I build pragmatic, commercially-driven solutions in markets where too many hard problems are treated like academic exercises.

I’m the founder and CEO of Paraxial, where we’re building an AI-native optical design platform to help hardware teams move from product requirements to manufacturable optical systems dramatically faster than with legacy tools. Our goal is to compress work that often takes weeks or months into days, while making advanced optical design more accessible to the broader engineering teams who increasingly need to participate in it.  

Before Paraxial, I spent five years at Zemax, the dominant optical design and engineering software, where I grew from optical engineer to principal product manager. That experience gave me a front-row seat to the core problems in the industry: workflows that take too long, software that remains too hard for most engineers to use effectively, and a culture that too often favors perfect analysis over practical speed. I worked with major customers, helped drive product direction, and saw clearly that the next step change would not come from layering modern UX onto legacy foundations.

In 2025, I published research on a hybrid AI approach to optical tolerancing that showed how machine learning and traditional methods can work together to accelerate performance prediction and yield analysis without abandoning engineering rigor.  That work, combined with years of direct exposure to customer pain, became the foundation for Paraxial.

Paraxial is the company I’ve been building toward for a decade: a modern platform for optical and sensor design that combines AI, faster computation, and better workflows to make elite design capability available to far more teams. One of the strongest validations for me has been seeing former skeptics from the legacy world become believers, including leaders I once debated internally who now advise and support what we’re building.

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