Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that recently raised $22 million, is launching a new vertical focused on improving the healthcare system. Julien Mérode, a senior member of the French unicorn startup team doctulibjoins the startup studio.
As a reminder, Hexa started life as an e-founder and originally focused specifically on B2B SaaS startups. The studio comes up with startup ideas, looks for startup founders to pair with those ideas and help them get started with its core team and some seed funding.
After a period of time, startups “graduate” from the startup studio and continue their lives as independent companies – Hexa retains a stake in its portfolio companies. Some of Hexa’s predecessors include Front, Aircall, and Spendesk.
As Hexa begins to expand into other sectors, the startup studio is also rethinking its strategy. For the health sector, Hexa is not just hiring Julien Mérode. You will also work with a full-time physician to help when it comes to evaluating future projects.
For each healthtech startup, Hexa will look for co-founders – a doctor who already knows their specialty and has hands-on experience as well as an operating founder who knows how to scale companies.
Hexa Health will have a vertical approach where each company focuses on one pathology specifically. The first two startups to emerge from the studio will focus on weight loss and skin cancer detection.
“The idea is to have a CEO and a CTO – just like in most startups. This is very common across all Hexa companies. But what is a bit new in this particular sector is that we believe that innovation in healthcare should It’s physician-driven. In other words, if you asked me to design the perfect care for skin cancer detection, I wouldn’t be able to do it. “That’s why we want to work with physicians on every innovation,” Merode told me.
He also insists on the fact that Hexa does not want to disrupt the healthcare industry as a whole. With this new sector, the startup studio wants to discover inefficiencies and improve care pathways as there is a growing imbalance between Europe’s aging population and available medical time.
“Technology should not only enable faster care. It should also enable better care. We will really focus on measuring the quality of medical care and everything we create,” Merod said.