We just invested in a small and contracting market - are we nuts?
Why we believe edtech Filiz will 10x from here.
Apprenticeships are going down -20% this year. Every school in France is impacted. Many of them, especially among the small ones, will probably struggle, get acquired or close in the years to come.
The market itself is not very large - we found a few thousands higher education schools with an apprenticeship program in France.
But we decided to invest €6M in Filiz, a software company dedicated to apprenticeship financing in France, amid this turmoil.
Are we nuts?
Long-term: higher education is not going anywhere (nor are apprenticeships)
A mega-trend is ongoing for the last few decades: young adults in Europe study more, and study for longer. This is easily explained by the arrival of the knowledge economy. We need to learn more for longer, and we need to learn more new things and more often. Even if demography is decreasing, the share of adults getting higher education is still increasing, with a net positive effect in coming years as education will remain a key part of our western societies.
It triggers a second trend, which is the privatization of higher education in Europe. In many countries, the public state is not agile enough to adapt to the changes of the work environment and therefore to the changes required in teaching our young adults. Non-profit associations and for-profit enterprises fill the void.
AI will certainly quicken our acquisition of knowledge. However, we are firm believers that getting together in a classroom, be it virtual or face-to-face, will remain a key part of preparing young people to the work environment. The learning experience in a group will stay and probably be more focused on experience: peer communication, teamwork, soft skills.
Apprenticeship itself is an amazing tool to professionalize our students and reduce young adult unemployment. It has been subsidized by the government, and as always, this has triggered some excesses in the system. Now is the time of a market correction which was necessary — but apprenticeship will remain at a high level as it is so important for the state, the students, and the companies hiring them.
Short-term: reforms increase the need to adopt modern software Filiz
This market correction is coming in the form of administrative reforms. In 2025, it has become even more complex to get public financing for every apprentice in your school. The mounting bureaucracy is a necessity to fight against the excesses — but fortunately, solutions exist.
Filiz has developed a mind-blowing software that allows any school with an apprenticeship program to connect immediately to the OPCOs (financing bodies), to automate entirely the financial and administrative cycle from the contract to every invoice, and therefore to remove errors and get paid faster, all of which with a much lower administrative burden.
There is a reason why the company has grown 300% this year, with only just word-of-mouth.
Higher education software in Europe is such a beautiful niche
The software space for higher education in Europe is relatively immature. It is fragmented between continuous education (vocational training), apprenticeship and higher ed schools.
It is also fragmented between: CRM, ERP, Student information system, Job boards, Learning management systems… Most of the main actors are legacy, local and relatively small.
But schools have extremely specific requirements. A student is not a customer nor an employee. A school is not a non-profit association nor a company. And running it implies many workflows that easily benefit from the adoption of modern software.
Why has nobody taken up the market yet? I believe we can sum it up in three reasons:
The American and, to a lesser extent, British mature software solutions have a hard time penetrating the market because of the huge differences in how we deliver higher education in continental Europe.
The privatization trend is recent, and so is competition between schools (at all levels, not just the top 10 business schools) and therefore the will to modernize.
The European market is fragmented, and selling an all-in-one solution to a school is no easy feat.
Filiz has built incredible potential
Maxime and Aurelia, the founders of Filiz, have built an amazing product muscle. Not only did they manage to build a tool that many had tried before to nail: automating the public financing of apprenticeship — but they did so by being so close to their customers that now every time they work on a new module or feature, they easily gain immediate adoption.
It is hard to have customers praising a tool that’s just an administrative shortcut. And it’s even harder to get immediate adoption of your product extensions that wander out of your initial scope. It is the combination of being subject matter experts, of being super close to the customers and of excellent engineering that Filiz has created.
This is why they are in the best position to build the modern all-in-one software for higher education in Europe that the market finally deserves.
And we can help unleash it
What was preventing Filiz from deploying that vision alone?
With Hexa Scale, we not only provide some capital to invest into that vision, but we’ll work hand-in-hand to build the other parts of the business, such as the go-to-market and international expansion of the company. Word of mouth is amazing, but what took you here is not what will get you there.
As we’ve been doing with Veevart for the last several months, we’ll help recruit the key talents required to execute this plan, we’ll help define the priorities of the product roadmap, we’ll act as a co-founder to Maxime and Aurelia in achieving this ambition.
Long live Filiz!
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