Equals raises $16m in Series A funding round

A start-up founded by two former Intercom employees has raised a $16 million series A funding round to further develop its next generation spreadsheet tool that it hopes will replace Excel.

Equals, which was founded by Bobby Pinero and Irishman Ben McRedmond in 2020, combines the spreadsheet with built-in connections to databases and other data sources, bringing in live data and team workflows.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife, and Combine. Among the new investors participating in the Series A were dbt chief executive Tristan Handy, and April Underwood, cofounder of #Angels and former chief product officer at Slack.

The funding brings to $23 million the total raised by Equals to date, with a seed round raised last year. Equals intends to use the latest round of funding to build out its research and development team, and open it up to more users through a freemium offering.

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It’s a tool we wish existed when we were building Intercom. It comes from a really simple, obvious insight

Equals currently employs 10 people in a distributed workforce, but expects to end next year at up to 40 people. Mr Pinero said the company as planning to scale its research and development team “significantly”, with the company concentrating on engineering and design. It is also looking at Dublin as a potential source of talent, with the potential for an office located in Ireland if enough recruits were found.

Mr Pinero described Equals as a passion project for both him and his cofounder. “It’s a tool we wish existed when we were building Intercom. It comes from a really simple, obvious insight, which is that the spreadsheets are the best way to do analysis, plain and simple. It’s the best way to work with data, it’s this canvas that lets you touch and feel data moving around and build compounding formulas. It’s a really magical way of working,” he said.

“The bet with Equals is: can we build the next spreadsheet? Excel was built 40 years ago, Google Sheets was built 16 years ago. The way we work with data, the way we work as teams is fundamentally different. There’s nothing wrong with the spreadsheet as a way of working.

“The spreadsheet should just be built for this generation of work to be connected to the places where we get our data and it should be connected to the places where we as a team work: Slack Email, Notion, all these other tools.”

Equals launched its product five months ago, and has since registered thousands of start-ups and enterprises requesting access. The announcement of the funding coincided with Equals opening up access to the basic product to everyone free of charge, with a tiered subscription plan that adds extra features if needed.

“It’s just been incredible to see the reception, people are ripping it out of our hands,” Mr Pinero said. ”When we raised our seed, I can’t tell you the number of VCs and advisors who told us: ‘Absolutely not, there’s no way you’re going to be able to build this’.

“To our credit, with a really small team with some exceptional engineers, led by a couple former Intercom engineers, we’ve been able to build just that in 15 months and blow people away.”