Antoine Durieux, co-founder of Alkemics, has joined Hexa, the startup studio founded by Thibaud Elzière, as a Partner to launch software companies focused on critical industries. He will operate within Hexa Start, the studio's program for creating around a dozen new startups each year. His initial focus includes energy, space, aviation, maritime, and defense, sectors that remain largely untouched by modern artificial intelligence.
From Alkemics to Hexa
Durieux developed an early interest in technology and studied at École Polytechnique before earning a master's degree at Stanford in smart product design. In 2012, he co-founded Alkemics, a SaaS platform that allowed retailers to collect and manage supplier product data. The company grew to 180 employees and raised more than US$50 million from investors including Index, Partech, Cathay, Serena, and Highland Europe.
In 2021, Alkemics joined forces with Salsify to create a global leader in product information management that surpassed US$100 million in annual recurring revenue. Durieux remained through the scaling phase until 2023 and then spent two years advising SaaS companies such as Sirona, Hiboo, and Elax. During that period, he also explored opportunities in nuclear energy, marine shipping, and sovereign cloud.
Targeting Critical Industries
Hexa's Start program has become known for launching software startups that address complex business problems. Durieux will use his enterprise go-to-market experience to support founders in industries where sales cycles are long, buyers are demanding, and failures are not tolerated. Hexa CEO Matthieu Gombeaud said critical industries still run on software that has not been rewritten in two decades and that these buyers do not convert on a demo.
Durieux argues that companies in energy, space, aviation, maritime, and defense keep the world operating, yet almost none have been transformed by AI. He believes an outsider can have an outsized impact on the environment and on the protection of democracies by modernizing these sectors. That conviction is now guiding the first startups he is supervising at Hexa.
Two Initial Startups
The first company is Integrity, an on-premise AI coding assistant designed for mission-critical codebases that cannot leave a company's own infrastructure. It targets enterprises that require strict security, certification, and data control while still wanting developer productivity gains. The approach responds to buyers in defense, energy, and other regulated industries.
The second company is Encore, a marketplace for second-hand GPUs and data center equipment. It enables companies to run AI workloads inside their own cloud environments by accessing available processing capacity. Encore also helps organizations reduce dependency on scarce new components while scaling artificial intelligence operations and addressing sovereignty requirements in regulated markets.
Founder Profile and Hexa's Momentum
Durieux said his experience at Alkemics taught him to think long term and to obsess over understanding customer value. He is looking for founders who move fast, prototype constantly, and build for durable outcomes. He also values leaders who publicly embody a strong point of view and attract customers and employees before a product is finished.
His arrival adds to Hexa's growing community of French tech founders in Belgium. The studio has previously welcomed Thibault Chassagne, co-founder of Virtuo, Raphaël Vullierme, co-founder of Luko, Maxime Brousse, co-founder of Selency, and Tanguy Goretti, co-founder of Cowboy and Hexa's first CTO. This pattern highlights Hexa's ability to attract experienced operators into startup creation.
Durieux's appointment signals a stronger focus on modernizing critical industries through AI and enterprise software. With Integrity and Encore, Hexa is moving quickly to address security, sovereignty, and infrastructure bottlenecks in sectors that have been slow to change. The studio's combination of founder talent and domain-specific startup creation could give European industrial software a new competitive edge.