At Madrona, we believe that the best investments happen when an exceptional founder meets a pivotal market moment — and when that founder is uniquely positioned to see what others can’t. That’s exactly the case with Francois Ajenstat and Golden Analytics.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Golden Analytics, which is building an AI-native platform for the full cycle of data exploration and analysis. Golden has raised a $7M seed round co-led by Madrona and NEA.
The Third Generation of BI
For thirty years, business intelligence tools have promised to bring data to the heart of decision-making. The first generation delivered on that promise for IT: Cognos and Business Objects built the infrastructure for data reporting at scale. The second generation democratized exploration: Tableau, Power BI, and Looker put powerful tools directly in analysts’ hands and changed how companies related to their data.
But those second-generation platforms are now aging inside the larger organizations that acquired them. Tableau belongs to Salesforce. Power BI is a feature of Microsoft Fabric. Looker is part of Google Cloud. Each has evolved toward the needs of the enterprise that owns it, not the analyst who uses it. They were built for a pre-AI world, and you can’t retrofit your way into a new era.
Even at their height, these tools only solved part of the problem. Working with data has never been a simple act of asking a question and getting an answer. It’s an iterative cycle: find the data, clean and shape it, analyze it, let the answer surface a deeper question, and start again. That cycle has always involved too many tools, too much manual work, and too much time between insight and action. AI creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the entire loop, not just the visualization at the end.
That’s the opportunity Golden Analytics is built to seize.
The Right Founder for This Moment
Francois Ajenstat has lived every generation of this market from the inside. He built first-generation BI at Cognos. He worked on the analytics services of SQL Server that later evolved into PowerBI at Microsoft. Then he spent over 13 years leading product management at Tableau, where he became the face of the product to the global community of data analysts. Francois established a peerless position of trust and closeness with the analyst community, demonstrating a genuine understanding the art and science of their work.
That background gives Francois the rare authority to understand what’s broken for this community, and the credibility to be believed when he proposes what comes next. Francois is already a well-known character in the data analyst community. They know Francois, they’ve followed his career, and many have been waiting for him to build something new. That kind of deep trust is something that Francois has earned over thirty years of participating within this community, and is an opportunity to deliver a meaningful solution that competitors will find hard to displace.
Madrona’s connection to Francois runs deep and personal. Ted Kummert and Tim Porter worked alongside him at Microsoft. Mark worked directly with Francois at Tableau, including through the sale to Salesforce. When Francois called Mark to demo his first prototype, we were in immediately.
What Golden Is Building
Golden Analytics is designed from the ground up for the AI era. More than an AI layer on top of a legacy product, Golden is a rethinking of the entire analytical experience.
The platform meets analysts at every stage of the data cycle: helping find the right data, shaping and transforming it, surfacing insights, and making the results beautiful and shareable.
Crucially, Golden is built around what Francois calls a “slider of autonomy”: AI can handle the mechanical drudgery in full autopilot, or an experienced analyst can stay in complete control, with every configuration in between. The goal isn’t to replace analytical judgment; it’s to remove everything that gets in the way of it. And while everything in Golden is infused with AI, it goes well beyond asking AI to analyze data for you. It combines an opinionated framework on how great data analysis is done with the power of AI to help with the work and the right points for human feedback to guide the process to the right answers and insights.
This is the vision Francois describes as the Third Generation of analytics: not making data possible, not making it accessible, but making it genuinely useful and insightful to everyone who needs it, and to do so without sacrificing the depth that serious analysts demand.
Why We’re Excited
Madrona has been investing in data companies for decades, and we’ve watched every layer of the stack evolve. We’ve been waiting for the right founder to address what AI now makes possible for the people who actually work with data every day. The installed base of legacy tool users alone represents millions of data professionals who are underserved by tools that haven’t fundamentally changed in years. The market is large, the timing is right, and the founder is uniquely exceptional.
Mark and Tim will be working closely with Francois and the team, with support from across Madrona. With our shared history in data infrastructure and our firsthand experience building alongside Francois, we couldn’t be more excited to help him bring about the Golden Era of analytics.
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