data-apps
(7)
Observable and the case for showing your work
A chart can settle an argument. Observable would rather let you inspect it: the data, the code, the assumptions, and now the AI that helped put it together.
Rob Woollen and the Seven-Year Flatline
Before Sigma passed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, its co-founder spent years staring at a line that barely moved. His career is a study in patient engineering, durable relationships, and the usefulness of refusing the obvious exit.
Posit Gave Away the Data Science Workbench - Then Sold Enterprises the Keys
The company behind RStudio spent years making data science software free. Its business appeared when banks, drugmakers and governments needed that freedom packaged with permissions, audit trails and a dependable place to publish.
Deepnote
Deepnote is a cloud-based, collaborative data notebook that reimagines the Jupyter notebook for teams. Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, it lets data scientists and analysts connect data sources, write Python, SQL and R, and work together in real time - like a Google Docs for data. In recent years it has leaned heavily into AI, adding an agent that can generate, edit and debug entire notebooks, and it went open source in 2025.
Reflex
Reflex is an open-source, full-stack Python framework and cloud platform that lets developers build and deploy production-grade web apps entirely in Python - no JavaScript required. Founded by ex-Apple and Ancestry engineers Nikhil Rao and Alek Petuskey, the company (originally Pynecone, a Y Combinator W23 startup) wraps React components in Python so data scientists, analysts, and engineers can ship UI, backend, and deployment from a single codebase. It has grown to over a million apps built, 25k+ GitHub stars, and adoption inside Fortune 500 companies.
Sigma
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics and business intelligence company that lets anyone explore live data from cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery through a familiar spreadsheet-style interface - no SQL required. Now pivoting into 'agentic analytics,' Sigma layers no-code AI agents on top of governed warehouse data so business teams can ask questions, build apps and trigger actions directly against the data, with security and governance intact.
Hex
Hex is a San Francisco-based AI analytics platform founded in 2020 by former Palantir employees Barry McCardel, Caitlin Colgrove, and Glen Takahashi. The company builds an integrated workspace where data teams and business users can analyze data, build interactive apps, and share insights using SQL, Python, and natural language — all in one place. With $177M in total funding including a $70M Series C in May 2025, Hex serves over 1,500 organizations including Reddit, Figma, Anthropic, Brex, and the NBA, replacing fragmented tool stacks with a single governed platform powered by AI agents.