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Duwe Osinga and Jack Amadeo were working together at Alphabet on the sidewalk to build tech-forward cities when they came to the conclusion that most spreadsheet software wasn’t up to today’s data challenges. Data science tools like Pandas and Jupiter notebooks do, but they’re not very accessible to the average person—at least in Osinga and Amadeo’s experience.
“Talk to any analyst or financial modeler and they’ll tell you that Excel just doesn’t cut it anymore,” says Osinga. “Everyone knows it’s important to move to more powerful solutions, and Python is an obvious candidate. But interoperability with today’s tools is poor.”
Osinga and Amadeo’s solution was Neptune, an app that uses an AI assistant to help users create spreadsheets without having to learn how to code. A member of Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 class, Neptun this month closed a $2 million pre-seed round from Y Combinator and a high-profile group of angels, including Google AI lead Jeff Dean and Google Maps founder Lars Rasmussen.
Neptun joins startup startups on a mission to transform the traditional spreadsheet. There’s AirTable, of course, and startups like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk, and Pigment — the last of which raised $73 million last November for data analytics and visualization services. Most recently, Equals, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, raised $16 million for a spreadsheet platform that includes tools like Live Data Integrations.
Image Credits: He doesn’t ask.
Neptun is unique in packaging a spreadsheet engine based on Python, Python is the most commonly used programming language for data science. Osinga described it this way. It’s a spreadsheet where everything works the way you’d expect it to work in a spreadsheet, but that also provides access to the Python ecosystem – including libraries, frameworks, and tools.
“The biggest models of language [like OpenAI’s GPT-4] They are very good at writing Python code that has recently produced mind-blowing results, Osinga said. “Because Neptyne speaks Python natively, that means the AI doesn’t just help you write formulas or visualize data — you can have a conversation with the AI about the spreadsheet app in front of you and have it change for you.”
For example, imagine you have a pivot table built using Pandas, an open-source Python library for data analysis, that aggregates data both by product and region. With Neptun, you can ask the AI assistant to include or exclude products in a pivot table calculation, or change group criteria, for example by product category by individual product. Neptun updates the calculations in real time, which allows you to explore different options.
“A lot of important modeling and calculations today are hidden in complex spreadsheets or data processing systems, and developers have to dig deeper,” Osinga said. “Neptune’s powerful AI integrations dramatically reduce the complexity of using advanced data tools, eliminating the limitations of standard spreadsheets.”
They are fighting words. But it’s early days for Neptun — the company is pre-revenue and won’t disclose the size of its customer base. Osinga expects growth this year, so much so that he expects to hire six employees to round out Neptune’s four-person workforce.
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