Databricks has acquired early-stage spreadsheet startup Row Zero. TechCrunch reported on Sept. 24 that Databricks plans to integrate spreadsheets as a work interface connecting AI agents and business intelligence (BI).

Databricks moved to acquire Row Zero after confirming its finance team was using it internally.

Databricks' finance team has used Row Zero, a cloud tool that can process more than 1 million real-time spreadsheet rows, with its in-house AI agent Genie. Genie handles complex questions such as profit margins or sales opportunity status through natural-language commands based on data stored in Databricks.

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi (알리 고드시) said on X that spreadsheets are one of the interfaces preferred by all business analysts, and that combining BI, agents and spreadsheets is reasonable.

Databricks appears to be seeking to keep enterprise data in its own cloud storage while allowing users and AI agents to handle the data in familiar spreadsheet formats and formulas. The company's position is that users would not need to learn new standalone BI software, and that it could also reduce the need to move data to and share it through external spreadsheets with weak security.

Row Zero was founded by engineers who previously worked at AWS and Tableau. PitchBook said Row Zero raised $10 million in May 2025 at a valuation of about $40 million.

Databricks has continued acquisitions this year. It completed an additional $5 billion funding round in August, and its annualised revenue totalled $7 billion. Ghodsi said it plans to pursue further acquisitions similar to Row Zero.

Databricks acquired Quotient AI, which deals with AI agent evaluation and reinforcement learning, and early-stage interactive notebook startup ShiftD.ai in March. In June it acquired Panzer, an AI security operations centre startup founded in 2021, and last month it also acquired Electric, the developer of PGlite, a small Postgres database useful for agents that run in local on-device environments.