Chatting with your Data: Flatfile Acquires AI Start-up ChatCSV

Today, I’m excited to announce Flatfile’s recent acquisition of ChatCSV, and share a glimpse into what this means for our customers and the future of LLMs in data exchange.

From the moment we found ChatCSV, I was impressed by the enthusiastic user feedback, the elegant user experience, and the practical hybrid of chat and dataframes — meaningfully exceeding the built-in capabilities of OpenAI while maintaining a much higher degree of data privacy.

In a chat interface, users can simply upload a CSV and start a conversation with their data, asking specific questions to extract insights, write queries, or display charts.

Given the millions of CSV files Flatfile customers work with each year, I reached out to ChatCSV’s founder Sam Barrowclough. I was excited about the product, but Sam was even more impressive. His entrepreneurial spirit, thoughtful intuition about the problem space, and pragmatic approach to product theory made it obvious how in just a few months he had built an unarguable breakout success. Over the course of hours, Sam and I connected over our shared, and unbridled passion for this problem and his hair-raising pace of thought and action.

In just a few months since its launch, ChatCSV had garnered 5000+ users, ranging from individual operators to large enterprises such as Procter & Gamble and McKinsey, and successful startups like Zapier, Quora, and Vimeo.

I shared the roadmap of what our AI team at Flatfile has been developing, from built-in natural language queries, AI data cleaning, and the world’s best trained AI model for schema mapping. I shared my excitement with Flatfile’s board of directors, and it was obvious to all of us that we needed to find a way to work with Sam.

Fast forward to today’s announcement - we’ve closed on the acquisition and are thrilled to welcome Sam to our growing AI engineering team, responsible for delivering powerful AI capabilities to some of the hardest data exchange problems on the planet. If you’re interested in learning more about Flatfile’s beta release of AI Assist, natural language queries, or our upcoming roadmap, reach out to our support team!

We are excited to welcome all ChatCSV users to the Flatfile family. And as a welcome gift, starting today, we’re making ChatCSV entirely free with unlimited usage for all users. If you are interested in what ChatCSV can do for you, feel free to check it out directly at chatcsv.co. And of course, if you’re building data import, exchange, or onboarding solutions for your business, you can begin building on the Flatfile Data Exchange Platform here.  

At Flatfile, we are committed to making data exchange effortless, and this acquisition is a significant step in that direction. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks. Thank you for being a part of our journey toward a better data future.