Anna Monaco has been building AI agents even before the term “AI agent.” After building a number of chatbots, she began looking for other types of interfaces that would make sense to AI agents and landed on a spreadsheet.
“I had this personal pattern, but I realized that many other people have this pattern. This means placing very important CRM data in a spreadsheet just because it was the most flexible,” Monaco told TechCrunch. “But it was actually painful to maintain. It involves a lot of manual work. So. [I] Building a product for myself I wanted to go down this rabbit hole and rethink what a spreadsheet would look like at the full power of LLMS. ”
The result is a paradigm of an AI-driven spreadsheet with over 5,000 AI agents. Users can assign different prompts to individual columns and cells, and individual AI agents crawl the internet to find and fill in the information they need.
Paradigm works with AI models from Anthropic, Openai, and Google’s Gemini to support switching models.
“We want to support all models because not only can users have the largest inference output when they need it, but also the cheapest output,” Monaco said. “This is a constant cycle of evaluating different models, working closely with model providers to make sure the limits are high enough and giving users a portion of their power.”
The company began a small closed beta preview in late 2024, and is repeating its products using customer feedback. Paradigm operates a subscription model that attracts users from consultants to salespeople and financial people and has a tier based on usage. Paradigm counts the recognition of consulting firm EY, AI chip startup etching and AI coding firms as early customers.
The Paradigm is now opening its products to the public and has announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by the general. The company has raised $7 million so far. Monaco said the funds will be directed towards the implementation of the company’s “very aggressive product roadmap.”
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
“The interesting thing that happened when we provided the funding was that the people we pitched continued to use and pay for the product,” Monaco said. “I think that was the cool part. We found a lot of value internally. Investors are still using it, not just our investors (the other investors we talked about).”
Paradigms aren’t the only company trying to offer AI upgrades to spreadsheets. The third quarter, which raised more than $6 million in venture funding, is a 3-year-old startup with similar goals. Legacy companies such as Google and Microsoft are also adding AI tools to their spreadsheet applications.
Monaco said they don’t really think of competition because the paradigm doesn’t think of itself as an AI-driven spreadsheet. She said she sees it as a new AI-powered workflow that happens to be in a familiar format in a spreadsheet, but doesn’t necessarily stay that way forever.
“What we see with today’s most popular AI products is a balance between the present and the future,” Monaco said. “How do you build something that’s really strong and produces a lot of value?
We are constantly trying to evolve and you can help us by providing insights into TechCrunch and your perspective and feedback on our coverage and events! Fill in this research to let us know how we are doing and get the opportunity to win an award in return!
Source link
