By Rajwa Quasim
A cloud-based data and artificial intelligence platform, Databricks has acquired spreadsheet startup Row Zero as the company looks to make its AI tools more useful for everyday business tasks. This makes Databrick’s fourth acquisition of 2026 and is expected to acquire more in future.
The acquisition was announced on Thursday. According to the company, the — to acquisition traces back to Databrick’s finance team, who had grown attached to Row Zero’s service because unlike traditional spreadsheet tools, it could scale to handle more than a million live rows of data without any issue.
The financial terms of the Row Zero deal were not made public. Row Zero was founded by former engineers from Amazon Web Services and Tableau, Breck Fresen (who serves as CEO) and Nick End. Its software is designed to handle larger datasets than conventional spreadsheets, with the company saying its technology can work with billions of rows at interactive speeds.
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Databricks plans to integrate the technology with Genie, the company’s AI coworker designed to help business teams analyze data and generate answers using natural language prompts.
For instance, an employee could use Genie to investigate why profit margins changed and then move into a spreadsheet to examine the underlying figures, build models, and even visualize the results. Which means, users can manipulate data in spreadsheet form without moving into a separate one and it will remain secure.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi framed the logic behind the deal in a post on X, he wrote, “At the beginning of this year, big portions of Databricks started running on Genie. When finance started doing all their work with Genie, we noticed that they were combining Genie with a Live Cloud Spreadsheet called Row Zero. This combination is really powerful. We met the Row Zero team and were blown away. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Row Zero. Stay tuned for an awesome experience of Genie + Row Zero.”
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Row Zero raised $10 million in a funding round in May 2025 at a valuation of roughly $40 million.
Meanwhile, Databricks recently closed a $5 billion funding round in August at a $190 billion valuation. The company reached an annualized revenue rate of $7 billion.
Ghdosi indicated that Row Zero purchase won’t be the last of its kind, saying the company intends to pursue many such deals in the future. In March, Databricks acquired both Quotient Ai, a startup focused on evaluation and reinforcement learnings for AI agents.
In another deal, the company acquired Panther, an Ai driven security operations center startup that had previously carried a $1.4 billion valuation in 2021.