Today Madrona is excited to introduce our new Managing Director Karan Mehandru. Karan is a curious, creative investor who we have known for over a decade. We have worked alongside him at companies like Jama Software and CommerceIQ. He has lived in the Pacific Northwest for a decade and is invested in some of our region’s most successful companies. And we have seen how he works with founders at every stage — he digs in and helps them to build lasting companies. He is what we call a Full-Stack Venture Capitalist, bringing company-building expertise, long-term capital allocation, exceptional company engagement, and overall good judgment to all stages of company growth.
Karan joins Madrona at a key time in Madrona’s history. Just two years ago, we celebrated our 25th anniversary and raised our largest funds to date — $500 million across our two fund strategies. Our core fund, Fund 8, focuses on seed and Series A companies based in the Pacific NW. We believe technology-driven innovation in the PNW is still at Day One and are excited to help exceptional founders based here build their companies from the earliest days for the long term. Our other proven strategy is investing in Series B/C stage companies out of our Acceleration Fund (AF 2). Acceleration stage companies have found product-market fit and are early in scaling their go-to-market strategies. For us, these companies are primarily based in North America and are building solutions that are artificial intelligence and machine learning enabled. In recent years, we have funded acceleration-stage companies in California, Utah, Illinois, Ohio, New York, and Washington. In recognition that proximity is important to company building and as part of Karan joining the team, Madrona is also opening our first office outside the Pacific Northwest, in Palo Alto, California. Karan will lead the office there.
Madrona’s entire team invests in and helps to build companies for the long term — and Karan brings with him a depth of experience that we are excited to have complement an exceptional and hungry team. He most recently was at STEADFAST, heading up their venture capital investing, where he did acceleration and growth-stage investing. Before that, he was at Trinity for a decade, focusing primarily on early-stage investing, and he started his career doing acceleration-stage investing with Scale Venture Partners.
But a person is more than their experience. Karan is passionate about building great companies. The founders he works with find him to be a trusted sounding board, a problem solver and someone who actively works to make connections and help move the company forward. And he has done this very successfully. Auth0, Outreach, and Cohesity are prime examples. Auth0, based in greater Seattle, was recently purchased for $6.5 billion by Okta, while Outreach and Cohesity closed rounds at well over $4 billion valuation.
Please welcome Managing Director Karan Mehandru to the team – for more on Karan, read his blog here. Karan will join Madrona on September 15th
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