Founders Interviews: Humberto Ayres Pereira of Rows

Our Founders Interview this month is with ROWS Founder and CEO, Humberto Ayres Pereira.

ROWS allows users to build powerful, automated workflows and applications directly within a familiar spreadsheet interface, without requiring coding skills. By integrating with various data sources and APIs and powered by AI, ROWS enables businesses to streamline processes, collaborate in real-time, and turn data into actionable insights, making it an invaluable tool for teams across various industries.

First, can you tell us about your professional background and the path that led you to Rows?

Yes, so I am one of that large class of people who are Frustrated Engineers or frustrated non-engineers. I really like technology. But I’m not that sort of engineer. I know how to do a few applications. I can code a little bit but I am a thousand times worse than the average engineer around us and so I always looked for the things where I feel more comfortable around and one of these things have been spreadsheets.

But then the question was why can’t I send an email from a cell? Why can’t I grab information from an API to sell all of these things? Felt possible and doable but somehow the existing platforms did not offer those things?

What would you say that it makes Rows really unique?

I think it’s the data. Think of Rows as a spreadsheet for data generation. So the generation that works with tools around the cloud where the data is activated across many different apps and everyone will need more access to data to do analogies and see how things are doing. The novelty in the last two years was AI and when we launched Rows things really exploded. So it’s the data component plus the AI what made us really special.

If you could go back in time, is there anything you’d do differently?

Lots of things! Firstly, I would have started Rows earlier and I would have focused a lot more on the experience of data rather than availability of data. When we started out we thought we’re just going to make the connections available to users and they will figure everything out. They will download it and play the data but the reality is very different.

Do you have any tips or advice for an aspiring founder?

Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers, in a way business is like a video game, you don’t really die in real life, if you fail it is part of the business. Lots of entrepreneurs suffer from that but I think it’s very important to start early and iterate faster.

What can we expect from Rows now that you have raised €8 million?

I think people can expect a lot more data and a lot smarter AI. We are now working on a couple of projects and that will come out, between the next three months to six months and one of them is a lot of improvements around data, specifically around how you can do more advanced tasks with data time comparison…stay tuned!