About Operon
Built for the industries that build everything else.
Operon was started by engineers who spent years around plants, drawings and the people who keep them running. We build the software we wished those teams had.
Our story
Industrial work is specialized. Its software should be, too.
We started with P&IDs because they are the hardest documents in industry to read and the most expensive to get wrong. The same problem turned up everywhere we looked: mechanical contractors recounting drawing sets for every bid, EPCs diffing revisions by eye, operators rebuilding compliance lists by hand. The documents change from trade to trade. The work of reading them, and everything that follows, doesn't.
Generic AI breaks on engineering documents.
Engineering drawings are symbols, lines and tables that only make sense together, drawn to conventions that vary by owner, era and trade. Chat assistants read text; they can't trace a line across forty sheets or tell you which revision an answer came from. And in work that carries liability, a confident wrong answer is worse than none.
Operon reads them, then does the work.
We read the documents with domain models, have the people who own the work verify what we found, and connect it across every sheet and revision. Then Operon does the work on top: take-offs, reviews, compliance lists and drafts, each traced to the sheet it came from and approved by a person.
Where we're going
From one drawing type to the whole physical economy.
01
02
03
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01 · P&IDs
Reading and verification for process plants, where mistakes cost the most.
02 · Mechanical
Take-off and estimating for HVAC and mechanical contractors.
03 · Construction & energy
Revision control, turnover and compliance across projects and assets.
04 · Portfolios
The same software across every company an owner brings together.
Team
Engineers first.
We are process engineers, software engineers and researchers who would rather be on site than in a slide deck. We hire people who care about the work and understand it.
Backed by Y Combinator
Anderson Chen
Founder & CEO
Previously a process engineer. Chemical Engineering at NTU and EPFL.
How we work
Four principles behind every deployment
01
Work for engineers, not instead of them.
Operon takes the reading, counting and first drafts off people's plates, not the judgment. Decisions stay with the people accountable for them.
02
Show the work.
Every answer cites its source, every output records who approved it, and when the documents don't support an answer, we say so.
03
Don't add another platform to rip out.
Operon reads the documents where they already live and writes to the systems you already run. Nothing gets migrated for our sake.
04
Outcomes, not pilots.
We deploy on live work with engineers on site, and measure ourselves on what changes in your bids, reviews and audits.
Join the team
We're always looking for people who care about the problem and understand the work.
See open roles
Start with the work that costs you the most.
Tell us where your team loses the most hours. Three weeks later, an AI employee built for your company is doing that work.