--- title: "TechCrunch — Databricks buys Row Zero" url: https://stacklist.com/card/2e4ee641-16de-4fd9-973e-8c27e28986ac source_url: "https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/24/databricks-buys-row-zero-and-is-scouting-for-more-startups-to-acquire/" stack: https://stacklist.com/c/finance/stack/cd56e1a1-45bb-4978-945b-4a9e71b13b5f summary: "Databricks acquires Row Zero and is actively scouting for additional startups to acquire as part of its expansion strategy. The acquisition represents Databricks' continued investment in growing its product portfolio and market presence." tags: "databricks, row-zero, acquisition, startup, tech-news, venture-capital" key_entities: "Databricks (organization), Row Zero (organization), TechCrunch (organization), OpenAI (organization), Anthropic (organization), Google (organization), acquisition (concept), venture-capital (concept)" classification: "news" content_hash: "sha256:436e9ae9a38d76e35e930342ba7eae7a65b395287b0e9cc88071fc50020f8c2c" acp_version: "0.2" token_counts_approximate: 4747 visibility: public agent_accessible: true status: "final" --- # TechCrunch — Databricks buys Row Zero –:–:–:– Last day to demo your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders is on Oct 2 . Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt ticket savings of up to $200 + 50% off a second ends Sept 25, 11:59 p.m. PT. REGISTER HERE. Close
Image Credits: ChatGPT for TechCrunch Startups Databricks buys Row Zero and is scouting for more startups to acquire Julie Bort 10:07 AM PDT · September 24, 2026 Databricks announced on Thursday that it has acquired an early-stage spreadsheet startup called Row Zero. The story goes that Databricks’ finance team fell in love with Row Zero because it was a cloud tool that could scale beyond 1 million live spreadsheet rows. They were combining Row Zero with Databricks’ homegrown AI agent called Genie. With Genie, Databricks users can use natural-language prompts to ask complicated business questions of their data stored in Databricks systems, such as analyzing profit margins or the status of sales prospects. When the executive team asked the finance team about this 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 about how the acquisition went down. So an enterprise’s secure data lives in Databricks’ cloud storage, and AI agents and humans interact with it through the spreadsheet format and formulas they know well, rather than using and learning some other business intelligence software. By integrating Row Zero with Databricks, the data can be manipulated in a spreadsheet form but remain secure, rather than transferred to an insecure spreadsheet that is shared around. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Row Zero, founded by former AWS and Tableau engineers, raised $10 million in May 2025, at an estimated $40 million valuation at the time, according to PitchBook . Databricks, which closed another $5 billion in funding in August and hit $7 billion in annualized revenue run rate, has been busy shopping in 2026 and is eager to keep doing so. “We intend to do many more acquisitions like this in the future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch. In March, Databricks bought two startups , Quotient AI, which does evaluation and reinforcement learning for AI agents, and very early-stage interactive notebook SiftD.ai. In June, the company bought AI security operations center startup Panther , previously valued at $1.4 billion in 2021. Last month, it bought Electric, makers of a small, lite Postgres database known as PGlite, useful for agents running locally on devices. Topics ali ghodsi , Databricks , Enterprise , Startups When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Julie Bort Venture Editor Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch. You can contact or verify outreach from Julie by emailing julie.bort@techcrunch.com or via @Julie188 on X. View Bio October 13 – 15 San Francisco Get 50% off a second pass The Disrupt experience is meant to be shared. Get your pass and bring a colleague, partner, or peer at 50% off. Cover more ground by making connections, building momentum, and discovering what’s next in the startup ecosystem. BOOK NOW Most Popular Crusoe abandons $1.25B plan to use Boom turbines at AI data centers Kirsten Korosec Astra and Opus just passed Turing’s other test Tim Fernholz Oracle sends force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate data center Aditya Mehta Meta made a Tamagotchi-like wearable for its Muse AI agent Lucas Ropek Vogue sent robots down the runway at Vogue World, and people were not impressed Dominic-Madori Davis Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big Julie Bort PitPro’s first tire-changing robot goes live in Canada Sean O'Kane Loading the next article Error loading the next article