In February 2025, the co-founder and co-owner of PanDao Dr Oliver Faehnle, takes over the role of chief technical officer in full time as a response to the rapid growth of the business. The start-up has successfully expanded into Asia and the USA in 2024 with key clients now including Carl Zeiss Jena, Edmund Optics, Hensoldt, HHV Advanced Technologies, Innoviz Technologies, and ASML.

PanDao offers the global optical design and manufacturing market an innovative software platform that enables the user to determine to design and replicate optical bespoke fabrication chains from prototyping to serial production at minimum cost and risk. PanDao is the only product on the market that masters the producibility of optical products with access to 360 optical manufacturing technologies, providing producibility analyses with just one click. It is the optimum tool for production and supply chain planning, substantially shortening product development times and removing costly errors from optical manufacturing, by identifying mistakes in the early stages of products and smart manufacturing design processes.

For Oliver, it is an exciting time to devote himself completely to the company, which he co-founded in 2019 with Prof Rolf Rascher and CEO Marco Tinner. He is internationally renowned specialist in optical fabrication technologies, having received his Physik Diplom 1993 from Heidelberg University, Germany, and made his PhD at the University of Delft, The Netherlands. Oliver has been in the optics industry for more than thirty years and is a senior member of Optica and SPIE, head of the industrial advisory committee of the European Optical Society EOS, and executive board member of Swissphotonics.

From 1993 he worked at TNO Institute of Applied Optics, Delft, The Netherlands, carrying out contract research. From 1999 he was working at Fisba, St Gallen, Switzerland, heading the optical fabrication technology group. Since 2020 he was heading the group for photonics systems manufacturing at the University of Applied Sciences OST, Buchs, Switzerland, while lecturing optical fabrication technologies in Switzerland, USA, Japan, Germany, and the UK.

Meet Oliver and PanDao at SPIE Photonics West, or at his invited scientific talk at Optica’s Optical Design and Fabrication congress this June in Denver, or in May at the Bayern Photonics Optical Design meeting in Teisnach, Germany.

Further reading: Oliver Fähnle, Rolf Rascher, and Marco Tinner (PanDao / OST – Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences): Optical fabrication chain design – By analyzing lens data during optics design, the optimal optical fabrication chain can be determined, PhotonicsViews 18(4), 2021, pp. 43–45; DOI: 10.1002/phvs.202100051