“This Ain’t Your Father’s Spreadsheet,” Says Team Sourcetable After Securing Major Funding

This company believes, “Spreadsheets are here to stay,” and despite the fact that 750 million people use spreadsheets daily, a mere 20% possess the knowledge to utilize basic functions such as VLOOKUP or create a pivot table. This lack of proficiency prevents the majority from accessing valuable insights.

Spreadsheets are universally understood, collaborative, and powerful tools that are not only easy to use, but also offer superb scaffolding for the mind and excellent support for the thinking process.

Therefore Sourcetable was founded in 2020 to democratize data analysis for every office worker with the launch of what it says is the first artificial intelligence-powered spreadsheet.

The startup recognized that mainstream spreadsheet platforms have not kept up with the needs of today’s knowledge workers. These platforms are slow, static, and siloed, with workbooks being emailed back and forth and CSV download or upload loops serving as the standard method for data transfer.

Spreadsheets that think

Sourcetable has recently introduced an innovative solution to eliminate slow and inefficient processes with the launch of its groundbreaking autopilot mode. This “self-driving spreadsheet,” a world first, has the capability to automate tasks such as creating pivots, writing cross-tab VLOOKUPS, cleaning data, and streamlining laborious and time-consuming workflows. The user simply instructs the spreadsheet on the desired outcome, and it executes the tasks accordingly.

Sourcetable has astutely made use of AI, that will interpret the instructions, create a plan of action, and execute on it step-by-step until it is done once activated using their voice mode and the user simply need to interact the way he/she would with an analyst. Simple isn’t it??

Eoin Mcmillan’s aim was 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.

Initially, McMillan and his co-founder, Andrew Grosser aimed Sourcetable at data scientists, Python programmers, Structured Query Language analysts and other power users with the goal of simplifying their tasks. However, they soon realized that using AI to reduce obstacles for the majority of non-power users would be significantly more beneficial.

But as McMillan described, “As AI makes analysis easier, everybody will become an analyst. Sourcetable’s AI automation ushers in a new era of productivity and human cognition” (for all).

Sheet happens but now with AI

Sourcetable uses the best AI models from both commercial and open-source providers. These models are tailored to the specific context of the user’s spreadsheet and their workflow. Sourcetable’s Autopilot feature automatically chooses the most suitable model for the task, ensuring the best balance of quality, accuracy, and speed. All AI models are hosted on Sourcetable’s servers or utilize the paid, non-training tiers of third-party services such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama (Meta), Groq, NVIDIA, and AWS.

The founders made it very clear that a user does not have to know Python in order to access the virtual environment, where they have hundreds of tools, agents, models, and libraries at their disposal. These tools operate in the background to validate answers, evaluate results, and enhance Sourcetable’s capabilities for the variety of questions and tasks users may have.

One early user, Simar Singh, co-founder at Butternut AI, added, “In the future, it’s obvious that humans won’t be doing spreadsheet grunt work and will defer to AI instead.”

No fuss just funding

This innovative launch coincides with the company’s recent announced of a buf funding.

It has secured $4.3 million in seed funding, led by Bee Partners, with participation from Julien Chaumond (co-founder and CTO of HuggingFace), Preston-Werner Ventures, Trac.VC, Roger Bamford, and James Beshara. 

As Julien Chaumond, Co-Founder & CTO at Hugging Face said: “Spreadsheet apps are an Internet-native product I use every day in both my work and personal life, and I’ve for a long time wished that one could multiply their productivity with AI. So when I got the opportunity to invest in such a product in Sourcetable I was excited to do it.”

The Autopilot mode embraced by the Sourcetable team and any new technology will not be perfect. It is slower than desired and could be more intelligent and capable. However, it is a significant improvement from manual spreadsheet work and question-and-answer AI.