When Michael Ritchie talks about building analytics startups, he speaks from scars, not theory. His first venture, SeekWell, started as a side project after watching a CFO struggle to get simple numbers into a spreadsheet. Despite “technically” having access to all the data, the finance team couldn’t easily use it. SeekWell solved that problem, became one of the early leaders in the emerging “reverse ETL” category, and eventually was acquired by ThoughtSpot.
Ritchie spent a year inside ThoughtSpot, one of the biggest independent BI players in the market, integrating SeekWell’s tech and watching how enterprises struggled with data. That year crystallized what would become his next company.
From Five Vendors to One
At ThoughtSpot, Ritchie watched customers spend months cobbling together warehouses, pipelines, and tools just to answer basic business questions. To him, the fragmentation didn’t make sense.
“You needed five vendors stitched together to make it work,” he said. “For most companies, that should really just be one.”
That “one” became Definite, an AI-native data platform that collapses the modern data stack into a single product. Instead of Snowflake here, Fivetran there, Tableau on top, and countless engineering hours in between, Definite spins up a complete environment in minutes.
The centerpiece is Fi, an AI agent named after Ritchie’s daughter Serafina. Fi doesn’t just generate SQL or spit out a chart. She spans the entire workflow: connectors, transformations, analysis, dashboards.
“Snowflake’s agent can write SQL. Tableau’s can make a report. Fi can run the whole process end to end.”
Fixing Self-Serve Analytics
If “self-serve analytics” has become one of tech’s most overused promises, Ritchie is quick to point out why. Most AI copilots either lack access to the right data or drown in too much of it.
“Companies take a warehouse with thousands of tables, point an agent at it, and then ask big questions. You end up with wrong answers,” he explained. “That’s a context problem. Which column is ‘revenue’? Is it ARR? Is it MRR? The AI has no reason to know.”
Definite solves this with a semantic layer. A curated map of metrics and relationships that functions as the system’s source of truth.
“That’s where we pull the human in the loop,” Ritchie said. “Whatever’s in the semantic layer is the gold standard. That’s how Fi can give reliable answers.”
Why Investors Moved Fast
In August 2025, Definite announced a $10 million seed round led by Costanoa Ventures and Acrew Capital. The speed of the raise surprised even seasoned investors.
Being a second-time founder helped, Ritchie admits, but the broader reality is that nearly every SaaS and fintech company in VC portfolios wrestles with the same pain.
“Our ICP is FinTech and B2B SaaS. These companies have budget, they need analytics, and they’re growing fast enough to feel the pain. Every investor we spoke with had multiple portfolio companies dealing with this exact problem.”
That resonance made the pitch straightforward: what now takes six months and millions of dollars should take five minutes.
The Philosophy: SaaS with Open Source Bones
Definite is built on modern open-source infrastructure like DuckDB and Apache Iceberg. But unlike open-core companies that blur the line between free and
paid, Ritchie’s philosophy is crisp.
“We’re a SaaS company. You pay for Definite, and you get the product,” he said. “At the same time, we contribute back heavily to the projects we use. That’s a cleaner model, customers pay for value, and the ecosystem benefits.”
Definite has already contributed code to DuckDB’s Iceberg connector and is among the heaviest users of its ETL framework outside the core maintainers.
The Road Ahead
Definite today delivers what Ritchie describes as “a really solid data analyst” through Fi. But that’s just the beginning.
“The next step is expanding her skillset,” he explained. “Right now she’s a great analyst. Next, we’re training her to be a great data engineer and a great data scientist.”
That means Fi won’t just answer questions, but will architect data pipelines, train models, and automate advanced workflows. Alongside that, Definite is investing in hardening its data lake for scale and performance, making open-source infrastructure enterprise-ready.
For Ritchie, the arc from SeekWell to Definite isn’t just another founder’s pivot. It’s a deliberate strike at the inefficiency he’s seen firsthand across fintech, SaaS, and beyond.
If SeekWell solved the CFO’s spreadsheet, Definite aims higher: compressing the modern data stack into a single, AI-powered product. Where it once took armies of engineers and months of work, Ritchie believes it should now take minutes.
And if he’s right, Definite won’t just be another tool in the stack. It will be the stack.
