Madrona Venture Group has been a mainstay of the Seattle and northwest United States startup ecosystem for years now, and it looks like it is going to continue that legacy going forward.
In four separate filings with the SEC, the firm announced its eighth venture capital fund, raising $345 million. That’s up slightly from the firm’s past three funds, which were $300 million vehicles. The filing comes roughly two and a half years after the firm’s last fundraise for its seventh fund. That slight increase in size is a different choice from many other VC firms these days, which have ballooned their fund sizes in pursuit of larger and later-stage deals.
Madrona in recent years has been on a hiring spree. It picked up Steve Singh, the former CEO of enterprise startup Docker, as a managing director earlier this year, and also promoted Hope Cochran as its first female managing director in 2019. She had joined the firm in 2016 as a venture partner and was formerly the CFO of mobile gaming giant King Digital and telecom services provider Clearwire. The firm has also hired several experienced enterprise hands to round its portfolio services, including Katie Drucker and Mark Britton.
The firm is perhaps best known for its enterprise bets, and the firm has been on a tear this year writing checks. Among the companies it has invested in are Sila, which offers programmable banking infrastructure and Madrona led a $7.7 million seed; Temporal, where Madrona joined a Sequoia-led $18.75 million Series A round; and Stratify, an automated budgeting startup where the firm led a $4.9 million seed.
Last year, the firm raised a $100 million Acceleration Fund that was designed to take minority stakes in growth rounds at the Series B and Series C stages. No word on where that growth fund sits, or whether the firm will double down more on that strategy in the future.
Update December 30, 2020: We actually do have a word on that Acceleration Fund. Madrona raised $161 million for its Acceleration Fund II, according to the aggregate of four separate SEC filings and confirmed by a spokesperson. That brings the total amount of Madrona’s late 2020 new fundraise to almost $500 million. We also updated the early-stage fund from $320 million to $345 million, since we didn’t include three other small, affiliated vehicles attached to Madrona’s early-stage fund.