Matt McIlwain on the Evolving Generative AI ecosystem, Hear from Common Room CTO, and the Seattle Orcas Launch

It has been a busy couple of weeks leading up to our Annual Meeting today! This week we welcomed Numbers Station AI to the portfolio, and Matt McIlwain continued our coverage of the evolving #GenAI ecosystem. S. Somasegar was also recently featured in a Q&A about generative capabilities — he also announced the Seattle Orcas — the region's new Major League Cricket team! Continuing the generative AI theme, Sabrina Wu and Vivek Ramaswami talked to several founders and builders about LLMs and the power of generative AI.

Madrona News

Game On in the Generative AI Stack

As investors in the intelligent and generative application sector for a decade, Madrona continues to advance our perspective on the rapidly changing generative app ecosystem and the game theory around which types of companies are more likely to win at various layers of the generative AI stack. Read more here.

Data Transformation With Foundation Models: Why We Are Investing in Numbers Station

We are thrilled to lead the Series A financing in Numbers Station AI and to work with Christopher Aberger, Ines Chami, Sen Wu, and the whole team!

Using #foundationmodel technology pioneered at the Stanford AI Lab, Numbers Station aims to accelerate insights and data workflows by democratizing access to the #ModernDataStack — starting with #datatransformation — for a non-technical audience of business and #dataanalysts. Read more in our blog post and on TechCrunch.

Founded & Funded

Common Room Co-founder and CTO Viraj Mody

In the latest episode of Founded & Funded, Managing Director S. Somasegar dives into the world of intelligent applications and generative AI with Common Room Co-founder and CTO Viraj Mody. 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 view of their user base to activate their community, build products customers love, and accelerate product-led growth. They also discuss how Common Room has utilized #foundationmodels to build intelligence — not just generative intelligence — into its platform and so much more. Listen here.

Newsletters

Aspiring for Intelligence: Talking to the Practitioners

In the past few days alone, we've witnessed OpenAI launching the highly anticipated GPT-4, Google introducing AI for Workspace, Microsoft announcing 365 Copilot, Updates from Midjourney, Anthropic, and others! What does this renaissance in AI mean for practitioners? How are startups leveraging LLMs and foundation models? Sabrina Wu and Vivek Ramaswami spoke with several founders and builders of AI companies for this week's Aspiring for Intelligence to get their thoughts on the benefits and challenges of LLMs/FMs, the power of generative AI, and where they see the future heading. Read here.

Hooked: Talent Cultivation

Now is the time to have introductory chats — before the transactional pressure of recruiting someone for a job sets back in. Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, founders will have a difficult time overcoming that fear if they don't have established relationships with talent. If you wait to connect with great people for another year, or until you have the perfect job available, you'll be right back in the perpetual slog of the talent war, along with everyone else at the very same time. It's a predictable cycle, but you can get ahead of it. Read more here.

In the News

Seattle Lands Major Cricket Team

Soma Somasegar announced the Seattle Orcas Major League Cricket team Thursday. It was a monumental moment for him, four years in the making. He says it has been very exciting for him to be involved both at the league and team levels to bring professional cricket to the U.S. and the Seattle area. He shared more about how this has all unfolded in a LinkedIn article! This was also covered in GeekWire. 

S. Somasegar on the Present and Future of Generative AI

Soma talked generative Ai with Jesus Rodrigues of The Sequence. He dives into Madrona's thesis around generative AI and foundation models, what he sees as the most important software development tools that will be reimagined with foundation models, the most interesting new capabilities he foresees in a new generation of foundation models, and other deep learning trends he sees on the horizon. Read more here.