Founder Reimagines Spreadsheets with 5,000+ AI Agents

From chatbots to spreadsheets: Paradigm’s AI agents reshape workflows

Anna Monaco has been building AI agents since long before the label became mainstream. After iterating on chatbots, she focused on a familiar frustration: the spreadsheet. Many teams stash mission-critical CRM, sales, and finance data in sheets because they’re flexible, but maintaining that data is slow and manual.

Her answer is Paradigm, an AI-powered spreadsheet built around more than 5,000 specialized agents. Instead of one-size-fits-all formulas, users assign prompts to individual cells or columns. Those agents can crawl the web, fetch missing details, and populate sheets automatically — effectively turning spreadsheets into active, data-gathering workflows.

Paradigm supports models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google’s Gemini and lets users switch between them. Monaco’s design goal is practical: give teams the highest-reasoning outputs when needed and the cheapest outputs when that’s sufficient. That means a continuous evaluation loop with model providers to balance capability and cost.

Paradigm ran a closed beta in late 2024, iterated with users, and attracted a range of professionals — consultants, sales reps, and finance teams. It operates on a subscription model with usage tiers and already counts early adopters like EY, AI chip startup Etched, and coding company Cognition.

Today the company opened access to the public and announced a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst, bringing total funding to $7 million. Monaco says the capital will fuel an “extremely aggressive product roadmap.” She also noted a telling fundraising signal: investors who met Paradigm continued to use and pay for it.

Paradigm isn’t alone. Startups like Quadratic and giants such as Google and Microsoft are layering AI into spreadsheets. But Monaco frames Paradigm differently: not merely an AI spreadsheet but an AI-powered workflow that happens to use the familiar grid metaphor — one that could evolve beyond sheets over time.

Why this matters to teams

Think about common pain points: stale CRM records, manual competitor research, or time-consuming lead enrichment. Paradigm’s agents promise to shave hours off those tasks by automating lookups and updates while letting teams control which model handles each job to manage accuracy and cost.

There are trade-offs to watch: web crawling raises questions about data provenance, freshness, and compliance; model switching introduces complexity around latency and billing. Early enterprise customers and consultants will likely focus on governance, auditing outputs, and integrating Paradigm into existing pipelines.

• Automate data enrichment and reduce manual CRM upkeep
• Choose models per task to balance cost vs. reasoning accuracy
• Embed agent outputs into downstream reporting and automation

What organizations should consider next

If your teams rely on spreadsheets for business-critical workflows, view Paradigm as both an opportunity and a design exercise. Start with high-value, low-risk use cases (lead enrichment, vendor lists, research). Define governance for web-sourced data and set cost guards tied to model choices.

Paradigm’s journey — from a founder building for her own needs to a public product with enterprise customers and outside investors — highlights a broader trend: AI products that blend familiar interfaces with new automation patterns can lower adoption friction while delivering outsized productivity gains.

As competitors and legacy vendors add AI to sheets, the real battleground will be how teams operationalize model choice, data quality, and compliance. Monaco’s bet is that the spreadsheet form factor — for now — is the fastest path to turning agents into everyday tools.

For organizations aiming to scale AI-driven workflows, success will come from marrying product experimentation with firm policies: clear ownership, auditing of agent outputs, and cost controls tied to model selection. That’s the operational horizon Paradigm is racing toward — and where many teams will find immediate ROI.