Databricks acquires Row Zero for governed spreadsheets

Databricks acquired Row Zero, a cloud spreadsheet startup that raised $10 million in 2025, to give its Genie AI coworker a governed spreadsheet interface. Databricks says finance, operations, sales, and marketing teams will be able to explore live data, model scenarios, and let agents act through Genie Ontology, Unity Catalog, and Unity Gateway. For builders, spreadsheet governance—not spreadsheet replacement—is the near-term design question: keep familiar formulas, but require live permissions, lineage, and auditability, as the archive’s earlier Databricks coverage shows how quickly platform scale compounds.