
AI assistant for Excel that builds spreadsheets and models with natural language instructions.
Carousel is an AI assistant embedded directly in Microsoft Excel that helps professionals build complete multi-tab financial models, format data, explain complex formulas, and ingest document context through natural language prompts and keyboard shortcuts. Core features include Carousel Chat for conversational model building, Quick Fix for instant formatting changes via Ctrl+Enter, Model Walkthrough for plain-English formula explanations, and File Context for smart data retrieval from uploaded documents with automatic citations.
The product targets financial analysts, investment bankers, management consultants, private equity professionals, and operations leaders who spend significant time building models in Excel. Carousel was developed by Carousel Technologies, a Y Combinator W24 company that was acquired by AlphaSense in October 2025.
The market for AI-powered spreadsheet automation is expanding rapidly as enterprises seek to reduce manual data work. Carousel addresses a specific gap in financial modeling workflows where analysts spend hours on repetitive tasks.
The acquisition by AlphaSense positions Carousel within a comprehensive market intelligence ecosystem, enabling analysts to move seamlessly from research to modeling. This integration creates a unified workflow from document discovery to financial model creation, potentially accelerating adoption among AlphaSense's existing enterprise customer base. The combined platform addresses the full analytical workflow: research, data extraction, model building, and presentation.
Carousel's primary competitive advantages include native Excel integration that eliminates workflow friction versus standalone modeling tools, natural language model building that requires no deep Excel expertise, and document ingestion capabilities that extract data from PDFs and presentations directly into spreadsheets with automatic citations. The post-acquisition integration with AlphaSense uniquely combines generative Excel modeling with a market intelligence universe of over 500 million documents.
The product is built specifically for finance and consulting professionals rather than general spreadsheet users, providing targeted features like precedent and dependent navigation, context-aware referencing of cell ranges, and custom integrations for enterprise data providers on the Deal Team plan.