On Thursday, Databricks revealed its acquisition of an emerging spreadsheet startup named Row Zero.

According to reports, Databricks’ finance team became enamored with Row Zero due to its capability as a cloud tool that can handle over 1 million live spreadsheet rows. They sought to integrate Row Zero with Databricks’ proprietary AI agent known as Genie. This integration allows Databricks users to utilize natural-language prompts for complex business inquiries about their data in Databricks systems, including analyzing profit margins or assessing the status of sales prospects.

When the executive team inquired about the cloud tool favored by the finance team, a realization occurred.

“Spreadsheets are a beloved interface among business analysts. Therefore, it is logical to combine Business Intelligence (BI), Agents, and Spreadsheets!” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi shared on X regarding the acquisition process.

Thus, an organization’s secure data resides in Databricks’ cloud storage, allowing AI agents and humans to interact with it via the familiar spreadsheet format and formulas, instead of adopting and learning different business intelligence software. By merging Row Zero with Databricks, data can be handled in a spreadsheet format while remaining secure, instead of being converted to an insecure spreadsheet that is circulated broadly.

The specifics of the deal have not been revealed. Row Zero, started by ex-AWS and Tableau engineers, secured $10 million in May 2025, with an estimated valuation of $40 million at that time, as per PitchBook.

Databricks, which secured another $5 billion in funding in August and achieved a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate, has been actively acquiring in 2026 and plans to continue this trend. “We plan to undertake many more acquisitions similar to this in the future,” Ghodsi informed TechCrunch.

In March, Databricks acquired two startups: Quotient AI, focusing on evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and the early-stage interactive notebook SiftD.ai. In June, the company purchased AI security operations center startup Panther, which had a valuation of $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, it acquired Electric, creators of a compact, lightweight Postgres database called PGlite, beneficial for agents operating locally on devices.