hexa
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Mehdi Boudoukhane and the company he meant to challenge
Cycle began with an ambition to take on Atlassian. Six years later, Atlassian bought its technology and team - a turn that brought Mehdi Boudoukhane’s long experiment in listening to customers inside the company he had set out to rival.
Cycle
The Paris startup that turned scattered customer feedback into a product roadmap - then handed its engine to Atlassian.
Hexa
Hexa builds AI agents for mid-market industrial distributors and manufacturers - the companies that move bearings, fasteners, PVF, and electrical parts and drown in RFQs, purchase orders, and invoices. Its agents plug into the ERP the customer already runs (SAP, NetSuite, Epicor, Dynamics) and run whole workflows end to end: reading an emailed request for quote, entering the order, matching the invoice, chasing the late payment. No rip-and-replace, live in weeks. Founded in 2026 and part of Y Combinator's P26 batch.
Eric Olden
Eric Olden is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Strata Identity, the Boulder-based company behind the Maverics identity orchestration platform. With more than 25 years in the identity field, he co-authored the SAML federation standard, built the first web single sign-on product and the first Identity-as-a-Service company, and led Oracle's global identity and security division before launching Strata. He has been called the father of modern identity management and holds 13 US patents.