Databricks buys Row Zero and is scouting for more startups to acquire

Databricks has acquired the early-stage spreadsheet startup Row Zero, according to a Thursday announcement. The finance team at Databricks found Row Zero to be a cloud tool capable of scaling beyond one million live spreadsheet rows. The company plans to integrate Row Zero with its AI agent, Genie, which allows users to use natural-language prompts to ask complex business questions of their data stored in Databricks systems.

This merger will enable secure data manipulation in a familiar spreadsheet format, rather than transferring data to potentially insecure shared spreadsheets. Row Zero was founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers and raised $10 million in May 2025 at a $40 million valuation. Databricks recently closed another $5 billion in funding and aims to continue acquiring startups like Row Zero in the future.

In March, Databricks acquired two other startups, Quotient AI and SiftD.ai, while Panther, an AI security operations center, was purchased in June. Last month, Databricks acquired Electric, the maker of PGlite, a lightweight database useful for agents running locally on devices.