Madrona Venture Group, an early-stage venture capital firm, has made two additions to its team.
Maria Karaivanova is joining Madrona as a principal to focus on sourcing and evaluating new investment opportunities, and Alice Ryder as director of investor relations and business development.
She will work with Madrona’s investors, as well as continue to develop Madrona’s programme for connecting C-level executives with portfolio companies for partnerships, customer relationships and advisory roles.
Each brings a deep background of business, technology and finance experience to the firm, and has helped rapidly scale very successful businesses like Cloudflare, King Digital and Clearwire.
“Both Maria and Alice embody what we look for at Madrona, experts in their field who have a passion for working effectively with entrepreneurs and innovative ideas,” says Tim Porter, managing director, Madrona. “While they have been on board just a short time, each of them has already made meaningful contributions, and we are looking forward to working together in the coming years.”
Karaivanova has nearly a decade of technology experience, garnered through roles at some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Cloudflare, Intel and Boeing. Karaivanova comes to Madrona after five years as head of business development and an executive team member at Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based web performance and security company, where she helped build the company from 25 employees to unicorn status.
While at Cloudflare, Karaivanova built a global ecosystem of over five thousand partners and launched strategic partnerships with Google, Rackspace and other leading cloud platforms, delivering significant revenue and distribution. Prior to Cloudflare, she was an investor at Intel Capital with a focus on enterprise technologies and cloud security. She was also part of the Intel-McAfee strategic engagement team helping to integrate security into firmware. Before that, Maria held various positions at Boeing specializing in intellectual property management and international business development for the Chinook, Apache and F-15 programs, and unmanned aircraft. She started her career as an analyst at Citibank.
“Seattle has emerged as the cloud capital of the world and Madrona Venture Group is at the core of its innovation fabric,” says Karaivanova. “I couldn’t be more excited to work alongside the Madrona team to bring innovative ideas to life across the Pacific Northwest and to support the remarkable entrepreneurs across our portfolio.”
As director of investor relations, Ryder will work with Madrona’s limited partners who have invested nearly USD1.3 billion into funds that are more than 85 per cent invested in the Pacific Northwest. Additionally, she will help foster business development by continuing to build out the C-suite programme that connects CIOs, CTOs and CEOs with Madrona portfolio companies. Ryder comes to this role with a strong background in finance and partnerships, built over 10 years in companies representing a diverse set of businesses in the technology industry.
Ryder was most recently VP of investor relations at King Digital Entertainment, the maker of Candy Crush and other mobile games, where she helped ready the company for its IPO and worked closely with King’s global investor base through its public life, which culminated in a USD5.9 billion sale to Activision Blizzard. Prior to King she was VP of investor relations for Clearwire. She has also held similar roles at Expedia and Nextel Partners. Ryder began her work in technology investing as a banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
“I’m excited to dive into the world of venture investing which is so important to the continuing growth of the technology industry,” says Ryder. “The Pacific NW is full of engineering, entrepreneurial and business talent from wireless to software to infrastructure, and Madrona is at the centre of it all. I’m looking forward to working with the team to help create new opportunities for growth in the area.”
