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Databricks Acquires Spreadsheet Startup Row Zero, Plans Further Acquisitions

Databricks has acquired Row Zero, a spreadsheet startup, to link secure enterprise data and AI agents with familiar spreadsheet tools. Terms were not disclosed. Databricks says it plans more acquisitions.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-25 03:41

Databricks' finance team had adopted Row Zero because it is a cloud tool that can scale beyond one million live spreadsheet rows. The team was combining Row Zero with Genie, Databricks' homegrown AI agent, which lets users ask complicated business questions of data stored in Databricks systems through natural-language prompts. Those questions can include analyzing profit margins or the status of sales prospects. When the executive team asked the finance team about the cloud tool it was using, the acquisition idea took shape.

'Spreadsheets are one such interface that every business analyst loves. So it makes a lot of sense to intermarry Business Intelligence (BI), Agents, and Spreadsheets!' Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi posted on X. Under the combination, an enterprise's secure data would remain in Databricks cloud storage, while AI agents and humans interact with it through spreadsheet formats and formulas they already know, rather than through another business intelligence product. Integrating Row Zero with Databricks would let users manipulate data in spreadsheet form while keeping it secure, instead of moving it into an insecure spreadsheet that is shared around.

Row Zero was founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers and raised $10 million in May 2025 at an estimated $40 million valuation at the time, according to PitchBook. Databricks closed another $5 billion in funding in August and reached a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate. The company has been acquiring startups in 2026. In March it bought Quotient AI, which does evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and SiftD.ai, a very early-stage interactive notebook. In June it bought Panther, an AI security operations center startup previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month it bought Electric, maker of a small, lite Postgres database known as PGlite that is useful for agents running locally on devices.

'We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future,' Ghodsi told TechCrunch.