Has Hex Killed the “Industrial Dashboard Complex”?

“At Hex, we’ve long believed that our work should compound—that data teams shouldn’t be stuck rerunning the same analyses, only for their insights to disappear into a forgotten notebook or buried slide,” – CEO and co-founder Barry McCardel 

AI-powered Business Analytics Platform Hex announced a $70 million Series C funding round to accelerate its growth and platform development. This comes three years after their $52 million Series B round in 2022, and right after their acquisition of Hashboard last month.

The round was led by Avra, with continued support from major investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Redpoint Ventures, Amplify, Box Group, and Snowflake Ventures. 

Barry McCardel, CEO of Hex writes: “With this, we give ourselves the time and resources to keep building a great product, and tell lots of folks about it. And it comes on the heels of a lot of other exciting things, including crossing some major customer and revenue milestones, and welcoming the amazing Hashboard team – who are already contributing to this vision in profound ways.”

Coming Together to Solve the Problem of Data Disconnect

In 2019, Hex was formed by Co-Founders and former Palantir employees, Barry McCardel, Caitlin Colgrove, and Glen Takahashi to address the growing problem of data disconnect and the expectations around how AI can unlock value from data. 

According to Co-Founder Caitlin Colgrove, their motivation was due to lived experience: “Hex came from lived problems that all of us experienced. Barry, Glen, and I all worked together in a previous life on a variety of data analytics products and then went on to observe what I would say is the development of the modern data stack.”

In 2025, the company boasts an impressive list of paying customers: Cisco, Reddit, Anthropic, Figma, NBA, and StubHub to name a few.

Hex’s Platform Eliminates Fragmentation

Hex provides a AI-native workspace that is designed to streamline the entire data workflow, from quick queries to complex analytics and model development within a single environment. 

Rather than forcing users to juggle multiple disjointed tools, Hex enables end-to-end workflows that let data practitioners move seamlessly from writing SQL to creating visualizations, building models, and sharing interactive dashboards.

“You can really go end-to-end,” said CEO Barry McCardel in an interview during the 2023 AWS Startup Showcase. “All of this is cloud-based and collaborative first, so it works like a modern productivity tool you’d expect, like Google Docs or Figma.” This integrated approach eliminates the tool fragmentation that often plagues data teams, boosting productivity and enabling tighter collaboration across roles.

Hex has a built-in AI assistant called Hex Magic, which brings LLM capabilities directly into the product. Instead of context-switching between tools like ChatGPT and potentially leaking sensitive data, users can get AI-powered help where they’re working, enabling more sophisticated data driven work. 

“Organizations want to get a lot of value from their data,” said McCardel. “But the fragmentation of the tools and the lack of collaboration really winds up holding these folks back.” 

Hex is Enabling Enterprises to Rethink Dashboards

The ease that Hex brings to data analytics could potentially make dashboards obsolete.

Traditional dashboards have been the go-to solution for summarizing and visualizing business data, but they often fall short when it comes to flexibility and enabling collaboration. Hex’s integrated workspace is making building a complex model as easy as it is to run a quick query. Rather than relying on static dashboards maintained by separate teams, users across functions can now explore live data, ask follow-up questions, and iterate in real time within a collaborative cloud environment.

This ease and agility are pushing companies to reconsider the necessity of dashboards altogether. “We want to empower people to be more ambitious, to try things they wouldn’t have tried before,” said CEO Barry McCardel. 

A 5 Year Runway

According to the company, the new capital will help Hex’s mission to transform how teams work with data by expanding its operations and deepening its AI-driven capabilities. McCardel says this recent funding round has given them a 5 year runway to weather any economic uncertainties to come, while at the same time expanding operations. 

He envisions Hex as leading the charge to replace outdated BI tech: “The industry is finally waking up to what we’ve known all along: the old divide between notebooks and BI is broken. AI-native, unified tools are the future, and Hex is leading the charge to replace the outdated, fragmented data stack once and for all.”