Witanlabs

Market position

An early-stage, seed-funded enterprise software company in the AI agent tooling category, categorised by its investor as enterprise software and B2B SaaS, and listed alongside peers including Cicely, Sheetrocks, Rockhopper, Rows and Briefcase.

Agents get self-verification loops and format compatibility without needing desktop office software on a user's machine. The company emphasises independently audited security controls (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA compliance) and publishes benchmarks comparing its engine against Excel itself and against libraries such as LibreOffice, EPPlus, ClosedXML and openpyxl, as well as an open research log detailing accuracy improvements on spreadsheet manipulation benchmarks.

Technology

Headless, server-side execution and rendering engines for Office file formats. The spreadsheet toolkit provides an executable REPL-style interface (witan xlsx exec) plus render, calc and lint verification commands, exposed via CLI, Python and TypeScript. Capabilities include high-fidelity rendering, formula recalculation, cell and chart manipulation, and semantic linting. The CLI is written in Go and published under Apache-2.0; supporting research repositories are in Python and JavaScript. The company's research log describes an architecture that evolved from SQLite-based workbook representation and discrete tool calls through block discovery and a three-agent design to a REPL-centred interaction model, alongside a Rust formula pipeline and a large TypeScript evaluation framework.

Go-to-market

Developer-led distribution through a free, sign-in-free personal tier, one-line CLI install, PyPI and npm packages, an agent skills package (witanlabs/witan-cli), public documentation, and open-source repositories and benchmarks that serve as technical marketing. Presentations access is granted on request.

Engineering and product teams deploying autonomous agents that must generate or verify spreadsheets and presentations accurately, including AI application companies (ModelML is cited as a user) and organisations handling regulated or protected health information.

Geography

Headquartered in London, United Kingdom, with products distributed globally through package registries and a CLI.

History

The company's public research log dates its core engineering effort from October 2025 through February 2026, covering four months and four codebases spent building an LLM-powered spreadsheet agent. Early work converted Excel workbooks into SQLite databases queried by a LangGraph-based GPT-5 agent using xlwings for modification, evaluated against the SpreadsheetBench benchmark at roughly a 50% pass rate. Subsequent iterations added block discovery, a three-agent architecture, and a Rust formula pipeline, before a pivot to TypeScript and .NET and the adoption of a REPL interaction model. Testing showed the CLI verify workflow underperformed openpyxl on question-answering tasks because spawning a process per command suited exploration poorly; this led to the REPL being productised as witan xlsx exec, with render, calc and lint retained as a lightweight verification layer. A seed round was announced in May 2026.