She is trying to delete the most expensive bottleneck in modern business: the data team you can never book a meeting with. Her answer is Redbird - ask a question in plain English, get the analysis back.
In most large companies there is a small, overworked group of people who can actually answer a data question - and a much larger group who has to wait in line for them. Erin Tavgac built her company around erasing that line. Redbird, the New York startup she co-founded and runs as CEO, is an AI-powered analytics platform that lets anyone in an organization automate and unify their analytics work in minutes, without writing a line of code. It plugs into a company's data sources and runs the whole chain: data prep, wrangling, analysis, reporting, and data science.
By 2024 the pitch had a sharper edge. Redbird launched a conversational AI platform built on what it calls specialist agents - software workers that handle data collection, engineering, SQL analysis, data science, and reporting through plain chat. Tavgac's claim is blunt: those agents now cover more than 90% of an enterprise's business intelligence effort. The promise that Tableau, Looker, and PowerBI made for years - real self-serve analytics - is the promise she says legacy tools never actually kept.
The company runs inside a customer's own cloud, on the customer's own data, which is how you sell software to eight of the Fortune 50 and a list of U.S. government organizations without setting off the security team. Redbird grew its customer count sevenfold after a single seed round. Not bad for a company that started life under a different name entirely.
Users can finally achieve self-serve, conversational BI that runs on their organization's data.- Erin Tavgac, on fusing LLMs with Redbird's toolkit
The shortest version of Erin Tavgac's resume explains the whole company. She studied Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, then went to McKinsey & Company as a consultant. From there came a director role at NM Incite, the Nielsen-McKinsey joint venture chasing social intelligence. She made partner at Converseon, leading its consulting and insights group, and then served as President of Mesh Experience.
Across all of it she was doing one thing over and over: helping big companies stand up data analytics capabilities and run data science initiatives. She saw, up close and on repeat, the gap between the questions executives wanted answered and the engineering capacity available to answer them. Redbird is that frustration turned into a product.
She did not build it alone. Redbird is a sibling operation - Erin is CEO, and Deren Tavgac, a former Chief Product Officer at Saks Fifth Avenue, is COO. The market they pointed at: the million-plus organizations running analytics software without the data engineering teams to feed it.
BS in Management Science and Engineering.
Plus a director role at NM Incite, the Nielsen-McKinsey social intelligence venture.
Led the consulting and insights group.
Running consumer-insights work for enterprise clients.
Redbird (then Cube Analytics) graduates, then raises a $7.6M seed.
Specialist AI agents launch; eight Fortune 50 brands on board.
Enterprise deployments run on-premises inside the organization's own cloud. The proprietary data never leaves. That single design choice is what makes Fortune 50 and government deals possible.
Instead of another dashboard, Redbird ships agents that collect, engineer, analyze, and report. Admins load business logic, data definitions, and reporting blueprints so the answers are right, not just fast.
The company's stated superpower is speed: prioritize rigorously, listen to customers, execute the product vision rapidly. When generative AI arrived, Redbird folded a decade of tooling into agents rather than starting over.
Choose your early customers wisely, meet with them regularly, and do things that don't scale. Your future customers will thank you.- The Redbird founders' advice to other builders
Redbird was originally called Cube Analytics. Same mission, new feathers.
It's a family business: CEO Erin and COO Deren Tavgac run it together, with a Saks Fifth Avenue product pedigree on the COO side.
The goal Tavgac keeps returning to: make business intelligence as easy as a Google search.
Backers include Thomson Reuters Ventures and Soma Capital - a media giant and a founder-heavy fund in the same round.
Redbird is actively onboarding major U.S. government organizations, not just corporates.
The original target market: 1M+ companies that own analytics software but lack the engineers to run it.
Tavgac's ambition is not modest. She wants to take the kind of analysis that used to require a Stanford engineer, a McKinsey deck, and a quarter of waiting - and hand it to anyone who can type a question. If the agents really do cover 90% of business intelligence, the analyst stops being a bottleneck and becomes an editor. That is the future Redbird is selling: not fewer questions, but far fewer reasons to wait for the answer.