Tag: Investments

Our Investment in GO1, Offering Online Training and Learning Content Platform Right When We Need It Most

We, at Madrona Venture Group, are excited to announce our investment in GO1, a company that is focused on making learning easy. GO1 has been quietly establishing their platform in a LMS (Learning Management System) agnostic way for corporations, educational institutions and continuing education organizations to reach their users with the content they need. When we first met with GO1’s Andrew Barnes, this current COVID-19 crisis was not even a whisper. Now at a roar, we are seeing that not only is GO1’s core business of corporate training strong, but the learning management systems that deliver content from top educational institutions to their students are expanding their usage. And we think they won’t turn back once we are out of this global pandemic.

GO1 delivers an onboarding, compliance, educational and professional development platform for employee and student education and training. By aggregating training content from a broad set of content providers, GO1 redefines how enterprises procure training content and how employees consume it in an on-demand basis via a modern self-service user experience. GO1 also integrates with a variety of key learning management platforms and integrates with front ends such as Microsoft Teams, which has seen incredible growth.

When I first met with Andrew Barnes, CEO and co-founder of GO1, I was a little skeptical about the training/learning market and opportunity. The worldwide training market is massive and estimated at low hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide. At the same time, it is a highly fragmented market. I was transparent with Andrew about my skepticism, and to his credit he took that as a challenge to educate me – and now we are investing. So, it worked!

GO1 is taking a unique approach to this massive opportunity. Rather than being yet another content creator, they have built a platform that aggregates any and all training content, provides an easy-to-consume user experience, and is LMS agnostic. Additionally, they have an easy API and can be integrated into corporate platforms and, as mentioned above, popular collaborative learning environments such as Microsoft Teams.

There are several changes underway in the market that together provide a massive opportunity for a platform like GO1 to fundamentally transform how people learn and train themselves to the ever- changing needs and requirements of the business world.

  • Secular trends are driving the need for more training including compliance and regulatory requirements.
  • Enterprises view access to world-class training and learning as a core value proposition for their employees – both in terms of increased productivity and satisfaction.
  • Consumerization forces drive employees to want access to training that is highly relevant and curated with an easy-to-consume on-demand experience.

GO1’s solution is squarely focused on taking advantage of these trends and delivering a scalable marketplace for corporate training and educational learning content. The access to data that they have about course consumption across users and industries provides a valuable opportunity to provide more curated and targeted content that is highly relevant for their users – driving consumption and satisfaction higher.

GO1 is part of the Madrona Acceleration Fund that we raised last year to invest in great companies and teams that have found product-market fit and are ready to scale to the next level. We are excited that Salesforce Ventures joined us as new investors in this round. With 1.5M+ learners already taking advantage of the GO1 platform, this company has laid a strong foundation for scale.

The world needs all kinds of support right now and we are excited for GO1 to be a company that can provide learning experiences to a broad audience, inspiring minds and inspiring change. We are looking forward to being a valuable partner for Andrew and his team as GO1 continues to build the world’s largest online learning platform.

Our Investment in Kush Parikh and Player Tokens

I am pleased to announce Madrona’s seed investment in Player Tokens Inc. (PTI) and our partnership with Kush Parikh, the founder and CEO. Kush joined Madrona as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) in late 2017 and explored several ideas with the Madrona team, including a nascent category called crypto-collectibles. Player Tokens is launching today.

There have been a number of interesting crypto-collectible projects … this Medium post by CryptoKitties, one of the pioneers of the space, does a nice job covering both the definition of crypto-collectibles and some of the earliest experiments. This post is another good 101.

As Kush and we explored the world of crypto-collectibles together, a few things really stood out. First, there is an opportunity to bring together the digital and physical worlds (something my partner Matt lovingly describes as DiPhy) to create an entirely new and compelling collectible experience, powered by blockchain. Second, this intersection of worlds is particularly powerful in professional sports, where fans have the opportunity to encounter and interact with their favorite athletes, at games, on television, and through social media. Third, the crypto-collectible experience as it exists is entirely too complicated for the typical pro sports fan and collector.

These observations and a compelling vision for ways that crypto-collectibles could be the entry point to a whole slew of digital and physical fan experiences is what prompted Kush to found Player Tokens at Madrona, and for us to begin this journey together. Step one on the journey … talking to fans and collectors. Having lived in epic sports towns like Seattle and Chicago, we’ve had no shortage of conversations with sports fans and collectors who are interested in modern ways to buy, sell, and trade, authentic, rare collectibles for their favorite players. Through Madrona’s partnership with the OneTeam Collective, we’ve also had the opportunity to connect with the players, associations, teams and leagues, all of whom are excited about the future of crypto-collectibles and the opportunities they will enable in the professional sports world.

