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Databricks acquisition itch still unsatisfied - buys Row Zero Databricks has acquired Row Zero and its spreadsheet technology developed for both human and AI agent users. Row Zero says that it’s a Seattle-based cloud-spreadsheet startup founded in 2021 by former Amazon Web Services engineers Breck Fresen (CEO) and Nick End. They were repeat founders. Their earlier company, Shoefitr, a shoe-fitting startup, was acquired by Amazon in 2015. After that they spent years at AWS: Fresen as a principal engineer on S3, End in product management and later VP of product at Tasso. The starting idea came from their own frustration analyzing large datasets in Excel and Google Sheets, which top out around a million rows and force insecure CSV exports. They built a cloud-native spreadsheet that looks like Excel, runs on AWS, can handle hundreds of millions to a billion rows, connects directly to warehouses such as Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Postgres and S3, and supports Python alongside Excel-style formulas. The public product launch came in early 2024. Patrick Wendell, Co-founder and VP of Engineering at Databricks, said: “As more finance, operations, and go-to-market teams adopt Genie, incorporating a seamless spreadsheet experience is a must-have. We’re super excited to bring the Row Zero team to Databricks, helping us continue to evolve Genie’s capabilities to become the go-to AI coworker for every enterprise team.” Databricks is folding Row Zero into Genie, its AI coworker, so Genie gains a familiar spreadsheet interface that business teams can use to explore, model, and collaborate, all on a governed foundation powered by Genie Ontology, Unity Catalog, and Unity Gateway. Spreadsheets were the original data analysis and summation tool, with data warehouses, big data analytics, data lakes and bakehouses being used for the analytics jobs too big for spreadsheets. But spreadsheets were too useful a tool to go away and, as Databricks says, spreadsheets remain the primary engine of business decision-making despite continuous advances in the data and analytics market. Now it’s adding spreadsheet functionality and interface features to its modern Genie AI. And it’s playing the spreadsheets-are insecure-card to to say Genie+Row Zero is better, saying the prevalence of spreadsheets creates major security and governance challenges for the modern enterprise. Teams have long relied on ungoverned spreadsheet files (“spreadmarts”) to store data or to share between humans and agents. Every data export adds to what is arguably the largest set of ungoverned data pipelines in the enterprise. As companies deploy agents that analyze, model, and act on business data, they can't afford to have those agents operating on sensitive data of unknown lineage and quality. So, Databricks implies, buy into the Genie+Row Zero combo because Row Zero offers a scalable spreadsheet that connects directly to live, governed data. This means teams can work the way they always have, backed by built-in security and governance. And because they can work directly with the spreadsheet via Row Zero’s agent tools, every agent action remains fully interpretable and auditable by the business teams using the spreadsheet's syntax and processing model. Row Zero will natively integrate with the Databricks Data + AI Platform, including Genie on web as well as desktop and mobile apps, so teams can easily move from chat to hands-on pivoting, modeling, and visualization. Acquisition terms were not disclosed, although we understand Row Zero has raised about $13 million at a roughly $40 million valuation. Co-founder Nick End made an informative LinkedIn post about the acquisition. Breck Fresen, Founder and CEO of Row Zero, said: “We built Row Zero because we love spreadsheets but recognized they needed to seamlessly connect to enterprise-scale data with governance and security at the core. Joining Databricks accelerates our vision of giving business users the spreadsheet they deserve: secure, connected, scalable, and deeply integrated with AI agents.” The Row Zero team are joining Databricks. Row Zero will be available to all Databricks customers across all major clouds and will continue to feature support for data sources beyond Databricks. Bootnote So far this year Databricks has bought: - Quotient AI (March 2026) — tools for evaluating and doing reinforcement learning with AI agents. - Antimatter (March 2026) — security startup focused on data protection, authorization, and governance for AI agents, supporting its Lakewatch security lakehouse. - SiftD.ai (March 2026) — early-stage security company working on agentic AI–human collaboration and large-scale detection engineering. - Panther Labs (agreed June 16, 2026) — AI security operations center (SOC) platform. Databricks described this as its third security acquisition and a step toward an “agentic” security lakehouse that can compete with legacy SIEM tools. Terms were not disclosed; Panther had previously been valued at about $1.4 billion. - Electric (August 2026) — maker of PGlite, a lightweight WebAssembly-based Postgres database, plus a real-time sync engine. The goal is to give AI agents a local Postgres instance that can still sync with Databricks’ Lakebase. CEO Ali Ghodsi has said the company intends to keep making similar acquisitions. Financial terms for most of the 2026 deals have not been disclosed.
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