Hex 4.0 and $100M: BI rebuilt for AI agents, as code

The analytics vendor Hex threw out its product and started again. On October 27, Hex announced Hex 4.0, a from-scratch rewrite for AI agents, and a $100 million round at a $1.2 billion valuation. The core idea: "everything is code." Hex's CEO says no chatbot sidebar will save legacy BI. For a small business that runs on dashboards and spreadsheets, the useful part is not the funding. It is why Hex says the old product broke.

What actually happened

Per Hex's announcement, written by CEO Barry McCardel:

• The round: $100M at a $1.2B valuation. Peak XV and 137 Ventures led, with Amplify, Avra, a16z, Next Legacy, Redpoint, Sequoia and Zero Prime. Law firm Cooley's coverage calls it a Series D. Hex's own post calls it a "financing round."
• The rewrite: Hex has over 2,500 customers. It says its data model and architecture were set in 2020 to 2021, before agents. Its agent harness grew to "hundreds of tools." Outside agents had to reach Hex "through a keyhole via MCP." And the compute engine was not built for the fast, high-concurrency work agents do.
• The new bet: Hex 4.0 treats all data work as "plain code," not a proprietary YAML format. Context, controls and guardrails sit on top. McCardel also says agents wrote the code for the rewrite, with Hex's engineers guiding them.

Hex also names the problem its customers have now. People use Cursor, Codex, Claude and custom agents to "vibe code" dashboards and reports. Then they share the results as HTML files, with no permissions, no provenance and no observability.

Why it matters for your business

You probably have this problem already. Someone asked an AI for a sales report. It made a nice chart from an export. Now three versions of "revenue" are going around, and nobody knows which query made which number. That is not an analytics problem. It is a definitions problem.

Define your metrics in code, once. Revenue, gross margin, repeat-customer rate: write each one as a versioned SQL query or a dbt model in a repo you control. Then every agent and dashboard reads the same definition, Hex or not.

Portability is the real lesson. Hex is betting that plain code beats proprietary formats. You should hold your vendors to the same rule. If your metric logic lives only inside a BI tool's UI, you rebuild it when you switch. If it lives in code, you point the new tool at it.

Don't buy because of the round. $1.2B is a vote of confidence, not a product review. If you test Hex 4.0, check two things: can you export your work as code, and do its permissions hold when an outside agent connects?

Sources: Hex, Cooley.