Opdo has raised $2.3M in pre-seed funding to automate optical engineering, a discipline where demand for specialists keeps outrunning supply.
Angular Ventures led the round, joined by Inflection and Tiny.vc. Based in Los Angeles and Berlin, the company has spent more than a year working with customers on complex optical systems, pairing AI agents with human engineering expertise.
Its software sits inside the design tools engineers already know, including Zemax and CODE V, so teams speed up their workflow rather than swapping platforms. Customers can also draw on Opdo’s own engineers and order prototypes and finished parts through the company.
Closing the loop between design and factory
What separates the approach is the feedback path. Data from components that were manufactured and tested returns to the models, sharpening the next round of designs and gradually automating the route from a set of requirements to a production-ready system. That path has already cut end-to-end development and manufacturing cycles from months to weeks.
Engagements so far cover lasers, imaging systems, micro-optics and nanostructured surfaces.
A bottleneck across critical industries
Optics underpins quantum computing, aerospace, AR/VR, defence and advanced sensing, yet component design and production stays slow and labour-intensive as specialist ranks thin out. Co-founder and chief executive Stephan Kuehr, a repeat entrepreneur who earlier co-founded 3YOURMIND, said every hardware team he speaks with has an optics problem waiting in line, and the engineers who could solve it are scarce.
Angular Ventures partner Jerry Dischler framed the opportunity around augmentation, since Opdo does not ask engineers to abandon tools and expertise built over years. Fellow founder Yousef Arzhangnia serves as CTO.
The money goes to engineering capacity, AI tooling and more customer projects.
