We are happy to announce Madrona’s most recent investment, a Series A financing  for Cedexis, the Portland, OR-based market leader in community-based cloud performance monitoring and optimization.  To read more about the company’s financing check out its blog.  Madrona Venture Partner Len Jordan led the round.

Madrona Venture Group CEO Spotlight, Mike Fridgen CEO Decide from Madrona Venture Group on Vimeo.

Madrona is starting a series of video interviews spotlighting different CEOs we get the chance to work with. For our first video, Greg Gottesman interviewed Mike Fridgen, CEO of Decide. Mike talks about being addicted to startups, what he’s learned as an entrepreneur, what makes a great product, and gives one piece of advice to first time CEOs. We hope you like the video and want to see more!

Congratulations to the team at Animoto on the close of its new financing round.  We look forward to working with Spectrum Equity Investors and supporting Animoto as it continues to build on its killer product.  If you haven’t used Animoto yet, go and make a video today!  Read more about the financing on TechCrunch.

-by Scott Jacobson

One of the best parts of being an early-stage investor is getting to be part of the creation process. Partnering with very smart and passionate entrepreneurs to take the early seeds of an idea and turn those seeds into products that solve interesting, tangible customer problems. I have really enjoyed working with the Decide.com team, and am super excited for them as they launch the first version of their product to the public today. CEO Mike Fridgen wrote a great blog post (here – http://blog.decide.com/decidecom-launches), and there has been a lot of nice coverage from the tech blogosphere. But thought I’d share three quick reasons I’m excited about the company.

1.) Great founding team

At Madrona, it is part of our core strategy to build long-term partnerships with outstanding entrepreneurs. The founding team at Decide includes Oren Etzioni, who is a venture partner at Madrona, and a great founder on company #3 with Madrona (Netbot and Farecast previously) and CEO Mike Fridgen, who is also a third-time Madrona entrepreneur (Triphub and Farecast previously). Oren and Mike have built an incredibly strong team from a mix of previous Madrona portfolio companies, e-commerce leaders, and top engineers from the University of Washington.

2.) Hard IP

Over the last 18 months, Decide has built a massive proprietary database (60tb and growing) comprised of model lineages (for hundreds of thousands of devices), historical pricing (billions of price observations from thousands of sellers), and product rumors and news across the web. On top of this database, they apply advanced machine-learning and text/data-mining algorithms to make highly accurate predictions of product price changes and future model releases. This is very hard to do algorithmically, and there are very few people in the world who have done it in a way that creates value for the mass market. Fortunately, most of those people work at Decide.

3.) Solving a real consumer problem (i.e., there is a market need)

There are two simple value propositions at Decide that resonate with consumers: avoid buyer’s remorse, and save money. We’ve all had that experience where we buy a new TV and three weeks later the next model gets released that obsoletes the one we have, or we buy a camera at Best Buy, are surfing Amazon a month later, and find out we could have saved $100 if we’d held off a couple of weeks. Decide endeavors to eliminate these frustration points for consumers for all of the products we buy. The company is starting with a few categories in consumer electronics, but the need and appeal is very real across a broader set of products.

It is still very early days for the Decide team, but we are very excited about what they’ve accomplished to date and the vision going forward. Congrats to Mike, Oren, and the rest of the team on this important milestone in the life of the company. If you haven’t been to Decide yet, check it out (http://www.decide.com). And please let the team know what you think!

Congratulations to CEO Mike Fridgen, Founder Oren Etzioni, and the rest of the team at Decide on a great product launch today.  Anyone in the market for a new television, camera or laptop should do their research on Decide.  The site will tell you whether the price of the product you are interested in will go up or down as well as if there is a new model expected to be released.  Mike and the team have been working for almost a year on R&D and the hard work shows.  More categories will be coming so don’t worry if they aren’t covering a product you are interested in.  Check out Decide today.

BTW, thanks to John Cook for a great article on the company’s product launch today. Read it here.

Congratulations to ShopIgniter on closing its Series B financing round with Madrona and new lead investor Trinity Ventures.  CEO Matt Compton wrote a nice blog post sharing his experience on the fundraising trail.

Congratulations to Lucas Carlson and the rest of the PHP Fog team on their general availability launch today.  You guys have worked so hard and it shows in your great leadership in the PHP developer community.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the coverage of today’s launch.  Read the story here.

One of our newest investments, Indochino, had a nice piece on CBCNews (not a typo, the company is based in Vancouver, BC). Watch first, then order your suit immediately after.

Here is a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmWsVOTiz04
Click on Indochino’s logo to check out the company’s great offerings.

Last week a new startup in town, called Sewichi, announced it has raised some money from Madrona along with a few other angels. We are excited to be working with David Shim again who we first met while he was at Farecast, a prior Madrona investment that was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Neither we or David can tell you what Sewichi does quite yet, but we can tell you we are pretty excited. Congratulations David. Here is a link to some of the press that Sewichi got after their announcement last week.

Congratulations to Jesse Rothestein and Raja Mukerji. ExtraHop is certainly one of the most exciting tech companies in Seattle. Click here to read more…