Former NM Economic Secretary Alicia Keyes Scores Big No-bid Deal Converting State Enviro Data for “Apaluma”
On April 10, 2025, Meta Hirschl and Todd Hochman met with New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) Secretary James Kenney and other senior department officials regarding an agency document digitization project.
The project was being developed by a team of NMED employees and an outside vendor, Speridian Technologies LLC, which had a professional services contract with NMED for $1,801,300.
Hirschl is Chief Data & Tech Steward, and Hochman is the IT Architect, for NMED.
Hochman is a classified employee, and according to State Personnel Office records, has worked for the state of New Mexico since 1998.
Hirschl is a Governor’s appointee (GOVX), hired in August of 2023.
The Candle has copies of emails from both Hirschl and Hochman to other NMED employees and contractors, describing the meeting and directives issued by their boss Kenney.
Significant amongst the instructions from Kenney, is the directing of contracted work to an AI company named Apaluma and created by a former high official in Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration, and which bills itself as “Illuminating Data for Actionable Intelligence.“
Apaluma is a company founded by former Economic Development Department Secretary Alicia Keyes. Keyes is also the CEO of Apaluma.
A reasonable person can deduce from the emails, that Kenney directs that the contract be amended.
In one of the emails, with the subject line reading: “Subject: IMPORTANT_New Directives from Cabinet Secretary re. Document Digitization,” Hochman wrote, “The Secretary wants the Apaluma solution as a ‘front-end’ to the digitized unstructured content. To that end, he would prefer for convenience’s sake that Speridian act as host SWPA vendor to this vendor.”
Hochman continues in an email,
“While after my talk with @Ashith Vahab the other day, I fully understand his concerns regarding such an arrangement, here is my proposal to both assuage those concerns and allow us to move forward to meet the Secretary’s wishes expeditiously:
- “The amended contract will contain an additional deliverable specifically for this
implementation. - “This amendment will be phrased as an Epic-based deliverable, which absolves
Speridian of any responsibility to ensure vendor performance, as the Epic-based
nature of the deliverable ensures performance as the prerequisite to payment. - “Speridian has no involvement in this deliverable other than to accept passive
income from the upsold subcontracted services at a reasonable percentage.”
The amendment to the contract Hochman referred to in his email, added $499,990, and descriptions of work to be performed specifically by Apaluma.
Despite his drafting and signing the contract amendment as Acting Chief Information Officer for the
Environment Department on May 7, 2025, its been reported to The Candle by sources not wanting to be identified for fear of retaliation, that Hochman felt pressured to do so by Kenney.
Hirschl, however, appears to be all in with the Secretary’s directing them to subcontract with Apaluma.
She writes,
“Hi all, including Apaluma team members Alicia Keyes (Founder) and Tilan Ukwatta (CTO),
“Thanks, Todd, for capturing the next steps and the urgency around them.
“I’d like to clarify one key point to ensure alignment between Speridian’s document processing work and Apaluma’s RAG-based front-end solution.
“From a previous conversation, I understood that the outcome of Speridian’s processing might be to identify documents containing search terms. However, the vision we’re pursuing—with support from the Secretary—is that these documents will serve as inputs into Apaluma’s Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system.
“In this model, users won’t simply be directed to documents to review. Instead, they’ll receive direct answers to their questions, generated by AI and supported by citations from the underlying content. This distinction makes the format and structure of Speridian’s output critical—ideally clean text or markdown with preserved structure—optimized for ingestion into Apaluma’s architecture, rather than a standard search or display format.
“Tilan, please feel free to add any details about what Apaluma’s system needs to make this handoff seamless.”
She ends her email, “Appreciate everyone’s continued momentum and collaboration. We’re calling this Project Velocity because we need to move quickly and effectively—with clarity and accuracy.
Project Velocity has significant goals, and The Candle will be reporting on them in a follow-up article.
However, the importance of goals is not an excuse to preclude making sure the procurement process is, 1.) transparent, and 2.) providing bidding options, such as the use of Requests for Proposals, to other vendors, of which there are many.
A fair bid process would provide for the best outcome of the digitization and AI interfacing efforts needed for this important project – an outcome the state procurement process is supposed to ensure.
Secretary Kenney has prevented that open bid process from happening, by pressuring his “team” to contract with his former Cabinet colleague’s company – Apaluma.
The Candle sent emails yesterday to Hochman and Hirschl, as well as NMED’s communications person seeking a reply to a series of questions. There has been no response.
A message was also left for Keyes on the Apaluma contact page – but no response.
More on this tomorrow – there is another contract that Speridian was tasked to include Apaluma as as a subcontractor, and apparently engage Alicia Keyes and other Apaluma affiliated persons as “Key Staff and Qualified Personnel” of Speridian at rates of $125 and $130 an hour.