Paradigm launches to reinvent the spreadsheet with generative AI, filling in 500 cells per minute

Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney

The spreadsheet is up there with the document as one of the most important file types to make the transition from the physical world to the digital — gaining lots more capabilities in the process.

However, besides Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, it’s hard for me to name a single spreadsheet provider off the top of my head. More importantly, both of those software programs were invented in the days before generative AI.

But now, a new startup backed by famed San Francisco accelerator Y Combinator founded by a 22-year-old recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, Anna Monaco, is aiming to reimagine the spreadsheet for the modern white-collar worker using generative AI to power every cell.

Called Paradigm, it emerged from stealth today with a (relatively modest) $2 million seed funding round from Y Combinator, Soma Capita, and Pioneer Fund, as well as Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox; Harrison Chase, co-founder of LangChain; Eoghan McCabe, founder of Intercom; and Jordan Singer, founder and CEO of Diagram, according to Fortune magazine’s Sharon Goldman (formerly a senior reporter at VentureBeat!).

Every cell is a gen AI enivronment

Paradigm’s launch promotional video showcases its capabilities, including an example scenario in which a user — in this case, what appears to be a potential Paradigm recruiter — creates a new spreadsheet with the company’s software, then instructs it to look at GitHub for the most productive engineers and list them in order of their activity (most active to least active).

Paradigm’s software uses AI agents — built atop proprietary and open-source gen AI models from third parties including OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama family, according to Fortune — to scour the web for the information the user desires and automatically populate the spreadsheet cells accordingly.

According to Monaco’s announcement post on X, “Paradigm is 1000x faster than manual data collection, completing an average of 500 cells per minute.”

The video showcases this in real time, as we see cells filling in with information after just one click by the hypothetical user.

The user can then edit and augment the spreadsheet further using Paradigm’s AI agents by clicking to add a new column, entering in natural language the categories of information they’d like — in this case, combining data scoured from LinkedIn, Github, Twitter/X and more to summarize their tech stack — and Paradigm will follow it autonomously and pull the information automatically.

As Monaco’s X post states, “The real power of Paradigm comes with scale: imagine having tens of thousands of interns working for you in parallel.”

The video goes on to show the hypothetical user adding a column that uses a database they uploaded of their own team to compare the potential engineering candidates to their current team and spot connections, as well as adding yet another column that compares each engineer’s qualifications and experience to that of a job listing description and rates them out of 1 to 10 as to how well they match.

Notable early users even as questions around accuracy remain

It’s but one example — and doesn’t really answer Paradigm’s AI agents will be prevented from engaging in the notorious issues of hallucination and spotty math that large language models (LLMs) sometimes exhibit, such as miscounting the number of “r” letters in the word “strawberry” — but it is a compelling one.

Moreover, Monaco told Fortune that the company already has hundreds of early users from Google, Stanford University, Bain and McKinsey and starts at $500 monthly. It is currently accepting new users through a waitlist on its website: paradigmai.com.

For enterprise decision-makers, this development represents a significant leap in productivity tools, particularly for industries reliant on heavy data manipulation, such as consulting, recruiting, and sales. The ability to automate repetitive tasks and enhance data accuracy could lead to cost savings, faster decision-making, and more efficient use of human resources. Enterprises should monitor Paradigm’s progress and consider integrating such AI-powered tools to stay competitive and improve internal operations.