Many companies today struggle to obtain financing in an increasingly tight investment environment. It seems that the days of VC firms approaching promising startups about funding are gone rather than the other way around, but Hexa data collaboration startup, has defied expectations.
Company co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel says he was not looking for funding when Sequoia knocked on his door. The company eventually raised another $28 million from Sequoia with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify and Snowflake.
McCardel says he still hasn’t touched the $52 million he had in the bank from his previous funding round last year. “We weren’t raising and didn’t need the money — we hadn’t touched a penny from the last round. But Sequoia’s Matt Miller pre-emptively approached us with an offer that gave us very little dilution, and let us bank another 2-3 years of runway,” McCardel told businesskinda.com.
“This felt like a good idea coming at a time where we want to invest deeply in our product and our team, especially around the AI opportunity,” he said.
One of the reasons for investor interest is that the company has been growing rapidly since funding last year. “We shed a tear. I think from a top business perspective, we grew revenue 4x and the size of the company 4x in one year, which was great. We’ve increased our user base tenfold because we launched a tier that just gave access to a ton more people.”
“So just the raw number of people who used the product in the last year was amazing. And I think that clearly caught the attention of new investors,” he said.
The company now has 450 paying customers, including Brex, Notion, Toast and Chegg. He believes the collaborative approach to data and the growing recognition that AI is transforming workflows are the biggest reasons for the product’s growing popularity.
Recently, the company added a tool called Hex magic, a generative AI approach to interacting with the data in plain language by asking questions about the data, or asking Hex to perform a task such as automatically completing a join, and the software responds to the requests. He sees this as a way to expand the user base beyond the likes of data scientists and people who know SQL or Python.
“Our product uniquely enables collaboration between different data personas. I think that’s also very powerful. And I think the AI stuff just adds to that. You don’t necessarily need to know how to write the perfect syntax in Python to do anything, because Hex can help you with that. So I think that’s a pretty powerful thing that we’ll just see become increasingly important in terms of opening up [the platform] for more people,” he said.
Founded in 2019, Hex has now raised over $100 million dollars in just four years Crunchbase data. With the most recent financing round. McCardel says he should have five years of catwalk setting up his company to weather any economic uncertainty while giving him the freedom to grow the platform as needed.
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