https://vimeo.com/333423816
Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle, Washington-based venture capital firm that has been focused on early-stage funds, is planning to expand beyond the Pacific Northwest (PNW) through its $100 million Acceleration Fund. Not only will the Acceleration Fund expand Madrona’s geographic reach, but it will give the venture firm a way to invest in later rounds. Specifically, Madrona is going to make more investments at the Series B and C stage.
Founded in 1995, Madrona has been investing in consumer services and enterprise cloud companies like Apptio, Smartsheets, Jama Software, Redfin, and Heptio. And Madrona managing director Matt McIlwain told TechCrunch that the new fund will have a similar focus. But there will be an emphasis on cloud and applied machine learning companies. Some of the entrepreneurs that Madrona has backed have had tremendous success partnering with Microsoft and Amazon — which are the two biggest tech companies in the area.
“Our long-time strategy has been early stage, broad-based technology, Pacific Northwest,” said McIlwain via TechCrunch. “We call it an acceleration fund because we want to differentiate it from what some people call opportunity funds, which is more of a ‘put more money into my existing company.’ This is not that. This is new money into great companies that have reached that initial product-market fit and that want to accelerate their growth.”
Madrona has not made its first investment from the new fund yet. But McIlwain said that the company is eager to find the first one that will be special enough. Since launching, Madrona previously raised three separate $300 million investment funds and a $250 million fund in 2008.
“When I joined Accolade almost four years ago – the mission was to accelerate the company’s growth by finding the best talent to build a world-class product and distribution team,” added Accolade CEO Rajeev Singh “To do that, you need world-class partners. Having worked with Matt McIlwain and Madrona on both the Apptio and Amperity board of directors, reaching out to Madrona was high on my priority list on day one. And they have lived up to my expectations – helping with customer acquisition, critical hires, key partnerships, and invaluable counsel.”
