Row Zero raises $10M to accelerate development of its spreadsheet for big data
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SEATTLE, May 15, 2025 ~ Seattle, WA - Row Zero, the enterprise spreadsheet designed for handling big data and ensuring security, has recently announced a successful seed round of $10 million. The funding was led by IA Ventures and included participation from Trilogy Equity Partners, Founder's Co-op, Ludlow Ventures, K9 Ventures, Functional Capital, and Wes Mckinney. This brings the total funding for the company to $13 million, as they had previously raised $3 million.

The founders of Row Zero, Breck Fresen and Nick End, both former employees of Amazon Web Services (AWS), were inspired to create the platform after experiencing frustration with data analysis on large datasets while working at Amazon. The duo saw a need for a spreadsheet that could handle billions of rows of data (compared to Excel's limit of 1,048,576 rows), automatically update from connected data warehouses, and provide enterprise-level security controls.

In an interview with CEO Breck Fresen, he stated that "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." He went on to explain that while spreadsheets are still the go-to tool for data analysis, traditional spreadsheets have not kept up with the increasing size and complexity of datasets. Additionally, with more data being stored in the cloud and locally stored data posing a security risk, there was a clear need for a solution like Row Zero.

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Although their website boasts customers ranging from small startups to large corporations, Row Zero has found most success with Fortune 500 companies. These companies often have business teams that rely heavily on spreadsheets but also need to eliminate the security risk associated with exporting data from BI tools. Marc Millstone, Director of Platforms, Infrastructure and Security at Flexport shared his experience using Row Zero: "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."

One of the key differentiators of Row Zero is that it runs in the cloud, utilizing larger compute, memory, and connectivity resources. This allows for direct connections to data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, and BigQuery. The platform also enforces row-level security and has the ability to restrict data export, eliminating the risk of locally stored data.

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Fresen explained that Row Zero can perform analytical operations that would take minutes or hours in Excel or Tableau in an instant. This allows business teams in finance, operations, sales, and marketing to work with large datasets in a familiar spreadsheet format.

With the new funding secured, Row Zero plans to accelerate product development by expanding its connector surface to support additional business applications like ERPs and CRMs. They also plan to integrate AI into the spreadsheet and enhance support for Python-based workflows. To support this growth, Row Zero is currently hiring for positions at their Seattle headquarters and Pittsburgh satellite office.

In conclusion, Row Zero's innovative approach to handling big data and ensuring security has caught the attention of investors and Fortune 500 companies alike. With their recent funding round and plans for product development and growth, it seems that Row Zero is well on its way to becoming a leader in the world of enterprise spreadsheets.
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