Hexa Letter #3: Fueled with ambition, driven by purpose

While the Hexa brand is still being built, we have made great strides this year in transitioning the studio towards a more scalable model. Overall, we raised over €35 million this year to support this transformation.

€15 Million for the “Hexa Build 1” Fund

This fund allows us to finance our projects upfront and shift towards an asset-light model. Our operating costs are no longer tied to the number of projects we launch each year, allowing us to potentially create as many startups as we want annually, or more concretely, reach our target of 30 startups by 2030 set when Hexa was launched in 2022. There has been great enthusiasm for this new fund, which offers a unique opportunity to systematically participate in all seed rounds of the next 20 startups we will launch. To date, the fund has invested in companies like Catalog (alongside LocalGlobe), Roundtable (with top European business angels), Elba (alongside XAnge), and Tengo (alongside Point Nine). We estimate it will take about three years to deploy these €15 million, meaning another raise within the next 18 months.

€20 Million Raised for Hexa’s Parent Company

The remaining €20 million was raised directly for the parent company Hexa in our second capital increase since the beginning of our journey. Historically we had “only” raised €10 million in 2016 from around 40 investors and completed a €27 million bank debt financing in 2021 from Belfius, BNP Fortis, Caisse d’Epargne Haut de France and CIC. Partnering with banks for this type of funding was quite innovative at the time and underscored their strong support for entrepreneurship and innovation. The revolving structure of the credit line was ideally suited to our business model, allowing us to draw and repay funds based on our investments and exits. This form of 'non-dilutive financing,' as it's commonly referred to in the tech ecosystem, has been instrumental in strengthening our financial strategy and communication.

In 2024, we initially planned to raise €10 million this time, but due to strong interest, we doubled the amount. Alongside the €15 million fund, we therefore completed a €20 million capital increase, the first since our €10 million raise in 2016. Our investors include a mix of long-term entrepreneurs and family investors such as Dominique Vidal, Johan Van Damme, the Van Campenhout, Habert-Dassault, Le Hodey, Peterbroeck, Janssen and  Van der Vaeren, as well as Alexandre Prot (Qonto), Gary Anssens (Alltricks), Olivier Duha (Webhelp), Violette Watine (Mademoiselle Bio), Gauthier Picquart (Rue du Commerce), and Pierre-Emmanuel Bercegeay (OuiHelp), whom we are delighted to welcome and sincerely thank.

Valuing Hexa’s Unique Studio Model

Bringing in investors naturally raised the question of valuing our studio model. Hexa is a unique setup offering the diversification of a fund with a portfolio of over 40 startups and the multiples of a startup since we are founders with “free” access to capital. The studio model is challenging but also highly rewarding. The best way to value Hexa is to combine the value of the historical “Portfolio” with our ability to create capital through our “Factory.” The “Portfolio” reflects the value of the companies it contains relative to our shareholding. The “Factory” value represents our proven ability to create successful startups and enter their capital at advantageous prices compared to traditional seed funds.

Armed with this new model and recent fundraising, we entered 2024 in a still turbulent ecosystem. We are still refining our new organizational model.

As we continue to refine our new model and expand our horizons, we have also taken a step back to reflect on what truly drives us forward every day.”

Keep Your Eyes on the Stars but Your Feet on the Ground

This year, we had the opportunity to work on our values. After 13 years of operations and more than 40 companies created, we took a step back and reflected on what has driven our efforts and channeled our energies. Instead of listing overused buzzwords, we aimed to be thorough and identified 14 pillars that represent our beliefs. Yes, it’s a lot, but capturing the essence of a culture isn’t easy to condense without oversimplifying. While we ended up with many foundational principles, we managed to categorize them into two core beliefs.

The first revolves around ambition. We don’t hide our ambitions; we aim to create companies with significant impact. We believe that working as a team allows us to go further and faster than working alone, and we accept that most of our companies will need funding to sustain initial growth. We are convinced that the pursuit of ambition does not detract from the pursuit of purpose.

