Databricks has acquired Row Zero, a Seattle startup whose cloud spreadsheet was built to hold millions of rows without stalling, and intends to fold the grid into its own data platform.
The price was not disclosed. Row Zero was founded in 2021 by Breck Fresen and Nick End, both former Amazon Web Services engineers, and raised a $10M Series A last year at a valuation PitchBook put near $40M. Its pitch was speed at cloud scale plus the access controls that ordinary spreadsheets lack.
The deal began inside Databricks itself. Finance analysts had paired Row Zero with Genie, the company’s natural-language assistant for querying warehouse data, and executives noticed the tool their own team was quietly relying on.
Chief executive Ali Ghodsi framed the logic on X, arguing that spreadsheets remain the interface every business analyst loves, which makes it sensible to marry business intelligence, agents and grids. His company says the acquisition will let governed enterprise data stay inside Databricks while people explore it in a format they already know, rather than exporting it into an unmanaged file. Row Zero’s standalone product stays available to existing users.
Databricks raised $5B in August and runs at a $7B annualised revenue rate, and it has been an active buyer in 2026, picking up Quotient AI, SiftD.ai, security operations startup Panther and PGlite maker Electric. Ghodsi says more deals are coming.
