Thierry Benoist

Co-Founder & Co-CEO Hexaly

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Thierry Benoist co-founded and co-runs Hexaly, the French company whose mathematical optimisation solver sits underneath scheduling, routing and industrial planning problems at around four hundred organisations, Amazon, Toyota, Sony, Airbus and Starbucks among them. The company’s stated premise is that optimisation is chronically underused in business not because it does not work but because it has been too complex and too expensive to reach for, and its product strategy — a solver, a modelling language, a development environment and a cloud service — follows from trying to fix that. Benoist is an unusual sort of software chief executive: an École Polytechnique graduate with a doctorate and a habilitation in computer science, a published operations researcher with prizes from both the French computing and operations research societies, who ran the OR team at Bouygues before co-founding the company with Fred Gardi. The two share the chief executive role.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and co-chief executive of Hexaly, sharing the role with fellow co-founder Fred Gardi; both are listed as Co-CEO on the company’s own team page.
• Oversaw the company’s rebrand from LocalSolver to Hexaly in 2024, alongside a product line spanning Hexaly Optimizer, Hexaly Modeler, Hexaly Studio and Hexaly Cloud.
• Around 400 companies worldwide use the platform, including Amazon, Toyota, Sony, Airbus and Starbucks.
• Formerly head of the operations research team at Bouygues, one of the largest French listed corporations.
• Awarded the 2005 Doctoral Prize for Innovative Applications by the French Computing Society.
• Third prize in the 2006 Robert Faure Prize of ROADEF, the French operations research society.
• Finalist for the EURO Excellence in Practice Award, 2012.
• Publishes in leading operations research journals and holds a habilitation, the French qualification to supervise doctoral research.

Professional Journey

Benoist came to entrepreneurship from research rather than from management. He entered École Polytechnique in the X95 cohort, and completed a doctorate in computer science at Avignon University in 2004. His thesis work was recognised almost immediately: the French Computing Society gave him its Doctoral Prize for Innovative Applications in 2005, and ROADEF, the French operations research society, awarded him third prize in the Robert Faure Prize in 2006. The pattern of the recognitions is worth noting — both are prizes for applied rather than purely theoretical work, which is consistent with where his career went.

He spent the following period inside industry, heading the operations research team at Bouygues, a French listed group whose businesses span construction, telecoms and media. Corporate OR groups of that kind exist to solve the operator’s own planning problems at scale, and the experience of building optimisation tools for real industrial constraints, rather than for benchmark instances, is the thread that runs into the company he went on to found.

With Fred Gardi he founded LocalSolver, built around a solver intended to make large combinatorial optimisation problems tractable without the specialist modelling expertise that such problems had historically demanded. In 2012 the work was a finalist for the EURO Excellence in Practice Award, the European operations research society’s prize for applied impact. He continued to publish through this period, and in 2014 took a habilitation from Nantes University — the French qualification that certifies a researcher to direct doctoral work, and an unusual thing for a working software executive to hold.

In 2024 the company rebranded from LocalSolver to Hexaly, restructuring the product line into an optimizer, a modelling language, a development environment and a cloud offering. Benoist and Gardi run the company jointly as co-chief executives, with Julien Darlay as head of science and Romain Megel as head of engineering, over an organisation weighted heavily towards optimisation scientists, a large share of them doctorate-holders. The customer base of roughly four hundred companies is concentrated where combinatorial complexity actually bites — logistics networks, production scheduling, industrial planning — and includes Amazon, Toyota, Sony, Airbus and Starbucks.

Education

École Polytechnique

Engineering, X95 cohort

Avignon University

Ph.D., Computer Science, 2004

Nantes University

Habilitation, awarded 2014