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Databricks announced on Thursday that it has acquired an early-stage spreadsheet startup called Row Zero. The story goes that Databricks’ finance team fell in love with Row Zero because it was a cloud tool that could scale beyond 1 million live spreadsheet rows. They were combining Row Zero with Databricks’ homegrown AI agent called Genie. With Genie, Databricks users can use natural-language prompts to ask complicated business questions of their data stored in Databricks systems, such as analyzing profit margins or the status of sales prospects. When the executive team asked the finance team about this cloud tool they were using, a light bulb went off. “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 about how the acquisition went down. So an enterprise’s secure data lives in Databricks’ cloud storage, and AI agents and humans interact with it through the spreadsheet format and formulas they know well, rather than using and learning some other business intelligence software. By integrating Row Zero with Databricks, the data can be manipulated in a spreadsheet form but remain secure, rather than transferred to an insecure spreadsheet that is shared around. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Row Zero, founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers, raised $10 million in May 2025, at an estimated $40 million valuation at the time, according to PitchBook. Databricks, which closed another $5 billion in funding in August and hit $7 billion in annualized revenue run rate, has been busy shopping in 2026 and is eager to keep doing so. “We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch. In March, Databricks bought two startups, Quotient AI, which does evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and very early-stage interactive notebook SiftD.ai. In June, the company bought AI security operations center startup Panther, previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, it bought Electric, makers of a small, lite Postgres database known as PGlite, useful for agents running locally on devices.
document fetched 2026-09-25 02:58 · canonical https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/24/databricks-buys-row-zero-and-is-scouting-for-more-startups-to-acquire