Databricks announced on Thursday that it has acquired an early-stage spreadsheet startup referred to as Row Zero.
The story goes that Databricks’ finance staff fell in love with Row Zero as a result of it was a cloud instrument that would scale past 1 million reside spreadsheet rows. They had been combining Row Zero with Databricks’ homegrown AI agent referred to as Genie. With Genie, Databricks customers can use natural-language prompts to ask sophisticated enterprise questions of their knowledge saved in Databricks techniques, comparable to analyzing revenue margins or the standing of gross sales prospects.
When the chief staff requested the finance staff about this cloud instrument they had been utilizing, a lightweight bulb went off.
“Spreadsheets are one such interface that each enterprise analyst loves. So it makes numerous sense to intermarry Enterprise Intelligence (BI), Brokers, and Spreadsheets!” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi posted on X about how the acquisition went down.
So an enterprise’s safe knowledge lives in Databricks’ cloud storage, and AI brokers and people work together with it by means of the spreadsheet format and formulation they know properly, somewhat than utilizing and studying another enterprise intelligence software program. By integrating Row Zero with Databricks, the info may be manipulated in a spreadsheet type however stay safe, somewhat than transferred to an insecure spreadsheet that’s shared round.
Phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed. Row Zero, based by former AWS and Tableau engineers, raised $10 million in Might 2025, at an estimated $40 million valuation on the time, in line with PitchBook.
Databricks, which closed one other $5 billion in funding in August and hit $7 billion in annualized income run price, has been busy procuring in 2026 and is raring to maintain doing so. “We intend to do many extra acquisitions like this sooner or later,” Ghodsi instructed TechCrunch.
In March, Databricks purchased two startups, Quotient AI, which does analysis and reinforcement studying for AI brokers, and really early-stage interactive pocket book SiftD.ai. In June, the corporate purchased AI safety operations center startup Panther, beforehand valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Final month, it bought Electric, makers of a small, lite Postgres database often called PGlite, helpful for brokers working domestically on units.
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