The Rise of AI Excel:3+ startups Secure Millions in Funding
AI Is Reinventing Excel
The combination of AI and Excel seems to be emerging as a hot new startup trend, with at least three AI-for-Excel products recently securing VC funding.
AI Agent built for Excel raised 14M
One example is Endex.ai, backed by OpenAI’s startup fund as lead investor. It positions itself as an AI Agent built for Excel, designed to accelerate financial modeling and data analysis.
Founded in 2022, Endex primarily targets the enterprise B2B market and has raised $14 million to date. It appears as a plugin inside Excel, offering AI-enhanced capabilities on top of the existing infrastructure.
The founder emphasized that Endex is not trying to replace Excel but rather enhance it. The product is embedded within Excel and helps finance professionals handle time-consuming tasks such as financial modeling, data cleaning, and in-depth analysis.
It understands financial language, provides smart recommendations, and can even identify the sources of the numbers being used.
Tarun Amasa, founder of Endex, is also a Thiel Fellow. One founder remarked that consulting firms and investment banks are willing to pay at least $1,000 per employee for such a product, which underscores the size of this market.
For now, it mainly serves financial clients, where demand is reportedly very strong.
Enhancing existing tools via plugins is a compelling direction—especially since most users stick with the tools they’re already accustomed to. Excel, as one of the most fundamental business tools, is the best example of this.
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Another product, however, recently raised $10 million in funding. Unlike Endex.ai, it is an AI-native tool, more like a fusion of Excel + Python + ChatGPT.
Its growth has been explosive: in just about a year, it has amassed over 2 million users.
The vision is to become an essential tool for business professionals in the AI era, much like Excel has been for decades.
It reminds me of Granola’s trajectory—it’s also AI-native, focused on professional use cases, and scaled to millions of users in barely over a year.