Hex Technologies Inc., a San Francisco maker of data analytics software, raised $100 million at a $1.2 billion valuation, betting that investors will back software platforms that rebuild themselves around AI agents rather than bolt chatbots onto older products.
Peak XV Partners and 137 Ventures led the round, with participation from Amplify, Avra, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint, Sequoia and Zero Prime, Chief Executive Barry McCardel said in a company blog post Tuesday. The valuation is on a post-money basis.
A rewrite for the agent era
The funding accompanies the launch of Hex 4.0, a ground-up rewrite of the product the company has built since its 2019 founding and that more than 2,500 customers use. McCardel wrote that the older architecture was straining under the demands of AI agents, including an agent toolset that had ballooned to hundreds of functions and a compute engine not designed for the fast, highly concurrent work agents generate. The new version treats analysis as plain code and adds context and permission controls meant to make work produced by outside agents and coding tools trustworthy.
Hex plans to use the money to expand its team and go-to-market operations and to keep building the platform, the company said.
Software valuations under scrutiny
McCardel acknowledged that the company raised in a skeptical climate. Earlier this year, he wrote, many investors were questioning whether standalone software companies would survive the rise of large AI models, and he said he expects legacy business intelligence tools to be displaced as the category is reshaped. A unicorn valuation for an analytics platform suggests at least some growth investors are willing to pay for model-independent software that can work alongside AI agents.
