Partnering with Hex: Data Collaboration Made Easy

Data is the competitive advantage of the 21^st century. Without access to the right information, businesses are unable to make the quick decisions they need to survive—and any dream of AI is off the table. The good news is that the wave of the cloud has brought with it a whole set of new companies and technologies to collect and break down more information than we ever could have imagined, including cloud data warehouses, real-time data and integration, efficient data loading, transactional cloud databases, transformation and metrics. These products and others like them are giving us better information than ever before and the companies behind them have created more than $100B of market cap in the process.

The irony, though, is that atop this modern data stack, teams are still forced to use kludgy, decades-old analytics tools to actually make all of that data useful and deliver insights to users. But these are the types of opportunities we love at Sequoia: when a shift in the competitive landscape creates a clear opening for an enduring company to emerge. 

Today, we are thrilled to embrace just such an opportunity and announce our partnership with Hex. We believe the platform that co-founders Barry McCardel, Caitlin Colgrove and Glen Takahashi and their team are creating has the potential to transform how businesses work together—in modern languages, with modern infrastructure. Hex starts its journey with data scientists, offering them the best way to collaborate on notebooks and work together to deliver insights. It ends with an analytics platform that empowers both business users and data analysts to quickly find the answers they need to do their jobs.

We learned about Hex through our partnerships with Snowflake and dbt, where customers were raving about their experiences with the product. People tell us they love the collaborative experience it offers and the ease it gives them in accessing the information they need. For some customers, Hex is already being used not only by data scientists, but the whole company.

When we first met Barry, Caitlin and Glen, they weren’t raising money. We are thankful to them for nonetheless being patient with our interest—and for seeing value in the opportunity to partner with us. We are excited to put Team Sequoia behind Hex, and we look forward to seeing them accomplish their dream of making data an easy and collaborative experience for everyone. By doing so, they will rightfully claim their spot as the crown jewel atop the modern data stack that is changing our world.