Announcing Hex

Where we're coming from

Over the past 10 years, Data has gone from a "cool innovation initiative" to a critical function. But the tools that Data teams use day-to-day feel stuck in the past.

As individual Data Scientists or Analysts, we can spend our day jumping between local Python notebooks, traditional BI platforms, spreadsheets, SQL scratchpads, visualization tools, and scripts, depending on whether we're exploring or analyzing or modeling. This fragmentation is painful, and also makes it hard to collaborate and share. In fact, as Data teams have gotten more sophisticated, we have seen it get harder to communicate their work. Copy-pasted charts. Emailed CSVs. One-off decks and PDF'd docs. Custom apps. It's a mess.

Then there's the overhead. Most Data folks are "Analytically Technical": they're not software engineers, but they are technical in how they work and think. Unfortunately, today's tools can make it challenging to access and manage more sophisticated workflows. Configuring local environments, data connections, and compute backends isn't what we signed up for, and are a barrier for others to adopt more advanced tooling.

Our team has felt all of this pain personally, as users and builders of data tools. It's what inspired us to create Hex, the product we always wish we had.

Introducing Hex

Hex is a Data Workspace for teams. It makes it easy to connect to data, analyze it in collaborative SQL and Python-powered notebooks, and share work as interactive data apps and stories.

The ability to go end-to-end, from query to analysis to sharable data product, is a big shift. Let's go through it step by step:

Connecting to data

Hex integrates with popular data warehouses, including Snowflake, Redshift, and BigQuery, and stores credentials securely, eliminating friction around environment variables or plaintext tokens.

Hex has built-in SQL cells. They're fully-featured SQL editors, in a notebook. They let you write repeatable, templated queries that tells a story, with the ability to visualize at each step. You can easily browse your schema if you're not sure about types, and integrated caching to save time (and money, on that data warehouse bill).

Collaborative notebooks

Code notebooks are a fixture of many data workflows. Our team has been using notebooks for over a decade, from Mathematica to iPython to Jupyter.

We think they're great, and it's why Hex has a fully-featured Python and SQL notebook environment, with lots of new superpowers.

The built-in Chart Cell makes visualization easy, or, you can always tap into the vast universe of Python charting.

Real-time multiplayer, commenting, and granular permissions create a truly collaborative editing experience, while integrated version control simplifies iteration.

All together, these features push notebooks beyond being just scratchpads, and into a true analysis workspace for teams.

Shareable data apps

Hex's interactive App Builder makes it easy to turn analyses into interactive, sharable apps. These artifacts are easily usable by others, with no extra setup or overhead required.

This means that instead of 42 back and forth messages with your stakeholders about "what happens if we filter out deactivated users", you can just add a checkbox or a dropdown that lets them explore it themselves.

You can check out some examples for yourself in our Use case gallery.

Where we're headed

Hex is now being relied on by Data teams all over the world, including at Glossier, Imgur, Pave, and many more. They’re using Hex to explore data, collaborate on analyses, share quick reports, build complex apps, and everything in between.

And we're just getting started! Looking forward we're focused on a few core things:

• An amazing editor experience: we're making Hex the best place to build and share data projects, and are making our core SQL-and-Python editing workflows great for everyone.

• Deeper collaboration: improving how you work together and share projects as a team, including powerful versioning, more complex apps, and better organization.

• Easier access: continue pushing down the barrier to entry for data workflows, and make super powers available for everyone working with data.

• Exceptional security: keep making sure Hex is a safe, secure place to work with data.

We're hard at work on all of this and much more, and can't wait to roll these out to all of you soon.

Money stuff

We need money to pay for rent, food, computers, etc., so last year raised a $5.5M Seed round led by Amplify Partners. As early believers in companies like Datadog, Fishtown Analytics (makers of dbt), and OctoML, they have a unique perspective on building the next generation of data platforms.

Hex is also supported by amazing funds and angels including XYZ, BoxGroup, Data Community Fund, Operator Collective, Scott Belsky, Worklife, Todd and Rahul, Justin and Jeff, and more. We are so grateful and proud to have everyone onboard as we work to build something great.