Ridge AI has emerged from stealth with $2.6 million in pre-seed funding, positioning itself as an AI-native analytics provider that helps B2B software companies demonstrate product value to customers in a matter of hours. The round was led by Madrona, with participation from TheFounderVC and a group of angel investors that includes founding leaders from Tableau, Trifacta, and Streamlit.
Based in Seattle, Ridge AI enables companies to rapidly deploy interactive, customer-facing dashboards alongside AI-powered data agents. The platform is built on years of data visualization research and open-source technologies, allowing organizations to bypass months of engineering work traditionally required to build and maintain analytics features.
The company was founded by CEO Ellie Fields and Chief Scientist Jeff Heer. Fields previously 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 widely used data visualization tools, including D3.js, Vega, and Mosaic.
Ridge AI’s core differentiator is its browser-native architecture, which processes data locally rather than relying on server-side infrastructure. This enables sub-second interactivity on large datasets without requiring companies to manage or pay for cloud-based query processing. The platform also integrates natural language capabilities, allowing end users to ask follow-up questions and receive immediate answers from an AI data agent embedded within dashboards.
The company’s technology is built on the Mosaic framework, an open-source system for highly interactive analytics that uses DuckDB and WebAssembly. According to Ridge AI, the convergence of large language models, WebAssembly, and modern visualization frameworks has enabled capabilities that were not feasible just a few years ago.
Ridge AI is currently offering limited beta access, onboarding a select number of teams each week as it continues to develop its platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. That’s a terrible trade-off, and it’s exactly what Ridge eliminates.”
Ellie Fields, CEO And Co-Founder Of Ridge AI
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ellie and partnering with Jeff for years now. 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.”
Mark Nelson, Venture Partner At Madrona And Former CEO Of Tableau And CTO Of Concur
“This is what I would have wanted to see built for data in the age of AI.”
Chris Stolte, Co-Founder Of Tableau
