Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group announced today it has raised a bumper $690 million for two oversubscribed funds that will be used to back promising technology startups in the Pacific Northwest region, Silicon Valley and beyond. The $430 million Madrona Fund 9 and the $260 million Acceleration Fund 3 saw 100% of existing institutional investors participate, Madrona said. Combined, they represent an almost 40% increase over the funds Madrona raised in 2020. The funds will be used to invest in technology firms ranging from pre-seed all the way through to Series C startups. Madrona is one of the more prominent of tech-focused venture capital firms, focusing on seed, early-stage and acceleration-stage startups that leverage technology and promise to disrupt huge existing markets.

That's the thrust of a white paper proposal that imagines an "autonomous vehicle corridor" replacing the I-5 freeway between Seattle and Vancouver. VC firm Madrona Venture Group first proposed the idea last year, and has now refined it to explain how such a radical proposal could be phased in over time. The Golden State already allows electric cars access to coveted carpool lanes, to encourage low-emissions driving. Of course, a white paper from some VC firm won't convince any transportation agency to make such a major change.

Do we need an Asimov's Law for chatbots? And how do they compare with a talking parrot? What can dairy farmers learn from outfitting cows with pedometers? How can algorithms better explain to humans not just what they're predicting, but why? Some of the biggest names from the Seattle area's growing machine learning and artificial intelligence community tackled these questions and more Wednesday at a Madrona Venture Group summit. The sprawling array of challenges and opportunities in this fast-growing, fascinating, and sometimes frightening field defy easy summary.

Seattle is poised to be an epicenter for machine learning and artificial intelligence. That's one takeaway from the inaugural Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence Summit hosted by Madrona Venture Group on Wednesday in downtown Seattle. Thanks to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and a wide range of startups, the Emerald City is already known as a hub for cloud computing technology development, with Madrona Managing Director Matt McIllwain calling Seattle the "cloud capital of the world" more than two years ago. There is also a long list of Silicon Valley tech companies who have established engineering outposts in the Seattle area, including Google, Facebook, Oracle, Apple, HP, Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Splunk, and many others. But looking beyond the infrastructure and services side of cloud computing, there is also momentum building from both tech giants and small startups in Seattle that are developing technologies related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, algorithms, data analytics, and more.