In 2017 Murali Mohan and I set out to build a new online spreadsheet. One that works the same as traditional spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets, but with a whole new set of capabilities that give it the power of a database and project management system so teams can use one familiar tool to manage any kind of work.
Today, after 3.5 years of building, we’re proud to announce our private beta and $5.5 million in seed funding co-led by First Round Capital and Spark Capital, with participation from Mitch Kapor, Steven Sinofsky, and other great investors. This news was originally covered in TechCrunch.
Over 16,000 people have already signed up for early access, many of whom we’ve onboarded over the past few months. To add yourself to the waitlist, sign up here. We’re letting people in as quickly as we can.
Spreadsheets are used more than any other tool at work with the exception of email and messaging. This, despite so many purpose-built tools meant to take us away from them.
There are over 1 billion spreadsheet users, most of whom use spreadsheets for things they weren’t designed for more often than for calculation and data analysis. Even people who use popular collaborative work management tools like Smartsheet, Airtable, Trello, Asana, and Jira, use spreadsheets more.
That’s why we designed Spreadsheet.com to be the best of both worlds. It works just like the spreadsheet you already know, but with a whole new set of capabilities that allow you to go beyond text and numbers with over 25 rich cell data types such as dropdowns and icon sets, file attachments that live in cells, worksheets that connect together like database tables, forms for collecting data, and built-in project management features like Kanban views and Gantt timeline views, all with real time updates and messaging.
It also includes a visual, no-code workflow editor for creating automations and integrations with other popular tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and Mailchimp, without leaving your spreadsheets. For example, when a cell value changes to “Completed,” automatically send a Slack notification and create a new row in a different spreadsheet.
Teams are already using Spreadsheet.com to collaborate on everything from product roadmaps and content marketing plans to customer relationship management and order tracking. Our Template Gallery can help you get started quickly with free templates for just about everything.
There are other products that look like spreadsheets, but they all stop short, avoiding a lot of the hardest technical challenges like creating a formula engine that can handle thousands of real time formula updates across multiple connected worksheets.
Unlike products that were influenced by spreadsheets, Spreadsheet.com is an actual spreadsheet with support for over 400 formula functions using identical syntax to Excel and Google Sheets, cell-level styling and formatting, cross-sheet formulas, and more. Not only does it feel instantly familiar, it functions that way too.
The result is a unique evolution of the spreadsheet, one that we believe the world has needed for decades, and we feel lucky to be the team building it.
We’re privileged to be working with Natalie Sandman from Spark Capital and Todd Jackson from First Round Capital, both of whom bring strong product-led growth backgrounds to Spreadsheet.com that we have already learned from.
We’re also honored to have Mitch Kapor as an investor, founder of Lotus Software and creator of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and Steven Sinofsky, former President of the Windows division at Microsoft.
Several other great investors have joined us in this formative round, including Fenwick, Firebolt Ventures, Jon Wittwer (founder of Vertex42, a leading provider of spreadsheet templates), Aaron Harris (Global CTO of Sage), Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan (founder of Drawbridge, acquired by LinkedIn), and Phil Pead (former CEO of Progress Software and Allscripts).
We have a multi-year roadmap ahead of us filled with all of the traditional spreadsheet features you’d expect such as charts, conditional formatting, and pivot tables. However, we’re most excited about all of the new things we’ll continue to bring to the spreadsheet, like dashboards and reports, more no-code and low-code automation capabilities, and a full set of features designed for our Enterprise plan.
This funding will help us expand our R&D team, build product marketing and content marketing teams, and make important hires in customer success. If you’re interested in helping us evolve the spreadsheet into a more powerful platform for collaborative work, check out our open roles -- we’d love to hear from you!
Matt
