Sourcetable gets $4.3M in funding to help everyone become a spreadsheet power user – News

Sourcetable Inc. wants to democratize data analysis for every office worker with the launch of what it says is the first artificial intelligence-powered spreadsheet.

Today’s launch comes as the startup revealed today it has secured $4.3 million in funding to transform the way officer workers get work done. The round was led by Bee Partners and saw participation from Preston-Werner Ventures and angels such as Hugging Face Inc. co-founder Julien Chaumond and Magic Mind Inc. co-founder James Beshara.

The company is looking to eliminate the technical barrier in spreadsheets that separates so-called “power users” from those who can just about work out how to use the Sum key to add up the value of entries in a single column.

With Sourcetable, users simply tell the spreadsheet what they’re trying to achieve using their natural language. It supports both keyboard commands or voice, similar to the emerging practice of “vibe coding,” which is where a developer describes a problem in a few sentences in order to prompt a large language model to generate code.

The startup describes its product as the first “self-driving” spreadsheet with autopilot capabilities, with the underlying AI having full write and editing access to each file so it can perform complex, multistep tasks on behalf of users.

Among other things, Sourcetable can create and edit financial models, create charts and graphs based on spreadsheet entries, build pivot tables, clean data, edit the formatting, enrich the data within a column, or analyze an entire workbook and summarize its contents. With a traditional spreadsheet, all of these tasks would take advanced knowledge to perform, but with Sourcetable, they’re only a simple command away.

In addition, Sourcetable can understand data context without users needing to pre-select a range, and it can interpret multiple ranges across different tabs. It can also work with and clean messy data, and it will ask for clarification if the user’s instructions aren’t clear.

Sourcetable co-founder and Chief Executive Eoin McMillan believes there’s going to be a lot of interest in such a product, because it estimates that about 750 million people use spreadsheets to perform their work every day. Yet fewer than 20% of those users know how to perform even the most basic spreadsheet functions, such as VLOOKUP or creating a pivot table. As a result, data-based insights remain inaccessible to the vast majority of spreadsheet users.

“AI is the biggest platform shift since the browser, with a bigger opportunity for disruption, and Sourcetable is building the AI spreadsheet for the next billion users, be they human or AI,” McMillan said. “As AI makes analysis easier, everybody will become an analyst. Sourcetable’s AI automation ushers in a new era of productivity and human cognition.”

McMillan explained that when he first set out with his co-founder Andrew Grosser to build Sourcetable, they were originally targeting data scientists, Python programmers, Structured Query Language analysts and other power users, looking to make their lives easier. However, they soon realized there would be far more benefits to flipping their approach and using AI to eliminate the friction for the vast majority of non-power users.

At the heart of Sourcetable is what the company describes as a “fast, accurate code-driven evaluation loop” that can verify the underlying LLM’s responses in real time to ensure the accuracy required for complex, multistep automation tasks. This ensures that users can trust that the insights it generates are accurate, founded in the actual data within the spreadsheet.

The company offers access to a selection of different LLMs, by the way, including options such as OpenAI GPT models, Anthropic PBC’s Claude Sonnet, xAI Corp.’s Grok, Meta Platforms Inc.’s open-source Llama models, DeepSeek Ltd.’s R1 and various others that can be found on the Hugging Face platform. Users can choose for themselves which model they’d like to use, or Sourcetable can choose what it believes is the most suitable model for each task on their behalf.

Bee Ventures Managing Partner Michael Berolzheimer said that for decades we’ve been stuck in a world where people either know how to use Excel and all of its advanced functions, or they know next to nothing at all. There’s hardly any middle ground, he said.

“But not anymore,” he said. “Now anyone, human or agent, can benefit from accurate, reliable data analysis that’s underpinned by the all-important spreadsheet.”

Images: Sourcetable