Fred Gardi

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Hexaly

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Frédéric “Fred” Gardi is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hexaly, the French-origin optimization software company whose solver was known for over a decade as LocalSolver. Hexaly sells a single hybrid mathematical optimization engine that unifies three modelling paradigms normally served by separate tools – mixed-integer linear programming, non-linear programming and constraint programming – so that hard combinatorial problems in routing, scheduling, packing, clustering, matching and assignment can be expressed once and solved without hand-tuning a decomposition. Gardi’s distinguishing characteristic is that he is a working researcher who commercialized his own research programme rather than an executive brought in over one: he holds a PhD and a habilitation in computer science, won the ROADEF Challenge and the Robert Faure Prize, and then spent more than a decade turning the underlying local-search technique into a product now used by more than 400 companies including Amazon, FedEx, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Bosch, Sony and Airbus.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Hexaly, the optimization company formerly known as LocalSolver.
• Started the LocalSolver project in 2007 with the aim of building a solver that applied local search methods to combinatorial optimization straight out of the box.
• Incorporated the project as a company in 2012 as a subsidiary of Bouygues, in partnership with Aix-Marseille University and the CNRS LIS laboratory.
• Led the November 2023 rebrand from LocalSolver to Hexaly, reflecting the solver’s evolution from a purely local-search engine into a general global optimization solver.
• Won first prize in the 2005 ROADEF Challenge for car-sequencing software built for Renault.
• Received the 2012 Robert Faure Prize, awarded once every three years to an operations research scientist under the age of 35.
• Finalist for the 2012 EURO Excellence in Practice Award, recognizing roughly fifteen years of operations research work at the French broadcaster TF1.
• Holds a habilitation (Dr. habil.) in computer science from Sorbonne University in addition to his PhD.

Professional Journey

Gardi’s career began inside the French operations research community rather than in industry. He took his BSc at the Luminy Faculty of Sciences and his MSc and PhD at Aix-Marseille University, the doctorate completed in 2005 on mutual exclusion scheduling with interval graphs, and served as an assistant professor at Aix-Marseille during his doctoral studies. That period also produced his first applied success: first prize in the 2005 ROADEF Challenge, for car-sequencing software developed for Renault – an early signal that his theoretical interests mapped cleanly onto industrial scheduling problems.

He then moved into industry, working at PROLOGIA and subsequently at Bouygues e-lab, the research arm of the French industrial group. It was there, in 2007, that the LocalSolver project began. The premise was deliberately contrarian for the time: rather than asking practitioners to hand-craft local search heuristics for each new problem, build a solver that applies diversified neighbourhoods and incremental algorithmics automatically, so that a model written declaratively gets good solutions to large-scale problems without bespoke algorithm engineering. A team formed around the work – Thierry Benoist, Bertrand Estellon and Karim Nouioua, later joined by Romain Megel and Julien Darlay.

The software was publicly released in 2010 and launched commercially in 2012, the same year the project was incorporated as a company under the LocalSolver name, structured as a Bouygues subsidiary in partnership with Aix-Marseille University and the CNRS LIS lab. Gardi continued to publish through this period, completing a habilitation at Sorbonne University in 2013 on mathematical programming solvers based on local search, and was recognized with the 2012 Robert Faure Prize and a finalist place for the 2012 EURO Excellence in Practice Award.

Over the following decade the solver broadened well beyond its original technique, absorbing mixed-integer linear programming, non-linear programming and constraint programming capabilities into a single hybrid engine. By November 2023 the “local search” name had become a poor description of the product, and Gardi retired the LocalSolver trademark in favour of Hexaly for both company and product. He continues as founder and CEO, with the company serving supply chain and workforce optimization use cases across a customer base of more than 400 companies, ranging from large industrial enterprises to software startups embedding the solver in their own products.

Education

Sorbonne University, Paris

Habilitation à diriger des recherches (Dr. habil.), Computer Science, 2013 – thesis on mathematical programming solvers based on local search

Aix-Marseille University

PhD, Computer Science, 2005 – mutual exclusion scheduling with interval graphs

Aix-Marseille University

MSc, Computer Science, 2001 – discrete structures and operations research

Luminy Faculty of Sciences, Aix-Marseille University

BSc, Computer Science, 2000