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Hexa<\/a>, the Paris-based startup studio that recently raised $22 million<\/a>, is launching a new vertical focused on improving the healthcare system. Julien M\u00e9raud, a senior team member of the French unicorn startup Doctolib<\/a>, is joining the startup studio .<\/p>\n As a reminder, Hexa started its life as eFounders and originally focused specifically on B2B software-as-a-service startups. The studio comes up with startup ideas, find startup founders to pair them with these ideas and help them get started with its own core team and some initial funding.<\/p>\n After a while, startups \u201cgraduate\u201d from the startup studio and continue their life as independent companies \u2014 Hexa keeps a stake in its portfolio companies. Some of Hexa\u2019s past companies include Front, Aircall and Spendesk.<\/p>\n As Hexa starts to branch out to other verticals, the startup studio is also rethinking its strategy. For the health vertical, Hexa is not only hiring Julien M\u00e9raud. It is also going to work with a full-time medical doctor to help when it comes to assessing future projects.<\/p>\n For each healthtech startup, Hexa is going to be looking for two co-founders \u2014\u00a0a doctor who already knows their speciality and has hands-on experience as well as an operational founder who knows how to scale companies.<\/p>\n Hexa Health will have a vertical approach with each company focusing on one pathology specifically. The first two startups that will come out of the studio will focus on weight loss and skin cancer detection.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea is to have a CEO and a CTO \u2014 just like in most startups. And that\u2019s quite common across all Hexa companies. But something that\u2019s a bit new with this particular vertical is that we believe innovation in healthcare should be driven by doctors. In other words, if you ask me to design the perfect care to detect skin cancer, I\u2019m not capable of doing it. That\u2019s why we want to work with doctors on every innovation,\u201d M\u00e9raud told me.<\/p>\n He also insists on the fact that Hexa doesn\u2019t want to disrupt the healthcare industry as a whole. With this new vertical, the startup studio wants to find inefficiencies and improve the care pathways as there\u2019s a growing imbalance between an aging population in Europe and the available medical time.<\/p>\n \u201cTech shouldn\u2019t just enable faster care. It should also enable better care. And we\u2019re really going to focus on measuring the medical quality of care and everything we create,\u201d M\u00e9raud said.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n