Member Profile: Nikhil Reddy
Nikhil Reddy is Kaizen’s co-founder and CEO. Kaizen builds the application layer for America’s mission-critical government services, with active federal deployments across the Department of War, Veterans Affairs, Department of Education and the National Archives.
Before founding Kaizen, Nikhil was an early engineer at Anduril Industries, where he led engineering and design teams building drone interfaces for military operators worldwide. He holds dual degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.
Reddy spoke with Potomac Officers Club about Kaizen’s mission, how the company built and fielded the Joint Interagency Task Force-401 Counter-Unmanned Aerial System Marketplace in under nine weeks, its approach to modernizing government digital services at speed and how it sees the application-layer opportunity across the Department of War and federal civilian agencies.
Potomac Officers Club: What is Kaizen’s mission and why did you start the company?
Nikhil Reddy: Kaizen exists to strengthen trust in American public services by building technology public servants are proud to use. We partner with federal agencies to replace legacy systems with modern, AI-native software worthy of the people they serve.
The “why” is a trust problem, not just a technology problem. America’s public institutions were once the standard for how governments engage citizens, but the technology behind those services became slow, hard to use and generations behind what people expect from everyday apps. When the digital front door to government feels broken, faith in the institution itself erodes.
When our public servants lack access to modern and intuitive software, the consequences are serious. I founded Kaizen in 2022 to restore that faith through beautifully designed, modern software.
POC: How did Kaizen build and ship the C-UAS Marketplace in nine weeks using Blacksmith and Taproot?
Reddy: Kaizen secured a $15 million other transaction authority to build the Counter-UAS Marketplace for the DOW. Built for JIATF-401, we went from award to fielded capability in under nine weeks. Two things made it possible. Taproot is our platform library: the reusable pieces every government program needs, including payments, registrations, business intelligence, identity management, triage and approvals. We didn’t start from scratch. We assembled the C-UAS Marketplace from these modules that have been tried and tested in production.
Blacksmith is our proprietary AI harness, where those blocks get configured, extended and assembled into a working application at a speed a traditional integrator can’t match. Blacksmith is how we forge; Taproot is what we forge with.
The point is leverage. Taproot and Blacksmith let us put engineers and designers directly against the mission instead of billing thousands of hours against it. The contract vehicle mattered as well as an OTA allowed the government to move at the speed of the requirement, rather than the speed of procurement. The model compounds as everything generalizable we build flows back into Taproot, so the next program starts further ahead than the last one.
POC: What is Kaizen’s approach to modernizing government digital services at speed?
Reddy: One AI-native, highly reusable platform that is configured per use case, rather than rebuilt each time. The same foundation that powers the C-UAS Marketplace can also power how millions of Americans access essential government services.
Three principles sit underneath it. First, an experience that rivals commercial software, whether the user is a public servant, a warfighter or a citizen. Second, the ability to iterate and deploy like a modern software company, rather than a traditional integrator.
Third, alignment with commercial off the shelf-first policy, so agencies buy down risk and schedule, instead of owning bespoke code forever. The result is modernization measured in weeks, without the multi-year procurement and build cycle.
POC: How does Kaizen perceive the DoW/FedCiv application-layer opportunity?
Reddy: The whitespace is the application and experience layer: the software public servants,
residents and service members touch on a daily basis. Decades of federal IT investment went into infrastructure, data plumbing and integration handled by the large primes. Comparatively little went into the interface a warfighter uses to relocate their families, a veteran uses for benefits or a citizen uses to renew their passport. That’s the layer Kaizen plays in, and it’s structurally underserved.
Policy is moving in the same direction. The Improving Our Nation Through Better Design executive order created the National Design Studio, under Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia, with a mandate to overhaul roughly 26,000 federal websites. Software funding reform is changing how the DOW and civilian agencies buy and sustain software. COTS-first policy is pushing agencies toward proven commercial platforms.
On the DoW side, the clearest fit is quality of life and readiness: marketplaces and beneficiary services for service members and their families, where the experience layer affects retention and mission directly. The incumbents built the back end. The front door is still open.
POC: What’s next for Kaizen in the federal and national security space?
Reddy: We build outward from JIATF-401. It proves that we can field consumer-grade and mission-critical software on a warfighting timeline and that one platform can serve U.S. forces, federal law enforcement and partner nations simultaneously. The next step is scaling across the DoW application layer, particularly for service member quality-of-life and readiness programs such as installation and family services and marketplace platforms. As the platform is reusable, each deployment moves faster than the one before it.
In the near term, that means pursuing recompetes and new starts where a modern experience layer determines the outcome and growing the team to support them. Long term, we intend to lead the new wave of technology primes that power our federal institutions.
Category: News
