Paul Le Floch did not arrive at Harvard with a company already rehearsed in his head. In 2021, the year he finished his doctorate and co-founded Axoft, he looked back just two years and said: “Two years ago, I would never have told you I was going to start a company.” That is a pleasingly awkward beginning for a founder’s story. The business arrived after the questions. The title followed the work.
Today he is Axoft’s co-founder and chief executive in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His subject is soft materials and the electronics they make possible. His working vocabulary includes polymers, microfabrication, and manufacturing. These are words with little talent for cocktail parties, but considerable usefulness when something has to be built. Le Floch’s career has followed their demands across an ocean, between laboratories, and eventually onto a company’s balance sheet.
Two Paris degrees, then a different kind of classroom
His training in France joined disciplines that university departments often keep apart. In 2016, he completed a master’s in applied physics and chemistry at ESPCI Paris, alongside a master’s in mechanical engineering at MINES ParisTech. Chemistry asks what a material is made of. Mechanics asks what happens when it is pulled, bent, or pushed. For someone interested in stretchable electronics, both questions are rather hard to avoid.
The combination matters to the shape of this story. Electronics can be described through circuits and software, but the object itself still has to exist somewhere. It has surfaces, boundaries, and mechanical properties. A design may be elegant on a screen and obstinate on a workbench. Le Floch’s education gave him several ways to interrogate that obstinacy, with physics adding its own questions about how the thing behaves.
He moved to Harvard in 2016. His early work took place in the laboratory of Zhigang Suo, whose field is mechanics and materials. Later, he moved to Jia Liu’s laboratory and became its first graduate student. Liu would become an Axoft co-founder; Tianyang Ye, another Harvard-trained researcher, would join them. The relationships that eventually supported the business began inside the research, before there was a business to support.
The education hidden inside a piece of glass
An early snapshot of his research contains a wonderfully inconvenient assignment: making glass stretchable. Glass is useful for sealing electronic devices because it limits exchanges with the surrounding atmosphere. Stretchable electronics ask the seal to accommodate movement as well. It is the sort of request that sounds simple until someone hands you the material.
Le Floch also worked on hydrogel-elastomer ionic conductors with durability in air and water. The phrasing is technical; the underlying demand is plain. A material must keep doing its job in the conditions where it will actually be used. Softness alone leaves other questions unanswered. What passes through it? How does it change? Can it protect the electronics it surrounds?
That period included workshops on complex fluids and mechanics, and mentoring other graduate students in teaching practices at Harvard’s Bok Center. The picture is wider than a solitary researcher with an inspired formula. There are discussions, instruction, and other people’s experiments. A material earns its place by surviving questions from more than one direction.
A conceptual map of the disciplines in Le Floch’s work, rather than a product specification.
A company becomes a reasonable next experiment
Axoft was founded in 2021. Le Floch defended his doctorate that June, in mechanical engineering and materials science. While finishing the degree, he raised nearly $1 million in pre-seed funding. The overlap is the telling detail: the academic work and the practical work of starting a company occupied the same stretch of his life.
He also received the Materials Research Society Graduate Student Gold Award and appeared on the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 Science list. These recognitions marked his transition into public view. The more interesting transition was already underway. A laboratory result was becoming something that needed a team, capital, and a way to reach people outside the laboratory.
The founding group brought complementary experience. Liu’s work included ultra-flexible electronics; Ye had pursued bioelectronics during his Harvard doctorate. Le Floch’s research helped make the materials scalable enough to integrate many sensors. His stated ambition extended to an interface containing at least a million sensors. That remains an aspiration, a useful distinction when the number is large enough to attract its own spotlight.
- 2016Paris training gives way to Harvard research.
- 2021A doctorate and a new company arrive in the same year.
- 2026A $55 million Series A supports the next stage of building.
Owning the recipe changes the conversation
In a 2024 interview, Le Floch explained a practical advantage of designing the material itself: “we can modify it because we designed the materials.” The team can return to polymer chemistry, alter composition or structure, and adjust properties. The starting point is a recipe the company can revisit.
