From Data to Insight to Action: The Next Evolution of the 5X Platform

At 5X, we’ve always believed in one simple principle: over time, the hardest technical problems become easier to use and move closer to the people who need them.

You’ve seen it before. Just a few years ago, launching software meant buying physical servers, racking them, maintaining them. Then came EC2 — and in seconds, you could spin up compute without even thinking about the hardware. In DevOps, once you had to write custom pipelines for CI/CD and manually manage infrastructure. Now, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and Kubernetes give you production-ready pipelines, declarative infrastructure, and automation out of the box. Even in security — no one builds custom auth anymore. You use OAuth, Okta, IAM. Secure, standardized, and one API call away.

But in data? We’re not there yet.

Instead of simplification, we got categories. Dozens of them. Ingestion, transformation, orchestration, governance, observability, activation — each with its own tools, interfaces, pipelines. Even best-in-class stacks end up looking like a wall of logos. As the stack grew, so did the fragmentation, and somewhere along the way, the promise of outcomes got lost in the middle.

The good news? It’s starting to collapse. Fast.

Databricks bought Neon to firm up its lakehouse base. Datadog snapped up Eppo and Metaplane to bring experimentation and observability closer to ops. Fivetran acquired Census to close the loop between ingestion and activation. Hex brought in Hashboard. Coalesce picked up CastorDoc. ServiceNow took over data.world. And OpenAI, of all companies, bought Codeium — the AI-native IDE. The writing is on the wall: the stack is compressing. Vendors are converging. Everyone’s racing toward integration.

And when AI enters the mix — a whole new stack on top of data — the pace only accelerates.

That’s the future 5X was built for.

From the start, we didn’t want to be another point solution in the stack. We wanted to be the stack. A complete data and AI platform that could take companies from ingestion to insight, to action — all in one place. But unlike other platforms — Palantir, Databricks, Fabric — we built 5X on open-source foundations. No vendor lock-in. No proprietary DSLs. Just modular, battle-tested tools that engineers already know and love.

That made onboarding easy. Companies could plug in 600+ data sources, bring it into a lake or warehouse, model and clean it, add semantics — and activate that data through BI tools or AI apps. We gave teams a data platform that just worked. And in Q4, we added the ability to run applications — built in Streamlit, Docker, and more — directly inside 5X. Your apps could now live right where your data was.

But something was still missing. We had created the capability — but we hadn’t yet told the story.

The story of what happens when your data stack isn’t just a backend — it’s a launchpad.

So we made a move.

I'm incredibly excited to announce that 5X has acquired a dedicated AI services team whose sole focus is to build applications on top of 5X. Not integrations. Not demos. Applications. Built natively on your stack. Using your semantics. Integrated into your business processes. Apps that don’t just sit on top of your data — they close the loop from insight to outcome.

Take our “Spares” application. It’s currently in use at two large Indian manufacturing enterprises. It optimizes procurement of consumable inventory — helping companies reduce working capital without risking stockouts. It plugs directly into their ERPs and works within their existing processes. And each company is saving over $1 million a year.

This isn’t a dashboard. This isn’t visibility. This is value. This is the kind of ROI companies have been waiting for from their data investments.

Because here’s the truth: for most traditional businesses, dashboards and metrics are not enough. They help, sure. They streamline operations. They enable better decisions. But they rarely translate to hard ROI you can take to the boardroom.

AI changes that. And AI applications are  how it happens.

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We believe the future of data and AI is simple: platforms that span the full value chain. From data to insight to action. From infrastructure to intelligence to impact. From raw inputs to real decisions to measurable ROI.

Because we’re not just building a platform anymore.

We’re building what comes after.