A mix of product vision from Kush and team, and feedback from fans, collectors and athletes alike, have shaped the initial version of Player Tokens launching today, as well as the long-term roadmap for PTI. We are excited to be working with Evan Kaplan and team at the Major League Baseball Players Association, who represent the Major League players, as our first business partner in this journey; we look forward to building great things together for fans and professional athletes across the globe.

Special thanks to our friends Ahmad Nassar, Ricky Medina, Casey Schwab and team at NFL Players Inc. / OneTeam Collective, who have been great thought partners and connectors for PTI at this early stage in the life of the company and the category.

Why Madrona Invested in Pulumi

Today I am very excited to announce our investment in Pulumi.

Pulumi aims to fundamentally improve the way people build, manage, and interact with cloud-native applications, services, and infrastructure.

There is a massive movement to the cloud among enterprise customers around the world. As that trend continues to gather and gain momentum, new and transformative techniques are required as customers truly begin to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities. This transformation grows leaps and bounds with serverless computing starting to emerge as the next frontier to enable truly distributed applications and services that are powered by microservices and event-driven functions.

Recent cloud infrastructure breakthroughs include serverless, containers and hosted cloud infrastructure. Containers are great for complex stateful systems, often taking existing codebases and moving them to the cloud. Serverless functions are perfect for ultra-low-cost event- and API-oriented systems. Hosted infrastructure lets you focus on your application-specific requirements, instead of reinventing the wheel by manually hosting something that your cloud provider can do better and cheaper. Arguably, each is “serverless” in its own way because infrastructure and servers fade into the background.

“This disruptive sea change is enabling Pulumi to deliver a single platform and tools suite that allow developers to build and ship code to the cloud in the easiest and fastest way.”

 

Eric Rudder, Joe Duffy and Luke Hoban are a world-class team to deliver such transformative experiences in a cloud-native world. They have decades of experience in platforms, tools, and programming models. Eric Rudder was one of the most senior executives at Microsoft, including running the $10B+ Server and Tools business, serving as a Technical Advisor to Bill Gates, and most recently as the EVP for Advanced Technology before leaving Microsoft. Joe Duffy was a senior technical engineering leader at Microsoft and was a critical part of the early team that built .NET and C#. Most recently, he was Director of Engineering and Developer Tools Strategy and, in that role, was instrumental in open sourcing .NET and taking it cross-platform to Linux and Mac. Luke has held a variety of product and engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft. While at Microsoft, Luke co-founded TypeScript and developed Go support for Visual Studio Code.

I have had the privilege and the fortune to have worked with Eric, Joe and Luke closely over the years, and their passion to solve hard problems for developers and enterprise customers is unparalleled. I am personally very excited for the opportunity to work with this very talented group of people. We are confident that this kind of a world-class team is what is going to help drive a breakthrough as cloud-native becomes fundamental to enterprise software today and in the future.

We are doubly excited to partner with Pulumi given it is a Seattle-based early-stage start-up focused on native-cloud environment with a world-class founding team.

Please join me in welcoming Eric, Joe, Luke and the Pulumi team to the Madrona family!

Tigera Joins the Madrona Family

Ever since the advent of virtualization technology in the early 2000s, software has become increasingly abstracted from its underlying hardware. The ability to “write once, run anywhere” has led to the runaway success of technologies like containers, which package software in a format that can run in isolation on a shared operating system. This allows developers to more easily collaborate on code across environments, get better utilization from their hardware, and build agile, secure software delivery pipelines.

The concept of the “software-defined datacenter” extends this analogy beyond compute into networking, storage, and security as well. With the advent of hybrid and multi-cloud, the underlying infrastructure is only getting more complex. The ability to manage infrastructure that cuts across private and public cloud leads to cost-effective solutions; better ability to simplify, automate, and scale; and the agility to move quickly in today’s IT landscape.

While containers have been the rage for the last 18-24 months, the complexity that grows from this technology quickly escalates to an unmanageable level from an application connectivity and security perspective. In fact, this has often been the talking point of those who are hesitant to adopt them too deeply. This conundrum has been an issue for large enterprises as they look to benefit from these new methods of software architecture and management.

This is the context in which we are very excited to invest in Tigera and the team.

Tigera provides secure application connectivity solutions built for modern cloud native applications. It addresses the application networking connectivity challenges that come with cloud native architectures, especially those that must connect to on-premises, legacy environments. Tigera does this by extending leading open source projects, Calico and Istio into commercial enterprise software that enables policy-based security, enterprise controls and compliance that works across on-premises data centers and all public clouds. Tigera offers large enterprise companies a solution for deploying containers within the Zero Trust security framework that they require and opens up this Fortune 500 market to innovations that increase agility and cost effectiveness.

The leadership team behind Tigera including the CEO, Ratan Tipirneni; co-founders Andy Randall, Alex Pollitt, Christopher Liljenstolpe, VP of Engineering, Doug Collier; and the most recent additions including Andy Wright, VP of Marketing and Amit Gupta, VP of Product Management make a world-class team that knows networking and cloud deeply. They have demonstrated strong leadership in the open source community and the ability to build a commercial offering that solves real pain points for enterprise customers moving to the cloud.

