Meet the Founders
Abhilash Kuzhikat
Co-Founder
As the former Senior Managing Partner for State and Local Consulting at Gartner, Abhilash brings unparalleled expertise in leading massive digital transformation initiatives across complex, highly regulated government environments.
Having advised countless public sector leaders, he recognized a recurring theme: technical failure almost always begins at the procurement and scoping phase. He co-founded WhyLX to bridge the fatal communication gap between business sponsors, IT leadership, and compliance officers, ensuring that every dollar spent aligns perfectly with validated business outcomes.
Bharat Bagaria
Co-Founder
As a former Senior Expert Partner and a key leader in the Data, Analytics, and AI practice at Gartner, Bharat possesses a profound understanding of how to operationalize cutting-edge technology safely and effectively within the public sector.
He is the architect behind translating complex, rigid regulatory requirements into automated, frictionless software experiences. Bharat champions the Adaptive Jurisdiction Engine at WhyLX, leveraging his deep technical expertise to empower agencies to innovate rapidly—especially in high-stakes domains like Generative AI—without being stifled by bureaucratic red tape.
Eugene Martinez
Co-Founder
With over 30 years of IT consulting experience across four major firms, including his tenure as a Senior Managing Partner at Gartner, Eugene has navigated the most complex data integration and IT strategy challenges in the public sector. He witnessed firsthand how disconnected applications and disjointed data architectures derailed mission-critical operations across states like California, Florida, and Texas.
Driven by the frustration of seeing brilliant strategies lost in procurement translation, Eugene co-founded WhyLX to serve as the ultimate product owner for the platform's core business applications. He engineers our solutions to ensure technology inherently aligns with mission outcomes from day one, transforming bureaucratic roadblocks into streamlined, executable architectures.
Heide Cassidy
Co-Founder
A 30-year career consultant dedicated exclusively to the public sector, Heide brings deep expertise from prominent leadership roles at North Highland, Point B, Accenture, and Gartner. Throughout her career focusing on IT strategy and staff augmentation, she consistently encountered the same roadblock: brilliant project teams hamstrung by rigid, outdated procurement frameworks that penalized agility and innovation.
Heide co-founded WhyLX because she knew the public sector needed a product designed by the practitioners who actually execute the work. As a chief product owner for our business alignment modules, she translates decades of on-the-ground transformation experience into automated workflows that empower government agencies to move from complex requirements to successful deployments with unprecedented speed.