Equals, a New York-based startup aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance of high-volume spreadsheets, today announced it has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife. And combine. Co-founded by Ben McCredmond and Bobby Pinero, two former Intercom employees, Equals says its spreadsheet is one of the few built with database, versioning and collaboration features.
A traditional spreadsheet is no match for the first start on a mission to kill. There’s AirTable, of course, and startups like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk, and Pigment — the last of which raised $73 million last November for data analytics and visualization services. But Equals CEO Pinero said Equals is unique because it doesn’t replace a spreadsheet so much as it includes additional tools like live data integration.
“Equations is really simple and intuitive: a spreadsheet is the best way to analyze it,” Pinero told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Excel was developed 40 years ago. Google Sheets 16 years ago. The way companies operate today is significantly different. Our data is more accessible. We need to automate much of the painful, manual work of entering data into a spreadsheet. And we’ve learned a lot about how teams can better collaborate over the past decade. The spreadsheet should include these lessons. That is equal.”
Customers can tap Equals to build analytics directly from a database or data warehouse, with or without a sequential query language. It supports standard formulas and provides templates for common use cases such as tracking recurring revenue and measuring user engagement.
Image Credits: It is equal.
Soon, Equals will be able to import scripts to allow users to connect spreadsheets to various APIs and internal tools in JavaScript or Python. There are also pivot tables on the way and links to business intelligence apps from Salesforce, QuickBooks, Stripe and Google Analytics.
“Equals represents a great opportunity for business stakeholders – especially those who have been neglected to have access to their own data – to get access to data. So that they can work with data in a convenient tool and know in advance how to use it: the spreadsheet,” Pinero said. No more hours of manual spreadsheets, no more dumping data from BI tools into spreadsheets and then doing analysis.
That’s a lot to promise, but Pinero is well aware of the obstacles ahead. He doesn’t expect 10-employee Equals to be profitable for a while — the Series A proceeds will mostly go to R&D, he says; Equals has raised $23 million to date – and the platform remains behind a waiting list awaiting its next major product release. Pinero said so far “thousands” of people have signed up.
“It speaks to the excitement and enthusiasm with Equals that we were able to raise a significant Series A in this market. We have over eight years of runway in our current burn,” Pinero said. “We are in a very good position to overcome this recession, however long it may take. As the saying goes, companies are built during these failures, and we intend to make Equal one of them.
