First Oliver wanted to write a book about his 25 years of experience in optic fabrication and so he told Rolf about his Idea. Rolf had the idea of technical data sheets of all the existing fabrication technologies in optics. Talking about these ideas, both came to the opinion: Books and sheets are outdated, let’s create an App!
Oliver knew that Marco had written Apps before, so he asked him, what he thought about their idea. Marco responded that an App was not the right approach and that we should create a web service.
So, in January 2017 the three sat together and decided to start the PanDao project. At first there was just the idea to create a program, which determines the best fabrication chain for a given optical design. An early prototype took shape and the deeper the three where involved with the subject the more they recognized that the program could save companies a lot of money if they start optimizing their products in the design phase not only on performance but also on fabrication. This thought is nothing new, but it is hard to realize.
There are a lot of different fabrication technologies out there in industry and in research departments and one needs specialized employees and big efforts to do this design to cost approach. So, Oliver started to use the first version of the program in his daily business and found, that the software delivered valid results. We were even able to publish some papers generated from ideas by the software’s output.
There was such a high potential in the software, that we developed an additional web interface to give more people access to the program. Every time the software was shown to someone, they were excited about what it could do. Consequently, in 2018 the three decided to create a company and PanDao GmbH, St. Gallen, Switzerland, was founded.