Douwe Osinga and Jack Amadeo were working together at Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's company dedicated to building technologically advanced cities, when they came to the conclusion that most spreadsheet programs are not up to today's data challenges. Data science tools like Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks do, but they tend to be too inaccessible to the layman, at least in Osinga and Amadeo's experience.
“Talk to any financial modeler or analyst and they will tell you that Excel is no longer enough,” says Osinga. “Everyone is aware of the need to move to more powerful solutions, and Python is the obvious candidate. However, collaborating with current tools is disappointing."
Osinga and Amadeo's solution was Neptyne, an app that uses an AI assistant to help users program spreadsheets without having to learn to code. Neptyne, a member of Y Combinator's Winter 2023 class, closed a $2 million seed funding round this month from Y Combinator and a group of high-profile angels, including Jeff Dean, Head of AI at Google, and Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps.
Neptyne thus joins a series of emerging companies whose mission is to transform the traditional spreadsheet. There's Airtable, of course, and other startups like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk and Pigment, the latter of which raised $73 million last November for its data visualization and analytics service. Most recently, Equals, a San Francisco-based company, raised $16 million for its spreadsheet platform that incorporates tools like real-time data integration.
Neptyne is different because it incorporates a spreadsheet engine based on Python, the most widely used programming language for data science. Osinga describes it like this: It's a spreadsheet in which everything works as you expect it to in a spreadsheet, but also offers access to the Python ecosystem, including libraries, frameworks, and tools.
“Great linguistic models [like OpenAI's GPT-4] that have produced amazing results recently turn out to be very good at writing Python code,” says Osinga. "Because Neptyne natively speaks Python, it means the AI doesn't just help you write formulas or visualize data — you can have a dialogue with the AI about the spreadsheet app in front of you and have it modify it for you."
For example, imagine you have a pivot table created with Pandas, an open source Python library for data analysis, that summarizes data by both product and region. With Neptyne, you can ask the AI wizard to modify the PivotTable calculation to include or exclude products or change grouping criteria, such as by product category instead of by individual product. Neptyne updates the calculations in real time, allowing you to explore different options.
“Today, much of the important modeling and calculations are hidden in complex spreadsheets or data processing systems, and changing them requires experts to dig deeper”says Osinga. "Neptyne's powerful AI integrations remove the limitations of regular spreadsheets while drastically reducing the complexity of using advanced data tools."
They are fighting words. But it is early for Neptyne: the company has no revenue and does not disclose the size of its customer base. Osinga is optimistic and expects to grow this year, to the point that he plans to hire six employees to complete Neptyne's current staff, made up of four people.
