Kaizen

Kaizen is a New York-based govtech company founded in 2022 by Nikhil Reddy (CEO, previously an early engineer at Anduril) and KJ Shah (who began his career in M&A at William Blair). It sells a single, hyper-configurable SaaS platform that lets local, state, tribal and federal agencies replace legacy systems for high-volume resident services — parks and recreation, transit, hunting and fishing licenses, DMVs, courts and payments — with a branded, e-commerce-style front end and administrator building blocks behind it. The platform launched at the start of 2024; by October 2025 Kaizen worked with more than 50 agencies across 17 states serving over 30 million residents, with ARR up 9x year on year and a team of 30 planned to grow to 50. In Maryland it launched a state-parks day-pass system in under 60 days, ending seven-mile entry queues. In May 2026 the Pentagon's counter-drone task force JIATF-401 awarded Kaizen a $15 million contract to prototype the Counter-UAS Marketplace, a tiered online catalogue where US forces, law enforcement and allied militaries buy drone-defence systems from vendors including Anduril, DroneShield and AeroVironment; Kaizen built it on its Taproot building blocks and Blacksmith AI configurator and took it live in under nine weeks. It raised an $11M seed co-led by Accel and a16z's American Dynamism practice and a $21M Series A led by NEA (October 2025), for $35M in total; no valuation has been disclosed.