VC firm Madrona Venture Group closes $300M fund

Early investor in Amazon gets cash infusion to invest in Pacific Northwest start-ups

Venture capital seems to be on a roll these days. At least seven firms this year have announced new funds that the team will use to invest in start-ups and new technology.

Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group announced Tuesday that it's closed a $300 million.

Madrona Venture Fund V was targeting $250 million, but the fund was oversubscribed. Most of the funding came from existing investors including the Kauffman Foundation.

The money will be used to invest in early-stage information technology companies headquartered in the Pacific Northwest.

“Early-stage venture capital is a local business, and Madrona has a long track record of successfully helping great entrepreneurs build lasting companies from the seed and Series A stage onward,” Matt McIlwain, one of Madrona Venture Group’s seven managing directors, said in the press release.

 “Our new fund will focus on backing the entrepreneurs and ideas that drive the next technology revolution and expand the innovation ecosystem our team fosters every day.”

Founded in 1995, Madrona Venture Group was an early investor in Amazon.com. It has also invested in Apptio, Decide.com, Impinj, Redfin, ShopIgniter and Z2Live.

Some of its investments that have either gone public, or been acquired, include aQuantive, Classmates.com, Farecast.com, Isilon Systems, ShareBuilder and World Wide Packets.

Some of its more recent investments have included dogsitting service Rover.com in April, software-as service company Apptio and analytics company Placed in March, and online real estate brokerage Redfin in October.

This is Madrona’s fifth fund. It current manages almost $1 billion across all funds.

The fund was reportedly supposed to be announced two days from now, but was broken by Bloomberg earlier Tuesday.

Other VC recent funds

There have been a slew of recent funds in the past few months.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers closed a $525 million fund last month. In April, early-stage venture capital firm First Round Capital announced that it was going  to raise its fourth fund, with a target of $135 million, while Berlin-based Earlybird raised a $100 million fund.

In March, Groupon investor NEA filed with the SEC to raise $2.3 billion, while DST, one of Facebook's biggest investors, was looking to raise $1 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz, also based in Menlo Park, secured a $1.5 billion fund in January, announcing it had raised $2.7 billion in three years. While it has only been around since 2009, Andreessen Horowitz is already a top VC firm, raking in siginificant management fees.

Yesterday, Khosla Ventures announced a new fund for an undisclosed amount. 

(Image source: gawker.com)