Ridge AI, a company that sells embedded analytics to business software providers, came out of stealth on 6 April 2026 with a $2.6m pre-seed round led by Madrona. TheFounderVC also took part, along with angel investors, according to Madrona's announcement, Pulse 2.0 and Open Source For You.
Madrona's post named three angels: Chris Stolte, a Tableau founder, Carlos Guestrin, who founded Turi, and Adrien Truille, who founded Streamlit. The other reports described the angels as founding leaders from Tableau, Trifacta and Streamlit. No valuation was disclosed.
“We're proud to be backing Ridge AI from Day 1.”Mark Nelson and Tim Porter, Madrona
What Ridge does
Ridge provides embedded analytics and AI data agents that software companies can build into their products for their customers. Pulse 2.0 said it is a browser-based platform that lets those companies deploy interactive dashboards quickly, and that data is processed locally in the browser, giving sub-second interactivity on large datasets without cloud query costs.
It is built on Mosaic, an open-source visualisation framework that uses DuckDB and WebAssembly, according to Madrona. The company claims interactivity on datasets with millions of rows and that product teams can ship customer-facing analytics in hours rather than months.
The AI data agents use large language models to profile datasets and answer end users' questions in natural language, applying visualisation best practice, and users can ask follow-up questions. Pulse 2.0 said Ridge is offering limited beta access and onboarding a small number of teams each week.
The founders
Ellie Fields is co-founder and chief executive. She spent 12 years at Tableau in marketing, engineering and product management, according to Madrona, and was later chief product and engineering officer at Salesloft. Jeffrey Heer is co-founder and chief scientist. He is a computer science professor at the University of Washington and co-director of its Interactive Data Lab, and his work produced D3.js and Vega. Madrona said he co-founded Trifacta, which Alteryx bought for $400m in 2022.
Pulse 2.0 gave Seattle as Ridge's location. The reports reviewed gave no headcount.
Why Madrona backed it
Madrona's post was written by Mark Nelson and Tim Porter. Nelson is a former chief executive of Tableau and chief technology officer of Concur, and Pulse 2.0 listed him as a venture partner at Madrona. The post said Porter and Fields met in business school and later both joined Microsoft, and that Heer and Madrona have known each other for more than a decade.
The post cited a market estimate that embedded analytics was worth more than $15bn in 2022 and could exceed $55bn by 2030. The authors wrote: "We're proud to be backing Ridge AI from Day 1."
What the money is for
None of the reports reviewed gave a use of funds for the pre-seed money. Fields said in the Pulse 2.0 report: "We would spend months building dashboards instead of focusing on what made us different." Ridge's pitch is that software companies can skip that work by embedding its dashboards and agents.
Company website: ridgedata.ai