We, at Madrona, are looking forward to this exciting journey with Ratan and team at Tigera.

Announcing the Microsoft Ventures and Madrona Venture Group AI Startup Competition

Today we are announcing our partnership with Microsoft Ventures to launch the Innovate.AI global startup competition. We are thrilled to be working with Microsoft on this project to find the world’s most promising early stage startups tackling unsolved problems, at scale, using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

At Madrona we have been early believers and investors in the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence and intelligent applications. The convergence of cloud computing (massive amounts of compute and storage available on the cloud at reasonable price points), specialized chips for machine learning (e.g., GPUs and FPGAs), and new advances in machine learning algorithms has created a unique opportunity for startups to build high value intelligent applications powered by unique and proprietary sources of data.

We have invested early with several platform companies and are actively looking at vertical applications. Examples include Turi, purchased by Apple, Lattice Data, purchased by Apple, Xnor.ai, MightyAI, Amperity, SmartAssist, Suplari, Saykara, Versive and others.

In thinking about how we might reach companies as early as possible we came up with a couple of ideas including developing an “American Idol” like competition. In discussions with our friends at Microsoft – we saw that we were aligned on interests in finding, supporting and investing in AI focused startups in the early days and we worked together to develop the AI:Innovate competition which Microsoft is taking Global.

We believe that in the next five to ten years, the impact of these technologies will transform most industries, from education, to real estate, to manufacturing, to transportation, to healthcare and we have only begun to see the impact of machine learning on the economy and society.

Over the next six months, Madrona will work closely with Microsoft Ventures to select a batch of promising startups that are either building new products and platforms with data and machine learning at their core or using AI to build the next generation intelligent applications. These startups will compete for a $1M investment from Madrona and Microsoft Ventures as well as an Azure package of credits, Office 365 licenses, and technical support worth over $500K.

Additionally, startups may also win an “AI for Good” prize that will be awarded to one startup that is using AI to create a positive impact on society, which will earn $500K in funding from Microsoft Ventures and Azure package of credits, licenses, and support worth over $500K.

The qualification requirements for startups to participate in the Innovate.AI global startup competition are as follows:

  • Companies that have raised no more than $4M in equity funding and/or loans at day of application
  • Companies that offer or intend to release or build a product or platform which utilize machine learning; such product/service/platform must be based on a model developed by the company, and/or be trained with data obtained/generated by the company or a 3rd party, and/or make use of pre-trained ML/AI APIs
  • Companies can utilize any technology stack or cloud platform to build their product, but the intention will be to work with the winners to help them utilize Azure and MS technology through our BizSpark offers and portfolio development efforts

See Peggy Johnson’s (EVP, Microsoft) blog post for more details about this competition.

Madrona is excited to kick off the Innovate.AI competition with Microsoft Ventures to find the next generation of great machine learning and artificial intelligence companies. The competition begins this month with applications, and we intend to select a final winner by Spring 2018. To find out more about entering the competition or submit an application, please visit the Innovate:AI page to view more information!

 

Heptio – a Day One Cloud Native Company Raises Series B

Today, Madrona is very pleased to announce that we are leading the new $25M Series B round in Heptio, partnering with existing investor Accel Partners and new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Heptio is another example of a “Day One” investment for Madrona. In November of 2016, we participated in the Heptio Series A led by Accel. In doing so, we partnered with Heptio founders and Kubernetes co-creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda at the very formation of their company whose mission is to (initially) make Kubernetes more accessible for all enterprises and (longer term) provide the standard framework for delivering enterprise apps in a multi-cloud world.

Our thesis with the Series A was pretty simple: (1) one of the largest trends in enterprise computing was the move to cloud native technology (container-based distributed microservices) and operations, (2) Kubernetes had become the leading way to orchestrate and manage container-based applications, (3) customers were beginning to demand better ease of use, accessibility, and an independent provider of support, services and training, and (4) the best team in the world to build this company began with Craig and Joe, two of the Kubernetes co-creators.

Since that time, the team has executed extremely well and, if anything, the market for Kubernetes has continued to explode even beyond expectations. Today, 50 of the Fortune 100 are using Kubernetes across industry verticals from retail to banking to manufacturing. Kubernetes continues to be the most active open source project in the world, and all the major cloud platforms are adopting it. Craig and Joe have begun to build a world class team at Heptio, launched three initial products, landed a number of high-profile (although still confidential) customers, and laid the groundwork for key partnerships.

Given all this progress, and our conviction that Heptio can be one of the next billion-dollar cloud companies in Seattle, we were honored to partner with great open source and infrastructure investors like Ping Li from Accel and John Vrionis from Lightspeed to lead the Series B. We are looking forward to continuing to partner closely with the Craig, Joe, and team to build Heptio through this next phase and beyond.