Ellie Fields and Jeffrey Heer know data visualization from the inside: Fields spent more than 12 years as a product and marketing leader at Tableau, and Heer is the University of Washington professor whose open-source tools are widely used for web-based visualization.
But even as they and their colleagues pushed the field forward, they couldn’t escape a similar conclusion: presenting and analyzing data on the web is basically still broken.
Their solution: Ridge AI, a Seattle-based startup that uses AI and browser-based technology to help software companies build and deploy interactive dashboards and data agents in hours instead of days or months, embedding them directly in their products for use by their customers.
The company calls its core product a “ridge” — a dashboard and a data agent that share a common data set, letting users get visual context from the dashboard and ask follow-up questions through the agent.
Funding: Ridge AI is emerging from stealth Monday with $2.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Madrona. The Seattle venture capital firm’s investment was spearheaded by Managing Director Tim Porter and Venture Partner Mark Nelson, the former CEO of Tableau.
Joining in the funding is a roster of angel investors that reads like a who’s who of analytics, AI and data: Chris Stolte, Tableau co-founder and former CTO; Carlos Guestrin, co-founder of Turi and director of Stanford’s AI Lab; Adrien Treuille, founder of Streamlit; Elissa Fink, former Tableau CMO; and Jeff Hammerbacher, Cloudera founder, among others.
Target market: Although their technology could be applied broadly, Ridge AI is focusing specifically at the outset on serving software as a service (SaaS) companies, giving them a way to present rich, interactive analytics to the people and businesses that use their products.
In an interview, Fields said the need is especially acute when a SaaS company is trying to renew a customer’s contract. The product might be delivering real results, but if the people making the buying decision can’t see that in the data, the deal can be at risk.
“The CFO is going to be asking, is anyone even using this?” Fields said, calling it one of the use cases where Ridge AI’s technology could be of significant value to SaaS firms.
The pressure to prove this value has intensified amid the “SaaS-pocalypse,” as it’s known — as companies consolidate their software spending and the rise of custom AI-coded apps makes many of them question whether existing tools are worth keeping.
What they’re solving: Madrona’s Nelson said he experienced the larger problem during his time as CTO of Concur, where the company built an analytics product on top of IBM Cognos, giving customers the ability to glean insights into employee travel and spending.
It was important to the business, he said, but it was a pain to maintain, and it wasn’t in Concur’s core skillset. The problem persists for many SaaS companies to this day.
SaaS companies have historically had to choose between heavyweight business intelligence platforms like Tableau and Power BI, specialty embedded analytics tools, or building their own. Fields said none of those options was purpose-built for the problem Ridge is solving.
Founders: Ridge AI was co-founded by Fields, who serves as CEO, and Heer, chief scientist, who will continue as a UW professor in addition to working on the company.
Also on the team: Andy Caley, a founding engineer who previously worked at Tableau, and Fritz Lekschas, a founding research engineer with a Ph.D. from Harvard and more than 20 publications in data visualization.
Fields and Heer were introduced by Madrona’s Nelson and Porter. Nelson had known Fields since she worked for him at Tableau and he had separately kept in touch with Heer through his UW work. Porter, meanwhile, had gone to Stanford Business School with Fields.
“I can’t think of two people I like more, and would bet on more, than Jeff and Ellie,” Nelson said, describing the pairing as an example of what’s possible in Seattle’s tight-knit tech community.
Heer previously co-founded Trifacta, a data transformation company acquired by Alteryx in 2022. He and his academic collaborators have produced some of the most widely used open-source tools in data visualization, including Vega(-Lite), D3.js, and the Mosaic framework that serves as Ridge AI’s technical foundation.
Fields joined Tableau as its first product marketer and rose to senior vice president of product development over more than 12 years, spanning the company’s IPO and its acquisition by Salesforce. She went on to serve as chief product and engineering officer at SalesLoft, where she experienced firsthand the problem Ridge is now trying to solve.
Technology: Ridge runs in the user’s web browser rather than on a remote server, using Heer’s open-source Mosaic framework and an in-browser database called DuckDB. That architecture delivers near-instant interactivity and means the software company that embeds it doesn’t pay for cloud computing costs with every dashboard interaction.
On the creation side, AI agents handle the visualization design, so product managers can describe what they want in business terms rather than learning a specialized tool.
What’s next: Fields said Ridge AI plans to focus on its SaaS wedge for at least a couple of years before expanding, noting that the market has historically been under-served.
The company has been working with a small number of pilot customers, and is now inviting additional companies into a closed beta, accepting applications at ridgedata.ai.
