All-star data visualization raises $2.6M for Ridge AI to solve SaaS applications analytics problem
Ellie Fields and Jeffrey Heer know how to visualize data from the inside: Fields spent more than 12 years as a product and marketing leader at Tableau, and Heer is a professor at the University of Washington whose open source tools are widely used in web-based visualization.
But as they and their colleagues pushed the field forward, they couldn’t escape the same conclusion: presenting and analyzing data on the web is still broken.
Their solution: Ridge AI, a Seattle-based startup that uses AI and browser-based technology to help its software companies roll out interactive dashboards and data agents in hours instead of days or months, embedding them directly into their products for their customers to use.
The company calls its main product “ridge” – a dashboard and data agent that share a common data set, allowing users to find visual content on the dashboard and ask follow-up questions through the agent.
Sponsorship: Ridge AI comes out of stealth Monday with $2.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Madrona. The Seattle-based company’s investment was led by Managing Director Tim Porter and Venture Partner Mark Nelson, former CEO of Tableau.
Joining the funding is a list of angel investors that reads like a who’s who of analytics, AI and data: Chris Stolte, Tableau founder and former CTO; Carlos Guestrin, founder of Turi and director of Stanford’s AI Lab; Adrien Treuille, founder of Streamlit; Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau; and Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera, among others.
Target market: While their technology may be widely used, Ridge AI is primarily focused initially on providing software as a service (SaaS) companies, giving them a way to deliver rich, interactive analytics to the people and businesses that use their products.
In an interview, Fields said demand is particularly high when a SaaS company tries to renew a customer’s contract. A product may deliver real results, but if the people making the buying decision can’t see that in the data, the deal could be in jeopardy.
“The CFO will ask, is anyone using this?” Fields said, calling it one of the cases where Ridge AI technology can be of great value to SaaS companies.
The pressure to ensure this value has intensified amid the so-called “SaaS-pocalypse,” as companies pool their software capital and the proliferation of custom AI-coded applications has many of them questioning whether existing tools should be preserved.
They solve it: Madrona’s Nelson said he ran into a big problem during his time as CTO of Concur, when the company built an analytics product on top of IBM Cognos, giving customers the ability to get information about 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 heavy business intelligence platforms like Tableau and Power BI, specialized embedded analytics tools, or build their own. Fields said none of these options are purpose-built for the problem Ridge solves.
Founders: Ridge AI was co-founded by Fields, who serves as CEO, and Heer, a senior scientist, who will continue as a UW professor in addition to working at the company.
Also on the team: Andy Caley, a founding engineer formerly at Tableau, and Fritz Lekschas, a founding research engineer with a Ph.D. from Harvard and over 20 publications in data visualization.
Fields and Heer are presented by Madrona’s Nelson and Porter. Nelson had known Fields since working for him at Tableau and had kept in touch with Heer separately through his UW work. Porter, on the other hand, had attended Stanford Business School through Fields.
“I can’t think of two people I like more, and would bet more on, than Jeff and Ellie,” Nelson said, describing the pairing as an example of what’s possible in Seattle’s tight-knit tech community.
Heer 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 for data visualization, including Vega(-Lite), D3.js, and the Mosaic framework that serves as the technical foundation for Ridge AI.
Fields joined Tableau as its first product marketer and rose to senior vice president of product development over 12 years, from the company’s IPO and acquisition by Salesforce. He went on to serve as chief product and engineering officer at SalesLoft, where he saw firsthand the problem Ridge is now trying to solve.
Technology: Ridge runs on the user’s web browser instead of a remote server, using Heer’s open source Mosaic framework and an in-browser database called DuckDB. Those features bring closer collaboration and mean the embedded software company doesn’t have to pay cloud computing costs for all the dashboard interactions.
On the creative side, AI agents handle visual design, so product managers can define 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 few years before expanding, noting that the market has historically been less active.
The company has been working with a small number of pilot customers, and is now inviting more companies to the closed beta, accepting applications at ridgedata.ai.
