Row Zero, an enterprise spreadsheet company built for big data and security, announced a seed round of $10 million, led by IA Ventures, with participation from Trilogy Equity Partners, Founder’s Co-op, Ludlow Ventures, K9 Ventures, Functional Capital, and Wes Mckinney.
The company previously raised $3 million, bringing its total funding to $13 million. Launched by former AWS employees, Breck Fresen and Nick End, Row Zero was created out of their frustration doing data analysis on big datasets while working at Amazon. Row Zero opens billion-row datasets (Excel has a 1,048,576 row limit), automatically updates from connected data warehouses, and supports enterprise security controls.
Row Zero noted that most of their use comes from Fortune 500 companies that need a spreadsheet for their business teams and want to eliminate the security risk of CSV exports from BI tools.
Value proposition: Unlike traditional spreadsheets that run on a user’s laptop, Row Zero runs in the cloud, using the larger compute, memory, and connectivity resources. And the spreadsheet connects directly to data warehouses, such as Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, and BigQuery, enforces row-level security, and has the ability to restrict data export, eliminating locally stored data.
What the funding will be used for: The Row Zero team plans to use the new funding to accelerate product development, namely, by expanding its connector surface to support additional business applications such as ERPs and CRMs, integrating AI into the spreadsheet, and enhancing support for Python-based workflows. Row Zero is hiring for positions in its Seattle headquarters and Pittsburgh satellite office to accelerate growth.
KEY QUOTES:
“For 20 years BI tools have been selling the promise of self-serve analytics but the first thing business teams do when visiting Tableau or PowerBI dashboards is click ‘export to CSV’ so they can open the file in Excel. The spreadsheet is still the number one data analysis tool but data set sizes have outgrown the capabilities of traditional spreadsheets, data has moved to the cloud, and locally stored data is a huge security risk.”
“Row Zero instantly performs analytical operations that would take minutes or hours in Excel and Tableau, enabling business teams in finance, operations, sales, and marketing to work with large datasets in a spreadsheet they already know how to use.”
CEO Breck Fresen
“Row Zero is a simple, easy to use spreadsheet-based interface for working across multiple Snowflake tables, containing millions of rows each. We no longer need to manually copy data between systems and have shifted our weekly reporting from Google Sheets. Flexport is a leader in global logistics, and sophisticated big data analytics are a big part of our culture.”
Marc Millstone, Director of Platforms, Infrastructure, and Security at Flexport
