Former Tableau product manager launches Golden Analytics, which uses AI to challenge the old guard of BI
Francois Ajenstat has been in business intelligence long enough to see two creative shifts, from the early days at Cognos to the self-service revolution at Tableau, ending up as chief product officer at a Seattle-based data visualization company.
Now he’s launching Golden Analytics, a Seattle-based startup built on the premise that the third revolution is underway, and the incumbents are in no position to continue.
The company emerged from Stealth Tuesday with $7 million in seed funding led by NEA and Madrona, with participation from Breaker. The company builds a web-based business intelligence and data visualization platform Ajenstat that it says combines the analytical depth of Tableau, the design insights of Canva, and the AI-enabled workflow of Cursor.
“The current leaders in the space are Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and they are doing a great job. They are good products, but they are putting AI as opposed to building with AI in the context,” said Ajenstat, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview. “And it doesn’t feel right.”
Important features: In the Golden Analytics demo on our phone, Ajenstat loaded a raw e-commerce dataset and had a dashboard completed with two clicks. The platform automatically interpreted data, surfaced information, suggested questions, and built visualizations.
When he wanted to go deeper, he asked the AI to add a region field to the sales chart, and it agreed right away. He also demonstrated a storytelling agent that performs written narrative analysis, identifying patterns such as regional benefit gaps.
Key to the platform is what Ajenstat calls the “autonomy slider” – users can let AI do everything, do it themselves, or stay somewhere in between.
It is deliberately different from the chatbot-style AI analytics tools that have emerged since ChatGPT, which often replace human analysts. Ajenstat does not buy such framing. “It’s about empowering people — whatever they want to do,” she said.
Technical details: The program uses about 120 calls to a large-scale language model (LLM) through an orchestration layer that moves tasks to any model that fits best, such as Gemini for visual design, Anthropic’s Claude for data analysis, and others.
Ajenstat calls itself a platform for “AI experts” rather than a single agent.
Golden itself was built entirely using AI coding tools, with a small team of developers. Ajenstat, the domain’s product leader, said he also contributes to development using Cursor and Claude Code. “It’s empowering to see how quickly you can build in this era.”
Availability: The company plans to follow a product-led growth model, allowing individual users to use the platform before it spreads within their organizations – similar to the approach taken by tools like Cursor and Slack. About a dozen early adopters are already giving feedback, and Ajenstat said general availability is weeks away. The price was not disclosed.
Background: Ajenstat, the startup’s sole founder, is the first CEO after a decade-long career in data analytics. He started at Cognos, one of the first business intelligence companies, and then spent ten years at Microsoft in product roles across SQL Server and Office.
He spent 13 years at Tableau, rising from senior director of product management to chief product officer, a role he held for more than seven years, helping guide the company through its IPO and its $15.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in 2019.
Golden has five full-time employees and a chief technology officer. The team includes engineers from Tableau, Snowflake, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies, who had the opportunity to rethink a category they felt was stagnant, Ajenstat explained.
Investors: NEA’s role in funding is evident. The company was an early sponsor of Tableau. After Ajenstat left the company, he spent nearly two years as a business consultant for NEA while serving as CPO at Amplitude, a San Francisco product analytics firm.
Madrona’s side of the investment also has deep ties to Tableau. Madrona partner Mark Nelson served as president and CEO of Tableau from 2021 to 2022, and managing director Tim Porter knows Ajenstat from his Microsoft SQL Server days.
In a post on LinkedIn, Porter noted that the major BI platforms are now dominated by Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google, and have evolved into a priority for their parent companies.
“That’s how great organizations work,” Porter wrote. “But it means that the analyst – the person doing the work – has been around for a while now.”
The start of the second deep-rooted Tableau calculation to appear this week.
On Monday, we reported on Ridge AI, led by former Tableau product leader Ellie Fields and UW professor Jeffrey Heer, who is also backed by Madrona’s Porter and Nelson. Ridge focuses on embedded analytics for SaaS companies, a different market than Golden’s broader BI play.
