In a remarkable display of innovation on a shoestring budget, Nigerian AI startup Decide has surged onto the global stage by ranking fourth worldwide in accuracy for AI agents handling complex spreadsheet tasks. The achievement, announced earlier this month, highlights the growing prowess of African-built AI solutions in competing against heavily funded international players.
Decide, founded by Abiodun Adetona, a former developer at fintech unicorn Flutterwave, specializes in building frontier-level AI agents for Excel and data analytics. Its flagship product, Decide Agent, empowers users to perform sophisticated data analysis through natural language prompts cleaning messy datasets, running statistical models, generating dashboards, and solving intricate Excel workflows without writing code.
The breakthrough came via SpreadsheetBench, a rigorous and widely respected benchmark developed by researchers at Tsinghua and Renmin Universities. Accepted as a spotlight paper at NeurIPS 2024, SpreadsheetBench evaluates AI agents on 400 verified, real-world Excel problems sourced from online forums. These tasks test practical skills like formula writing, multi-sheet reasoning, data cleaning, and handling edge cases challenges that stump even advanced models.
Decide Agent achieved an impressive 82.5% accuracy score, successfully completing 330 out of 400 tasks with a 100% completion rate and an average processing time of around 10 seconds per task. This places it ahead of many established tools and on par with offerings from global heavyweights, using the same leaderboard that Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic reference for evaluating their own spreadsheet agents (such as integrations in Excel Copilot or similar tools).
What makes this feat even more striking is Decide’s bootstrap status: the startup has raised zero external funding to date. Launched publicly just a few months ago, Decide rapidly gained traction reaching 1,000 users within 24 days of launch through organic growth alone. Founder Abiodun Adetona recently shared that the platform now boasts over 3,000 users, including paying customers, with users generating thousands of analysis files.
Decide’s web-based tool supports uploads from Excel, CSV, or Google Sheets, allowing users to query data in plain English. For example, a prompt like “Analyze sales trends and build a dashboard” yields charts, insights, and visualizations in minutes democratizing advanced analytics for non-technical professionals in business, finance, research, and beyond.
Adetona emphasized the significance of the benchmark in a recent update: “SpreadsheetBench uses real Excel problems and strict verification that’s why it’s the standard for measuring Excel
agents globally.” The company’s blog details the performance breakdown, linking to the official leaderboard for transparency.
This milestone underscores Nigeria’s rising role in the global AI landscape, where local talent is building competitive tools despite limited resources. As AI adoption accelerates across Africa fueled by needs in sectors like finance, agriculture, and enterprise bootstrapped successes like Decide signal untapped potential for homegrown innovation.
Decide Agent is now generally available at trydecide.ai, inviting users and developers to experience frontier-level spreadsheet intelligence firsthand.
