Spreadsheets go
self-driving

Sourcetable has launched an autonomous self-driving spreadsheet that uses AI to make data analysis more accessible to users.

While 750-million people use spreadsheets every day, according to Sourcetable, only 20% know how to use basic functions like VLOOKUP or create a pivot table – leaving powerful insights inaccessible to many.

The platform’s approach eliminates the technical barrier that has plagued spreadsheets since their inception. By using natural language commands, users can say what they want, and the AI carries out the tasks accordingly. Instructions can be made via keyboard or through a hands-free voice control mode, creating an experience the team calls vibing – similar to the emerging practice of vibe coding.

Sourcetable says this is the first time a spreadsheet has offered full self-driving autopilot capabilities, where the AI has complete write access and edit control to complete multi-step operations.

Image courtesy Sourcetable.

The company says it has closed a $4.3-million funding round to accelerate its mission of making spreadsheet analysis accessible to all. This seed funding round was led by Bee Partners with participation from Julien Chaumond, Hugging Face co-founder; Preston-Werner Ventures, GitHub co-founder; Roger Bamford, Distinguished Architect at MongoDB; and James Beshara, Magic Mind co-founder. 

“AI is the biggest platform shift since the browser, with a bigger opportunity for disruption,” says Eoin McMillan, CEO and co-founder of Sourcetable.

“Sourcetable is building the AI spreadsheet for the next billion users, be they human or AI. As AI makes analysis easier, everybody will become an analyst. Sourcetable’s AI automation ushers in a new era of productivity and human cognition.”

Sourcetable’s autopilot mode can complete a wide range of complex tasks that typically require advanced spreadsheet knowledge, including creating and editing financial models, generating spreadsheet templates, building pivot tables, cleaning data, creating charts and graphs, editing formatting, enriching data, and analysing entire workbooks.

The AI can understand data context without requiring users to pre-select ranges, interpret multiple ranges across different tabs, work with messy data, and seek human clarification when instructions are unclear.

Founded by San Francisco-based McMillan and Andrew Grosser, Sourcetable builds on the founders’ experience in machine learning and AI from previous startups. This technical foundation has enabled the team to introduce full automation capabilities ahead of established platforms like Excel and Google Sheets.

The platform was originally built for technical users – data scientists, Python programmers, and SQL analysts. However, the team flipped this approach to focus on making spreadsheets more powerful for everyday users.

By integrating AI to streamline common but complex workflows, friction went down, engagement went up, and the team realised the potential of AI to democratise data analysis.

Sourcetable says that at its core is a fast, accurate, code-driven evaluation loop. This system verifies AI responses in real-time, ensuring the accuracy needed for complex, multi-step automation. Without this foundation, self-driving spreadsheet automation would be too slow and unreliable to be trusted.

Early user Simar Singh, co-founder of Butternut AI, says: “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.”

Andrey Karmanov, research assistant at Waterloo University, says: “Sourcetable is great for importing data for clear and easy visualisations, especially when using the AI assistant to transform data for forecasting or further analysis.”

Sourcetable says its flexible approach to models is what sets the company apart. The company says while Microsoft and Google are locked into proprietary AI models, Sourcetable’s AI selects the optimal model for each task – often combining multiple models for the best results.

This enables Sourcetable to integrate breakthroughs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Meta (Llama), NVIDIA, Prior Labs, DeepSeek, and Hugging Face on the day of release, ensuring users have access to new AI capabilities.

Michael Berolzheimer, managing partner of Bee Ventures, says: “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.”

Sourcetable is evolving into a full-scale platform for AI agents and applications, designed to support agent-to-agent interactions and function as an operating system for the web. With plans to introduce read and write capabilities for third-party systems, the platform aims to go beyond reimagining spreadsheets, offering a new approach to how businesses interact with data.