Why Paradigm built a spreadsheet with an AI agent in every cell

Anna Monaco has been building AI agents since before the term “AI agents” was even a thing. After building numerous chatbots, she started looking for other types of interfaces that made sense for AI agents and landed on spreadsheets.

“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,” Monaco 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.”

The result was Paradigm, an AI-powered spreadsheet equipped with more than 5,000 AI agents. Users can assign different prompts to individual columns and cells, and individual AI agents will crawl the internet to find and fill out the needed information.

Paradigm works with AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini, Monaco said, and supports model switching.

“We want to support every single model because we want our users to be able to have the highest reasoning outputs when they need it, but also the cheapest outputs,” Monaco said. “It’s just a constant cycle of evaluating different models, working closely with model providers to make sure our limits are high enough, and then giving some of that power to our users.”

The company launched a small closed beta preview in late 2024 and has been iterating on the product using customer feedback. Paradigm attracts users ranging from consultants to sales professionals and finance folks and operates on a subscription model with tiers based on usage. Paradigm counts the consulting firm EY, AI chip startup Etched and the AI coding company Cognition as early customers.

Paradigm is now releasing its product to the public and announcing that it raised a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The company has raised $7 million to date. Monaco said the funding will go toward executing on the company’s “extremely aggressive product roadmap.”

“The interesting thing that happened when we fundraised is some people we pitched just kept on using and paying for the product,” Monaco said. “I think that was a cool part of it. We found a lot of value from it internally and our investors, not even just our investors — other investors that we talked to — are still using it.”

Paradigm isn’t the only company looking to give spreadsheets an AI upgrade. Quadratic, which has raised more than $6 million in venture funding, is a three-year-old startup with a similar goal. Legacy companies like Google and Microsoft are also adding AI tools to their spreadsheet applications.

Monaco said that she doesn’t really consider the competition because Paradigm doesn’t think of itself as an AI-powered spreadsheet. She said she thinks of it as a new AI-powered workflow that happens to be in the familiar form of a spreadsheet but won’t necessarily stay that way forever.

“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? That’s the question that I asked myself a year ago when I was starting the company.”