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Hex 的新时代和数据
宣布Hex 4.0 和1亿美元的资金募集——建设面向agent的本土未来用于分析。
几个月前，在我们刚刚关闭了我们最好的季度之后，我们决定做一些大胆的事：从头开始，从一个干净的黑克思版本开始，我们建造了6年的产品，在全球被超过2500个客户使用。
这是一件激进的事情——但是在将AI带入数据的前沿4年之后，我们知道这是对的。 今天我们要介绍这个新版本
让我告诉你为什么，以及我们看到这一切的去向。
“如果我们从零开始，我们将建造什么？”
这是我们今年早些时候向我们自己提出的问题。 看，我们成立于2019年，让我们成为AI公司前身(ew!).
现在，我还认为我们做了一个惊人的工作使AI进入我们的产品这些年！我们有一个文本到SQL的原型，在ChatGPT之前使用GPT-3. 2023年2月我们发布的"魔法"特征。 我们发布是去年第一个真正好的数据agent，今年早些时候，我们再次用基因应用改变了游戏。 我为这一切感到骄傲。
但从根本上说，我们正试图将AI整合到已经存在的产品中去。 我们的数据模型、架构和围绕用户在产品中所做的核心假设都是在2020至2021年被烘烤的——我们远离“agent本土”，无论我们多么喜欢这样说。
这导致了一些重大问题：我们的agent带被数百个工具膨胀了，需要这些工具来教导agents 如何使用Hex - 某事强烈地退出发行。 我们与外部的agents的兼容性，因为这些产品需要通过一个通过MCP的键孔来使用Hex，而不是能够与更本土的东西合作。 我们的计算引擎并不是用来支持agents高速、高通量、迭代工作流程的。
在这些问题的同时，我们看到数据工作也在很多其他地方发生：人们正在使用Cursor,Codex,Cognition,Claude，以及定制的agents——这反过来引起了很多问题！人们是"vibe编码"的仪表板和报告方式比他们使用其遗留的BI工具以及环绕HTML文件发邮件的方式还要多，没有出处，上下文，也没有权限。 但之前版本的Hex无法以我们所希望的方式解决问题。
总而言之，这增加了一种越来越强烈的感觉，即尽管增长迅速，而且有很多快乐的客户，但我们正走向一个不断减少的回报点。
当我们聚集在一起谈论这个问题的时候，我们有一个想法，如果我们从今天开始从零开始，我们实际上会做什么：一个植根于代码的平台——它具有无限的灵活性和agent的自然性——并拥抱数据工作可以发生很多地方，但是它需要背景，控制，指导和护栏来使它得到信任。
这就是我们建造的。
引入正弦 4.0
Hex 4.0是agents时代真正的出手重写(当然，通过使用agents来写出所有代码，以我们团队数十年在建设缩放数据平台方面的综合专业知识为指导).
4.0的核心假设是，一切都是代码——而团队需要上下文，控制和复合，使其可信和可扩展。 它倾向于认为数据工作正在很多地方发生，而"平面代码"(不是专有的YAML格式)就是让这个方法有意义。
我建议你读一下！也许有几次，因为这很有趣，我们怀疑你将会听到许多其他公司的消息，它们会意识到它们也需要从第一原则中思考。
这仅仅是我们所想到的许多其他事情的基础；事实上，我们努力这样做的原因之一，是因为我们想建造一些东西，我们无法想象在旧建筑上做什么—— 但是在新建筑上是微不足道的。
我们迫不及待想给你看！
一些钱，我们再加一亿
随着这一切的聚焦，我们意识到更多的资金将帮助我们更快地前进 — — 扩大我们的团队规模，扩大上市规模，并继续大摇大摆。 唯一的问题是，在上半年，投资者认为所有的软件都快死了，只剩下两家公司了。
然而，Shailendra和在峰地十五号的球队并不认为：事实上，他们非常肯定，模式独立的平台将会有一个光明的未来。 他们不怕我们采取大胆的第一原则来建造它。
因此我兴奋地宣布，我们已经在高峰十五和我们137家风险投资公司(Amplify, Avra, au16z, Redpoint, Sequoia，和Zero Prime)牵头的1.2B估值中结束了1亿美元的融资回合。
这给了我们更多的runway 来继续建造这个东西，并且把更大胆的赌注带到未来。
BI的结束，新的开始
我对上面的“SaaS启示录”投资人投下一些严肃的阴影，但我会给他们一些肯定：我认为很多软件类别在接下来的几年里确实会死亡。 但我也相信，许多人会结合并被再生成新的形状。
这是我们对BI的基本观点：旧的范式已经结束了，没有多少时间将一个聊天员侧边栏挂入遗留的平台上，但也有奇妙的新机会
我们认为，下一章植根于守则，其背景和管制是建立信任、治理和护卫所需的。
BI的基本承诺终于在这里：每个人都可以提问！每个人都可以建造！但现在很混乱，所有的信任都消失了。 我们认为这是要打破的核心取舍，我们对此有点着迷。
1，我不会叫任何人的名字，但我确实认为这很有趣在我们的空间有多少公司一直在周围8年或更久现在称自己为"AI土生土长"，尽管从字面上来说，这与这句话是对立的。 我的意思是，我知道为什么他们这样做，但是除非你在过去24个月里真的重建了你的产品，我不确定你能否可信地声称它。..
