Why the paradigm built a spreadsheet with an AI agent in each cell

Anna Monaco has been building AI agents since the term “AI agents” was even one thing. After built many chatbots, she started looking for other types of interfaces that made sense to AI agents and landed on spreadsheets.

“I had this personal model, and I noticed that many other people had this model, to put very important CRM data in spreadsheets simply because it was the most flexible thing,” Monaco told Techcrunch. “But it was actually pain to maintain. There is so much manual work involved. So (I) I just got off this rabbit burrow to build a product for me and I wanted to reinvent what a spreadsheet could look like the power of the LLM.”

The result was ParadigmA calculation sheet powered by the AI equipped with more than 5,000 AI agents. Users can assign different guests to individual columns and cells, and individual AI agents will explore the Internet to find and fill in the necessary information.

Paradigm works with the IA models of Anthropic, Openai and Gemini de Google, said Monaco, and supports the switching of the model.

“We want to take care of each model because we want our users to have the highest reasoning outings when they need it, but also the cheapest outings,” said Monaco. “It is just a constant cycle of evaluation of different models, working in close collaboration with model suppliers to ensure that our limits are sufficiently high, then giving part of this power to our users.”

The company launched a small closed beta overview at the end of 2024 and iterated on the product using customer comments. The paradigm attracts users ranging from consultants to sales and funding professionals and operates on a subscription model with levels depending on the use. The paradigm counts the consulting firm EY, the Ai engraved startup startup and the cognition of the AI coding company as the first customers.

Paradigme now publishes his product to the public and announces that he has raised a series of seeds of $ 5 million led by General Catalyst. The company has raised $ 7 million to date. Monaco said funding will execute the “company’s extremely aggressive product roadmap”.

“The interesting thing that happened when we have collected fundraising is that some people we presented continued to use and pay for the product,” said Monaco. “I think it was a cool part. We have found a lot of internal value and our investors, not even our investors – other investors to whom we have spoken – always use it. ”

The paradigm is not the only company to seek to give the calculation sheets an upgrade of the AI. Quadratic, What has raised more than $ 6 million in venture capital funding, is a three-year startup with a similar objective. Companies inherited like Google and Microsoft also add AI tools to their spreadsheet applications.

Monaco said that it did not really consider competition because the paradigm does not consider itself a spreadsheet powered by AI. She said that she considered it as a new workflow fed by AI which happens to be in the familiar form of a spreadsheet but will not necessarily remain for forever.

“What I see in the most popular AI products now is this good balance between the present and the future,” said Monaco. “How do you build something that is really powerful and generates a lot of value now, but that also prepares you very well for the future? This is the question I asked myself a year ago when I started the business.”