2 days Ago
Sourcetable, an AI startup based in San Francisco, announced the launch of what it calls the world’s first “self-driving spreadsheet” this morning, alongside a $4.3 million seed round led by Bee Partners with participation from Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond, GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and MongoDB Distinguished Architect Roger Bamford. “This is a GPT moment for spreadsheets,” says Sourcetable CEO and co-founder Eoin McMillan.
“The same way ChatGPT changed how we interact with search, we’re changing how people interact with data.” Every day, 750 million people open a spreadsheet, but only a fraction of them know how to do anything more than add and subtract. Built from the ground up with AI at its core, Sourcetable allows users to issue natural language commands—typed or spoken—to analyze data, build financial models, clean up spreadsheets, and even generate pivot tables, something McMillan says Sheets and Excel still struggle with.
In autopilot mode, the AI not only interprets commands but also executes multi-step workflows, navigating between tabs, interpreting inconsistent field names, and validating its outputs in real-time. The interface looks familiar, but under the hood, Sourcetable is powered by a Python-based “thinking machine” and a flexible AI model stack that draws on the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Meta. The spreadsheet itself is XLSX-compatible, meaning Excel users can bring over their old files and instantly unlock AI capabilities—what McMillan calls “the last spreadsheet you’ll ever need.
” “Most people don’t know what a VLOOKUP is,” McMillan says. “Now, they don’t have to.” Instead, users can say things like, ‘Show me total sales by country’ or ‘Clean this dataset and create a forecast chart,’ and the AI handles the rest.
Hands-free, voice-enabled functionality makes the experience feel less like typing formulas and more like talking to a colleague—or a data analyst. The platform is already in use by startups, academics, and small businesses. Simar Singh, co-founder of Butternut AI, uses it to streamline internal analytics.
“In the future, it’s obvious that humans won’t be doing spreadsheet grunt work. We defer to AI instead,” Singh says. Sourcetable didn’t start with mainstream users in mind.
Originally aimed at data scientists and Python power-users, the team pivoted after seeing how much demand there was from non-technical workers drowning in spreadsheet tasks. “When we made the shift from building for the 1% to building for the 99%, engagement exploded,” McMillan recalls. Now you can talk to your spreadsheet data.
Sourcetable.com Founded in 2020, Sourcetable was restructured two years later when McMillan joined forces with CTO Andrew Grosser, a longtime friend and deep learning expert. The duo saw an opening to disrupt one of the most entrenched tools in enterprise software.
“Excel built the last billion users,” McMillan says. “We’re building the spreadsheet for the next billion—both human and AI.” McMillan knows he’s taking on the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft and Google, but they are burdened with legacy systems.
“We’re not just a plug-in,” McMillan insists. “We re-architected the entire spreadsheet for a world where thinking machines do the heavy lifting.” The AI assistant is free to try and $20/month for pro users.
There’s also a freemium tier with limited AI use. For students and academics, the product is free—an intentional move, McMillan says, to seed the next generation of analysts. Ultimately, Sourcetable’s ambitions go beyond spreadsheets.
The founders envision a platform for AI agents to collaborate with each other and interact with third-party systems, transforming data workflows across industries. “If you unlock productivity in spreadsheets,” McMillan says, “you’re unlocking trillions in GDP.”.
