Suplari, which announced their $3.1 million funding round today, is our newest investment in an area we helped define – Intelligent Applications. Intelligent Apps combine data and machine learning to provide real-time, actionable insight into business and consumer applications. Going back 4-5 years, we were investing in more horizontal machine learning platforms like Dato/Turi, Algorithmia and MightyAI to help companies combine the talents of their business users, data scientists and programmers to design, text and build intelligent apps. More recently we have been focusing on building vertical or functionally focused intelligent applications including Amperity, Saykara, and Placed.com.
Suplari will be sharing more in the months ahead about their specific focus. For now, we are excited to be working closely again with three founders who are an incredible team. At Madrona we look for companies that fit our key investment themes, focus on real customer problems in large markets and have an outstanding founding team. The three founders of Suplari have all worked with Madrona over the last couple decades and have excellent track records at building innovative and successful companies.
For Jeff Gerber, CTO, this is the fourth Madrona company he has helped build. He was an early engineer at Performant (acquired by Mercury Interactive), then co-founded iConclude (purchased by OpsWare and then HP) with Sunny Gupta, and was most recently working at Apptio (NASDAQ: APTI) on their machine learning and intelligent apps that help CIOs manage the business of IT. Jeff is an incredible technologist who understands the needs of the business customer.
Brian White, CPO, was the first executive hire at iConclude back in 2005 (working with Jeff and Sunny there) as the head of product and then went on to be VP of Products at SkyTap where he drove their shift to focus on larger enterprise offerings across multiple clouds. He also was an early product executive at Amazon Web Services. Jeff and Brian are excited to be reunited at Suplari and have already started building a great engineering and product strategy team.
Nikesh (Niki) Parekh, CEO, was an EIR here at Madrona and has been a long-time friend of the firm. He has worked deeply in the real estate industry including at Market Leader, Trulia and House Values. We have regularly met and worked with Niki on a variety of initiatives in our innovation economy and are excited to be directly working with him at Suplari.
Suplari is staying stealth for now on their specific plans, but expect to share more later in the year! We were delighted to partner on this investment with our friends at Amplify Ventures as well as some highly strategic angels that we worked together with the Suplari founders to attract to the opportunity. The team is officing in Madrona’s innovation space so if you are visiting, please stop by!
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