About us

Lighting design is our craft. AI is our tool.

Planphos grew from a simple observation: most lighting designs follow clear rules — standards, formulas, established decision trees. Yet every project still takes weeks and costs thousands.

Our story

Why Planphos exists

After hundreds of lighting designs for offices, hotels, restaurants and public buildings, a pattern became clear: 80 percent of designs follow the same rules. The same standards. The same utilance method. The same decisions — classify the space, look up normative values, calculate luminaires, position them, document the result.

The question was not whether this could be automated. The question was whether it could be automated well enough for an architect to trust the result. Not as a black box, but with traceable calculation, transparent normative references and deterministic validation.

That is Planphos: 20 years of lighting design expertise, translated into an AI pipeline that delivers in 60 seconds what previously took weeks.

Team

The people behind Planphos

Lars Nellesen

Chief Executive Officer

13 years of experience in sales, retail expansion and revenue architecture in the lighting industry. As Chief Retail Development Officer at Occhio, Lars led global expansion and tripled total revenue. Currently CSO & CMO at RIBAG Licht AG. He builds the bridge between technology and market.

Global scaling & revenue architecture
Manufacturer networks
Go-to-market and business development

Hannah Hölzl

Chief Product Officer

20 years of experience in architectural lighting design. Hannah is the normative authority behind the AI logic. With stations at Bartenbach, Occhio and Foster & Partners in London, every rule, every decision tree, every standard interpretation in Planphos comes from her professional practice — spanning offices, hotels and places of worship.

Architectural lighting design
DIN EN 12464-1 / ASR A3.4
Lighting calculation and positioning

Marcel Nellesen

Chief Technology Officer

15 years of experience in product & tech leadership. As CPO at Tangany, Marcel led the development of one of Germany's most widely used blockchain custody platforms. Previously 10 years at DATEV — from lead developer to chief scrum master with agile transformation across 50+ engineers.

Platform & product engineering
Cloud-native architectures
Agile transformation at scale

Vision

The global standard for automated lighting design.

Today we start with quantitative lighting design for the German market. Next we add photometric calculation, tender documents and cost estimation. Further ahead, we connect planners directly with manufacturers — for automated procurement in real time.

Now Quantitative lighting design — upload floor plan, receive lighting layout

Next step Photometric calculation with illuminance verification and UGR analysis

Planned Manufacturer-neutral tender documents and cost estimation

Vision Manufacturer interface with real-time availability and transactions

Be part of the journey.

Try Planphos and experience how automated lighting design works.

Get started Contact us