Hex Raises $100M

> https://hex.tech/

that is one of the most unhinged landing pages i've ever seen, it looks like a vibe coded claude mess that somehow raised 100M

is no one looking at what they're releasing anymore? do people just not care? i guess they don't have to if some intern can just prompt "make cool website for our useless company" and then 100M appears at your door from eager VCs

I liked Hex. I introduced it to my company and now it has become the main BI tool.

However, since they started pushing the whole AI thing I no longer like them.

It may speed up doing analytics, but makes everything hard to maintain, creates a ton of duplication and adds yet another layer to take care of.

I also think AI may come back to bite them in the ass. What's the point of an analytics platform is you can create dashboards from scratch directly using AI. What are they adding to the table?

They should have stuck to just making developers lives easier instead of that weird objective that is trying to make analytics accessible for everyone

We are heavy Hex users at OpenRouter. I was skeptical that it would replace "core" reporting tools like Looker, but the efficacy of the Hex agent has made it our go-to for just about all of our analytics, and allowed us to get incredibly far with a single (very good) person on the data team.

We can make completely reproducible reporting when we need it (for e.g. our weekly business reviews), while the agent can answer all of the ad-hoc stuff that would normally be done by a small army of analysts scurrying around.

> And this was leading to some major issues: our agent harness was becoming bloated with hundreds of tools, which were required to teach agents about how to use Hex-something emphatically out of distribution. Our compatibility with external agents, because those products were having to use Hex through a keyhole via MCP versus being able to work with something more native. And our compute engine wasn’t built to support the high-speed, high-concurrency, iterative workflows agents seem to like.

I'm having déjà vu... I read almost the same thing word for word ~6 months ago. I think it was from an open source project.

Edit: February, but it was published in November:

What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46844822

Actually I think I've seen the same thing three or four times this year. But yeah, actually solving the actual problems you actually have is a good idea :)

Cool. But honestly all you need is mcp, a semantic layer and let your team run their analysis. Then use something like evidence for bi reporting via duck db. Costs almost nothing.

I used Hex at $PREVJOB and it was easily one of my favorite tools. It is maybe the one BI tool that I have felt truly attached to in my career

I used to use Hex but Marimo (OSS local first) honestly renders it completely obsolete for me

It similarly offers the combo of SQL and dataframes, built in dataviz and UI widgets, great LLM integration and essentially everything else one would want from either a notebook or a BI tool

This is getting crazy and is another feather in the cap of unhinged American investing and business culture right now.

My first question, what does a BI company need $100M for?

Why does it seem that Figma’s logo is on every company’s trust badge list. Do they spend millions on SaaS subscriptions? Or are they getting bamboozled into getting their name hijacked for trust?

Is this just me or do other people feel this is getting out of hand?

Fascinating. We used to use it quite a bit. But nowadays its just claude + skills.

In my company, we're pretty happy with Claude plus Metabase CLI (self-hosted). We quickly get any dashboard we want, regardless of the skill level of the person asking.

I'm surprised at the negative feedback in the comments.

We signed up for Hex a few weeks ago. The PoC was smooth. My colleagues love it.

This site is really a headache... Scrolling and trying to read through the endless content straight up isn't pleasant, which is really hard to achieve.

Is this basically a public version of Meta’s bento notebooks?

> to unlock your team's curiosity

God, what sort of a world do we live in where curiosity has to be "unlocked". No. Curiosity is the thing that happen when you naturally want to know something. If it has to be unlocked, it's not curiosity. And even if there were some meaning one could ascribe to unlocking curiosity, it wouldn't be with some sort of vibe-coded behemoth AI analytics system....

Glad I got out of the corporate world as soon as I could. It's all rather inhuman.

Have....they seen Arcane ?

> "If we didn’t have Hex, we might’ve left more than $100M on the table. That might even be an underestimate."

Hex saved Mercor $100MM. That's impressive!

I've never seen a Modern Slavery Act statement, does that mean no 996?

Downvote me if you want, I'm flaunting the guidelines in service of the discourse.

If I may posthumously discipline the horse - when did the suffixes "-native" and "-first" merge in unholy matrimony?

Was it when B2B marketing realized that engineers equated "native" with "best/fastest/simplest solution available"? Or is it even more stupid than that?

We built a much simpler alternative to this over complicated mess that is Hex.

If you're interested in using it, you can 1-click deploy.

https://dbpro.app/studio