- Company adds Workrise, AngelList, Whatnot, dbt Labs and more to its customer base
- Hex 2.0 solves key pain points in Data Science accessibility and collaboration; incorporates integration with dbt
Hex Technologies, the collaborative data workspace that empowers organizations to drive impact from their data, announced that it has raised $16 million in Series A financing, bringing its total funding to $21.5 million. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from previous investors Amplify Partners, as well as Data Community Fund, Geometry, Operator Collective, Tokyo Black, Vandelay Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital and individual investors.
Redpoint Managing Director Tomasz Tunguz has joined the Hex Board of Directors. Hex will use the funding to grow its exceptional product and go-to-market teams, and continue building its platform.
Hex is the first fully collaborative data workspace, equipping data teams to seamlessly go from idea to insight to sharing. The Hex platform includes real-time collaborative data notebooks, interactive data apps, first-class SQL support and an all-new reactive compute engine. It’s used by data teams at companies like Workrise, Glossier, AngelList, Human Interest, Whatnot, dbt Labs, Setel and dozens of others worldwide.
“We’re on a mission to help everyone do more with data, together,” said Barry McCardel, Hex’s co-founder and CEO. “The fast adoption and incredible reception we are seeing among our users is evidence of a real need. Our team is excited to keep pushing analytics workflows even further into the future.”
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A New Kind of Workspace for Data Teams
Within a typical organization, data scientists and analysts jump between multiple tools to do their work, such as code notebooks, SQL scratchpads and dashboards, and sharing via spreadsheets, screenshots and slides. This fragmentation causes major issues for collaboration, sharing and organization, and limits data teams’ impact. Hex eliminates these problems so that companies can get the most from their data investments.
“Hex has unlocked our team’s analytical ability,” says Nikhil Sabharwal, Head of Data at Human Interest. “Prior to Hex, we communicated through analysis dashboards or decks, which limited our ability to employ complex data structures, statistical methodologies or predictive analytics. With Hex, the potential of our analysts is fully unlocked while maintaining an interactive, easy to understand interface for data consumers.”
Hex’s collaborative data workspace has taken a previously siloed and fragmented workflow and turned it into something collaborative and inclusive. Using Hex, organizations can connect to data sources like Snowflake, analyze it in a collaborative notebook using SQL and Python, and share work as interactive apps and stories. Features like first-class SQL support and interactive app sharing make working with data more accessible to a broader population, while retaining more sophisticated Python workflows. By equipping analytically technical persons, Hex aims to simplify data workflows just as tools like Figma have done with design workflows.
“Hex has seen extraordinary demand because the company uniquely enables a broad population of those who are data literate to explore data and deploy data applications to colleagues. This creates a workflow of compounding insight for the millions of people working with data daily,” said Tunguz.
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Introducing Hex 2.0
The launch of Hex 2.0 introduces an entirely new way to work with code notebooks and build data apps. The new reactive compute model makes data projects more reproducible, interpretable and performant, solving critical issues that plague notebook-based workflows today.
“Like many in the data community, we have been using notebooks for years, but have also been frustrated by the legacy state and sharing issues,” said Glen Takahashi, Hex’s co-founder and Chief Architect. “Hex 2.0 is a big next step towards bringing these workflows into the future, and making them accessible to a bigger audience.”
Hex 2.0’s reactive compute engine analyzes the code to automatically infer relationships between cells, and the innovative Graph UI allows users to understand dependencies and execution order. Hex 2.0 also includes Dataframe SQL, which makes it easy for users to work with both Python and SQL in a single workflow.
Partnering with dbt Labs
Additionally, Hex announced an integration with dbt, which has quickly become the standard for transformation in the data warehouse and preparing raw data for analysis. “We are big dbt fans, so it made sense for us to make our products work well together for our growing list of shared customers,” said Caitlin Colgrove, Hex’s co-founder and CTO. “We’re excited to partner on unlocking the potential of the modern data stack.”
The integration enables Hex users to uncover valuable information about the databases in their workspace. Details such as table freshness and data quality are displayed directly in Hex, eliminating the need to cross-reference between multiple tools in the data pipeline.
Hex Technologies has created a new type of workspace for data teams to collaborate, analyze and share their best work. It removes inefficiencies while enabling people with different levels of understanding to work together to get the most out of data. Hex is backed by Redpoint Ventures, Amplify Partners, Data Community Fund, Geometry, Vandelay Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital and several angel investors. The company is based in San Francisco.
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