That gives his version of entrepreneurship a particular rhythm. A problem encountered in a device may send the work back to the chemistry. A better formulation can then return to fabrication. The route is a loop, with each pass offering another chance to change the object. It also requires people who can understand what happened at each step.
Le Floch spoke about iteration and the decision to commit resources before every uncertainty has vanished. Materials work gives that familiar founder dilemma a physical form. The question is whether a promising substance can sustain a useful system and a viable organization. Confidence has to coexist with revision. Otherwise the recipe becomes an heirloom, carefully preserved and increasingly inconvenient.
“we can modify it because we designed the materials.”
Paul Le Floch, 2024 interview
Fleuron leaves the laboratory
The material family has a name: Fleuron. Its history reaches back to Liu’s postdoctoral work in Zhenan Bao’s Stanford research group. At Harvard, Liu and Le Floch worked to improve its scalability. In May 2025, Axoft announced an exclusive Stanford licensing agreement and made Fleuron available to research and industrial organizations.
The first products were soft, negative photoresists for microfabrication. A photoresist lets light help define patterns during fabrication. Making a soft material compatible with that process connects two requirements: the properties wanted in the finished object and the methods needed to make it. An appealing substance still needs a workable route through production.
Selling the material also brings other laboratories into the story. Their devices, procedures, and specifications create demands of their own. Axoft’s materials catalog now offers formulations for microfabrication, microfluidics, and advanced microscopy, along with custom formulation work. A company built around one research direction has acquired a second audience: people who want the substance so they can build something else.
The polymer that disappears on purpose
In August 2026, Axoft introduced Fleuron WISE, short for Water Invisible Soft Elastomer. Its trick is to match water’s refractive index. Submerged, the material is designed to appear to disappear, reducing optical distortion in aqueous imaging. For a company trying to make its work more visible, this is an admirably contrary product description.
WISE was developed through a collaboration with the Shroff Lab at Janelia Research Campus. It is available as a curable liquid or in sheets, and can be cast into molds. The requirements include optical clarity, softness, and the ability to manufacture small structures. Again, several properties have to agree inside the same object.
This chapter makes Le Floch’s original training feel especially relevant. Chemistry, physics, and mechanics return together, now inside a catalog entry. The product’s name is memorable, but the underlying work is patient negotiation among properties. The customer needs a material that behaves properly under light, in water, and during fabrication. Each setting gets a vote.
The less glamorous address of progress
By April 2026, Axoft had announced a $55 million Series A led by C.P. Group Innovation, with participation from Alumni Ventures, the Stanford President’s Venture Fund, Hillhouse Investment, and Gaorong Ventures. Part of the funding was assigned to a manufacturing facility. The company also described plans to expand its chemistry, microfabrication, and software engineering teams.
Manufacturing had already acquired a local footing. Massachusetts approved a grant of up to $835,000 in 2025 to support Axoft’s cleanroom and advanced fabrication setup. Axoft subsequently described a partnership with Bunker Hill Community College on workforce training for underrepresented students. Equipment needs people who know how to use it; the building and the skills have to grow together.
The geography has widened too. Axoft opened a Grenoble subsidiary in 2025, giving the Cambridge company a presence in France. Le Floch’s route across the Atlantic now sits inside an organization working on both sides of it. That is a concrete expansion, with a local team to build and work to organize, rather than a decorative dot on a map.
A founder with interests outside the formula
His graduate-student biography lists rock climbing, salsa dancing, beach volleyball, and film photography. It is a welcome collection. The camera, in particular, supplies a small comic contrast to a career spent advancing electronics: he also made room for a medium that requires waiting for an image to emerge.
Those interests belong to a documented period of his life. They give the researcher a little space beyond degrees and funding announcements, without turning hobbies into a management theory. A climber does not automatically become a daring chief executive. A salsa dancer need not run an unusually rhythmic meeting. Sometimes a person simply has several things he enjoys.
Le Floch has kept explaining the company in public, appearing on founder podcasts and presenting at industry gatherings. In October 2026, he discussed materials sales and the shift from research into pitching a longer-term vision. The task continues to change around him. There is another audience to persuade, another formulation to test, another part of the operation to build. His story began with a question about materials. Running Axoft has given him plenty more.