Company Profile — Data / SaaS
Coefficient 🌀
The company trying to fix the spreadsheet without asking anyone to leave it.
2015
Founded
$24.7M
Total Raised
100+
Connectors
~68
Employees
There is a genre of startup that promises to kill the spreadsheet. It is a large genre. Every few years someone builds a beautiful new tool, declares Excel dead, and then watches a finance team quietly export their data back into a grid of cells because that is where the work actually happens. Coefficient, founded in Palo Alto in 2015 by Navneet Loiwal and Tommy Tsai, made the opposite bet. The spreadsheet, they figured, was fine. The stale data inside it was the problem.
This is a subtle distinction that turns out to matter enormously. The complaint people have about spreadsheets is rarely the spreadsheet itself - it is that the numbers in it were true last Tuesday. Someone pulled a Salesforce report, pasted it into a tab, built a dashboard on top, and then reality moved on without telling the dashboard. Multiply that by every RevOps analyst, every finance manager, and every founder refreshing a board deck at 11pm, and you get an enormous, invisible tax paid in copy-paste.
Coefficient's product is a no-code add-on for Google Sheets and, later, Microsoft Excel. It connects the spreadsheet to more than 100 systems - Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, BigQuery, QuickBooks, Shopify, Stripe, the whole modern back office - and keeps the data live. You set a schedule, the numbers refresh, and the report that used to rot now updates itself. It is, in the least glamorous and most useful sense, plumbing.
"Bringing spreadsheets into the 21st century - modernizing a technology that hasn't substantially changed in 30 years."
The founders had done a version of this dance before. Loiwal, an ex-Google engineer who worked on AdWords, and Tsai, an early engineer at the location app Loopt, previously built Shopular, a shopping app backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia that was acquired by Rakuten Ebates. That outcome bought them the credibility - and, presumably, the patience - to go after something as deceptively boring as spreadsheet connectivity. Boring, it should be noted, is often where the money is.
The pitch is not "learn our platform." The pitch is "keep the spreadsheet you already know, and stop lying to yourself about how current the data is." Here is the shape of it.
One-click links to Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, QuickBooks, Shopify, Google Ads and 100+ more. The source of truth flows straight into your cells.
Edit values in the spreadsheet and push them back to the source system. No re-keying, no CSV round-trips into Salesforce.
Set data to update hourly, daily or weekly. Get Slack and email alerts when a number crosses a line you care about.
Prebuilt sales, finance and marketing dashboards, plus an AI assistant that drafts formulas, charts and pivot tables.
Previously an engineer on Google AdWords. Runs Coefficient's product and business direction. Reachable, per public records, at navneet@coefficient.io.
An early engineer at the location-sharing app Loopt. Co-built Shopular with Loiwal before it was acquired by Rakuten Ebates.
The founding pair is the tell here. People who have already sold a company tend to pick their second problem more coldly. They did not chase a flashy new interface; they chased a workflow that millions of people perform badly, every week, forever.
The $18M Series A, announced in November 2022, was led by Battery Ventures alongside existing backers Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. It followed a $6.7M seed round the year before. The investor list is worth reading closely: among the angels are Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, and Kedar Doshi, a senior executive on Salesforce's Tableau data platform.
That last name is a small joke with a point. Coefficient's product is, in some sense, the anti-Tableau - it keeps analysis inside the spreadsheet rather than moving it into a dedicated BI tool. Having a Tableau executive as an angel suggests the two worlds are less rivals than roommates. Most companies, it turns out, want both.
Coefficient's users are the people who live in spreadsheets by choice: RevOps, finance, and analytics teams who like the grid and just want it to stop lying. The named customer list skews toward companies that themselves sell software and have complicated tech stacks to wrangle.
"Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets - rather than force teams onto a new tool."
Loiwal and Tsai start the company after their prior venture, Shopular, is acquired by Rakuten Ebates.
The no-code add-on ships, connecting Sheets to live business systems.
Funding arrives to turn spreadsheets into a business team's operating system.
Microsoft Excel joins the lineup; Battery Ventures leads the Series A.
AI-generated dashboards and a Sheets Assistant for formulas, charts and pivots roll out.
The interesting thing about Coefficient is not that it built data connectors - lots of companies build data connectors. It is that it refused to fight the spreadsheet. A generation of software tried to convince knowledge workers to abandon Excel and Sheets for something purpose-built, and the spreadsheet won, every time, because it is infinitely flexible and everyone already knows it. Coefficient looked at that record and decided to be the thing that makes the winner better rather than the thing that dies trying to replace it.
There is a version of this business that is a feature, not a company - a plausible risk when your entire value proposition is "we keep your spreadsheet current." Google and Microsoft could, in theory, do this themselves. The counter-argument is depth: maintaining 100+ connectors, each with its own quirks and write-back logic, is genuinely hard work that neither giant seems eager to do well. Coefficient's moat, if it has one, is the unglamorous accumulation of integrations that keep working. That is not a story that makes headlines. It is a story that makes renewals.