Find out about the six hottest startup ideas
Ft. PMF Collector's latest episode
To get the Hexa Roundup delivered every month to your inbox, don’t forget to subscribe below - or go to your account settings to turn of Hexa Roundup emails.
🎙️ PMF Collector with Rodolphe Ardant (Spendesk)
Rodolphe didn’t start with a polished product. He started with a browser extension that didn’t work. Then he found a partner, issued virtual cards, and watched usage grow week over week at every client. In this episode of PMF Collector hosted by Mat Vaxelaire, the Spendesk cofounder covers why your first MVP failing can still point you toward the right signal, the 3 concrete moments that told him he had a real business, how to raise a round in 3 weeks after 3 months of VC rejection - and why ignoring your instincts in favour of outside advice is almost always a mistake.
🛡️ Europe’s defense tech moment - a collaboration with Mind the Gap
Hexa Sprint’s Emma Caillat and Agathe Thiery (founder, Mind the Gap) co-authored a piece on European technologies driving real geopolitical and societal impact. Hexa Sprint is currently supporting defense startups through its program - €500K investment and operational support. If you’re building in defense, applications are open.
⚡ Event: CTO Voices x OpenAI
OpenAI has shipped a lot lately: Super App, Codex, 111 new plugins, GPT-Rosalind, a new Agents SDK, ChatGPT Images 2.0, and $122B raised along the way. This Wednesday, Katia Gil Guzman (formerly CTO at Emera, now at OpenAI) joins Hexa CTO Tanguy Goretti for a conversation on how to get the most out of these tools without getting caught in the hype cycle. Drinks follow.
Portfolio news
🌱 Oligoplus (HX26) joins Hexa Sprint
Maxime Imhoff and the Oligoplus team join Hexa Sprint’s Climate cohort. Their bet: precision foliar nutrition by drone. Agronomists identify deficiencies, apply the right micronutrients at the right moment. Farmers pay for results — not inputs. That means +30 to +50% yield increases, less dependency on synthetic fertilizers, and healthier crops. €1.5M revenue in 2025, fully bootstrapped. Target: €5M in 2026.
🏦 Marble (HX22) launches v1: autonomous AML & fraud monitoring
Marble v1 is live. The platform now covers the full compliance journey (from screening and transaction monitoring to automated detection and AI-assisted investigations) with no gaps between modules. A swarm of AI agents handles what the industry has been billing for separately: tuning detection rules, calibrating scoring models, pre-qualifying alerts. All under the direct supervision of the compliance officer, not a vendor. 100+ financial institutions from the US to Singapore are already on it. Open-source core. On-prem or SaaS.
🥞 Pancake (ex-Basalt - HX24) — new name, beta next week
Basalt is now Pancake. The team has been heads-down on something big: new name, logo, and identity: done. 50 alpha users already testing: done. Beta launch: next week. More news coming very soon.
Hexa news
🚀 Six new ideas live on hexa.com/start
Hexa Start Partners Florent Quinti, Mat Vaxelaire, and Raphaël Vullierme each bring their own ideas to the table and are looking for the right founders to build them together. Six highly ambitious bets: QAx, CompanionX, LLMx, PhysicalAIx, CustomsX, PayX. Twelve months of hands-on support, a team to help you build and close your first customers, and three months fully covered in San Francisco.
→ Explore the ideas at hexa.com/start
🤝 Hexa partners with OpenAI
Every startup in the Hexa portfolio now gets direct access to OpenAI from day one: credits, model access, shared engineering support, and co-hosted events. At Hexa, AI is the core architecture of every company we build, not a feature. From Parallel deploying agents inside hospital workflows to Waniwani helping companies sell inside AI assistants, our founders are reimagining industries from the ground up. This partnership means they’ll have the best tools to do it.
🏛️ Inside Hexa: investor events in Brussels & Paris
We opened our doors to LPs and investors to share what’s changed. The conversations covered where value is being created, which business models will be reshaped, and where capital should flow next. Hexa Start, Hexa Sprint, and Hexa Scale each presented, with founders from Panora, Forest Admin, Spendesk, Enobase, and Yousign joining to give their perspective.
Thanks for reading! Follow us on Linkedin and Instagram to stay up to date between issues.
Cheers,
The Hexa Team