At Madrona, some of our most rewarding investments begin not with a pitch deck but with relationships built over years — and sometimes decades. Our investment in Ridge AI is one of those stories.
Today we’re excited to announce that Madrona is leading a $2.6 million pre-seed round in Ridge AI, with participation from TheFounderVC and angels including Chris Stolte, founder of Tableau, Carlos Guestrin, founder of Turi, and Adrien Truille, founder of Streamlit. Ridge AI delivers embedded analytics and AI-powered data agents for software companies to share data insights with their customers.
Built on the Mosaic web-native data visualization framework, Ridge enables product teams to ship interactive, customer-facing analytics in hours instead of months and gives end users AI data agents that can answer the long tail of questions in natural language. It’s a company born from deep personal connections, world-class technical innovation, and a founder’s firsthand experience with a problem that software companies face every day. We’re proud to be backing Ridge AI from Day 1.
Relationships That Span Decades
This investment is deeply personal for both of us. Tim has known co-founder and CEO Ellie Fields for many years. They originally met in business school and joined Microsoft around the same time. Over the years, Tim and Ellie stayed in touch, often talking about the possibility of joining or co-founding startups together. This was finally the right place, the right time, the right idea, and the right co-founder.
Mark worked with Ellie at Tableau where Ellie was an integral part of creating the market leading self-service analytics product for 12 years. During her run at Tableau, Ellie held leadership positions spanning marketing, engineering, and product management. After Tableau, Ellie went on to be Chief Product Officer at Salesloft, a provider of sales software. It’s an extraordinarily rare blend of experiences, and one that makes her uniquely suited to be a founder building at the intersection of product, technology, and go-to-market – and her experience at Salesloft specifically exposed her to the problem that Ridge is now addressing. Mark is also a natural adviser for Ridge, having spent his career at the center of data and analytics and as a builder of SaaS software as CEO of Tableau, CTO at Concur, and a technical leader at Oracle.
Mark, Tim and Madrona have also known co-founder Dr. Jeffrey Heer for many years. Jeff is one of the most respected researchers in the world in data visualization and interactive data systems. Jeff’s research has helped create visualization tools like D3.js and Vega that have been used by millions of developers worldwide. The Madrona relationship with Jeff goes back over a decade. He spoke at a Madrona Technical Advisory Board dinner in 2013 about how his new company, Trifacta (acquired by Alteryx for $400M in 2022), was using machine learning to transform data preparation. That evening was an early glimpse of the vision Jeff has been pursuing ever since: making data more accessible, more interactive, and more intelligent.
A True Day 1 Investment
This is a true Day 1 investment for Madrona: we were involved before the company even existed.
Tim and Mark began meeting with Jeff to discuss his open-source project called Mosaic, a powerful framework for creating highly interactive and expressive analytics and visualizations that run natively in the browser. Mosaic leverages DuckDB and WebAssembly to push data processing to the client side, achieving sub-second interactivity on datasets with millions of rows. Jeff had a strong sense that there was a company to be built around this technology, and Mark and Tim agreed.
We reconnected Jeff with Ellie, who was beginning to think about potential new opportunities after her time as Chief Product Officer at Salesloft. They hit it off immediately and started the company together.
Born from a Real Customer Problem
The best startups don’t just deliver a technical innovation, they use a technical innovation to solve a deep user problem. Ridge helps product teams surface customer data and insights to their users. This helps users understand the usage and value of the product, improving customer satisfaction and renewal, through the innovation of the Mosaic framework.
What we love about Ridge AI is that despite having a remarkable open-source project as the technological foundation, the company was crystallized around this concrete and urgent customer problem that the founders personally faced.
While serving as CPO at Salesloft, Ellie wanted to embed powerful, interactive analytics directly into the product: usage dashboards, ROI reports, the kind of data views that build customer confidence and unblock deals. Shockingly, there was nothing on the market that fit the bill. Existing embedded analytics solutions were slow, clunky, and felt like relics of a prior era. The options were either to build something custom (at the expense of precious engineering resources) or settle for a legacy tool that delivered a poor user experience. Neither was acceptable. It’s a problem that virtually every software company with in-product analytics faces.
Enter Ridge AI.
AI That Makes Data Accessible
Ridge AI doesn’t just deliver faster dashboards. The team has infused the solution with AI from the ground up to fundamentally change how end users interact with embedded data.
Ridge’s AI data agents use large language models to profile datasets and answer end-user questions in natural language. When a customer opens a Ridge-powered dashboard embedded in their SaaS application, they can simply ask a question (e.g. “Which user roles have the longest sessions?” or “How does usage vary by department?”) and get an immediate, intelligent answer. The AI automatically applies best practices in data visualization and generates insights, reducing the burden on product teams to anticipate every possible question. This means fewer support tickets, more self-service analytics, and higher customer satisfaction.
This is the kind of product that could only be built right now. The convergence of LLM capabilities, high-performance browser-native computing through WebAssembly, and the Mosaic open-source foundation creates an opportunity that didn’t exist even two years ago.
Ridge’s approach also points toward something bigger. We are rapidly moving toward an AI future where the primary UX for today’s SaaS applications will increasingly become natural language interactions with or through an AI agent. In that world, the ability to query, visualize, and reason over data conversationally isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the foundation of how software will work. Ridge is building the analytics layer that this agentic future demands, one where data is a first-class citizen in every AI-driven interaction.
The Perfect Founder Combination
This is exactly the type of Day 1 investment Madrona loves. Ellie is a product leader who has deep domain experience, has personally felt the customer pain, and is also a hands-on builder. Jeff is a deeply technical co-founder who has created defensible and innovative technology but is also deeply customer-driven, as evidenced by his track record of turning research into commercially successful products.
The embedded analytics market was valued at over $15 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to more than $55 billion by 2030. Current solutions from incumbent vendors were built for a different era. Ridge AI is purpose-built for the modern web, with AI at its core, and we believe it has the potential to define the next generation of embedded analytics.
Madrona has now invested in 25 companies that have spun out directly or indirectly from the University of Washington. Ridge AI is another in that proud tradition, illustrating the innovation, cutting-edge research, and new company formation that continues to emerge from UW. Seattle’s ecosystem of world-class research and entrepreneurial talent remains one of the most vibrant in the world, and we’re thrilled to be supporting it.
Tim and Mark will be working closely with the Ridge AI team. If you’re a software company tired of building dashboards for your customers, visit ridgedata.ai and learn how Ridge can help. The future of embedded analytics starts now.
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