Hex, which simplifies storing and sharing large data sets with integrations for Snowflake, BigQuery, and others, raises a $16M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Hex's $16M Series A lands in a crowded but well-funded lane: the last few years produced a wave of raises for tools that sit on top of cloud warehouses, including Matillion's $35M Series C for Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake integration, Upsolver's $13M round for SQL access to data lakes, and SingleStore's $80M Series E for querying across silos. The pattern traces back further still — Snowflake itself raised $45M in 2015 while launching its first product.
What distinguishes Hex is that it attacks the consumption side rather than the pipeline: a collaborative workspace for storing, sharing, and analyzing large data sets via Snowflake and BigQuery integrations. The bet paid off quickly — five months later Hex followed this Series A with a $52M Series B backed by a16z and, notably, by Snowflake and Databricks themselves.
First-order effects
- Hex gets the capital to scale its collaboration platform beyond the Snowflake and BigQuery integrations it launched with, while Redpoint gains an early position in warehouse-adjacent tooling.
- Data teams already standardizing on Snowflake or BigQuery gain another managed layer for sharing and analyzing warehouse data without building internal infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- The follow-on Series B shows the strategic logic of this layer: Snowflake and Databricks invested directly, effectively hedging on which collaboration surface wins atop their own platforms — competitors like Matillion and Upsolver now face a funded rival courting the same analytics teams.
- Warehouse vendors' equity stakes signal that distribution partnerships, not just APIs, are becoming the currency of this market, pressuring integration-only startups to secure platform alliances of their own.
Third-order effects
- If platforms keep buying into the tools built on top of them, the modern data stack consolidates into vertically-aligned ecosystems — warehouse owners deciding which collaboration and analysis layers get preferential access.
- The steady cadence of eight- and nine-figure raises across this stack since AtScale's 2018 Series D points toward a maturing category where differentiation shifts from connectivity (everyone integrates with the big warehouses) to workflow lock-in around collaboration and sharing.
The trend: Capital is flowing to the application layer built atop cloud data warehouses, with the warehouse platforms themselves taking equity stakes to shape which collaboration surfaces win.