to balance education and access for both parents and their teens in a way that the younger generation is actually appreciating and connecting with. And Will is maniacally focused on the education portion. Not only because he is a soon-to-be parent himself, but because in what he calls the Wild West of Web3 and crypto, he says somebody needs to be the good guy. To help continue that project, Stack just landed $2.7 million in funding to continue developing its platform. And Will's advice for every founder — "You need to have slime on your face" — a reference most of us millennials will understand, but you'll have to listen to see how Double Dare relates to launching a startup.

This week, Investor Maria Gilfoyle talks to Brad Van Vugt, founder and CEO of Battlesnake, a multiplayer programming game for experienced web developers where your code is your controller. Battlesnake builds games for programmers that encourage self-directed learning and are challenging to master. In this episode, Maria and Brad dive into where the idea for the game came from, how they get the developer community so involved, and how they're able to combine aspects of gaming, eSports, and traditional sports to create an engaging experience not just for developers, but for anyone to watch and enjoy. You won't want to miss Brad's stories and advice in this one.

In this IA40 spotlight episode, Managing Director Hope Cochran talks with Tesorio Co-founders Carlos Vega and Fabio Fleitas about getting finance teams out of the world of manual, error-prone and inefficient spreadsheets and equipping them with intelligent applications more common in other parts of a company. That’s where Tesorio comes in — they offer automation solutions designed to help companies manage accounts receivable — in other words, they help companies turn their revenue into cash. The platform replaces that tedious and manual collections processes with accurate, real-time predictions, optimized workflows, and actionable insights based on behavioral trends. Tesorio raised a $17M Series B in July to expand its go-to-market efforts and last year landed on Madrona’s list of the country’s top 40 intelligent applications, a list we launched to recognize companies applying machine learning to solve business problems better than ever before. We think these intelligent applications will define the next generation of innovation and shift the SaaS technology landscape into application intelligence. In this episode, Hope, Carlos, and Fabio dive into where the idea for Tesorio came from, how the company pivoted from the original idea, how these two met, the hard conversations any co-founders should have before deciding to launch a company together, and so much more.