Databricks acquires spreadsheet startup Row Zero to strengthen its Genie AI agent

Databricks announced on Thursday that it has acquired Row Zero, an early-stage startup whose cloud-based spreadsheets can handle more than a million live rows. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. It is the latest purchase in a year in which Databricks has been steadily buying smaller companies.

According to the company's account of the deal, the trail began with Databricks' own finance team. Its staff had settled on Row Zero because the tool scales far beyond the row limits of ordinary spreadsheets, and they were already using it together with Genie, Databricks' homegrown AI agent. Genie lets users ask complex business questions about data stored in Databricks systems in natural language, such as analysing profit margins or the status of sales prospects.

A familiar interface for BI and AI agents

When the executive team asked the finance staff which tool they were using, the idea clicked. “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!” CEO Ali Ghodsi wrote on X.

The logic: enterprise data stays inside Databricks' secure cloud storage, while both AI agents and people work with it through the spreadsheet format and formulas they already know, instead of learning a separate business intelligence product. Integrating Row Zero keeps the analysis inside a governed environment, rather than moving the data into an unprotected spreadsheet that gets shared around.

Who is Row Zero

Row Zero was founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers. It raised $10 million in May 2025 at an estimated $40 million valuation, according to PitchBook.

More acquisitions are coming

Databricks closed another $5 billion in funding in August and reached a $7 billion annualised revenue run rate. 2026 has been a busy year for purchases: in March the company bought Quotient AI, which works on evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and SiftD.ai, a very early-stage interactive notebook; in June it bought Panther, an AI security operations centre startup valued at $1.4 billion in 2021; last month it bought Electric, the maker of PGlite, a small, lite Postgres database useful for agents running locally on devices. “We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch.