Hex earned another $28M as the data collaboration platform continued to gain traction

Many companies are struggling to find funding in an increasingly tight investment environment. Conversely, VC firms approach promising startups for funding, but Hex, a data collaboration startup, defies the odds.

Barry McCardell, the company’s founder and CEO, said Sequoia wasn’t looking for funding when she knocked on the door. The company landed another $28 million from Sequoia and joined existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplifi and Snowflake.

McCardell said they still haven’t touched the $52 million in the bank from last year’s funding. “We weren’t raising money, and we didn’t need the money – we didn’t touch a penny the last round. But Matt Miller at Sequoia approached us early with an offer that would give us a little more leverage and put another 2-3 years of airport in the bank,” McCardell told TechCrunch.

“It felt like a no-brainer that this came at a time when we wanted to invest deeply in our product and team, especially in the AI ​​opportunity,” he said.

One reason for the investor’s interest is that the company has been growing rapidly since last year’s funding. “We were in tears. I think from a higher business perspective, we grew the revenue by 4x and the volume of the business by 4x in one year which was good. We’ve 10-folded our user base as we’ve started to open up access to more people.

“So the raw number of people using the product last year was pretty good. I think that caught the eye of new investors,” he said.

The company now has 450 paying customers, including Brakes, Notion, Toast and Chegg, and believes its data collaboration approach and growing recognition that AI is changing workflows are the biggest reasons for the product’s growing popularity.

Recently, the company added a tool called HexMagic, a tool that lets you interact with the data in plain language, and the software responds by asking questions about the data or performing tasks like auto-completing a Hex join. The questions. He sees this as a way to expand his user base beyond people like data scientists and people who know SQL or Python.

“Our product uniquely allows collaboration across different data people. And I think that’s really powerful. And I think the AI ​​stuff just acknowledges that. You don’t need to know how to write the right syntax in Python to do something, because Hex can help you do that. So that’s I think it’s a very powerful thing that we see more and more important in terms of opening up [the platform] For more people,” he said.

Hex was founded in 2019 and has now raised over $100 million in four years, according to Crunchbase data. With recent funding. McCardell said it should have a five-year runway, structuring the company to ride out any economic uncertainty, while giving it the freedom to grow the platform as needed.