Karan Mehandru Joins Madrona as a Managing Director

With fifteen years of experience as a venture investor and board member for rapidly scaling private businesses, Mehandru brings a wealth of experience working closely with founders, their teams, and partners to build lasting and exceptional companies. He will be based in Silicon Valley, opening a Madrona office in Palo Alto to expand the firm’s Bay Area network and team while bringing a deep understanding of Seattle innovation closer to that market.Immediately prior to Madrona, Mehandru led the venture capital practice at STEADFAST Capital, where he focused on AI, enterprise software, future of work, fintech, and related sectors. He led acceleration stage investments in, and partnered with, exceptional companies like Zapier, Klaviyo, Jumpcloud, Algolia, LucidChart, Sendbird, Wealthsimple, Pipefy, and others. Before Steadfast, Mehandru spent more than a decade at Trinity Ventures investing in early and acceleration stage founders and teams, including Auth0 (acquired by OKTA), Outreach, and Cohesity, which together have a current + exit valuation of over $10 Billion. Other companies he invested in at Trinity include Madrona portfolio companies, CommerceIQ and Jama Software. Mehandru started his venture career at Scale Venture Partners, working with mid-stage companies. Prior to that, he worked in operating roles across product development, marketing, and sales for startups and established technology companies. The Madrona team is currently investing out of Fund 8 and Acceleration Fund 2, announced in early 2020. Fund 8 focuses primarily on Seed and Series A companies based in the Pacific Northwest. The Acceleration Fund focuses on Series B stage companies and beyond anywhere in North America with an emphasis on intelligent applications leveraging applied AI/ML and cloud computing. The firm has invested in companies based in Utah, California, Ohio, and elsewhere over the last several years with the acceleration fund strategy.31/08/2022