Founders Interviews: Humberto Ayres Pereira — Rows
First, can you tell us about your professional background and the path that led you to Rows?
I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in this conversation and share my journey. I’m an electrical engineer by training, but my journey to Rows stemmed from a realization about my own personal limitations. Initially, I was fully immersed in engineering, with the ambition of becoming a top-tier engineer. However, I quickly discovered that programming wasn’t the best fit for me. I started to wonder if perhaps my strengths lay elsewhere.
I became frustrated by the complexity of building something meaningful, as managing various tools, processes, and technical elements left little time to focus on the actual ideas I wanted to bring to life. This frustration led me to explore a different path. I spent some time working in consulting at McKinsey, then pursued an MBA, and eventually moved into building startups. Throughout these experiences, I found that Excel was an incredibly powerful tool for me. It helped me express ideas, track progress, manage clients, and analyze data. In my mind, many of these tasks were closely tied to Excel’s capabilities.
This realization got me thinking: Why not create a modern strategy platform that speaks the language of business people, but with the power and flexibility of modern tools? That’s how I transitioned from my engineering background to something that bridges both business and technology — building a platform that’s intuitive for business professionals while still being powerful enough to handle complex tasks.
How was Rows born?
My co-founder and I were living in Berlin, working for another company, where we relied heavily on spreadsheets for almost everything. This included managing clients, analyzing data, tracking revenue growth, margins, marketing plans, and so much more. The more we used spreadsheets, the more we realized their potential could go beyond their traditional functions. We began discussing how they could be more dynamic, connect to online sources, and present information in more engaging ways. That’s when we decided to take the leap and build a better, more powerful spreadsheet platform ourselves.
How is your product different from others in the market? What makes it unique?
I believe our uniqueness lies in the convenience we offer, which stems from being modern and up to date. In the past, users often relied on CSV or Excel files, manually uploading data into spreadsheets. However, in today’s world, data predominantly resides in the cloud. We use platforms like Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Instagram, among others, raising the question: how do you effectively analyze data from these diverse sources? Exporting, downloading, and reloading data simply isn’t practical; you should have a live connection to the data.
This is where our solution excels. We provide seamless data connections to a variety of sources, making it incredibly easy to load data. Additionally, we recognized that many users struggle with data transformation, summarizing information, and creating insightful charts and analyses. Fortunately, the recent advancements in AI have greatly assisted us in this area. We were among the first to integrate AI capabilities into our spreadsheet, allowing users to ask questions about their data and even request automated data analyses.
Our platform streamlines not only data loading but also data transformation. Users no longer need to memorize complex formulas; we generate everything for you.
Finally, when it comes to sharing your insights, we facilitate this process as well. Whether you want to create visually appealing charts in Notion, export your work to an article, or send data via email, we make sharing seamless and efficient.
You recently launched AI Analyst 3.0, correct? Can you tell us about its new features?
Yes, it offers even more capabilities and operates at a faster pace. It can now generate charts and perform comprehensive analyses seamlessly. Additionally, it can execute multiple steps simultaneously and pull data directly from the web into your columns. The evolution of AI over the past year and a half has been remarkable, and it’s crucial for us to be prepared for what lies ahead.
What has been the most crucial moment in the history of Rows so far?
I believe that long-term AI development has been pivotal for us. It has guided our journey into an accelerator path, allowing us to gain deeper insights and engage meaningfully with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of potential customers.
If you could go back in time, is there anything you’d do differently?
Yes, there are many aspects we could have approached differently, and I believe we should have started with a narrower focus, more closely aligned with the user. Instead of initially building extensive backend capabilities in the cloud, we could have prioritized creating an exceptional user experience.
Through our journey, we’ve learned that users have incredibly high standards. They won’t adopt another tool unless it’s not only professional and well-crafted but also visually appealing, stable, and fast. These qualities are essential, and we have worked hard to integrate them into our product.
If we had concentrated more on the frontend, perhaps by launching exclusively with a macOS or iOS app, we could have gained valuable insights into how users in that specific context interact with data. From there, we could have gradually expanded to other platforms, including browsers, which would likely have accelerated our development process.
Do you have any tips or advice for an aspiring founder?
Throughout our journey, both in building the company and raising funds, including support from Indico, we’ve learned many valuable lessons. One key piece of advice is to focus on executing the most challenging aspects of your vision.
While there are numerous opportunities to create businesses that generate quick profits, this approach might only suit certain goals. If your ambition is to build something truly substantial, you need to think beyond the current landscape and envision what the future will look like in five to ten years.
Consider how you can make that future accessible to users today. Your solution should address their existing problems but do so in a way that is significantly better, faster, more affordable, and more impactful. It’s essential to present a vision that goes beyond incremental improvements and truly transforms the user experience.
What can we expect from Rows now that you have raised a €8M in a funding round led by Indico Capital Partners?
Our plan is to continue exploring various experiments in AI. As the field is still evolving, no one can predict its ultimate trajectory, but we’re already seeing positive results. With the funds we’ve raised, we aim to create an AI-centered experience for our users. This focus will also allow us to strengthen the business, benefiting everyone involved.
Lastly, what has been the most challenging part of growing your startup? And the funnier part?
Building a spreadsheet is incredibly challenging. We had to develop a robust computation engine that integrates seamlessly with a variety of functions, all while transitioning to a cloud-based platform and providing users with diverse capabilities. This journey has been quite demanding, requiring the discipline to show up every day and improve the product incrementally, by just 1% at a time. Although it may seem small, these incremental improvements compound over time, leading to significant progress.
On a lighter note, we’ve had our share of memorable experiences. One highlight was when we had the opportunity to demo our product for Bill Gates. A representative from a consulting firm asked us to prepare a demo, and during the demo, Bill simply said, “Yeah, it’s cool.” His brief feedback, though minimal, was both encouraging and surreal. Throughout this journey, we’ve also connected with incredible people, all driven by the ambition of creating something impactful. Building these centers of power on the internet has been one of the most rewarding experiences.
*Interview by Catarina Rebola — Marketing, Communications & Events
