Databricks said on September 24, 2026 that it had acquired Row Zero, a Seattle startup that makes a cloud spreadsheet designed for very large datasets. Neither company disclosed the price or other financial terms.
Databricks bought Row Zero to extend Genie, the AI assistant it sells to business teams for answering questions about company data. The plan is to give Genie a familiar spreadsheet interface where finance, operations, sales and marketing staff can explore data, build models and work together, while the data stays under the permissions and audit controls that Databricks already applies through Unity Catalog, Unity Gateway and Genie Ontology.
The Row Zero team is joining Databricks. Databricks said Row Zero will be offered to all of its customers on every major cloud and will keep supporting data sources outside Databricks. According to SiliconANGLE, Row Zero will also remain available as a standalone product.
What Row Zero built
Row Zero set out to build a spreadsheet that does not break when a dataset grows past the limits of desktop tools. SiliconANGLE reported that a single Row Zero sheet can hold up to 1 billion rows, compared with the 1,048,576-row cap in Microsoft Excel, and that each spreadsheet runs on its own Amazon EC2 instance to reach that scale. Databricks described the product as able to work through billions of rows at interactive speed.
The product keeps the formulas, pivot tables and keyboard shortcuts that Excel and Google Sheets users already know, and Databricks positioned it as a complement to those tools rather than a replacement. What sets it apart is the connection to live data: built-in connectors pull records from cloud data platforms, refresh them when the source changes and can write results back. Queries run under each user's own permissions, exports can be restricted, and every action is logged.
Row Zero also added an AI assistant for tasks such as summarising and charting data, and Python support so analysts can use libraries such as pandas inside a sheet, SiliconANGLE reported.
“We built Row Zero because we love spreadsheets but recognized they needed to seamlessly connect to enterprise-scale data with governance and security at the core. Joining Databricks accelerates our vision of giving business users the spreadsheet they deserve: secure, connected, scalable, and deeply integrated with AI agents.”
Why Databricks is buying
In its announcement Databricks argued that spreadsheets remain the main tool for business decisions, and that the habit of exporting data into loose spreadsheet files creates a large, ungoverned layer of copies inside most companies. That problem grows as companies let AI agents analyse and act on business data, because those agents may end up working from stale or sensitive files of unknown origin.
Row Zero is meant to close that gap. Because Row Zero exposes tools that AI agents can use directly in the spreadsheet, every change an agent makes shows up in ordinary spreadsheet formulas and cells that business users can read and check. Databricks said Row Zero will be built into Genie on the web as well as in its desktop and mobile apps, so users can move from a chat answer to working with the numbers by hand.
Genie has become a significant business for Databricks. Tiger Brokers, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Genie's annual recurring revenue had passed $100 million. Databricks said more than 20,000 organisations use its platform, including 70% of the Fortune 500.
The founders and the funding
Breck Fresen and Nick End founded Row Zero in 2021 after working as engineers at Amazon Web Services, according to SiliconANGLE. Databricks described the founding team as former AWS and Tableau engineers. Fresen is the company's chief executive.
Row Zero raised $13 million in total before the sale, including a $10 million seed round led by IA Ventures in May 2025, Tiger Brokers reported. SiliconANGLE said its backers also included local startup funds and Wes McKinney, a software engineer known for his work on open-source data tools.
Databricks did not say how many Row Zero employees are joining, and Row Zero has not published its headcount.
What happens next
Databricks has not given a release date for the Genie integration or said how the combined product will be priced. Existing Row Zero users can keep using the standalone spreadsheet, and the product will continue to connect to data warehouses other than Databricks, the company said.
The purchase puts Databricks in more direct contact with the office software market led by Microsoft and Google. Databricks co-founder Patrick Wendell said in the announcement that adding a spreadsheet experience was a must-have as more finance, operations and go-to-market teams adopt Genie.