This leads us to our second core belief: purpose-driven creation. The companies we build aim not just for financial success but strive to create lasting, positive value in the world, focusing on a deep mission and long-term commitment that guides all actions and decisions. Even when the mission isn't directly impact-driven, as most of our portfolio companies are in the productivity space. We believe that founders need to focus on long-term value creation and not short-term value extraction. This is something we profoundly believe in as a company and what motivates me each morning to keep building Hexa.  Our mission can be summed up in one defining statement: Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs to build exceptional companies—companies that are fueled with ambition and driven by purpose.

Expanding Our Support

As our studio grows, we’ve always believed in diversifying our support methods. Historically, we’ve focused on “Build,” creating startups “from scratch.” This is what defines us, makes us unique and remarkable, but it’s also the hardest activity. While we continue to concentrate our efforts on ex-nihilo creation across various verticals, we also want to open up to new activities.

At the beginning of this year, we launched a new initiative called “Scale” with new partner Augustin Celier. The idea behind “Scale” is to support existing, more mature companies to give them a new boost, alter their trajectory, and shift from linear growth to exponential. Our experience with Yousign inspired and validated this new initiative. When we joined Yousign in 2019, the company had been around for four years and was starting to take off. Since then, it has grown significantly, increasing from 6,000 to 17,000 clients and from 30 to 200 employees. What we did with Yousign, we now want to replicate with other companies. We aim to make a difference by bringing capital, experience, and a network, but most importantly, by offering new hope, new ambitions, and fresh energy.

Over the past nine months, we’ve been looking for targets across France and Europe, focusing on SaaS tech companies with a few million euros in recurring revenue that are at a growth plateau. The timing is quite good as investors are currently very selective, only funding companies with proven models. We’ve identified several companies but ultimately set our sights on one. We found the necessary funds to close the deal (€10 million), but at the last moment, we withdrew as the latest numbers from the company were not encouraging. Our goal with Hexa Scale is to support two companies by the end of the year—a big challenge but still theoretically achievable.

Currently, we can launch companies from scratch and scale businesses that have been around for a few years. The next step is to explore the acceleration/VC model. We’ve already had many teams approach us with ideas or projects that we’ve turned down because our model didn’t fit. It’s tempting to imagine a model that would allow us to support existing but still very young companies to accelerate their development. We need to invent a unique approach, different from existing models, that reflects our history and creative DNA. We have many ideas but haven’t yet settled on the right strategy; we may find the right person to lead this new activity in 2025.

The Importance of Partners

To scale the studio, we’ve fundamentally changed our structure by bringing in partners. This was one of the main reasons behind the shift from eFounders to Hexa. Partners are responsible for generating ideas and motivating entrepreneurs to co-found them together. Historically, this was our role, which we have now delegated to a team of partners tasked with launching 2-3 new companies each. This system allows us to exceed the five projects per year limit we previously faced and aim to launch 30 new projects annually within the next five years. Partners are often entrepreneurs or executives who, after launching a company, want to undertake something new but differently. Many founders are intrigued or excited by the studio model, which allows them to create differently by launching multiple projects simultaneously without being involved throughout the project’s entire lifecycle. It’s a virtuous way to undertake business in many ways—intellectually, by juggling different projects; socially, through constant interaction with entrepreneurs; and economically, by capturing more value than traditional entrepreneurship while minimizing risk through diversification.

Partners are crucial to Hexa’s development, and to succeed, we must attract the best. Attracting top partners isn’t always easy because they are often strong-willed entrepreneurs eager to create but ideally want to do so autonomously and independently. Our (new) job is to convince them that Hexa provides the perfect environment, allowing them to focus on key tasks: designing an idea, finding co-founders, and guiding them to transform the idea into an independent company within a year. We need to communicate that Hexa offers fertile ground without stifling their creativity or limiting their freedom. To accommodate partners, we must step back slightly; our role is to create the ideal environment for them to launch their businesses.

