Show HN: Superagents – connect spreadsheets to any database, API or MCP server
by mceoin | 2025-09-09 18:55:35+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Eoin, founder of Sourcetable (https://sourcetable.com).

Today, we’re launching Superagents. You can now connect your spreadsheet to any database, API or MCP server on the Internet. All of that data is available inside your spreadsheet, and you can use AI to analyze it and build models, reports and visualizations.

The reason I started the company is because I spent 10 years at startups across engineering and operations roles and realized that Excel and Sheets weren't architected for the modern information environment. This creates a tremendous amount of nuisance and busywork cobbling together SaaS tools, reporting suites, and the misery of endless coordination meetings to make it all happen. (Boo meetings!)

Spreadsheets aren’t just a business application: they’re the original thinking tool. The quality of these tools has a downstream impact on analytical thinking and creativity writ large, so this is a problem worth solving. Fast forward to today, we’re a 6 person team taking on Excel, Sheets and ChatGPT, so we’re excited to hear what you think!

Who are Superagents for? Analysts, operators, and anyone doing data-centric work in spreadsheets. We see a tonne of finance people, of course, but also students, researchers and mom & pop shops. Sourcetable's superagents democratize data access and analysis, which is nice because our company’s mission is to make data accessible to everyone.

Why “Superagents”? Because they can plan and orchestrate other task-specific agents to complete your work for you. We have a lot of different AI tools and agents inside Sourcetable, but there’s a whole lot more on the Agentic Web. Superagents are like the conductor that coordinates them all and calls on them when needed. Also, it’s a fun feature name (thanks, Alyssa!)

If you remember the linked-data dream of the semantic web movement, that future is now: all of your business data is available and connected in Sourcetable.

How does it work? Sourcetable is running a python virtual machine under the hood. Everything is sandboxed, and there are hundreds of AI tools and libraries our AI can access. Superagents are also doing code-gen on the fly to solve problems. The closest system we have found is Replit’s sandboxed operating systems. Beyond that Mixtral, ChatGPT and Anthropic offer some limited data connectivity features, except these AI chat services lack the storage, compute, and code execution that Sourcetable and Replit provide. This is all very new.

How is this different to your previous data connectors, etc? We started out using ETL services to sync data and provide a GUI-driven PowerBI like experience in your spreadsheet. This was useful for people who knew SQL and how to write joins to combine fragmented data, but for everyone else (read: practically everyone), this solution just didn’t provide the frictionless, self-serve experience that we wanted.

Our choices were to switch the GTM motion or change the product, so we shelved that reporting suite and focused on our AI spreadsheet and waited for models to catch up with our ambitions. Now that they have, we’re re-launching Sourcetable with our original goal in mind: building a spreadsheet-based operating system for the Agent Web, with fully networked data access for everyone on your team.

AI is the great UX enabler.

Caveats:

* We heavily use Postgres, Google Analytics, Stripe and Google Search Console with Superagents.

* We haven’t tested every endpoint on the Internet. We find that mainstream, well documented applications work best.

* Yes, you can write data back to 3rd party applications and databases. We generally advise against this unless you understand the risks involved in giving AI write-access to your data.

Bonus round:

* All data connectors added during this launch week are FREE. (Regular AI messaging limits still apply.)

Product Feedback? eoin@sourcetable.com