Guerric de Crombrugghe is joining Hexa as Partner. He will launch several companies inside Hexa Start, in markets most software investors have never looked at: water logistics for defense, satellite ground infrastructure, energy, AI infrastructure.
He is already building two of them.
An engineer and entrepreneur
Guerric is a Belgian engineer. He holds a PhD in plasma aerospace engineering from the University of Queensland, plus master's degrees in electromechanical engineering and fluid dynamics, and he has spent over a decade working in aerospace and energy.
He started a satellite company early in his career. He then moved to nuclear energy, where he played a key incubation role in three companies across fission, fusion, and defense. He also sits on several juries and evaluation boards, including the European Innovation Council Accelerator programme.
At Hexa, he will do what our partners do: co-build from day zero. Find an overlooked engineering problem with real economic weight behind it, find the technical founder who should own it, and get something in front of customers early.
Engineering risk, not research risk
Most hardware bets fail on the science. The technology may or may not work, adoption may or may not come, and capital has to be raised years before anyone knows.
Guerric looks somewhere else. He targets technologies whose scientific and technical principles are already proven, where the edge is execution rather than an uncertain research outcome. That changes the shape of the company: fast build-test-learn loops, customers in the room early, and serious capital raised only once the market has confirmed the thesis. The markets he is looking at (defense, energy, AI infrastructure) are all growing, and all short on the physical infrastructure they need.
What he's building now
WaterX takes on freshwater logistics for military deployments and remote industrial sites. Getting water to those places today is complex, expensive, wasteful, and sometimes dangerous. WaterX deploys atmospheric water generators that produce several thousand litres a day out of a standard ISO container, with AI-driven optimisation.
Pong (internal name for now) is a second venture still being explored. It would put satellite ground stations aboard commercial shipping vessels, extending downlink coverage to the more than 70% of the planet's surface that land-based networks can't reach. Ocean corridors are mostly idle. They could be capacity.
Who he's looking for
Guerric is looking for founders who want to build hardware, people who would rather ship a machine that works than a deck that explains one. If that's you, and the idea of putting a container-sized product into the hardest environments on the planet is more exciting than daunting, come talk to him.
Hexa has built more than 60 companies since 2011, most of them software. Front, Spendesk, Aircall, Swan, Yousign. The method that got those companies from zero to global (operators, shared talent, capital, and a studio doing the work alongside the founder) is the same one we are now turning to hardware.