Spreadsheets are coming to Databricks. The data company has acquired Row Zero, a startup whose spreadsheet connects directly to live company data and works with billions of rows. The price was not disclosed.
Row Zero was founded by Breck Fresen, with a team from AWS and Tableau. It keeps the formulas, pivot tables and keyboard shortcuts people know from Excel and Google Sheets, but pulls data straight from secured company systems instead of from exported files.
Why it matters
Business analysts still live in spreadsheets, and every exported copy of company data is one more copy that goes stale or ends up where it should not. Databricks is betting that its AI assistant, Genie, is more useful when people can move from asking questions in chat to checking and reshaping the answer in a familiar grid, with the data still under the company's access rules.
TechCrunch reports that Databricks' own finance team found Row Zero and tried it with Genie first. CEO Ali Ghodsi told the publication that "spreadsheets are one such interface that every business analyst loves."
More deals ahead
Databricks says Row Zero will be available to all its customers on every major cloud and will keep working with data sources outside Databricks.
The company was valued at $190 billion after a $5 billion round in August, according to TechCrunch, and has bought several startups this year, including Panther in June. Ghodsi told TechCrunch that Databricks intends to do "many more acquisitions like this."
