Douwe Osinga and Jack Amadeo were working together at Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s venture to build tech-forward cities, when they arrived at the conclusion that most spreadsheet software doesn’t scale up to today’s data challenges. Data science tools like Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks do, but they tend to be too inaccessible to the layperson — 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,” Osinga said. “Everybody is aware of the need to move to more powerful solutions and Python is the obvious candidate. Yet collaborating with today’s tools is underwhelming.”
Osinga and Amadeo’s solution was Neptyne, an app that uses an AI assistant to help users program spreadsheets without learning how to code. A member of the Y Combinator winter 2023 class, Neptyn...
