Databricks said Thursday it has acquired Row Zero, an early-stage startup that makes spreadsheet software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company.

The acquisition grew out of internal use at Databricks, where the finance team adopted Row Zero because it is a cloud tool capable of handling more than 1 million live spreadsheet rows. The team paired it with Genie, Databricks' own AI agent, which lets users pose complicated business questions in natural language against data stored in Databricks systems, such as questions about profit margins or the status of sales prospects. When executives asked the finance team about the tool it was using, the company saw an opportunity, according to CEO Ali Ghodsi, who described how the deal came together in a post on X.

The rationale centers on the spreadsheet, an interface that business analysts already know well. The combination of business intelligence, AI agents, and spreadsheets keeps an enterprise's secure data inside Databricks cloud storage while letting agents and people work with it through familiar spreadsheet formats and formulas, rather than requiring them to learn separate business intelligence software. Data can be manipulated in spreadsheet form while staying secure, instead of being moved into an insecure spreadsheet that is shared around.

Row Zero was founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers. The company raised $10 million in May 2025 at an estimated $40 million valuation at the time, according to PitchBook.

Databricks has been active on the acquisition front. The company closed another $5 billion in funding in August and has reached a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate. Ghodsi told TechCrunch that the company intends to do many more acquisitions of this kind in the future.

The purchase adds to a string of deals in 2026. In March, Databricks bought Quotient AI, which works on evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and SiftD.ai, a very early-stage interactive notebook. In June, it acquired Panther, an AI security operations center startup previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, it bought Electric, the maker of a small, lite Postgres database called PGlite that is useful for agents running locally on devices.

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