Rows raises $16M Series B led by Lakestar

Berlin, 23rd February 2021: Rows.com (previously dashdash), the next generation spreadsheet for developing business tools, announces it has raised a $16 million Series B led by Lakestar. Also participating in the round are previous investors Accel and Cherry Ventures, as well as new angel investors Christian Reber, CEO of Pitch, who joins the Advisory Board; and Neil Rimer, founder of Index Ventures. Armilar and Shilling, two Lisbon-based funds, also participated. Rows is also announcing its launch into public beta, enabling anyone to create an account and use the platform. The public beta follows Rows giving access to its waitlist of more than 10,000 people over the past few weeks.

Rows’ vision is to empower the world’s one billion spreadsheet users to build the tools they need. Rows offers a way for teams to solve more types of problems, faster, using a familiar interface with three key features: a spreadsheet, with all the Excel functions, such as SUMIFS; integrations, that connect any spreadsheet to business services like Salesforce or Linkedin; and a modern sharing experience, that turns spreadsheets into slick web-apps in one click. All of this without scripts or plugins, and without the need to call IT for help. This new combination of classic functions, integrations and sharing is the biggest rethink of spreadsheets since Google Sheets.

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Since its Series A in 2018, Rows has hired more than 30 people for its Porto and Berlin teams, released more than 200 features and expanded the private beta of the spreadsheet platform to new users. More than a thousand companies participated in Rows’ private beta, including corporates like Just Eat Takeaway.com and startups like Chattermill, and Loyalty Prime. Businesses are using Rows for critical functions across sales, marketing and operations. Their spreadsheets automate lead generation by connecting the best online data sources to the desired CRM; automate marketing campaign reports that gather analytics data from organic or paid sources such as Google, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook; and build forms-based internal tools for teams like order management systems.

Originally founded by Humberto Ayres Pereira and Torben Schulz as dashdash in 2016, the company rebranded to Rows in November 2020.

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From today, any user can create an account and start using Rows for free. Rows has a tiered pricing model. It is free for smaller teams who only need up to 10 users and occasional integration usage. The company also rolled out paid subscriptions for larger businesses, starting at $59 a month. All paid subscription plans include unlimited team members, and up to 100,000 integration tasks per month. Integration usage is measured by the number of executions of spreadsheet functions that connect to services, whether one of the Rows native data integrations like Crunchbase or Google Maps, integrations to business tools like Salesforce or Slack, or web requests to any API.

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Rows will use the new investment to build out functionality before its full product launch later this year. Rows will open its platform to the maker community, enabling teams everywhere to share and remix spreadsheets. Companies will be able to offer their spreadsheets privately or publicly in their own urls, e.g. rows.com/my-company. Rows will also build and release desktop apps and charts, to expand the integrations and data offered. With a team of 50 across offices in Berlin and Porto, Rows is making additional hires for R&D and growth.

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Humberto Ayres Pereira, CEO and co-founder of Rows, said: "The last decade has seen thousands of productivity apps released, but legacy players like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel still dominate spreadsheets, which remain the holy grail of productivity tools. The world continues to count on spreadsheets to create billions of documents every year, but modern work requires better collaboration and connectivity to online business tools. We think spreadsheets should do more, so we created Rows for those users who think outside the cell.”

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"Rows is for business professionals and teams who use spreadsheets to get work done, and we’re excited to share it with the world. We’ve built a new type of spreadsheet that can turn any user into a tool creator, without having to spend time learning new programs, coding or toggling between tools. We’ve already seen incredible demand during our private beta and are really excited to see what tools users continue to build.”

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Stephen Nundy, Partner at Lakestar, who joins Rows’ board, said: "Humberto and Torben have really impressed us with their ambition to disrupt the market with a new spreadsheet paradigm that tackles the significant shortcomings of today's solutions. Data integrations are native, the collaboration experience is first class and the ability to share and publish your work as an application is unique and will create more "Citizen developers" to emerge. This is essential to the growing needs of today's technology literate workforce.

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The level of interest they’ve received in their private beta is proof of the desirability of platforms like Rows, and we’re excited to be supporting them through their public beta launch and beyond with this investment.”

About Rows

Rows is the spreadsheet where teams work faster. Its cloud platform-based spreadsheet allows business teams to own and automate their workflows by building apps and tools straight from the sheet. The platform has powerful functionality such as integrations and publishing that are not offered by existing spreadsheet tools, removing the barrier to entry for users without programming experience. Rows has offices in Berlin and Porto, and is backed by the likes of Lakestar, Accel and Cherry Ventures. For more: https://rows.com/

About Lakestar

Lakestar is one of Europe's leading venture capital firms investing in technology companies led by exceptional entrepreneurs. The team’s early investments included Skype, Spotify, Facebook and airbnb. Since raising a first fund in 2013, Lakestar manages an aggregated volume of over EUR 1bn across three early stage funds, and more recently a growth fund.

The company has expanded and broadened its portfolio and holds investments in the likes of Opendoor, Oscar, GYG, Glovo, Sennder, Eigen, FiveAI, Revolut and Hometogo to name a few. Lakestar has presence in Berlin, Zurich and London.

Lakestar helps companies to identify new markets and expand into them rapidly, with a focus on the US and Europe. The team advises and supports portfolio companies in business development, recruitment, technology and marketing. The investments range from early stage companies to those in their growth stage.

For more, visit www.linkedin.com/company/lakestar-vc/ or www.lakestar.com

About Accel

Accel is a leading venture capital firm that invests in people and their companies from the earliest days through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Algolia, Avito, Celonis, Cloudera, Crowdstrike, Deliveroo, DJI, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Funding Circle, Kayak, Kry, QlikTech, Rovio, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, UIPath and WorldRemit are among the companies the firm has backed over the past 30 years. The firm seeks to understand entrepreneurs as individuals, appreciate their originality and play to their strengths. Because greatness doesn't have a stereotype. For more, visit www.accel.com, www.facebook.com/accel or www.twitter.com/accel.

About Cherry Ventures

Cherry Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm led by a team of entrepreneurs with experience building fast-scaling companies such as Zalando and Spotify. The firm backs Europe's boldest founders, usually as their first institutional investor, and supports them in everything from their go-to-market strategy and the scaling of their businesses. Cherry Ventures has previously invested in the seed stage of over 70 companies across Europe, including FlixBus, Auto1 Group, Infarm, Rekki, Forto, AMBOSS and TourRadar. Cherry Ventures is based in Berlin and invests across Europe with operations in London, Paris, and Stockholm.

For more, visit https://www.linkedin.com/company/cherry-ventures  or www.cherry.vc or https://twitter.com/cherryventures

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