Row Zero, The Enterprise Spreadsheet, Raises $10M in Seed Funding
Seattle, WA – Row Zero, the enterprise spreadsheet built for big data and security, announced a seed round of $10M, 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 had previously raised $3M, bringing its total funding to $13M. Founded by former AWS employees, Breck Fresen and Nick End, Row Zero was born 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.
According to CEO, Breck Fresen, "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."
While their website touts customers ranging from small startups to large corporations, Row Zero says most of their use comes from fortune 500 companies who need a spreadsheet for their business teams and want to eliminate the security risk of CSV exports from BI tools. Marc Millstone, Director of Platforms, Infrastructure, and Security at Flexport says "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."
Unlike traditional spreadsheets that run on a user's laptop, Row Zero runs in the cloud, making use of the larger compute, memory, and connectivity resources. The spreadsheet connects directly to data warehouses, like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, and BigQuery, enforces row level security, and has the ability to restrict data export, eliminating locally stored data. "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" explained Fresen.
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, integrate AI into the spreadsheet, and enhance support for Python-based workflows. To accelerate growth, Row Zero is hiring for positions in its Seattle headquarters and Pittsburgh satellite office.