Before the concept of "AI agents" became popular, Anna Monaco had already started building AI agent products. After developing many chatbots, she began looking for other interaction interfaces suitable for AI agents and eventually focused on spreadsheets.
Monaco told TechCrunch, "I have a personal habit, and I noticed that many others have the same habit: keeping very important CRM data in spreadsheets because it's the most flexible tool. But maintaining it is very painful, involving a lot of manual work. So I started to dig deeper and built a product for myself, hoping to redefine the possibilities of spreadsheets empowered by large language models."
The result of this exploration is Paradigm, an AI-driven spreadsheet platform equipped with over 5,000 AI agents. Users can assign different prompts to different columns and cells, and each AI agent will automatically crawl the internet, find, and fill in the required data.
According to Monaco, Paradigm is compatible with AI models from companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini, and supports model switching. She said, "We want to support all models because we want users to get the highest reasoning output when they need it, as well as the cheapest output. This is an ongoing process of continuously evaluating different models, working closely with model providers to ensure our limits are high enough, and then handing some capabilities over to users."
The company launched a small-scale closed beta version at the end of 2024 and continues to improve the product based on customer feedback. Paradigm has attracted a wide range of users, from consultants to sales professionals and financial practitioners, and uses a tiered subscription model based on usage. Ernst & Young Consulting, AI chip startup Etched, and AI programming company Cognition are among its early customers.
Paradigm is now officially launching its product and announced a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst. The company has raised a total of $7 million so far. Monaco said this funding will be used to execute the company's "extremely aggressive product roadmap."
"There was an interesting phenomenon during the fundraising process," Monaco said. "Some investors we pitched to later continued to use and pay for our product. I think that's cool. We discovered a lot of intrinsic value from them; even investors who weren't our investors—other investors we spoke to—are still using it."
Paradigm is not the only company seeking to upgrade spreadsheets with AI. A three-year-old startup called Quadratic has raised over $6 million with similar goals. Traditional giants like Google and Microsoft are also adding AI tools to their spreadsheet applications.
Monaco said she doesn't really consider competition because Paradigm does not see itself as an AI-driven spreadsheet. She believes it is a new AI-driven workflow that happens to take the familiar form of a spreadsheet, but it may not necessarily remain in that form forever.
"What I see in the current most popular AI products is a delicate balance between the present and the future," Monaco said. "How to build a product that is truly powerful and creates a lot of value right now, while also being prepared for the future? That's the question I asked myself when I started the company a year ago."
