How Hex Technologies ships fast and scales an effective engineering team
Blog post from New Relic
Hex Technologies, co-founded by Glen Takahashi, Barry McCardel, and Caitlin Colgrove, offers a collaborative data science and analytics platform that integrates SQL, Python, R, and no-code workflows into user-friendly notebooks, enabling both technical and non-technical users to perform exploratory analysis and create interactive data applications. The founders, motivated by their own experiences with data analytics, aim to bridge the gap between data scientists and non-technical users. Hex's solution features real-time collaboration, no-code charts, first-class SQL support, and a reactive, graph-based compute engine, emphasizing a "low-floor, high-ceiling" approach to make data analytics accessible and impactful. The company has faced challenges such as building comprehensive documentation and tooling to support a full-stack engineering approach, but it has maintained a reputation for rapid product development, thanks in part to utilizing New Relic's fast and intuitive UI for monitoring and debugging. The platform raised Series B financing with support from notable investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Databricks, and Snowflake, underscoring its potential in the evolving modern data stack landscape.