Ridge AI Emerges from Stealth with $2.6M Pre-Seed for AI-Native Analytics That Prove a Product Team’s Value in Hours

Ridge AI announced its emergence from stealth and a $2.6 million pre-seed funding round led by Madrona, with participation from TheFounderVC and a group of angels that includes founding leaders from Tableau, Trifacta, and Streamlit. Built on decades of data visualization research and open-source technology, the company enables B2B software companies to ship interactive, customer-facing dashboards and AI data agents in hours — not months.

The company was founded by CEO Ellie Fields and Chief Scientist Jeff Heer. Fields spent more than a decade at Tableau before serving as Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Salesloft, where she experienced firsthand the problem Ridge is now solving. Demonstrating value to customers is a constant pressure for product leaders. It’s one that existing tools couldn’t meet and custom-built solutions addressed only by diverting months of engineering from core development priorities. Existing tools are slow to implement, costly to maintain, and still leave customers unable to answer their most important questions. Fields and Heer co-founded Ridge to fix that.

“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,” said Ellie Fields, CEO and Co-Founder of Ridge AI. “We would spend months building dashboards instead of focusing on what made us different. That’s a terrible trade-off, and it’s exactly what Ridge eliminates.”

Heer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, co-director of the UW Interactive Data Lab, and helped create D3.js, Vega, and Mosaic — tools that underpin data visualization across the modern web. He previously co-founded Trifacta, which was acquired by Alteryx in 2022. His most recent research produced Mosaic, an open-source framework for building highly interactive, browser-native analytics using DuckDB and WebAssembly. It is the technical foundation on which Ridge is built.

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That architecture is what makes Ridge categorically different from legacy embedded analytics tools. By processing data natively in the browser rather than on a server, Ridge delivers sub-second interactivity on datasets with millions of rows — without requiring cloud infrastructure that the software company has to pay for with every query. When a customer opens a Ridge-powered dashboard embedded in their SaaS product, they can ask follow-up questions in natural language and get immediate answers from Ridge’s AI data agent. What previously required months of engineering time to build, embed, maintain, and update can now go live in hours.

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ellie and partnering with Jeff for years now,” said Mark Nelson, Venture Partner, Madrona, and former CEO, Tableau and CTO, Concur. “I experienced the problem that Ridge is solving personally at Concur. Providing rich insights for customers into their data inside of our system was critical, but not our expertise or the unique focus of our products. Having then been part of Tableau, I can appreciate the specific focus and capabilities that need to be delivered to provide great data insights for users. Ridge is the first solution I’ve seen that brings this power to software providers in the form of both great visualizations and AI agents for users to interact with.”

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The convergence of three technologies made this moment possible: large language models capable of reasoning over data, WebAssembly enabling near-native compute performance in the browser, and the Mosaic framework providing the visualization and interactivity layer to tie it together. That combination didn’t exist two years ago. Ridge was built specifically for it.

“This is what I would have wanted to see built for data in the age of AI.” — Chris Stolte, Co-Founder, Tableau

The angel round includes founding and senior leaders from Tableau, Trifacta, and Streamlit, representing some of the deepest institutional knowledge in data analytics and visualization.