About Pleco
Mission
Pleco researches and builds tools and infrastructure for open, non-equilibrium systems — systems whose behavior emerges from how they exchange information, energy, or material with their environment. These are everywhere: drugs binding to receptors in the body, organizations keeping their commitments, light propagating through a photonic chip. Pleco's tools model these systems more accurately in the regimes where equilibrium-based tools fail, enabling isoform-selective drug design and fragility mapping for organizational infrastructure. And because the mathematics of these systems is also the mathematics of photonic dynamics, computing them on a photonic substrate provides real-time simulation infrastructure at scales classical hardware cannot match for these workloads.
What this means in practice
Most modeling tools assume systems return to equilibrium. They work well when that's true. They struggle when the system's interesting behavior is precisely the trajectory away from equilibrium — which describes most of the systems anyone cares about predicting.
The mathematics for open non-equilibrium systems exists. It's been worked out across physics, chemistry, and complex systems theory for decades. What's harder is applying it to specific substrates with the right discipline:
- The right state space
- The right environmental coupling
- The right level of formalism for the mechanism in question
- Honest data, honest methodology, honest reporting
This careful upstream work is what we focus on.
What we deliver
Curated datasets. The first thing any predictor needs is data assembled correctly. Most ML in chemistry and biology is bottlenecked here, not by compute. We curate kinetic and binding-affinity data with documented provenance, multi-modality reproducibility weighting where applicable, and explicit data-quality flagging.
Mechanism-grounded models. We choose formalism by mechanism, not by convention. Some substrates need empirical rate laws. Some need two-state equilibrium. Some need classical master equations. Some need real quantum dynamics. We pick the right level for each.
Pre-registered methodology. Acceptance criteria locked before evaluation. Honest negative results when they happen. Documented uncertainty. No post-hoc reinterpretation.
How we operate
Pleco LLC is an Oregon-based independent research-and-product company. Funded by a mix of consulting revenue, grant applications, and an early friends-and-family round. Not VC-backed, not a hyperscaler, not a quant fund.
Our work spans three product lines that share infrastructure (toolchains, schema discipline, pre-registration) and mathematical framing (open non-equilibrium systems), not physics. Each product is the right tool for the substrate domain it operates in.
Founding
Founded 2026 by Conor Nolan-Finkel.