Funds for Billion-Row Spreadsheet Analytics Firm

Row Zero, which develops tools for spreadsheet-based big data analysis, has raised $10m in seed funding, with which to accelerate product development, and hire for positions in its Seattle headquarters and Pittsburgh satellite office.

Row Zero was founded by former AWS employees Breck Fresen and Nick End, who were frustrated in their analysis of big datasets: Excel's limit of 1,048,576 rows may seem substantial but in some contexts won't suffice, whereas Row Zero can cope with a billion rows. It also updates automatically from connected data warehouses, and supports enterprise security controls. The company says most of its users are Fortune 500 companies who need a spreadsheet for their business teams and 'want to eliminate the security risk of CSV exports from BI tools.'

Row Zero runs not on a PC but in the cloud, making use of its larger computing, memory and connectivity resources, and the firm says it 'instantly' performs analytical operations that would take 'minutes or hours' in Excel and Tableau.

The funding adds to $3m raised earlier and was led by IA Ventures, with participation from Trilogy Equity Partners, Founder's Co-op, Ludlow Ventures, K9 Ventures, Functional Capital, and Wes Mckinney.

According to CEO Fresen (pictured), '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.'

The firm is online at www.rowzero.io .