Camille Tyan was the first partner to join us. Since then, Florent joined us to launch the AI vertical, followed by Guillaume and Julien to launch the Health vertical, and more recently, Ugo has focused on open-source and cybersecurity projects. The historical activity, the B2B SaaS vertical still called eFounders, is managed by Matthieu Vaxelaire, who started eFounders with us over 10 years ago before running one of the portfolio companies and launching his own. Today, Hexa has five partners, including Augustin from Scale, and our goal is to have a new partner join by the end of the year, preferably a woman. We know that when a woman joins us at the top of the organization, there is a cascading effect, increasing the chances of attracting female entrepreneurs who, in turn, bring more women into the teams.

Learning by Doing

The past 12 months have allowed us to refine our new organizational model. It’s the first time we’ve aborted so many projects in such a short time; the attrition rate has never been higher. There’s been some fallout, but it’s normal—each partner must embrace the model and test its boundaries. We try to provide a framework while leaving some room to challenge even our beliefs. These failures have helped us refine what we call our “non-negotiables.” For instance, it confirmed that we must be deeply involved in every project as co-founders. At Hexa, we don’t just offer support through office hours; we engage in hands-on co-creation, getting directly involved in the process. It also validated that to save time and ensure project success, the initial idea needs to be well-defined. If we parachute an entrepreneur into a project that’s not yet clearly scoped, we risk falling into the classic iteration process around the idea, which we aim to avoid with the studio model as it is time-consuming and often leads to dead ends. This year has also reinforced how much easier it is to start with our ideas rather than supporting even early-stage ideas from existing teams. We knew this, but it was important for our partners to experience it themselves.

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Preparing to scale

Despite this trial-and-error period, we’ve never performed better in terms of the number of projects created, with five launched so far this year. Knowing that the end of the year is usually our most productive period, we aim to close 2024 with at least 10 startups launched. Achieving this would meet our targets and make 2024 a record year for the studio. If we want to reach 30 startups created annually within five years, we’ll need to add four new startups per year and recruit two new partners annually. By 2030, we anticipate having around a dozen partners launching about 30 projects each year. Projecting further, we estimate our core team will need to more than double by then, reaching about 60 people. In terms of recruitment, that would mean partnering with around 60 new entrepreneurs annually, which, based on current ratios, means meeting more than a thousand candidates. Similarly, if we scale recruitment needs linearly for each project based on current figures, including founders, first hires, partners, and core team members, we expect to recruit over 200 new people each year. It’s a good exercise to start visualizing the strategy needed in the coming years to achieve these goals. We’ll need to significantly strengthen our employer brand, be creative with our recruitment channels and methods, and bolster our talent team to keep pace.

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I recently realized that we’ve completed the largest fundraising in our history, perhaps at the worst time in tech history. It seems to function like communicating vessels; the money not going into our startups has been transferred to the startup studio. We hope they will steal the spotlight again and reconnect with funding. Our studio model is closely tied to the ability of companies to raise money. When our projects raise funds, they gain financial autonomy, allowing them to fly on their own, exit the studio, and enable us to reallocate resources to new projects. Fundraising mechanisms have faltered; the system went too fast, but that shouldn’t make us doubt the model itself. Risk financing is essential for innovation and has the virtue of benefiting everyone: entrepreneurs, fund managers (GPs), and their investors (LPs).

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I’m hopeful that, driven by a recovering ecosystem (in healthier and more sustainable forms than before), we can continue creating projects in 2025 in fields we know less about, accelerate, and finance companies inspired by our hands-on model, always keeping our mission in mind: Empower entrepreneurs to build exceptional companies—companies that are fueled with ambition and driven by purpose.

Past letters

2023 - Hexa Letter #2: The path from 1 to 30 companies a year

2022 - Hexa Letter #1: A new way for entrepreneurship

2021 - eFounders Letter #9: 10 years of Team Entrepreneurship

2020 - eFounders Letter #8: Scaling the Startup Studio Model

2019 - eFounders Letter #7 — Cracking the Startup Studio model

2018 - eFounders Letter #6 — A Software Galaxy

2017 - eFounders Letter #5 — a Startup Studio on a Mission

2016 - eFounders Letter #4 — Time to touch base

2015 - eFounders Letter #3 — Rise of a startup studio

2014 - eFounders Letter #2 - Birth of a startup studio

2013 - eFounders Letter #1: DNA of a Startup Studio

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