Former Tableau product chief launches Golden Analytics, using AI to challenge the BI old guard

Francois Ajenstat has been in business intelligence long enough to see two generational shifts, from the early days at Cognos to the self-service revolution at Tableau, ultimately serving as chief product officer at the Seattle-based data visualization company.

Now he’s launching Golden Analytics, a Seattle-based startup built on the premise that a third shift is underway, and the incumbents aren’t in a position to keep up. 

The company emerged from stealth Tuesday with $7 million in seed funding co-led by NEA and Madrona, with participation from Breakers. The company is building a web-based business intelligence and data visualization platform that Ajenstat says combines the analytical depth of Tableau, the design sensibility of Canva, and the AI-powered workflow of Cursor.

“The current leaders in the space are Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and they’re doing a great job. They’re fantastic products, but they’re bolting on AI as opposed to building with AI at the core,” said Ajenstat, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview. “And it just doesn’t feel right.”

Core features: In a demo of Golden Analytics on our call, Ajenstat uploaded a raw e-commerce dataset and had a finished dashboard in two clicks. The platform automatically interpreted the data, surfaced insights, suggested questions, and generated visualizations. 

When he wanted to go deeper, he asked the AI to add a region field to a sales chart, and it complied instantly. He also showed a storytelling agent that generates written narrative analyses, identifying patterns like regional profitability gaps.

Central to the platform is what Ajenstat calls the “slider of autonomy” — users can let the AI do everything, do it all themselves, or land somewhere in between. 

It’s a deliberate contrast to the chatbot-style AI analytics tools that have emerged since ChatGPT, which tend to position themselves as replacements for human analysts. Ajenstat isn’t buying that framing. “It’s about empowering people — whatever they want to do,” he said.

Technical details: The system runs about 120 different large-language model (LLM) calls through an orchestration layer that routes tasks to whichever model fits best, such as Gemini for visual design, Anthropic’s Claude for data analysis, and others. 

Ajenstat calls it a platform of “AI specialists” rather than a single agent.

Golden itself was built entirely using AI coding tools, with a small team of engineers. Ajenstat, a product leader by background, said he is also contributing to the 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, letting individual users adopt the platform before it spreads within their organizations — similar to the path taken by tools like Cursor and Slack. About a dozen early users are already giving feedback, and Ajenstat said general availability is weeks away. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Background: Ajenstat, the startup’s sole founder, is a first-time CEO after a three-decade career in data analytics. He started out at Cognos, one of the original business intelligence companies, then spent a decade 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 fractional chief technology officer. The team includes engineers from Tableau, Snowflake, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies, drawn by the chance to rethink a category they felt had stalled, Ajenstat explained. 

Investors: NEA’s role in the funding is notable. The firm was an early backer of Tableau. After Ajenstat left the company, he spent nearly two years as an NEA venture advisor while also serving as CPO at Amplitude, the San Francisco-based product analytics company. 

The Madrona side of the investment also has deep Tableau ties. Madrona venture partner Mark Nelson served as Tableau’s president and CEO from 2021 to 2022, and managing director Tim Porter has known Ajenstat since his Microsoft SQL Server days.

In a post on LinkedIn, Porter noted that big BI platforms are now controlled by Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google, and have evolved toward the priorities of their parent companies.

“That’s how large organizations work,” Porter wrote. “But it means the analyst — the person actually doing the work — has been an afterthought for a while now.”

It’s the second analytics startup with deep Tableau roots to emerge this week.

On Monday, we reported on Ridge AI, led by former Tableau product leader Ellie Fields and UW professor Jeffrey Heer, also backed by Madrona’s Porter and Nelson. Ridge is focused on embedded analytics for SaaS companies, a different market than Golden’s broader BI play.