Home / Founders / Rodolphe Ardant
Ardant joined Hexa's studio idea for company payments, co-founded Spendesk to give finance teams cards and controls as simple as consumer banking, and later moved from CEO to president after taking the product to unicorn scale.
Rodolphe Ardant is founder and president of Spendesk, a European spend-management platform that combines cards, invoices and expenses for finance teams. He co-founded the company in 2016 with Guilhem Bellion and Jordane Giuly after joining the idea inside the Hexa startup studio.
Turning a Studio Sketch Into Spendesk
The idea began in Hexa's studio in 2015 as a way to make company spending less painful by issuing cards and payment methods in a few clicks. Ardant came on as co-founder, then Bellion and Giuly joined, according to Hexa's Spendesk page. The first payment on the product in January 2016 was a bottle of champagne from an online grocery store.
Building Finance Controls for Growing Teams
In a TechRound interview while he was still CEO, Ardant said the goal was to give finance teams more control and visibility over company spend. Spendesk raised successive rounds with investors such as Index Ventures and General Atlantic, expanded across Paris, London, Berlin and other hubs, and became one of Hexa's unicorns as annual spend processed through the platform climbed into the billions of euros.
Moving From CEO to President
Hexa now lists Ardant as founder and president rather than day-to-day CEO, with co-founders Giuly and Bellion still on the roster. The company continues to sell spend management to mid-market and enterprise finance teams that want cards, approvals and accounting sync in one place, and Ardant remains the public founding face of that story.
