Grid, the new face of spreadsheets
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: Spreadsheets, Effectiveness, Data, Data Visualization, Data Science

Grid has raised $4.6M in total. We talk with Hjalmar Gislason, its CEO.

PetaCrunch: How would you describe Grid in a single tweet?

Hjalmar Gislason: GRID is the new face of spreadsheets. It empowers anyone to turn their spreadsheets into beautiful, interactive web content and securely share with their colleagues, without learning any new skills.

PC: How did it all start and why?

HG: Since starting my last startup — DataMarket — in 2008, and then joining Qlik through an acquisition in 2014 I believe I’ve learned a lot about how people and companies work with data, what they want to do with data and how they’re trying to accomplish that. The more I learned, the more I saw spreadsheets *everywhere*, being used for *everything* — including things they were obviously not designed to do. So I decided I needed to understand them better; understand fundamentally what spreadsheets are, why they are so ubiquitous, and by extension if there were some opportunities there.

So I dove in and started a few streams of research, anywhere from reading up on spreadsheet history and asking everyone I met about their spreadsheet usage, to gathering a large collection of real world spreadsheets and studying them to understand what they were all about. I ended up capturing some of my findings in a three-piece series on Medium called “3 things you don’t understand about spreadsheets”:

These posts form a sort of foundational understanding on which GRID stands as a business. However, if I were to sum my findings up in one sentence it would be that spreadsheets are the knowledge worker’s answer to the question: How can I get things done NOW (without talking to IT)?

In other words, spreadsheets empower business users — the domain experts themselves — to take care of a lot of their own every-day IT needs. The fact that they can is a testament to spreadsheets’ power, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time around spreadsheets — or in business in general — to realise some of spreadsheets’ obvious shortcomings.

And that’s where I saw an opportunity: What if we could give the — almost 1 billion — spreadsheet users a tool that would leverage their existing spreadsheet skills and assets but overcome many of those shortcomings.

That is what GRID is all about.

PC: What have you achieved so far?

HG: The co-founding team came together last fall. The first two of us sat down on September 1, 2018 and started hammering away on keyboards. Since then we’ve gone through two funding rounds: a $1M Angel round in October 2018 and a $3.5M Seed round in March 2019. The team has grown to 13 people. We started our Alpha testing in March and are just about to get ready to roll out our Beta.

PC: How will you use your recent funding round?

HG: The funding we closed in March will be used to develop the initial commercial version of GRID, prepare the initial go-to-market plans, and do a “controlled” launch of the product to learn and confirm what we need to accelerate our plans and make the product generally available in 2020.

PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

HG: In 3 years we see GRID having grown to 100s of thousands of users, and passing the $5M mark in ARR while still in a rapid growth phase. In terms of where the product will be, we haven’t yet publicly revealed too much about even the initial version, so it is too early to talk about specifics, but let’s just say that we’ll have given spreadsheet users around the world a way to make their spreadsheets and spreadsheet skills a lot more valuable.