Ridge AI Raises $2.6M Pre-Seed to Bring Browser-Native Analytics to B2B Software

The Seattle startup Ridge AI, founded by Tableau and Trifacta veterans, says its platform lets product teams ship embedded dashboards and AI data agents in hours rather than months.

Ridge AI emerged from stealth on Monday with $2.6 million in pre-seed funding to build AI-native embedded analytics for B2B software companies, the company said.

Madrona led the round, with participation from TheFounderVC and a group of angel investors that includes founding leaders from Tableau, Trifacta, and Streamlit.

The company was co-founded by CEO Ellie Fields and Chief Scientist Jeff Heer. Fields spent more than a decade at Tableau and later served as chief product and engineering officer at Salesloft. Heer is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, co-director of the UW Interactive Data Lab, and a co-creator of D3.js, Vega, and Mosaic tools widely used in data visualization across the web. Heer previously co-founded Trifacta, which Alteryx acquired in 2022.

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Ridge’s platform is built on Mosaic, an open-source framework developed by Heer’s lab that uses DuckDB and WebAssembly to process data in a user’s browser rather than on a remote server. The company says this architecture delivers interactive performance on datasets with millions of rows without requiring the software company to pay for cloud query infrastructure. The platform combines dashboard visualizations with a natural language AI data agent that lets end users ask follow-up questions and receive immediate answers. 

In my career as a product leader, I routinely experienced the problem where our team was creating real value for customers and had no good way to prove it. We would spend months building dashboards instead of focusing on what made us different.
Ellie Fields, CEO, Ridge AI

The problem Fields describes is widespread in business-to-business software. Product teams routinely divert engineering capacity to build custom reporting for customers, time that would otherwise go toward core product development. Existing embedded analytics tools, Ridge contends, are slow to configure, costly to maintain, and still fall short of letting customers answer their most specific data questions without additional engineering work.

Mark Nelson, a venture partner at Madrona and former chief executive of Tableau, said in the announcement that he encountered the same problem during his tenure as chief technology officer at Concur. Nelson described Ridge as the first solution he had seen that combined strong visualizations with an AI agent capable of responding to user queries.

The company said it is accepting applications for beta access and onboarding a limited number of teams each week. Companies can apply at ridgedata.ai.

Ridge enters a market that includes established players such as Looker, Sisense, and Tableau’s own embedded offering; it is unclear how Ridge’s browser-native architecture affects the total cost of ownership compared with those platforms at enterprise scale. The company has not disclosed a commercial launch date or pricing.

Disclaimer: This report is based on publicly available reports, including official press releases from Businesswire. Nervnow has not independently verified the claims.

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