Sourcetable Secured $4.3M Funding
San Francisco-based startup Sourcetable has launched the first-ever autonomous spreadsheet powered by artificial intelligence (AI). This innovative tool aims to democratize data analysis by enabling users to perform complex tasks through simple natural language commands, either typed or spoken.
This development addresses a significant challenge: while approximately 750 million people use spreadsheets daily, only about 20% are proficient with advanced functions like VLOOKUP or pivot tables, leaving many powerful features underutilized.
Securing Substantial Investment
To support its mission, Sourcetable has successfully closed a $4.3 million seed funding round. Leading the investment is Bee Partners, with contributions from notable figures such as Julien Chaumond (co-founder of Hugging Face), Preston-Werner Ventures (associated with GitHub co-founder), Roger Bamford (Distinguished Architect at MongoDB), and James Beshara (co-founder of Magic Mind). This financial backing will accelerate the development and expansion of Sourcetable’s AI-driven solutions.
Introducing ‘Vibing’ with Spreadsheets
Sourcetable’s platform eliminates traditional technical barriers by allowing users to instruct the spreadsheet using natural language. Whether through keyboard input or hands-free voice control, users can direct the AI to execute tasks, creating an experience the team refers to as “vibing.” This approach is akin to the emerging practice of “vibe coding,” where AI assists in generating code based on user prompts. It’s the first instance of a spreadsheet offering full “self-driving” capabilities, granting the AI comprehensive write and edit access to perform multi-step operations seamlessly.
Enhancing Productivity Across Tasks
The autopilot mode in Sourcetable can handle a variety of complex tasks that typically require advanced spreadsheet knowledge. These include creating and editing financial models, generating templates, building pivot tables (an area where other AI tools like those in Google Sheets may struggle), cleaning data, creating charts and graphs, formatting, enriching data, and analyzing entire workbooks. The AI understands data context without needing users to pre-select ranges, can interpret multiple ranges across different tabs, manage messy data, and seek clarification when instructions are ambiguous.
Founders’ Vision and Expertise
Founded by Eoin McMillan and Andrew Grosser, both based in San Francisco, Sourcetable leverages the founders’ extensive backgrounds in machine learning and AI. Their technical expertise has enabled the development of a platform that surpasses existing offerings from industry giants like Excel and Google Sheets, introducing full automation capabilities to the spreadsheet domain. This marks a significant milestone, considering the last major disruption in this space occurred in 2006 with the advent of browser-based collaboration in Google Sheets.
Empowering Everyday Users
Initially designed for technical users such as data scientists and programmers, Sourcetable’s real breakthrough came when the team shifted focus to empower everyday users. By integrating AI to streamline common yet complex workflows, the platform reduced friction and increased engagement, highlighting AI’s potential to democratize data analysis for all.
Ensuring Accuracy and Reliability
At the heart of Sourcetable’s innovation is a fast, accurate, code-driven evaluation loop developed by the team. This system verifies AI responses in real-time, ensuring the reliability and accuracy necessary for complex, multi-step automation. Without this foundation, self-driving spreadsheet automation would be too slow and unreliable to be trusted.
Early Adoption and User Feedback
Early users have praised Sourcetable’s impact on productivity. Simar Singh, co-founder at Butternut AI, noted, “In the future, it’s obvious that humans won’t be doing spreadsheet grunt work, and will defer to AI instead. We use Sourcetable to speed up our internal analytics workflows, and love the copy enrichment feature too. Big fans!” Andrey Karmanov, Research Assistant at Waterloo University, added, “Sourcetable is great for importing data for clear and easy visualizations, especially when using the AI assistant to transform data for forecasting or further analysis.”
Flexibility in AI Model Integration
Sourcetable distinguishes itself by adopting a flexible approach to AI models. Unlike Microsoft and Google, which are tied to their proprietary AI systems, Sourcetable selects the optimal model for each task, often combining multiple models for superior results. This agility allows the platform to integrate the latest advancements from organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Meta (Llama), NVIDIA, Prior Labs, DeepSeek, and Hugging Face upon their release, ensuring users have access to cutting-edge AI capabilities.
Investor Confidence and Industry Impact
Michael Berolzheimer, Managing Partner at Bee Ventures, emphasized the transformative potential of Sourcetable: “For decades, we’ve been stuck in a world with those who know Excel, and those who don’t. Not anymore. Today’s AI supercycle demands that all of our interfaces transform to become useful for both humans and machines, and they all demand a new data architecture. Eoin, Andrew, and the Sourcetable team have done it. Now anyone, human or agent, can benefit from accurate, reliable data analysis, underpinned by the all-important spreadsheet.”
Pioneering the Future of Productivity
Sourcetable is part of a new wave of AI-powered productivity platforms reshaping the industry. Companies like Cursor, Windsurf, Shortwave, and Granola are demonstrating that incumbents can be challenged, and Sourcetable is positioned to be a significant player in this transformation.
