Startups & Funding
Databricks buys spreadsheet startup Row Zero, eyes more M&A
Databricks acquired early-stage spreadsheet startup Row Zero and says it plans many more acquisitions as it builds out its AI-agent platform.
Databricks announced on Thursday that it has acquired early-stage spreadsheet startup Row Zero, its latest in a string of 2026 acquisitions. The deal traces back to Databricks’ own finance team, which had started using Row Zero — a cloud tool that can scale beyond 1 million live spreadsheet rows — and combined it with Genie, Databricks’ homegrown AI agent that lets users ask complex business questions, like profit margins or the status of sales prospects, in natural language over data stored in Databricks systems. When the executive team asked the finance team about the tool, it prompted what CEO Ali Ghodsi described as a lightbulb moment.
Ghodsi wrote on X that spreadsheets are an interface every business analyst loves, making it logical to combine business intelligence, agents, and spreadsheets. By integrating Row Zero with Databricks, an enterprise’s data can be manipulated in spreadsheet form while staying inside Databricks’ secure cloud storage, rather than being exported into an insecure spreadsheet that gets shared around — letting AI agents and humans interact with the data through a familiar format instead of separate BI software.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Row Zero, founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers, raised $10 million in May 2025 at an estimated $40 million valuation at the time, according to PitchBook.
Databricks, which closed another $5 billion in funding in August and has hit a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate, has been busy shopping throughout 2026 and is eager to keep doing so. “We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch. In March, the company bought two startups — Quotient AI, which does evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and early-stage interactive-notebook startup SiftD.ai. In June, it bought AI security operations center startup Panther, previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, it bought Electric, maker of PGlite, a small, lite Postgres database useful for AI agents running locally on devices.
Why it matters
Databricks folding a spreadsheet tool into its AI-agent stack signals enterprise AI vendors are competing less on raw model capability and more on which familiar interface — spreadsheets, chat, dashboards — convinces business users to trust an agent with their data.