Hexa is trying something new. Instead of fostering startups from the ground up and incubating them for the first year or so, the Paris-based startup studio is acquiring a majority stake in Veevart, a vertical software-as-a-service company for museums that provides solutions for ticketing, fundraising, CRM and collection management.
Hexa is a familiar name in the French tech ecosystem. The startup studio originally started its life in 2011 as eFounders and regularly comes up with ideas for new tech companies. It tries to find the right founding team and helps them with product design, go-to-market strategy, hiring, and fundraising.
After this first phase, the companies become proper, independent startups, but Hexa keeps a significant stake on the cap table. Some successful Hexa portfolio companies include Front, Aircall, Spendesk and Swan.
But Veevart isn’t a new startup. It was founded in 2014 and now works with 160 museums and cultural institutions of all sizes around the world. With its team of 70 people, Veevart is already profitable.
The product has been designed as an all-in-one platform for museums, built on top of Salesforce. Museums that use Veevart can create and manage events, sell tickets online and onsite, manage memberships, automate communications to donors and integrate with the museum shop.
Many museums use multiple tools for all those tasks. Having a single platform makes it easier to manage and maintain over time.
The reason why Veevart relies heavily on Salesforce comes down to Veevart’s founder Antonio Velasco Echeverry — earlier in his career, he had worked with Accenture and Salesforce.
“I wouldn’t say I ‘chose’ to build on top of Salesforce. People often assume these decisions are intentional, but honestly, luck plays a big part. We didn’t choose Salesforce — it was simply the technology I knew best,” Velasco Echeverry told TechCrunch.
Despite some platform limitations, he added that building on top of Salesforce has some advantages such as security, scalability and access to the entire Salesforce ecosystem.
Veevart has bootstrapped itself for the past decade and has been profitable for a while — “not incredibly profitable, but profitable,” Velasco Echeverry said.
“So when we started conversations with Hexa, we were not looking too much for money, but more for a partner that could help us get to our revenue targets faster and with less pain,” he added.
With this investment, Hexa acts as a sort of hands-on private equity partner. The startup studio is investing €5 million ($5.4 million at current exchange rates) to become the main shareholder in Veevart.
“Our objective is that Hexa can help us achieve $20 million in [annual recurring revenue], implement best practices around product, [go-to-market], sales, and leadership,” Velasco Echeverry said.
Private equity firms typically do not engage in small deals like this, while VC firms typically seek companies with high-growth potential. But Hexa believes it can elevate Veevart to the next level by providing operational expertise to accelerate the company’s growth.
