Databricks buys Row Zero and is scouting for more startups to acquire

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 one 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 CEE Ali Ghodsi posted on X about how the acquisition went down.