我开玩笑，但不是真的？你本该参加我们的一些演讲会。..
如果这很有趣，请点击下面开始，或检查加入我们团队的机会。
本文由 AI宝库自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
Blog
A new era for Hex, and data
Announcing Hex 4.0, and a $100m fundraise — building toward the agent-native future for analytics.
A few months ago, after we had just closed our best-ever quarter, we decided to do something bold: start from scratch on a clean-sheet version of Hex, the product we had been building for 6 years and used by over 2,500 customers globally.
This was a radical thing to do — but after 4 years on the frontier of bringing AI to data, we knew it was the right one. Today we’re introducing that new version — and announcing a fundraising to bring it to the world.
Let me tell you why, and where we see all of this going.
“What would we build if we were starting from scratch?”… and then doing it
This was the question we asked ourselves earlier this year. See, we were founded in 2019, making us a pre-AI company (ew!).
Now, I also think we had done an amazing job bringing AI into our product over those years! We had a text-to-SQL prototype using GPT-3 before ChatGPT. We launched our Magic features in February 2023. We launched the first really good data agent last year, and earlier this year we changed the game again with generative apps. I'm proud of all of this.
But fundamentally, we were trying to integrate AI into a product that already existed. Our data model, architecture, and core assumptions around what users were doing in our product were all baked in 2020 to 2021 — we were far from “agent native”, no matter how much we liked saying it.¹
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.
In parallel with these issues, we were seeing data work is happening in a lot of other places: folks are using Cursor, Codex, Cognition, Claude, and custom agents — which in turns was causing a lot of issues! People are "vibe coding" dashboards and reports way more than they're using their legacy BI tools and emailing around HTML files without provenance, context, or permissions. It’s a mess — but the previous version of Hex couldn’t solve this in the way we wanted.
Altogether, this added to a growing sense that – despite growing quickly and having a lot of happy customers – we were headed for a point of diminishing returns.
As we got together and talked about this, we had an idea of what we actually would do if we were starting from scratch today: a platform rooted in code — with all of its infinite flexibility and agent nativity — and embrace that data work can happen a lot of places, but that it needs context, controls, guidance, and guardrails to make it trusted.
And so that’s what we built.
Introducing Hex 4.0
Hex 4.0 is truly a from-scratch rewrite for the era of agents (and, of course, was greatly accelerated by using agents to write all of the code, guided by the decades of combined expertise from our teams in building scaled data platforms).
The core assumption of 4.0 is that everything is code — and that teams need context, controls, and compounding to make it trusted and scalable. It leans into the idea that data work is happening in a lot of places, and that "plain code" (not a proprietary YAML format) is the way to make that make sense.
We have a big, long blog post detailing all of this here, I recommend you read it! Maybe a couple of times, because it's interesting, and we suspect you’re going to be hearing from a lot of other companies who are going to realize that they need to think from first principles too.
And this is just the foundation for a lot of other things we have in mind; in fact, one of the reasons we went so hard on this is because there are things we want to build we couldn't imagine doing on the old architecture — but are trivial on the new one.
We can't wait to show you!
Some money stuff: we raised another $100m
As this all came into focus, we realized more money would help us go faster – to scale our team, expand go-to-market, and continue to make great swag. The only problem was that in the first part of the year, investors thought all software was going to die and there would only be two companies left.²
Shailendra and the team at Peak XV, however, didn't think that: in fact, they were pretty sure that model-independent platforms were going to have a bright future ahead. And they were not scared about us taking a bold first-principles approach to go build it.
So I’m excited to announce that we’ve closed a $100 million financing round at a $1.2B valuation led by PeakXV and our 137 Ventures, with participation from Amplify, Avra, a16z, Redpoint, Sequoia, and Zero Prime.
This gives us a bunch more runway to keep building this thing, and take more bold bets into the future.
The end of BI, the beginning of something new
I'm throwing some serious shade at the "SaaS apocalypse"-pilled investors above, but I'll give them some credit: I think it is true that a lot of software categories will effectively die over the next couple of years. But I also believe many will combine and be reborn into new shapes.
This is our basic outlook on BI: the old paradigm is over, and no amount of bolting a chatbot sidebar onto the legacy platforms is going to change that. But there are also fantastic new opportunities opening up!
We believe the next chapter is rooted in code, with the context and controls needed to establish trust, governance, and guardrails.
The basic promise of BI is finally here: everyone can ask questions! Everyone can build! But now it's chaotic, and all the trust is gone. We see this as the core trade-off to break, and we're kind of obsessed with it.
¹ I'm not going to call out anyone by name, but I do think it's funny how many companies in our space that have been around for 8 years or more now call themselves "AI native", despite that literally being the antithesis of that phrase. I mean, I get why they're doing it, but unless you have literally rebuilt your product in the last 24 months, I'm not sure you can credibly claim it...
² I'm joking, but not really? You should have sat in some of the pitch meetings we had…
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