The spreadsheet has survived every tasteful prediction of its demise. It sits beneath the glossy dashboard, behind the expensive database and beside the meeting where somebody asks, with dangerous innocence, whether the numbers can be exported to Excel. Navneet Loiwal has made a company out of taking that request seriously.
Coefficient, which Loiwal co-founded with Tommy Tsai, connects Google Sheets and Excel to the systems where a business keeps its live data. A sales team can pull from a CRM. An analyst can refresh a report without rebuilding it. A spreadsheet, in this telling, is neither a relic nor a temporary workaround. It is the place where people already know how to think.
This is a practical bet, but it also fits an unusually tidy career. Loiwal has repeatedly worked on products that deliver information at the moment and in the setting where it becomes useful. Google Finance organized the markets on a browser page. Shopular placed shopping offers on a phone near a store. Coefficient brings business data into the grid already glowing on the user's screen.
The gold medal before the grid
Long before the startup vocabulary arrived, there was physics. In July 2000, an 18-year-old Loiwal represented India at the 31st International Physics Olympiad in Leicester. He finished eighth in the individual results and received a gold medal. Only 15 golds were awarded among 291 participants. India sent five students; every member returned with an honor.
Four years later, he graduated in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He received the President's Gold Medal, the institute's award for the student ranked first across the graduating class. A contemporary campus profile gives the achievement a wonderfully unglamorous explanation. Loiwal said his approach was to attend class, pay attention and keep at it. He had ranked first through all four years.
The same profile catches a less solemn version of the medalist. During his first two years at IIT, Loiwal danced on stage, sang and took part in dramatics. The final two years tilted toward academics. The detail matters because biographies have a habit of sanding accomplished people into pure productivity. Here, briefly, is the founder before the founder: doing equations, then appearing in a play.
A finance page built from India
Google recruited Loiwal after graduation. His public career record places him there from 2004 to 2010, first in India and later in the United States. In 2006, he appeared on Google's official blog as a software engineer with Google India, announcing improvements to the recently launched Google Finance: portfolio auto-refresh, search suggestions, a Google News module and links to earnings-call transcripts.
The features sound ordinary now, which is often the fate of useful software. Auto-refresh becomes invisible the moment it works. Search suggestions are noticed chiefly when they fail. Yet the product instinct is already visible: current information, placed where a person is ready to use it, with less ceremony between curiosity and answer.
After Google, Loiwal joined Shopkick as an early engineer. The company used phones and location to reshape the in-store shopping experience. That move led to a partnership that would define his next two ventures. Tommy Tsai had also worked at Shopkick, and together they began looking at a missing layer in physical retail.
- 2000Physics Olympiad gold in Leicester.
- 2004IIT Bombay's President's Gold Medal, followed by Google.
- 2012Shopular launches from Y Combinator's Winter batch.
- 2016Ebates acquires Shopular; its founders stay to lead the business.
- 2019Loiwal and Tsai co-found Coefficient.
- 2022Coefficient announces an $18 million Series A.
The phone buzzes near the mall
Shopular launched nationally in late 2012 after passing through Y Combinator's Winter batch. Its premise belonged distinctly to the early smartphone era: use location to alert shoppers to relevant deals and coupons when they were near stores and malls. Loiwal described a “big, gaping hole” he and Tsai felt while shopping in the physical world. The phone knew where they were. Retail information, strangely, did not behave as if it did.
The app gained more than a million users and consistently strong ratings. In March 2016, Ebates, already owned by Rakuten, acquired Shopular for an undisclosed sum. Loiwal and Tsai remained as general managers, leading product development and the integration of cash-back shopping.
One acquisition did not end the partnership. It clarified it. Shopular had delivered data according to physical context: the right offer near the right shop. Coefficient would later deliver data according to working context: the right numbers inside the sheet where a team was already forecasting, reconciling or reporting.
The billion-user dark horse
Coefficient began in 2019. Its early argument was almost comic in its obviousness: business software keeps getting more specialized, yet the spreadsheet remains the common room. Sales, finance, operations and marketing teams all wander in. They know the grammar. Cells can hold numbers, formulas, assumptions and the occasional note written in a moment of despair.
The trouble begins upstream. Data sits in Salesforce, Snowflake, databases and other applications. Teams export files, copy columns, wait for analysts and create multiple local versions of the truth. A spreadsheet may be flexible, but static inputs make it stale almost immediately.
Loiwal's thesis is to preserve the surface and modernize the plumbing. Coefficient imports live data, schedules refreshes, sends alerts and can write information back to connected systems. The business user keeps the interface. The manual procession around it becomes software.
There is a product lesson here for anyone tempted to begin with a blank canvas. Familiarity is a capability. A user who knows pivot tables, formulas and filters has accumulated expertise, however unfashionable its container appears. Replacing the container asks that user to surrender fluency. Extending it makes the fluency more valuable.
Capital for the unglamorous layer
In November 2022, Coefficient announced an $18 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. At the time, the company said its customers included Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro. It reported more than 60,000 users and a 400 percent revenue increase during that year.
The round gave Coefficient room to expand beyond its Google Sheets add-on and bring support to Excel. It also produced a revealing piece of company theater: a spreadsheet escape room with a cash prize. Contestants solved puzzles inside a Google Sheet. For a business built around rows and columns, this was marketing with pleasing self-awareness. Even accounting's favorite rectangle could host a caper.
By 2024, Loiwal was discussing the self-serve motion on a customer-success podcast: how users discover value without an elaborate sales procession, then expand their use. That distribution approach suits the product. A spreadsheet add-on can start with one person and one stubborn report. If it works, the sheet travels through a team by the oldest enterprise network on earth: a colleague saying, “Can you send me that?”
Attention as an operating system
The temptation is to connect the Olympiad medal directly to the startup career, as though solving physics problems naturally ends in SaaS pricing pages. Life is less obedient. The more defensible thread is attention. Loiwal's products repeatedly notice where information and action fail to meet.
At Google Finance, market information needed to stay current. At Shopular, a useful offer needed to arrive near the store. At Coefficient, business data needs to show up in the working document before the meeting starts. Each product shortens a particular distance. None requires the user to admire the machinery.
His early explanation for academic success has the same plain quality. Show up. Pay attention. Do it for long enough that the result compounds. It is advice too modest for a poster, which is possibly why it is credible.
Coefficient's aspiration follows from that temperament. It wants business users to become more self-sufficient without first becoming database engineers. It wants the dashboard to refresh itself, the operational report to stay current and the familiar grid to act as a programmable surface connected to the rest of the company.
The spreadsheet will not become glamorous. That seems safe to predict. It may, however, become less lonely. Loiwal is betting that the interface people already understand can carry more live data, more automation and more of the decisions that follow. There are louder visions of the future. Few begin with such a faithful reading of the present.