Shadow-IT spreadsheets — centralized low-code platform to replace secret Excels

Many mid-market and enterprise teams — finance, operations, sales ops and product analytics — run critical but unsupported workflows inside thousands of “secret” Excel and Google Sheets files that create audit, compliance and availability risks for IT and business leaders. These organizations collectively represent roughly 8 million potential accounts in the target segments and a $96.0B addressable market assuming an average $12K ACV in internal workflow and app spend, and the cost of shadow IT manifests as both direct audit exposure and hidden operational waste. The product would be a centralized low-code platform that ingests spreadsheets, automatically extracts formulas and dataflows with LLM-assisted logic translation, and exposes them as governed, versioned apps with enterprise connectors, RBAC, and audit trails. The technical priorities are robust spreadsheet parsing, automated test-generation for migrated logic, and a UX that lets non-developers edit forms and rules while IT enforces policies and deployment pipelines. This market is attractive now because low-code adoption lowers the organizational barrier to replace spreadsheets, LLM-driven synthesis materially reduces time-to-migrate complex logic, and rising regulatory focus increases willingness to pay for governed alternatives. Strengths include a large TAM, realistic $8K–$20K ACV per engaged account, and clear buyer pain across compliance and ops; challenges include reliably translating arcane Excel models, long enterprise procurement cycles, and competition from established low-code platforms and niche migration services. To stand out you must deliver higher-fidelity automated migration (reducing manual rework by a measurable percentage), end-to-end governance out of the box, and a sales motion that targets compliance/finance sponsors as much as IT, recognizing that technical parity alone will not win enterprise deals.