Takeaways From the IA Summit, Announcing the IA40, and A Conversation with Troop Founders
It has certainly been a busy few weeks for Madrona. We released the 2023 IA40 winners and hosted our CEO, CIO, and?IA summits. We hosted Troop Travel Co-founders Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer on Founded & Funded and released Karan Mehandru's Investor Spotlight. And we've also seen a lot of news out of the portfolio, including raises from Pulumi and Observe!
5 Takeaways From The Second Annual Intelligent Applications?Summit
We hosted our second annual IA Summit last week, bringing together roughly 250 founders, builders, investors, and thought leaders from the AI community. Last year, the Summit's key question centered on how long users would take to adopt intelligent applications and embrace #AI. This year, that wasn't even a question — AI is here, and every company is racing to figure out how best to use it. Sabrina Wu and Vivek Ramaswami highlight five takeaways in their recap:
Read the full recap here. You can also read GeekWire's takeaways here.
Introducing the 2023 Intelligent Applications 40
Ahead of the Summit, we announced the 2023 Intelligent Applications 40 — the top private companies leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. Highlighting how dynamic the field of applied AI/ML is, there were 29 first-time winners in the?2023 #IA40!?Other trends in the list are the rapid emergence of open-source models, application frameworks to support the development of AI applications, and the adoption of foundation models by established application companies.?Read more insights about this year's winners in our blog post — and see the list on the IA40 website.?
Troop Travel Founders on the Startup Journey and Relationships That Matter
In our most recent episode of Founded & Funded, Managing Director Steve Singh sat down with TROOP Travel Co-founders Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer . Madrona invested in Troop and its corporate travel meeting management platform in 2021. These three talk about the startup journey — identifying the right problem and how you decide if it's the right time — when you need to switch from hiring generalists to hiring experts, how to identify the right investors, why working closely with customers and potential customers is so important, and so much more! Listen to the episode here.
Investor Spotlight with Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru
Karan Mehandru joined Madrona last year to open and lead our California office. Learn what drew him to venture capital and working with founders — and how he wouldn't take no for an answer — what he looks for in founders, what he thinks founders should look for in VC partners, and so much more in our latest Investor Spotlight episode of Founded & Funded.
Madrona Fuels Growth in Cloud-Native Infrastructure as Code With Pulumi
We're thrilled to announce that we led?Pulumi's Series C alongside NEA, Tola Capital, and Strike Capital. Pulumi has made phenomenal progress with its open-source and commercial offerings, enabling developers to be productive in a cloud-native world — and we couldn't be more confident that the company is poised for even greater success! Read more in our blog post, GeekWire, and the SiliconAngle.
Hooked on Hitting the Leadership Hiring Reset Button
Stalled-out leadership hiring processes can and will suck the life out of you and your startup. But it doesn't have to be this way! In this week's Hooked, Audra Aulabaugh tackles the issue head-on, urging founders to hit their hiring reset button. She usually sees founders diagnose their leadership recruiting woes as a top-of-funnel problem, which they try to solve by throwing more spaghetti at the wall. They push more?talent into the top of the funnel and have more conversations. But, as Audra shares, increasing the speed of an inefficient or broken process is a guaranteed losing strategy.?Read and subscribe to Hooked here.
COSM Technology Summit
Having wrapped up the IA Summit, we look forward to participating in the #COSM2023 summit in Seattle on November 1st through 3rd. The Summit will concentrate on artificial intelligence and its impact on various sectors, including business, investment, healthcare, freedom of speech, geopolitical power, and the U.S. economy.?There is a fantastic lineup of speakers, including?Cathie Wood, Stephen Wolfram, Andy Kessler, Kyle Bass, our own Matt McIlwain , and?more. Learn more here.
Launchable: Congratulations?NoxuData
Madrona Venture Labs recently hoasted?Launchable: Generative Apps! They gathered 11?teams to pitch startup?ideas in front of judges, investors, and the MVL community. The winning team from the event was NoxuData ,?a platform enabling conversational data analytics for CPG. Congratulations to David Lee and Dae Kim! Learn more here.
Portfolio Roundup
Highspot launched a Copilot for sales enablement. Its AI digital assistant automates, co-creates, advises, and answers questions — increasing sales productivity.
Observe?raised?$50M and integrated?generative AI into its product to simplify application observability.
Tangibly Founder and CEO Tim Londergan was named one of the IAM Strategy 300, which recognizes the world’s leading IP strategists.
Highspot General Counsel Matt Boise sat down for an interview with Allison Handy, Co-Chair of Perkins Coie’s Corporate & Securities practice.
Runway partnered?with Canva to make the?power of Runway and AI video generation available to?Canva users.?We love seeing two IA40 Winners work together.
SeekOut named Bryce Winkelman as its chief revenue and business officer.
Lexion Chief Legal Officer Jessica Nguyen is a?2023 Legal Innovation Apex Award winner.?
MontyCloud recently announced generative and interactive AI solutions.?
Statsig Lead Data Scientist?Timothy Chan was featured in an interview with?Experimentation Jobs.
WhyLabs CEO Alessya Visnjic was a guest on the What Fuels You podcast.
Echodyne CTO and Co-founder Tom Driscoll joined host Danielle Piekarski on the UAS Magazine podcast.
Coda released Coda 4.0,?the all-in-one business platform — now with AI.
Unstructured.io?Founder & CEO Brian Raymond was on the Collective Intelligence Community Podcast by The GenAI Collective.
Nautilus Co-Founders Sujal Patel and Parag Malice joined the BIOS —?Builders show to talk about how they built Nautilus to deliver on the promise of the proteomics revolution.
Lexion hired Cassie Pless as its new VP of Sales. CEO Gaurav Oberoi was also?on The Scale Up Show.
CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan wrote a column in Retail TouchPoints about his top 5 tactics to win Amazon Prime Big Deal Days.?
TaxBit CEO Lindsey Argalas was featured in a Fortune Q&A about the importance of regulatory clarity.