He co-founded Virtuo in 2015 and spent a decade building it into a category leader in on-demand car rental, close to €50M in revenue, 200+ employees, operations in France, the UK, Spain and Belgium. Before that he co-founded Neowebcar, which he sold to L'Argus in 2014. Today, he is joining Hexa Scale as its newest Partner.
What Hexa Scale is betting on
Hexa Scale buys majority stakes in profitable, vertical SaaS companies that have hit a growth ceiling: good businesses that got stuck. The fund launched this year, but the approach behind it isn't new: partners act as late co-founders, embedded, working alongside the existing team go-to-market, management and product.
Youtrust (previously Yousign) (HX19) is the clearest proof point. Hexa took a majority stake in 2019, brought in a late co-founder, repositioned the product, and it went on to become the European mid-market leader. Veevart (HX25) and Filiz (HX25) ollowed the same approach. Firms like Monterro in the Nordics and Turn/River in the US are building similar models, which suggests this isn't a one-off idea.
Two things anchor the playbook: a focus on software that's deeply tied to a specific industry's workflow, where domain expertise is hard to replace, and helping portfolio companies actually put AI to work internally, automating processes, cutting cost, freeing people up for the parts of the job that still need real expertise.
Thibault explained what drew him to it:
"What convinced me about Hexa Scale is the thesis underneath it: software spend is shifting from tools that help people work to AI that does the work outright, and that's a tough shift for generic products but the opposite for vertical ones. AI can't tell you how a dental practice schedules its operatories, or how a museum manages its collections, that knowledge is the moat. Those are the founders I want to back: people who've put in the years to understand their industry cold, and just need the right partner to help them turn that into something bigger."
Why now
Hexa Scale is raising its first private equity fund and getting ready to deploy into a pipeline it's been building for the past 18 months. Adding a founder who has actually built, scaled and exited companies means more hands-on capacity right when it's needed, someone who can sit with a portfolio company and work the problem.
His track record
- 2009 - Neowebcar. Co-founded the company, sold to L'Argus (Groupe Argus) in 2014.
- 2015 - Virtuo. Co-founded with Karim Kaddoura, grew it to close to €50M in revenue and 200+ employees across four countries.
Quentin Nickmans, who leads Hexa Scale, on why that background matters here:
"Thibault isn't a financier who learned to talk about operations, he's an operator who happens to understand capital. He's built two companies from scratch and knows that real value doesn't come from financial engineering, it comes from getting in the trenches with a team and making the business better. That's exactly what founders need on the other side of the table when Hexa Scale comes in: someone who creates value by building, not by watching from a distance."