AI+Data in the Enterprise: Lessons from Mosaic to Databricks
Release Date: 02/26/2025
AGI Needs Formal Reasoning. Carina Hong is Building it at Axiom.
Founded & Funded
There's a theorem being tested about how AI reaches general intelligence. Carina Hong's answer: through mathematics. Carina is the founder of Axiom, and in less than a year of building, her team's AI has scored a perfect 120/120 on the Putnam mathematical competition — a test where more than 50% of brilliant undergraduates score zero. More concretely, Axiom Prover has reached 98.93% on a Lean software verification benchmark that leading alternatives solve at 11–12%. In this conversation with Matt McIlwain, Carina explains her central thesis: that math and code are the two pillars of the...
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Palantir Alum Explains How AI is Used and Bought by the Federal Government
Founded & Funded
Nick LaRovere spent years at Palantir before co-founding Pryzm with friends, including a Lockheed Martin alum. And in this episode of Founded & Funded, Nick shares his inside account of how AI is actually being adopted inside the federal government, and what it takes to sell technology into that market. Pryzm is an AI-powered intelligence engine for government business development: it aggregates data across CRMs, email, Slack, and public procurement sources to help companies win contracts. Nick's argument is that by the time an opportunity appears on SAM.gov, the deal is already decided....
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Zapier Has More AI Agents Than Employees. Here's How That Happened
Founded & Funded
Zapier is doing hundreds of millions in ARR, has 800 employees, and has more AI agents than people. That ratio isn't an accident. Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, built one of the most capital-efficient software companies in history on less than $1 million in venture funding. When GPT-4 launched in March 2023, he called a company-wide "code red" (a term he'd never used before) and stopped the entire company for a week-long hackathon. What happened next reshaped how Zapier hires, operates, prices its product, and thinks about the future of software. In this episode of Founded &...
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Twitter's Ex-CEO: The Web Was Built for Humans — Let's Make it Work for AI Agents
Founded & Funded
What happens when AI agents — not humans — become your primary customer? That's not a hypothetical. It's already happening, and the founders who recognize it earliest are rebuilding their entire infrastructure stacks from scratch. In this live episode of Founded & Funded from our IA Summit in Seattle, Madrona Venture Partner Jon Turow sits down with Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter and founder of Parallel Web Systems, and Nikita Shamgunov, who led Neon through a rapid AI pivot before its acquisition by Databricks. What they cover: Why Parag is building a new search index from the...
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How to Sell AI Into the Enterprise: Pilots, Pricing, and Closing 12-Month Deals
Founded & Funded
What does it really take to sell an AI-native product into the Fortune 500? In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain sits down with two founders deep in the trenches of enterprise AI adoption, Esha Joshi (Co-founder, Yoodli) and Anup Chamrajnagar (Co-founder, Gradial.) Their companies are selling into some of the world’s most complex organizations, like Google, SAP, Snowflake, Databricks, and more. And they break down what founders often underestimate about enterprise AI sales. They dive into: Why most AI pilots fail and how to prevent it The...
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The Infrastructure of Intelligence: Inside Crusoe’s Massive AI Factory in Texas
Founded & Funded
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Ben Gilbert, co-host of the Acquired podcast, sits down with Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe-AI, the company building what it calls AI factories, including its massive campus in Abilene, Texas, which are designed to power this new era of intelligence. In this conversation, Ben and Chase explore the physical reality behind today's AI revolution. Why modern AI workloads demand entirely new infrastructure. How energy has become the primary bottleneck to scaling intelligence. What it takes to compress multi-year building timelines into...
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Can We Trust AI? The Future of Verified Reasoning in High-Stakes Systems
Founded & Funded
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Jon Turow hosts a live conversation with Carina Hong, Founder & CEO of Axiom, and Byron Cook, VP & Distinguished Scientist at AWS. Carina is building foundation models trained on verified proofs instead of human-written reasoning. Byron leads AWS’s automated reasoning group, which secures massive infrastructure with mathematically proven systems. During this live IA Summit conversation, they explore what it means to build AI that actually reasons and why verified intelligence is critical for domains where being right really...
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Microsoft's Agent Factory: The Future of AI Software with EVP of Core AI Jay Parikh
Founded & Funded
In this live episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar sits down with Jay Parikh, EVP of Core AI at Microsoft, to unpack the company's evolution from a software factory to an agent factory Jay leads the team responsible for Microsoft’s core AI stack, the systems that power Copilot, the tools developers rely on, like GitHub, and the infrastructure that makes large-scale AI possible. In short, his group builds the underlying tech that Microsoft and thousands of companies use to create AI-powered applications and agents. In this conversation, Soma and Jay dive...
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How — and What — to Build in the Age of OpenAI
Founded & Funded
Where is OpenAI going, and what does it mean for the broader AI and tech ecosystem? Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami sits down with Jason Kwon, Chief Strategy Officer at OpenAI, for a rare behind-the-scenes look at the decisions shaping one of the most influential AI companies in the world. In this live conversation from the 2025 IA Summit, Jason shares what OpenAI will build, what it won’t, and how founders can use that as a roadmap to go big without going head-to-head. They unpack OpenAI’s ecosystem-first mindset, what “full-stack AI” really means, and how the rise of agentic AI is...
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The Analyst Mindset in Venture: Madrona Investor Rasik Parikh's story
Founded & Funded
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Digital Editor Coral Garnick Ducken sits down with Investor Rasik Parikh to unpack his journey from public markets to venture capital and what makes a founder stand out. Rasik shares how working across institutional investing, M&A, and now enterprise AI at Madrona has shaped his analytical mindset and founder-first approach. They dive into how to build information asymmetry as an early-stage investor, why storytelling matters more than metrics in early fundraising, and what Rasik looks for in founders. Founders building in security, agentic...
info_outlineThe biggest AI breakthroughs won’t come from Ph.D. labs — they’ll come from people solving real-world problems. So how do AI founders actually turn cutting-edge research into real products and scale them? In this week’s episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Jon Turow sat down with Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks to talk about the shift from AI hype to real adoption — and what founders need to know.
They dive into:
1) How AI adoption has shifted from hype to real-world production
2) The #1 mistake AI startups make when trying to sell to enterprises
3) Why your AI system shouldn’t care if it’s RAG, fine-tuned, or RLHF — it just needs to work
4) The unexpected secret to getting your first customers 5) The AI opportunity that most startups are overlooking
Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/databricks-ia40-ai-data-jonathan-frankle
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:02) The Vision Behind MosaicML
(04:11) Expanding the Mission at Databricks
(05:52) The Concept of Data Intelligence
(07:42) Navigating the AI Hype Cycle
(15:10) Lessons from Early Wins at MosaicML
(20:50) Building a Strong AI Team
(23:36) The Future of AI and Its Challenges
(24:06) Evolving Roles in AI at Databricks
(25:55) Bridging Research and Product
(28:29) High School Track at NeurIPS
(30:39) AI Techniques and Customer Needs
(38:22) Rapid Fire Questions and Lessons Learned
(42:49) Exciting Trends in AI and Robotics
(45:40) AI Policy and Governance