Databricks Acquires Row Zero to Bring Spreadsheets Into Its AI Platform

Databricks has acquired Seattle-based startup Row Zero, a move that will bring the company’s cloud-based spreadsheet technology into Databricks’ AI platform and Genie AI coworker. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Breck Fresen, Row Zero Founder and CEO, said the startup’s product will continue to remain available to existing customers while its engineering team works on integrating the technology across Databricks.

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"What is changing is the speed at which we’ll be able to put Row Zero in the hands of customers. Databricks serves 20,000+ organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 500. Row Zero’s engineers are already hard at work integrating Row Zero throughout the Databricks platform," he said.

Databricks plans to integrate Row Zero into Genie, allowing finance, operations, sales and marketing teams to work with enterprise data through a familiar spreadsheet interface.

The integration is designed to let users analyse, model and visualise data while keeping it connected to governed enterprise data rather than moving it into separate spreadsheet files.

The acquisition also reflects Databricks’ broader push to combine AI agents with tools already used by business teams. Row Zero’s spreadsheet allows both humans and agents to work with large datasets while maintaining security, governance and auditability.

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What is Row Zero?

Founded in 2021 by former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineers Breck Fresen and Nick End, Row Zero is a cloud-based alternative to traditional spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets.

"When we started Row Zero, we saw an opportunity to build a new spreadsheet that would let business users in Finance, Operations, Sales, and Marketing work with large datasets using the spreadsheet skills they already have," End said.

Its platform can handle datasets far larger than conventional spreadsheets and connects directly to data warehouses, including Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, and BigQuery.

The startup had raised $13 million before the acquisition. Its most recent $10 million funding round, announced in May 2025, was led by IA Ventures and Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Founders’ Co-op, Ludlow Ventures, K9 Ventures, Functional Capital and others.

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