Opdo, an AI-native optical engineering company, has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate its ambition of automating optical engineering, from initial design to finished components.
The Los Angeles and Berlin startup is developing a self-improving system that connects AI-driven design and simulation with real-world manufacturing data, and has already demonstrated its ability to reduce end-to-end development and manufacturing cycles from months to weeks.
For more than a year, Opdo has worked alongside customers to design complex optical systems, combining AI agents with specialist engineering expertise. Its technology operates within established optical design software, including Zemax and CODE V, allowing engineers to accelerate their workflows without replacing existing tools. Opdo’s own engineers provide additional design expertise, and customers can also source prototypes and finished components through the company.
Optics underpins technologies ranging from quantum computing and aerospace to AR/VR, defence and advanced sensing. Yet designing and manufacturing optical components remains slow and labour-intensive, with growing demand for specialist engineers creating bottlenecks across these industries.
Opdo aims to overcome these constraints by connecting digital design with physical production. Data from manufactured and tested components can feed back into its AI models, improving subsequent designs and progressively automating the journey from initial requirements to production-ready optical systems. Its customer projects already span laser and imaging systems, micro-optics and nanostructured surfaces.
“Every hardware team we talk to has an optics problem waiting in line. The engineers who can solve it are scarce, and the tools were built for a different era,” said Stephan Kuehr, co-founder and CEO of Opdo.
“With AI doing the heavy lifting, our engineers have dramatically cut our customers’ time to market.”
Opdo was founded by repeat entrepreneurs Stephan Kuehr and Yousef Arzhangnia, its CTO, whose backgrounds span manufacturing, optical engineering, artificial intelligence and automation.
Kuehr previously co-founded 3YOURMIND, whose software automates distributed manufacturing.
Customers including the US Department of Defence, Ford and Bosch use its technology to identify and re-engineer qualified parts with AI, store their designs digitally and enable automated production on demand at connected manufacturing sites.
The $2.3 million pre-seed round was led by Angular Ventures, with participation from Inflection and Tiny.vc.
“Optics is one of the last deep engineering disciplines that AI has barely touched, yet it underpins some of the most important technologies being developed today,” said Jerry Dischler, Partner at Angular Ventures.
“What makes Opdo interesting is that it isn’t asking engineers to abandon the tools and expertise they’ve spent years developing, but rather making those engineers substantially more productive.”
“I believe the next frontier in applied AI will be physical,” said Alexander Lange, Founding Partner at Opdo.
“Opdo is building a self-improving system that takes real-world optical manufacturing data and feeds it back into AI-based simulation tools.
That creates a powerful feedback loop between design and production, with the potential to transform optical engineering at a time when it has become a strategic bottleneck for several critical industries.”
The investment will help Opdo expand its engineering capabilities, develop its AI tooling and take on more customer projects. Companies looking to accelerate an existing optical design project, or bring a new optical component into development, can submit their use case at opdo.ai.