Not a ‘legal tech’ story but definitely worth noting, Sourcetable today (31 March) announced the launch of an AI driven spreadsheet that is populated by natural language commands or voice, overcoming, they say, the technical barrier that has plagued spreadsheets since their inception. Together with the product launch, the San Francisco-founded startup announced a $4.3m raise 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). It is model agnostic and according to Forbes, which broke the story, it leverages large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face and Meta.
“AI is the biggest platform shift since the browser, with a bigger opportunity for disruption. Sourcetable is building the AI spreadsheet for the next billion users, be they human or AI,” said Eoin McMillan, CEO & co-founder of Sourcetable. “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 says that its 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 analyzing 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 McMillan and Andrew Grosser (pictured above), Sourcetable was originally built for technical users – data scientists, Python programmers, and SQL analysts. The breakthrough came when the team flipped this approach, focusing instead on making spreadsheets more powerful for everyday users. By integrating AI to streamline common but complex workflows, friction went down, engagement went up, and they realized the potential of AI to democratize data analysis for everyone.
At the core of this breakthrough is what is described as a fast, accurate, code-driven evaluation loop developed by the Sourcetable team. This system verifies AI responses in real-time, ensuring the accuracy needed for complex, multi-step automation.
Early user Simar Singh, co-founder at Butternut AI said: “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 said: “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.”