Row Zero, a Seattle startup that sells spreadsheet software, raised $10 million in a seed round led by IA Ventures.
Founded in 2021 by former engineers at Amazon Web Services, Row Zero is designed as an alternative to traditional spreadsheet tools from incumbents such as Microsoft and Amazon. The company pitches its software as a faster way to run complex analysis or process giant datasets.
“Row Zero is the best spreadsheet for big data,” the company wrote in a recent blog post. “It’s 1000x more powerful than traditional spreadsheets, connects to your data, and offers enterprise-grade security features.”
The startup raised $3 million last year.
More than 1,500 companies used Row Zero last month, said Breck Fresen, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Customers include companies in healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and logistics.
“Row Zero is a simple, easy-to-use spreadsheet-based interface for working across multiple Snowflake tables, containing millions of rows each,” Marc Millstone, a director at logistics company Flexport, said in a statement. “We no longer need to manually copy data between systems and have shifted our weekly reporting from Google Sheets.”
Fresen and Row Zero co-founder Nick End previously launched a shoe-fitting startup called Shoefitr that was acquired by Amazon in 2015.
They both spent more than five years at AWS. Fresen was a principal software engineer working on the S3 storage service. End was a senior manager of product management before departing in 2020 to become vice president of product at Seattle startup Tasso.
Competing startups offering spreadsheet tools include Sigma, Equals, and others.
Seattle-area venture firms Trilogy Equity Partners and Founders’ Co-op also invested in the Series A round, alongside Ludlow Ventures, K9 Ventures, and Functional Capital, and Wes McKinney, co-founder of Voltron Data and a data analysis expert.
Row Zero plans to hire in Seattle and at an additional office in Pittsburgh.
Read the full article here
