Paradigm’s announcement of a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst this week marks another venture bet (à la Airtable, Coda, Rows, Quadratic) on the idea that spreadsheets remain one of the most important pieces of business software. The company, founded in 2024 by 22-year-old Anna Monaco, is trying to prove that the familiar grid can be reengineered into something more powerful: a workspace where every cell has the capacity to operate as an autonomous AI agent.
Monaco’s motivation came from her own experience. “I had this personal pattern, and I noticed that a lot of other people had this pattern, of putting very important CRM data in spreadsheets just because it was the most flexible thing,” she told TechCrunch. “But it was actually a pain to maintain. There’s so much manual work involved. So [I] just went down this rabbit hole of building a product for myself and wanted to reimagine what a spreadsheet could look like with the full power of LLMs.”
Turning the Spreadsheet Into a Workflow Engine
Paradigm’s approach distributes thousands of AI agents across a sheet, each able to pull data, verify it, and run basic analyses. The product integrates models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, with the option for users to switch between them to balance reasoning quality against cost.
What makes Paradigm distinctive is not only the technical novelty of per-cell agents but also how the company is framing its long-term direction. Monaco has said she does not view the product as an “AI-powered spreadsheet” so much as a new type of workflow tool that happens to start with the spreadsheet interface. That positioning matters, because the incumbents (Microsoft and Google) are steadily adding AI assistants to their spreadsheet programs. By treating the sheet as a transitional interface rather than the end state, Paradigm looks to go beyond retrofitting formulas with generative AI.
The company’s early customers include EY, Etched, and Cognition, alongside individual consultants and finance professionals. For these groups, the appeal is speed: populating lead lists, enriching customer records, or running targeted research without the hours of manual copy-and-paste that typically accompany such work. The model is subscription-based, with usage tiers that scale according to the number of agents deployed.
Capital, Competition, and the Path Ahead
The recent $5 million raise brings Paradigm’s total funding to $7 million, including an earlier pre-seed round from Y Combinator and angel investors such as Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, LangChain co-founder Harrison Chase, and Intercom founder Eoghan McCabe. Monaco said the latest capital will fund an “extremely aggressive product roadmap,” underscoring the urgency of competing in a market where new AI tools surface almost weekly.
Paradigm’s competition is two-sided: other venture-backed startups like Quadratic are pursuing similar ideas, while legacy platforms already command the user base. That tension raises questions about whether Paradigm’s first-mover advantage in cell-level agents can be sustained. “What I’m seeing in the most popular AI products now is this fine balance between present and future,” Monaco said. “How do you build something that is really powerful and generates a lot of value now but also sets you up really well for the future?”
Investors’ continued usage of the product during the fundraising process suggests that Paradigm has tapped into a real need, at least among early adopters.
