Hex lands one other $28M as knowledge collaboration platform continues to realize traction

Many corporations are struggling to get funding today in an more and more tight funding surroundings. It appears the times are gone when VC corporations method promising startups about funding as a substitute of the opposite means round, however Hex, a knowledge collaboration startup, has defied the chances.

Firm co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel says he wasn’t searching for funding when Sequoia got here knocking on his door. The corporate ended up touchdown one other $28 million from Sequoia with participation from present traders Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify and Snowflake.

McCardel says he nonetheless hasn’t touched the $52 million he had within the financial institution from his earlier funding spherical final yr. “We weren’t elevating, and didn’t want the cash — we hadn’t touched a dime of the final spherical. However Matt Miller at Sequoia approached us preemptively with a suggestion that gave us little or no dilution, and allow us to put one other 2-3 years of runway within the financial institution,” McCardel informed TechCrunch.

“This felt like a no brainer coming right into a time once we need to be investing deeply in our product and workforce, particularly across the AI alternative,” he mentioned.

One of many causes for the investor curiosity is that the corporate has been rising at a speedy clip since its funding final yr. “We’ve been on a tear. I feel from a high line enterprise perspective, we’ve grown income by 4x and the scale of the enterprise by 4x in a single yr, which has been nice. We 10xed our person base as a result of we launched a tier that simply opened up entry to a ton extra individuals.”

“So simply the uncooked variety of individuals utilizing the product within the final yr has been nice. And I feel that clearly caught the attention of latest traders,” he mentioned.

The corporate now has 450 paying clients together with Brex, Notion, Toast and Chegg, He believes that the collaborative method to knowledge and the rising recognition that AI is remodeling workflows are the most important causes for the product’s rising reputation.

Most lately, the corporate added a device known as Hex Magic, a generative AI method to interacting with the info with plain language by asking questions concerning the knowledge, or asking Hex to undertake a process like auto-completing a be part of, and the software program responds to the requests. He sees this as a strategy to broaden the person base past people like knowledge scientists and individuals who know SQL or Python.

“Our product uniquely permits collaboration throughout completely different knowledge personas. I feel that’s additionally actually highly effective. And I feel the AI stuff is simply accretive to that. You don’t essentially should know how one can write the proper syntax in Python to do one thing as a result of Hex might help you do this. So I feel that’s a fairly highly effective factor that we’ll simply see develop into an increasing number of vital by way of opening up [the platform] to extra individuals,” he mentioned.

Hex was based in 2019 and has now raised over $100 million {dollars} in simply 4 years, per Crunchbase knowledge. With the latest spherical of funding. McCardel says he ought to have 5 years of runway, setting his firm as much as experience out no matter financial uncertainty could also be on the market, whereas giving him the liberty to develop the platform as wanted.