On Thursday, Databricks revealed its acquisition of Row Zero, a budding startup focused on spreadsheet technology.
The finance team at Databricks was particularly drawn to Row Zero for its cloud-based tool that can effectively handle over a million active spreadsheet rows. They are planning to integrate Row Zero with Genie, an in-house AI agent developed by Databricks. This combination allows users to utilize natural language to pose complex business inquiries regarding their data stored within the Databricks ecosystem, addressing issues like profit margin assessments and sales prospect evaluations.
When executives learned about the finance team’s enthusiasm for this cloud tool, it sparked a significant insight.
“Spreadsheets are a preferred interface among business analysts, making it a logical choice to blend Business Intelligence (BI), AI agents, and spreadsheets,” remarked Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi on X, reflecting on the acquisition process.
With this integration, secure enterprise data is housed in Databricks’ cloud infrastructure, allowing both AI agents and users to interact with it through a familiar spreadsheet format. This setup ensures data remains secure, avoiding the risks associated with transferring it to less secure shared spreadsheets.
Details of the acquisition deal have not been disclosed. Row Zero, launched by former engineers from AWS and Tableau, raised $10 million in May 2025, reaching an estimated valuation of $40 million, according to PitchBook records.
Databricks, which secured an additional $5 billion in funding in August and achieved a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate, is actively pursuing more acquisitions. “We plan to pursue many more deals like this moving forward,” Ghodsi communicated to TechCrunch.
Earlier this year, Databricks acquired Quotient AI, focused on AI evaluation and reinforcement learning, as well as the initial-stage interactive notebook SiftD.ai. In June, the firm acquired Panther, an AI security operations center startup that was valued at approximately $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, the company added Electric, known for its compact Postgres database called PGlite, useful for deploying AI agents on local devices.
