Nazli Tan has spent enough time staring at dashboards to know they might be the problem.
At FreshDirect, then later running US operations at the rapid-delivery startup Getir, she watched growth teams drown in fragmented analytics—product data in one system, marketing attribution in another, financial metrics somewhere else entirely. The promise of data-driven decision-making often meant weeks of wrangling spreadsheets before anyone could act.
So when Tan and three co-founders launched Hilbert last year, they made a bet that might sound audacious, or perhaps obvious depending on where you sit: What if the future of growth analytics involved fewer dashboards, not more? What if you could just ask your system what to do next—and have it actually do it?
In April 2026, that bet netted the San Francisco-based startup $28 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz. TIBAS Ventures joined the round, along with earlier backers Asylum Ventures and ScaleX Ventures, who quietly supported an undisclosed pre-seed round last May.
The company already counts Walmart, FreshDirect, Blank Street, and Levain among its customers—a roster mixing legacy retail with fast-scaling consumer brands, the kinds of companies perpetually recalibrating their growth engines in real time.
The Conversational Growth Stack
Hilbert's pitch centers on what the company calls "agentic growth infrastructure," a term that's appearing with increasing frequency in venture circles this year. The idea, stripped of jargon: unify all your fragmented data sources, then layer on AI that doesn't just surface insights but executes on them. Type a question in plain English—"Why did acquisition costs spike in the Northeast last week?"—and the system not only answers but can trigger budget reallocations or adjust CRM workflows without requiring a data scientist in the loop.
It's automation, certainly. But Hilbert frames it as something closer to delegation. Growth teams, the thinking goes, shouldn't be navigating dashboards; they should be directing an intelligent system that handles the tedious parts. The company's marketing materials promise decision cycles measured in minutes, not months.
Whether that vision holds up under scrutiny—or becomes another layer of complexity disguised as simplification—is the kind of question that won't be answered by a funding announcement. Still, the early traction with household names suggests the message is landing.
Hilbert isn't alone in this territory. Earlier this year, Firsthand pulled in $26 million for a similar premise: AI agents that automate brand and marketing workflows. The momentum points to investor appetite for tools that cross the line from analysis to action, a shift that could redefine how marketers and growth leads spend their days. Or it could just be the latest iteration of predictive analytics with a sleeker interface. Time, as they say, will tell.
A Team Built on Operational Scars
Beyond Tan, who serves as CEO, the founding team includes chief strategy officer Ceyda Erten (also a Getir alum, where she led transformation efforts), along with co-founders Murat Cenk Batman and Özgür Akaoğlu. The company has a presence across three cities—San Francisco, Istanbul, and Amsterdam—and has assembled a team drawing from Google, Nillion Labs, PwC, and Citi, with academic roots at MIT, NYU, Georgetown, Northwestern, and others. LinkedIn pegs the headcount in the 11-50 range, though recent job postings suggest aggressive hiring across AI engineering and go-to-market roles.
It's a founding team shaped by operational bruises, the kind earned scaling consumer businesses through turbulent growth phases. That experiential knowledge—knowing where dashboards fail in the wild, where budgets leak, where churn signals hide—may prove more valuable than the technology itself.
What Comes Next
With Andreessen Horowitz's backing and a client roster that includes one of the world's largest retailers, Hilbert enters a crowded but evolving market. The company is wagering that B2C brands are exhausted by the proliferation of analytics tools that demand constant attention but rarely drive action on their own.
The "agentic" framing—AI that acts, not just advises—could be a genuine inflection point in how growth teams operate. Or it could be marketing scaffolding around incrementally better predictive models.
What's less ambiguous: the problem Hilbert is addressing is real. Consumer brands are juggling more data sources, more channels, and more real-time demands than their analytics infrastructure was built to handle. If you can consolidate that chaos and make it responsive to plain language, you've solved something meaningful.
Whether Hilbert has actually cracked that, or simply built a more elegant version of the same dashboard trap, is the story still being written. But with Walmart already testing the premise, the startup has earned the chance to prove it.
