The AI Startup That Supercharged Excel Without Changing a Cell

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While much of the AI industry is racing to reinvent enterprise workflows from the ground up, one startup is taking a different route—by embedding AI into a tool that millions of professionals already know and trust.

Fundamental Research Labs, an MIT-born startup now based in Menlo Park, is gaining attention with its latest product, Shortcut—an AI-powered spreadsheet platform that looks and feels exactly like Microsoft Excel, but with agentic AI built in.

Co-founder and Chief Business Officer Nico Christie told The Wall Street Journal this week that Shortcut is designed with near-complete feature parity with Excel, enabling users to load existing spreadsheets, automate complex tasks, and export them back into Excel seamlessly.

The goal, he said, was to meet users where they already are: “It was obvious to me that if you could automate the Excel work, people would care… People feel emotionally tied to Excel—it’s a cultural thing.”

Shortcut – the first superhuman excel agent – is live.

While not perfect, Shortcut beats first year analysts from McKinsey/Goldman head-to-head 89.1% (220:27) when blindly judged by their managers.

We even gave humans 10x more time.

Try Shortcut now (before your boss does). pic.twitter.com/bOCVx6J77W

— nico (@nicochristie) July 28, 2025

Shortcut’s demo, released on 29 July, drew millions of views on X (formerly Twitter), with one viral post calling it “a ChatGPT moment for financial modeling.”

The tool allows users to generate leveraged buyout templates, discounted cash flow models, and more through natural language prompts, making it particularly attractive to private equity analysts, consultants, and bankers.

What sets Shortcut apart isn’t just the interface but the architecture.

The software uses AI agents to handle multi-step reasoning and task execution, bringing a level of automation Excel users have long desired but never fully achieved.

These capabilities stem from earlier experiments by the company in gaming environments such as Minecraft and Roblox.

Fundamental Research Labs has raised $44.5 million to date from backers including Andreessen Horowitz and First Spark Ventures, the AI-focused fund led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The company currently employs 23 people.

The timing of Shortcut’s release is also notable. Microsoft has been actively integrating AI into Excel via its Copilot feature, which became generally available in September 2024.

Yet for many enterprise users, the learning curve and integration challenges with Copilot remain high, giving Shortcut an edge with its plug-and-play approach.