Databricks Acquires Row Zero, Promises More Deals Ahead

Databricks has acquired early-stage spreadsheet startup Row Zero, in a deal that started not with a banker's pitch but with the company's own finance team falling for the product.

Row Zero, a cloud spreadsheet tool, can scale beyond one million live rows. Databricks' finance team began combining it with Genie, Databricks' homegrown AI agent that lets users ask complicated business questions of their data using natural-language prompts — for example, analyzing profit margins or checking the status of sales prospects stored in Databricks systems.

When the executive team asked the finance team about the cloud tool they were using, a light bulb went off.

"Spreadsheets are one such interface that every business analyst loves. So it makes a lot of sense to intermarry Business Intelligence (BI), Agents, and Spreadsheets!" Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi posted on X, describing how the acquisition came together.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Enterprise data lives securely in Databricks' cloud storage. With Row Zero integrated into the platform, both AI agents and humans can manipulate that data through the spreadsheet format and formulas they already know — rather than learning separate business intelligence software. The data stays secure inside the platform instead of being exported to an insecure spreadsheet and shared around.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Row Zero was founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers and raised $10 million in May 2025 at an estimated $40 million valuation, according to PitchBook.

The acquisition caps a busy buying streak. Databricks, which closed another $5 billion in funding in August and hit $7 billion in annualized revenue run rate, has been actively shopping for startups in 2026.

In March, the company bought two startups: Quotient AI, which does evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and very early-stage interactive notebook SiftD.ai. In June, it acquired Panther, an AI security operations center startup previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, it bought Electric, maker of PGlite, a small, lite Postgres database useful for agents running locally on devices.

The pattern is clear: Databricks is assembling pieces across spreadsheets, agent evaluation, security operations and edge databases — the tooling layer around enterprise AI agents. And the company has no intention of stopping.

"We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future," Ghodsi told TechCrunch.

With $5 billion in fresh funding and a run rate that makes tuck-in acquisitions like Row Zero easy to absorb, expect Databricks to keep buying.