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Listen to our 2026 Annual Investment Outlook Panel with four top VCs. Get their perspective on the investment climate in 2026 and their plans to invest specifically in AI based startups. See how they did with their 2025 forecast and what their big predictions are for 2026.

Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona Ventures
Tim joined Madrona in 2006 and invests in B2B software companies in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently interested in intelligent applications and SaaS, cloud-native software infrastructure, the modern data stack, machine learning, DevOps, and cybersecurity. He is also a board member of numerous Madrona portfolio companies.

Sudip Chakrabarti, Partner, Pruven Capital
Sudip is a partner at Pruven Capital where he works with companies that are transforming the enterprise, cloud and infrastructure markets. Sudip's past investments include Exabeam, Heptio, Serverless.com, Datacoral, Spotnana, Temporal, Tesorio and Polly. He had also been a board observer at Databricks, Digital Ocean, Actifio, Mesosphere and Samsara.

Kellan Carter, Founding Partner, FUSE Ventures
Kellan Carter is a founding partner of FUSE where he focuses on early-stage investments in intelligent software in both horizontal and vertical categories. He currently sits on the Boards of Zuper, Pictory, Avante, Owl, Xemelgo and PDM Automotive.

Joaquín Gallardo, Senior Vice President, Tech Banking at Silicon Valley Bank
Joaquín is a Senior Vice President at SVB, a division of First Citizens Bank, in our Seattle/PNW market focusing on enterprise clients. In his role we helps Series A and beyond clients to scale their finance stack with venture lending alongside global treasury and liquidity solutions. Before joining SVB Seattle, he lived in San Francisco, learned to code at UC Berkeley, and helped to co-found a pre-seed company. Joaquín holds a bachelor's degree in economics from George Mason University. He lives in Ballard, Seattle with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he gets to think about how he wishes he had more spare time.

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@fromstartuptoexitpodcast

2026 Investment Outlook and Predictions