Founded & Funded
Listen to conversations between Madrona investors and entrepreneurs, founders, and startup personalities who talk about some of the key moments in building a company. Designed to give would-be founders and others interested in working with or for startups a view into the struggle and the lessons learned, these conversations are informal and informative. With more than 25 years of investing in early-stage technology companies, Madrona has worked with founders from day one to help build their company for the long run. We invest in seed and Series A companies in the Pacific Northwest building across the information technology spectrum and in Acceleration (B and beyond) stage companies building with AI, regardless of geography.
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Most startups bolt AI onto old products. @ravennahq reimagined the entire workflow. When we first met Kevin Coleman and Taylor Halliday, it was clear they weren’t just chasing the hype cycle. They were pairing AI-native architecture with deep founder-market fit, and rebuilding how internal ops work — from first pr
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar sits down with Anoop Gupta, co-founder and CEO of @SeekOut — an AI-first company transforming how organizations discover, hire, and manage talent. They explore: 1) SeekOut’s evolution from LLM-powered workflows to the launch of SeekOut Sp
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
AI, Ambition, and a $3 Trillion Vision: Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s Bold Bet
Microsoft Chairman & CEO Satya Nadella sat down with Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar at Madrona’s 2025 Annual Meeting to discuss the key inflection points in his leadership journey, Microsoft’s AI strategy, and the massive economic impact AI will have on the world. From redefining company culture to betting b
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
The security industry has a math problem: 12 million job postings, only 7 million qualified professionals. The solution? AI. Edward Wu spent nearly a decade at ExtraHop, pioneering AI-driven security detection. But instead of just alerting security teams about potential threats, he saw a bigger opportunity — what if AI