Hey YC!

We’re Jennifer and Adam - cofounders of Photonium.

TL;DR

Photonium automates optical system design with AI, replacing costly manual iteration with end-to-end system optimization.

🚨 The Problem

Optical systems are mission-critical across many high-growth sectors — including quantum technology, biomedical imaging, LiDAR for defense and autonomous vehicles, and metrology for semiconductor fabrication.

But designing them is a nightmare:

• Companies pour millions into teams of 20+ optical engineers
• Projects take months or years to go from R&D to production
• Tools are fragmented and outdated
• Optimization is manual and often based on trial-and-error

Engineers spend countless hours on repetitive workflows — constrained by tools that haven’t changed in decades.

⚙️ Our Solution

Photonium is building the electronic design automation (semiconductor EDA) for optics. We work with complex optical setups across industries and handle the entire design process — from system generation and optimization to simulation, tolerancing, and sourcing.

Photonium enables companies to:

• Generate and optimize designs from product specs
• Predict tolerance impacts without slow simulations
• Recommend data-driven alignment and manufacturing tweaks
• Optimize for cost, size, and performance trade-offs
• Seamlessly integrate with existing CAD workflows and optics simulation tools
• Automate the full design-to-sourcing pipeline

Launch Video

🚀 The Team

Jennifer studied physics, math, and CS at Harvard and built quantum optics experiments across Harvard, Stanford, and QuEra (a Google-backed quantum computing startup).

Adam studied computational physics at Stanford, and worked on plasma simulation for fusion and large-scale astrophysical modeling of black holes.

We’ve both felt the pain of inefficient engineering design firsthand — and built Photonium to fix it.

⚛️ Why This Matters

Optical systems are foundational to cutting-edge technologies, from quantum computing to semiconductor fabrication. Yet, outdated tools and fragmented workflows slow innovation and inflate costs. We hope to eliminate these bottlenecks and accelerate innovation across industries.

📣 Our Ask

If you know anyone working with lasers and optics in any context, we’d love to chat! Contact us at founders@photonium.ai