Founded & Funded

In this IA40 spotlight episode, Managing Director Hope Cochran talks with Tesorio Co-founders Carlos Vega and Fabio Fleitas about getting finance teams out of the world of manual, error-prone and inefficient spreadsheets and equipping them with intelligent applications more common in other parts of a company. That's where Tesorio comes in — they offer automation solutions designed to help companies manage accounts receivable — in other words, they help companies turn their revenue into cash. The platform replaces that tedious and manual collections processes with accurate, real-time predictions, optimized workflows, and actionable insights based on behavioral trends. Tesorio raised a $17M Series B in July to expand its go-to-market efforts and last year landed on Madrona's list of the country's top 40 intelligent applications, a list we launched to recognize companies applying machine learning to solve business problems better than ever before. We think these intelligent applications will define the next generation of innovation and shift the SaaS technology landscape into application intelligence. In this episode, Hope, Carlos, and Fabio dive into where the idea for Tesorio came from, how the company pivoted from the original idea, how these two met, the hard conversations any co-founders should have before deciding to launch a company together, and so much more.

We've all struggled with call center experiences. Madrona's Ishani Ummat talks with Cresta Co-founder and CEO Zayd Enam about the unique angle Cresta takes to leverage AI to drive a better customer experience in real time.

The two dive into the important topic of how AI can be used to help empower people to be more productive. we hear the story of why Zayd dropped out of his Ph.D. program to pursue launching his own company based on what he explains as the "schlep blindness" of contact centers. He also discusses the unique way he landed his first customer, which happens to be Intuit, one of the largest financial software companies in the country, and the benefits of taking a modular approach versus a full rip and replace of a customer's entire system.

This episode may make you crave a Costco hot dog, but you'll have to listen to find out why!

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Managing Director Scott Jacobson is talking with CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan. CommerceIQ is a retail e-commerce management platform that automates and unifies category analytics, retail media management, and sales and operations all under one roof. The company secured $115 million in funding in March and just made its first acquisition — e-fundamentals — to expand into digital shelf analytics. The acquisition actually brings the company around full circle in a sense. CommerceIQ was originally Boomerang Commerce, which was a dynamic pricing software for multi-brand retail companies to better compete with the likes of Amazon. But Guru realized that despite the quality of that software and the A+ team he'd pulled together, he was trying to grow a business in an F market. He ended up pivoting the entire company to what is now CommerceIQ, selling the Boomerang business to Lowe's. Scott and Guru dive into what went into navigating those turbulent times, what it takes to be a vertical SaaS company, and Guru's realization that he couldn't solve every problem as though it were a math problem.

In this episode of Founded and Funded, we stray a little from our typical format to answer some questions that often come up in discussions between founders and our investors. Madrona Managing Director Matt McILwain talks with one of our Limited Partners — or the partners of ours that are not the day-to-day investors — Top Tier Capital Partners Founder and Managing Director David York. They explore different kinds of funding mechanisms, the current market conditions, and a bit of a history between the two firms – more specifically, why this San Francisco-based firm decided to bet on Seattle and Madrona all those years ago!

In this episode of Founded and Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo dives into the world of crypto and Web3 with Sila Co-Founder and CEO Shamir Karkal. Sila is a FinTech platform that provides payment infrastructure as a service and sits at the intersection of crypto rails and traditional financial services infrastructure — because as much as some people want to get away from the traditional financial system, crypto still needs to be able to plug into it. Shamir and Chris dive into the importance of this infrastructure, the ups and downs of the crypto market, the trends driving FinTech and crypto, and so much more!

In this episode of Founded and Funded, we spotlight IIA40 winner Snorkel AI. Managing Director Tim Porter not only talks with Snorkel Co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner all about data-centric AI and programmatic data labeling and development, but they also dive into the importance of culture — especially now — and how to take advantage of what Alex calls "one of the most historic opportunities for growth in AI."

This week on Founded and Funded, we spotlight our next IA40 winner – SeekOut. Investor Ishani Ummat talks to SeekOut Co-founder and CEO Anoop Gupta and VP of People Jenny Armstrong-Owen about their AI-powered intelligence platform, the importance of not only finding and recruiting new hires but also developing and retaining employees within a company, and maintaining SeekOut's own culture while seeing significant growth over the last year.