**tl;dr:** every day, Data teams at companies like Workrise, Literati, Glossier, Whatnot, dbt Labs, and dozens of others use Hex to explore, collaborate, and share in new ways. Hex is helping them create more impact in their organizations, and now we want to bring those superpowers to everyone.
Today we're announcing we raised a $16M Series A to help accelerate this effort, and fulfill our mission to empower Data teams to do more, together.
Almost two years ago, we started Hex in response to personal, lived frustration with data tools. The overhead. The friction. The difficulty sharing. It felt like they were getting in our way more than they were empowering us.
As we started building and bringing folks onto early versions of Hex, we realized this was true for many others as well. The number of data teams powering decision-making has expanded, but the pain of siloed, fragmented, antiquated tools for analytical work has only gotten worse.
The Analytically Technical
"Data Science" has traditionally been a garden with high walls. To do anything productive, you'd need to set up a local environment, manage dependencies, roll-your-own database connections, and debug weird state issues.
At Hex, we are building for the growing population of Analytically Technical users, who are data-driven and able to write SQL or Python, but shouldn't have to struggle through all the overhead to do it. Hex is designed to have a "low floor, and high ceiling", meaning that it is accessible for a large group, while not limiting those who need more power.
Now, as we have rolled Hex out for many hundreds of users, we see how it is enabling people of all sophistication levels and technical backgrounds to do more with their data, together.
Building the first collaborative data workspace
If you have used code notebooks before, Hex will feel familiar and powerful. But our vision isn't just bringing notebooks into the cloud: it's to fundamentally re-imagine how Data teams do and share their work, building the first collaborative data workspace.
Early on, we built novel capabilities like interactive data apps, real-time collaboration, and first-class SQL support, making it seamless and easy to go from idea to insight to sharing. And in just in the last few months, we have introduced some new, major steps forward.
Dataframe SQL answers the age-old question "Python or SQL?" with "why not both?" It makes it easy to go back and forth between the linguae francae of data, including building entire projects out of chained SQL queries instead of clunky CTEs.
The reactive compute model introduced two weeks ago in Hex 2.0 is a revolutionary new way to think about notebooks and data apps. Hex is now the best way to make work reproducible, interpretable, and performant.
But we're not done yet!
Partnering with dbt Labs
In 2018 I heard about a weird tool called dbt that was spreading ~~vira~~... quickly through the NYC data community.
Fast forward to 2021, and dbt has become the standard for teams (including us!) to transform data in their warehouse, and a staple of the modern data stack. Many of the new teams coming onto Hex (including dbt Labs!) are using dbt, so making the products work well together was a natural and common ask.
So, today we're rolling out the first version of our dbt integration. Teams can connect Hex to their dbt Cloud instance and automatically enrich schemas in Hex with table metadata, freshness, and test status. It allows dbt and Hex users to quickly get the context they need on their data, without juggling multiple apps and browser tabs.
Read more about our dbt integration
Supporting modern data teams everywhere
We think Hex is neat, but are especially flattered by the amazing teams using it to do their work. Every day, Hex is used to drive decisions at Workrise, Whatnot, Human Interest, Glossier, Booster Fuels, Setel, Literati, AngelList, dbtLabs, GoPuff, and dozens of other customers all over the world.
We're thrilled to support them, and excited to work with them to make Hex even more capable.
We're backed by some great folks
Our Series A was led by Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures. You may know him from leading investments in Looker, Dremio, Monte Carlo, Transform, Preset, and other companies on the vanguard of the "modern data stack".
We're also proud to have participation from our lead Seed investors at Amplify Partners, as well as Activation Fund, Data Community Fund, Geometry, Operator Collective, Tokyo Black, Vandelay Ventures, and XYZ Ventures. They're joined by individual operators such as Allison Pickens, Lenny Rachitsky, Viviana Faga, and a whole boatload of other data practitioners, founders, and casual acquaintances.
This brings our total funding to $21.5m, which we are mostly spending paying salaries for our brilliant team, making some awesome swag, and running a very large cluster of computers in The Cloud.
Start using Hex
Wanna give Hex a spin? Head here to get access.
Or, come help us build the future of Hex
We are a tight-knit crew of engineers, designers, and data aficionados. Our roadmap is full of big ideas and little details, and we would love your help bringing them to life.
If any of this is interesting to you, take a look at our open roles here.