SEEKING FOUNDERS & TECH LEADERS
SEEKING FOUNDERS & TECH LEADERS VIEW MVL OPPORTUNITIES
VIEW MVL OPPORTUNITIES
We have a flexible model that meets founders where they are in the 0 to 1 journey. Depending on the investment, advisory, and co-building commitment, MVL can earn between 5% and 25%.
It starts with an idea, sometimes yours, sometimes ours. We partner as co-builders to validate, build early traction, and secure funding.
You have a small team, an early product, and customer momentum and we help close the gaps to reach a funding milestone.
We make a small, often first, pre-seed investment to help you add to the founding team and generate product and customer traction.
Madrona Venture Labs brings big ideas, exceptional talent, resources, and capital together to create truly venture-scale companies. From validation to building traction through customer and product development and finally securing institutional investment, the MVL team is ready to put its decades of expertise and experience to work for you. Building a venture-scale idea isn't guesswork; our team has developed a proven process for rapidly validating, refining, and creating new businesses.
As entrepreneurs ourselves, we know how time-consuming it can be to validate a business idea and how important it is to get it right. To help accelerate this process, MVL will connect you with a network of hundreds of subject-matter experts, world-class enterprises, established investors, and founders at Madrona's portfolio of venture-backed companies. This process of delivering curated expertise and high-level introductions helps founders quickly test ideas, prototype, and fail fast until a long list of ideas narrows into one compelling opportunity.
Our in-house experts will help you prove your solution through rigorous acquisition testing through market sizing, competitive analysis, customer research, and domain expert interviews. You are mentored and coached by leaders within Madrona and MVL who help build the fundamentals of your business.
“We have such a trusted partner that whenever we are in doubt, especially as first time founders, we have somebody that we can ask questions to and have full trust that the answer will be in our interest” — Julia Turc, Co-Founder & Co-CEO Storia AI
Having established an initial product-market fit, together, we will form and fund your company with its first investment. We work with you to acquire your first customers and recruit the core founding team of people that will build your initial product.
The operating team at MVL brings direct experience building dozens of intelligent applications companies, where leveraging data and machine learning add differentiated product and customer value. We have expertise in applying these technologies across vertical domains, including e-commerce, finance, travel, logistics, and more. Whether you are an engineering founder needing to build up your sales chops, or a product founder looking for technology support, MVL can provide the support you need. We help you define and develop the initial product through roadmaps and agile product sprints. We assist you in strategizing market entry and growth, diving deep into financial modeling, identifying and executing contracts with pilot customers, and hiring the best team to level up your company.
“MVL was instrumental in helping me launch Outbound AI with critical support in testing the idea, helping me recruit my co-founder, and finding the right VCs to our vision for the next part of the journey.” — Stead Burwell, Co-founder and CEO of Outbound AI
By phase 3, your company has put together the team, built the initial product, and delivered initial customer traction, and you're ready to raise seed funding.
Raising capital can be challenging; we are here to help. MVL accelerates your fundraising process by guiding you through our network of many of the country's most respected VCs and investors. Friendly introductions to the right investors early in the process give you an advantage in pitching your idea and getting productive feedback. And, by being your advocate, we give you maximum leverage and optionality in choosing the right partner for your company. Our investors, which include Madrona Ventures and successful operators, support our founders throughout the 0-to-1 process and often invest.
Beyond providing industry connections, we assist you in refining your pitch and crafting a compelling story. We work extensively with you on your presentation's design, flow, and storytelling to position you for a successful raise.
“MVL provided me the ability to quickly test the idea through prototyping, and once it was clear that there was a passionate customer demand, access to top-tier talent and co-investors, hiring the initial team and ensuring successful seed funding." — Mia Lewin, Founder & CEO of Style Genome (acquired by Wayfair)
We are with our founders from day one, for the long run.
