- Opdo has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding, led by Angular Ventures, with Inflection and Tiny.vc also joining.
- Opdo’s AI agents work within Zemax and CODE V, sending the manufacturing data back into the design process.
- The startup has five people and hasn’t named any customers.
Optics is a huge part of quantum computing, aerospace, defence and AR/VR hardware. The problem with optical parts is that they’re still very slow to design and manufacture, and it’s very labour-intensive, partly because there aren’t enough optical engineers.
Opdo, a deeptech startup based in Los Angeles and Berlin, claims its AI agents can help solve that problem. The company has raised $2.3m in pre-seed from Angular Ventures, Inflection and Tiny.vc to fuel its growth.
Opdo’s agents work with the existing optical design software, such as Zemax and CODE V, rather than replacing it. That’s reportedly reduced development and manufacturing times from months to weeks.
“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. With AI doing the heavy lifting, our engineers have dramatically cut our customers’ time to market,” says Stephan Kuehr, co-founder and CEO of Opdo.
Founders have experience in optics machinery
Kuehr and CTO Yousef Arzhangnia met while at a company called xolo, which makes machines for producing optical elements. Kuehr was chief commercial officer at the time and responsible for the commercial side, while Arzhangnia handled the software side.
Prior to xolo, Kuehr founded 3YOURMIND, a manufacturing automation company with customers including the US DoD, Ford, and Bosch.
“We saw a huge market opportunity to really bring AI engineering to the optics world,” Kuehr told Tech Funding News.
Opdo launched its first product in June 2025: an AI co-pilot that takes a prompt and produces a manufacturable optical system. The company partnered with Luximprint on 3D printing in November 2025.
The firm now has agents within existing tools, in-house engineering, and customers can order prototypes and finished parts through Opdo. Kuehr says their ambition is to become fully vertically integrated.
Opdo’s main value is in its feedback loop. Data from manufactured and tested parts feeds back into the models, which in turn improves each design over time.
Established companies have their own AI tools
Kuehr sees the incumbent companies as the main competition. Nobody has implemented AI deeply into their processes,” he says, arguing that design and manufacturing at those firms are still largely manual.
On a broader scale, Keysight’s CODE V 2026 has an AI Start Expert that takes a very short specification and generates an initial design. Ansys Zemax, now owned by Synopsys, has also added AI assistants. Photonium, a YC-backed company, is working on AI for electronic design automation for optics, and Axiomatic AI raised $18 million to do AI verification for semiconductors and photonics.
The market is still very small. One study puts the optical design software market at $237 million in 2025 and $398 million in 2031. Kuehr says the plan is to eventually cover manufacturing as well as design.
Five employees and no named customers
Kuehr says the funding will go toward the engineering team, tooling, and the initial steps toward in-house production. The company is also hiring optical designers, photonics engineers and metrologists.
Customers are still an open question. The company works with design and research partners, and an article on their site refers to work with people from the University of North Carolina, Google and Amazon.
Jerry Dischler, partner at Angular Ventures, said, “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. 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.”
Alexander Lange, founding partner at Inflection, added,“I believe the next frontier in applied AI will be physical. 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.”
Kuehl is expecting the market to shift very rapidly. “In three years there will be nobody that is not putting agents to work,” he says. For Opdo, the issue is whether five people can actually convert that shift into paying customers before the bigger, better-funded competitors catch up.
