10x faster feature development with Gemini
<50 milliseconds to deliver nutritional insights
Migrated entire platform in one month
Hexis uses Google Cloud and Gemini to scale its nutrition OS for human performance globally and ship features 10x faster.
Hexis uses Google Cloud and Gemini to scale its nutrition OS for human performance globally and ship features 10x faster.
Consolidating cloud operations with a
scalable global platform
Athletes train with precision, periodizing load, monitoring recovery, and measuring performance. Nutrition has rarely had the same status, handled through static meal plans and calorie trackers that only report what has already happened. Wearables changed what athletes can see, capturing the strain, stress, and load they carry daily. The opportunity now is to turn that signal forward, into direction on what to fuel next.
Dr. David Dunne co-founded Hexis to do exactly that. He and his co-founders set out to make data work harder, translating exercise metabolism research into practice so athletes know what to do next, whether that means fueling better or recovering faster. Hexis adjusts the plan to the demands of each workout in real time.
Our platform processes constant streams of nutrition, lifestyle, and wearable data and runs complex physiological and metabolic calculations for athletes across the globe. Google Cloud provides the low-latency infrastructure to translate our science into real-time personalized fueling, so nutrition can become an athlete's smartest training tool.
Dr. David Dunne
CEO and Co-founder, Hexis
As the platform expanded from professional teams to endurance athletes worldwide, maintaining a fast, reliable app experience became challenging. Running operations across separate cloud services created administrative overhead and caused latency when athletes loaded data in other regions. A delay of a few hundred milliseconds risked making the app feel unresponsive, discouraging athletes from engaging with their plans.
To deliver instant, reliable coaching worldwide, the Hexis team unified its operations on Google Cloud. Moving to a single ecosystem with intuitive tools, multi-regional computing, and global load balancing kept the platform fast and secure and gave Hexis the strong foundation it needed to scale predictably. Joining the Google for Startups program provided additional proactive guidance and resources that helped accelerate this move.
“Consolidating our operations onto Google Cloud gives us the confidence to scale quickly,” explains Dr. David Dunne, CEO and co-founder at Hexis. “Our platform processes constant streams of nutrition, lifestyle, and wearable data and runs complex physiological and metabolic calculations for athletes across the globe. Google Cloud provides the low-latency infrastructure to translate our science into real-time personalized fueling, so nutrition can become an athlete's smartest training tool.”
Personalizing advice and accelerating
app development with Gemini
Translating decades of exercise physiology and metabolism research into simple, actionable advice for athletes is challenging. Using Gemini to bridge the gap between deep science and everyday language, and processing all that data seamlessly on Compute Engine, we deliver accurate, real-time coaching that feels completely natural for the end user.
Dr. David Dunne
CEO and Co-founder, Hexis
The transition to Google Cloud was efficient, with its intuitive tools and clear documentation enabling a single engineer to migrate the entire platform in just one month. As a result, Hexis gained the processing power needed to deliver its comprehensive digital coaching experience to sports nutritionists and athletes alike.
Today, when an athlete opens the Hexis app, they receive a clear, personalized daily fuel plan using Carb CodingTM, a red, amber, and green traffic light system, signaling whether they need low, medium, or high amounts of carbohydrate and energy. As the athlete goes about their day, Hexis uses Compute Engine-managed instance groups and a multi-regional Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database to continuously sync live workout and wellness data from connected fitness devices. Running across Europe, the US, and Australia, these stateless application instances automatically scale based on CPU utilization, while a global external load balancer routes each request to the nearest healthy region.
By storing data close to the user to ensure fast synchronization, the app can instantly recalibrate nutrition advice. Whether it's extending a run or moving a workout to the evening, Hexis ensures you know what to do next.
Athletes can use Hexis to plan and log their meals and the platform then uses Gemini models to process that information. Taking a picture of a plate of food or recording a quick voice note triggers Gemini to search a proprietary database of five million verified food items, returning exact carbohydrate, protein, fat and overall energy breakdowns, alongside 98 nutrients, in under 50 milliseconds. This removes the friction of manual data entry while helping the platform translate complex nutritional science into practical, easy-to-understand daily recommendations.
“Translating decades of exercise physiology and metabolism research into simple, actionable advice for athletes is challenging,” says Dunne. “Using Gemini to bridge the gap between deep science and everyday language, and processing all that data seamlessly on Compute Engine, we deliver accurate, real-time coaching that feels completely natural for the end user.”
Hexis uses Gemini to increase efficiency internally too. With Gemini Notebook, the team can centralize its scientific research into an accessible knowledge base. This creates a shared intelligence hub for the company, speeding up onboarding as well as helping new employees ask natural language questions about complex performance science without creating operational bottlenecks for the senior team. Working within a single cloud environment alongside AI coding tools also enables the engineering team to rapidly accelerate new feature development. For example, Hexis engineers used Gemini to design, build, and launch a new “Nutrients” feature in just three days, 10x faster than the estimated 30 days.
Predicting athlete habits with
Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
Unifying infrastructure on Google Cloud has allowed Hexis to double the size of its business over the past two years. By providing fast, reliable, and scientifically backed nutrition strategies, the platform is trusted by 40% of the Tour de France peloton and 50% of Premier League football teams.
Having proven its value with professional sports organizations, the company is now expanding directly to everyday athlete consumers who don’t have dedicated sports nutritionists to help them interpret their data. To support these users, Hexis is training Gemini to act as an automated digital coach. By establishing strict scientific guardrails, Hexis can use Gemini to hold natural conversations with users to explain how and why to adjust their fueling and recovery strategies throughout the day.
Working with Google Cloud has felt like launching a rocket ship for our business. It’s provided the scalable architecture and advanced AI capabilities we need to build more efficiently, deliver a higher standard of coaching, and rapidly expand the platform to help every athlete reach their full potential.
Dr. David Dunne
CEO and Co-founder, Hexis
Gemini interprets natural-language and image inputs and returns structured data, while Hexis validates the results against its curated nutrition database and applies its own Carb CodingTM engines to calculate recommendations. This makes the experience feel natural while Hexis’ data and scientific models remain the source of truth.
“Working with Google Cloud has felt like launching a rocket ship for our business,” concludes Dunne. “It’s provided the scalable architecture and advanced AI capabilities we need to build more efficiently, deliver a higher standard of coaching, and rapidly expand the platform to help every athlete reach their full potential.”
Hexis translates physiology, metabolism, and nutrition research into real-time personalized nutrition strategies tailored to the demands of each athlete’s workouts, lifestyle, and goals.
Industry: Healthcare and Life Sciences
Location: Ireland
Products: Google Cloud, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine, Gemini, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
