● About us
Optimization should be something you just use.
Why optimaru
Every day, countless small decisions — which driver takes which order, who works Sunday night, which class gets the lab on Tuesday — are combinatorial optimization problems. The mathematics to solve them well has existed for decades. Using it has not become much easier.
Teams either license commercial solvers that are powerful but opaque and expensive, or adopt research code that shines on benchmarks and falls apart at the first real-world rule: a driver’s break, a labor agreement, a teacher who cannot teach first period on Mondays.
optimaru exists to close that gap. We are building an open-source optimization engine that is easy to use, honest about its quality, and designed from the start for the messy constraints of real operations — so that combinatorial optimization becomes an everyday tool, not a specialist’s project.
Founder
Seunghyun Kang
Founder
I trained as a mathematician — a Ph.D. in stochastic analysis from Seoul National University — and then left pure mathematics to work on problems I could watch being solved in the real world.
At Samsung SDS I built machine learning, search and NLP systems. At Mesh Korea I worked on vehicle routing with both classical operations research and transformer-based reinforcement learning, and joined research on neural combinatorial optimization. At Wesang I designed and built, on my own, the dispatch solver behind a real-time food delivery service, combining metaheuristics with reinforcement learning. At Omelet I led product engineering for logistics: TMS and routing products, an in-house C++ routing solver and ALNS framework, and nurse and workforce scheduling engines.
Rigorous mathematics, logistics optimization running in production every day, and hands-on experience with machine learning and reinforcement learning — optimaru is built on that combination.
Career
- 2024 — 2026 Omelet Lead Software Engineer · Principal OR Engineer, Head of Product Development
- 2022 — 2024 Wesang Senior Staff Engineer · real-time food dispatch optimization
- 2021 — 2022 Mesh Korea Algorithm Engineer · TMS engine, routing research
- 2018 — 2021 Samsung SDS Machine Learning Engineer, then Research Engineer at the AI Advanced Research Lab
Education
- 2013 — 2018 Seoul National University Ph.D. in Mathematics · Stochastic Analysis
- 2010 — 2013 POSTECH B.S. in Mathematics
Talks
- NIMS Industrial Mathematics Workshop — vehicle routing in practice
- Google for Startups meet-up — optimization in production
- Beyond X — logistics optimization
- Invited lectures on vehicle routing — Dongguk University, Incheon National University