Databricks acquired Row Zero, a cloud spreadsheet startup built for datasets with more than 1 million rows, the company said in a newsroom announcement Thursday. It plans to fold the product into Genie, its AI agent for business data.
Row Zero, founded by former Amazon Web Services and Tableau engineers, had raised $10 million in 2025 at a roughly $40 million valuation, according to TechCrunch. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Databricks said Row Zero will connect spreadsheets to live data governed by its Unity Catalog and Unity Gateway systems, giving business teams a spreadsheet interface with an audit trail for whatever Genie changes. Databricks vice president of engineering Patrick Wendell said a built-in spreadsheet experience is now "a must-have" for making Genie useful to knowledge workers, according to the announcement.
Row Zero CEO Breck Fresen said the company built its product because spreadsheets needed to connect to enterprise data "with governance and security at the core," Databricks said. Row Zero will keep running as a standalone product. It is Databricks' fourth acquisition this year, after Quotient AI, SiftD.ai, Panther and Electric, and CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch the company intends "to do many more acquisitions like this in the future."
For founders building on top of Databricks, the pattern is now clear: the company is buying its way into the interface layer, not just the compute layer, one familiar tool at a time.