What AI-native analytics startups offer that BI vendors don't

AI-driven challenges -- and more challengers

Earlier this year, both Tableau and Qlik named new top executives and shifted their BI strategies toward agentic analytics. In July, Domo agreed to be acquired by Progress Software for $400 million, less than 20% of its peak valuation. ThoughtSpot has seen GenAI erode its key differentiator -- a natural language search capability built into its BI software from the start; it now positions the software as an agentic analytics platform.

While the challenges some BI vendors face stem in part from internal issues, they are all now contending with the same core problem: keeping current customers satisfied while pivoting toward AI technologies that have radically changed the BI process.

To add to their troubles, two AI-native analytics startups, both founded by experienced BI leaders, are gaining increased attention from venture capital investors and early users:

• Golden Analytics emerged from stealth in April and launched a public beta of its AI-native analytics platform in June. Led by CEO Francois Ajenstat, former chief product officer at Tableau and analytics vendor Amplitude, Golden has raised $21 million in two rounds of seed funding this year.
• Gravity launched Orion, an autonomous AI analyst tool, in September 2025 and announced a second funding round in April, taking its total funding to $10 million. It was co-founded by CEO Lucas Thelosen and CTO Drew Gillson, former product leaders at Google and Looker, a BI vendor Google bought in 2020.

These startups aim to inherit segments of the user communities created in the self-service BI era, without being weighed down by the renewal revenue that obliges incumbent vendors to preserve existing workflows for their installed bases. Golden and Gravity are freer to innovate as a result, which could help build their user bases.

Golden's aim: More effective analytics through AI

In a briefing I had with Ajenstat recently, he emphasized Golden's freedom from legacy technology and its embrace of GenAI. Multiple large language models are at the core of its platform, whereas established BI vendors are attaching LLM technology to products that predate it.

Golden generates data visualizations and text-based analytical narratives in response to user questions. Through a "slider of autonomy" control, individual users can decide how much the software does on its own. This reflects Golden's focus on enabling data analysts to work more efficiently and productively. That marketing message is directly targeted at Tableau users -- particularly the many who feel underserved by the BI vendor under parent company Salesforce, which acquired Tableau in 2019.

For data governance, Golden relies on transparency and human control. For example, any chart exposes the SQL code that queries the cloud data warehouse the software is connected to. Typically, that's Snowflake, but Golden also supports other data platforms, such as Databricks, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift.

Gravity's Orion: A virtual analytics co-worker

In contrast to Golden's focus on accelerating analytics work by individual BI users, Gravity's Orion software is an agentic analytics system for the enterprise. In a briefing, Thelosen told me that Orion is built to act as a virtual co-worker of data analysts. It uses multiple agents to handle both recurring data analysis tasks and heavier-duty analytics work, such as ad hoc deep dives, root cause analysis and anomaly detection. Data teams act as "conductors" who direct the system's work, Thelosen said.

But instead of answering questions framed and posed by an analyst, Orion investigates data unprompted. For example, it might detect a drop in revenue, trace the issue to one country and a single day, and then assess whether that's a genuine insight or an anomaly due to a data quality problem. Based on its findings, Orion delivers tailored reports, slide decks and dashboards to data analysts or business users.

Supported data sources include BigQuery, Looker, Snowflake, Databricks, PostgreSQL and other platforms. Gravity designed Orion to be cautious about its own discoveries: built-in quality assurance agents interrogate every analytics result and document the sources and the steps the system takes so that data teams using the software can review its findings.

AI-native analytics and the data analyst

Large organizations are already trying out these newcomers. Ajenstat said 20% of Golden's nearly 1,000 early-access requests came from the Fortune 500, and Thelosen said Gravity is making strong inroads with publicly traded companies.

But such customers are unlikely to fully migrate their analytics environments to AI-native platforms. Just as there is still a market for data warehouses after several decades, there will still be a market for existing BI tools that deliver repeatable dashboards and reports used to track KPIs and strategic indicators.

Nor are autonomous AI tools likely to completely take over higher-level analytics functions anytime soon. Golden recognizes this by supporting fully manual data exploration at one end of its slider of autonomy. An FAQ section on Gravity's homepage includes a telling question: Does Orion replace my data team? The answer is plain enough: No. Orion handles the routine analysis that consumes your data team's time ... so they can focus on strategic work. Think of it as adding a tireless senior analyst to the team, not replacing the team.

At the same time, actual senior analysts who honed their skills with self-service BI tools are not so tireless. Many are now actively looking to use these new AI-native analytics tools to support the next phase of their working practice. It's accelerating a fundamental shift for BI, one that's comparable to the transformation at the start of the self-service era -- and could become even more disruptive.

Donald Farmer is a data strategist with 30+ years of experience, including as a product team leader at Microsoft and Qlik. He advises global clients on data, analytics, AI and innovation strategy, with expertise spanning from tech giants to startups. He lives in an experimental woodland home near Seattle.