Today at Madrona we are excited to announce our seed investment in Integris, a data risk intelligence solution that enables companies to discover, classify and control how they’re using their customers’ data. This control enables companies to protect customer data and more easily comply with the complex set of privacy and consumer data regulations around the globe.
From our first conversations with Kristina, her vision resonated strongly and immediately with us. The ability to collect, store and analyze huge amounts of data from customers is immeasurably important to companies across every industry, but is being met with a wave of new (and frequently changing) regulations. The legal, customer-privacy, financial, and reputational risk of failing to meet this set of ever-evolving and complex regulations are dire, and companies experience significant challenges (and spend a lot of time, money, and resources) trying to keep up. It’s early days for Integris, but the team is building a powerful data risk intelligence solution that uniquely addresses this precise challenge for big companies in a proactive, automated, and continuous way.
We were so compelled by this team, the overall vision, and their progress, that we issued a term sheet before the company had even officially incorporated. When you encounter a team – and opportunity – like Integris’ and have the chance to back them even before “Day One”, you simply take it.
Following her stint as a highly respected Group PM at Microsoft, Integris’ CEO and co-founder Kristina Bergman became an all-star investor at Ignition, where she has been a principal for the past several years. On a personal note, there obviously aren’t too many women investors at institutional VC funds (much less in Seattle), so for years Kristina and I have always made a point of getting together at a regular cadence to exchange notes and ideas. I have profound respect for Kristina and for the way she both thinks and leads. Kristina spent late evenings and weekends over the past year and a half developing Integris, and it was energizing to spend time with her on the concept as it developed. It’s a delight today to officially partner with her as she and her talented co-founders – Uma Raghavan and Frank Martinez – bring Integris to life. We discussed with Kristina from the get-go the idea of creating a diverse syndicate for a seed round with complementary sets of experiences and networks; we’re very excited to partner up with Amplify, with Ignition, and such strong angel investors. It has been exciting to have our regular meetups evolve from two VCs chatting over interesting companies… to entrepreneur and board-member spending our time together on just one.
It’s just the beginning for Integris, but this is a world-class team taking a huge swing at a massive enterprise challenge. We’re all excited here at Madrona to get behind them.
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