AI & ML · London
Foceon
An autonomy platform for precision-optics manufacturing, from grinding and deterministic polishing through coating, centering, and inspection.
- Stage
- Seed
- Founded
- Founded 2025
- First invested
- We invested 2025
- Team
- 11 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $2.5M
- Current stage
- Seed
- Team
- 11
- Founded
- 2025
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Foceon runs the optics factory rather than reporting on it. Its agents control material removal during grinding and deterministic polishing, predict surface figure and roughness from interferometry in real time, hold thin-film coatings to spectral spec, and handle centering, assembly, and cleanroom inspection. An optics digital twin simulates removal, coating stacks, and wavefront before anyone cuts glass. The company was founded in London in 2025 and we led the seed round the same year.
- 01
Deterministic polishing control that converges surface figure in fewer passes
- 02
Surface metrology that predicts figure, roughness, and MTF from live interferometry
- 03
Thin-film coating control for layer thickness, uniformity, and spectral performance
- 04
Scratch-dig, coating defect, and subsurface damage inspection
- 05
An optics digital twin that hits target spec before the blank is cut
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Design partners
- 4
- Polish cycles saved
- 38%
- Scratch-dig recall
- 97%
- Coating scrap
- -31%
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“Precision optics sits underneath every camera, headset, and lidar unit shipping today, and it is still run on the intuition of a retiring craft. Peter and Naomi had already proved the correction models worked before they raised anything. We led the round on that.”
- Cut polish-measure-repolish iterations by more than a third on its first production surface.
- Signed all four design partners before the seed round closed.
- Runs at the fab edge, on-premise, because optics customers will not send process data anywhere.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Peter Aldridge
Co-founder and CEO
Ran optics production for a European camera-module supplier and spent six years watching high-value blanks scrapped at the last step.
Naomi Callender
Co-founder and CTO
Built deterministic-polishing correction models in an academic optics group, then discovered no fab could actually run them in the loop.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2025
Founded
Peter Aldridge and Naomi Callender start Foceon in London around one wedge: closing the polish, measure, repolish loop that decides whether a lens ships or gets scrapped.
- 2025
We led the seed
We wrote the seed check and took a board seat. This is the kind of company where the hard part is physics and the second hardest part is getting into a fab, and both take time.
- 2025
First design partners
Four optics manufacturers instrumented a polishing cell in shadow mode, which gave the team a measured baseline rather than a claimed one.
- 2026
Assist mode in production
Correction maps now go to a process engineer for approval instead of straight to the machine. Their edits train the models, which is the whole design.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Angel syndicate of optics operators
Working here
Open roles
Foceon is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Optics process engineer
- Perception engineer
- Founding solutions engineer
Building something next to Foceon?
We are usually early to a category and happy to be early again. Send us the short version.