Databricks buys Row Zero, eyes more acquisitions — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Databricks acquired early-stage spreadsheet startup Row Zero, announced Thursday, with deal terms undisclosed.
- Row Zero impressed Databricks' finance team by scaling beyond one million live spreadsheet rows in the cloud, where it was being paired with Databricks' Genie AI agent for natural-language data queries.
- Row Zero, founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers, raised $10 million in May 2025 at an estimated $40 million valuation per PitchBook.
- Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi posted on X that marrying BI, agents, and spreadsheets 'makes a lot of sense,' and told TechCrunch: 'We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future.'
- Databricks closed $5 billion in funding in August and hit a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate, giving it firepower to keep dealmaking.
- Databricks has already bought Quotient AI and SiftD.ai in March, AI security startup Panther (previously valued at $1.4 billion) in June, and PGlite-maker Electric last month.
Why it matters: Databricks is sitting on $7 billion in annualized revenue and fresh $5 billion in funding, and Ghodsi is signaling that Row Zero is a template — not a one-off — for tuck-in buys that bolt specialized tools (spreadsheets, AI evals, local Postgres) onto its data platform. Customers using Genie and Databricks' data layer now get a spreadsheet front-end that keeps data inside its secure cloud instead of exporting it.
Ask SkimNews
