Solais Lighting Inc. reported $1.8 million in new funding, with plans to raise $750,000 more as the Stamford company manufactures LED lamps used for lighting applications.
Long too expensive for anything but specialty lighting applications ”“ including Christmas tree lights ”“ LEDs are inching toward mainstream acceptance, with New York-based SL Green among the landlords retrofitting tristate area multitenant office buildings with the lighting.
An energy savings calculator on Solais”™ website suggests its lamps can pay for themselves in well under a year”™s time, depending on the type of fixture they are replacing.
Solais says its lamps combine the long life and energy efficiency of LEDs with the high output and intensity of halogen technology, resulting in a product ideal for track and recessed applications in settings ranging from homes to stores to museums.
Last May, the Smithsonian American Art Museum selected Solais for a demonstration installation in the Washington, D.C., museum, with Solais saying it beat out multiple other manufacturers. The Smithsonian is using Solais lights to illuminate a gallery that includes a mural by Thomas Hart Benton.
According to Solais, heat is the enemy of LED performance and the company”™s technology addresses that in a thermal transfer process that uses fans to cool the unit. That is particularly important in recessed lighting where airflow is limited, hiking temperatures. Solais says competing LED lamps rely on bulky metal heat sinks that do not perform as well as its system.
The CEO of Cree Inc., which supplies Solais with LED chips, agrees there is plenty of room for further innovation.
“It”™s not as simple as taking LEDs and shoving (them) in a metal box,” said Chuck Swoboda, Cree CEO, in a conference call with investment analysts reviewing the company”™s third-quarter results. “Making good LED lighting is a complex problem, and one of the things we get paid for is solving that complexity ”¦ It doesn”™t just take good LEDs ”“ it takes optics knowledge, it takes thermal knowledge, it takes the ability to build a highly efficient drive circuit to make this all work together.”
Solais”™ chief technology officer, Steve Johnson, previously led the lighting research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. CEO James Leahy previously was CEO of Wiedenbach-Brown, which was the nation”™s largest specialty lighting distribution company before its sale to Franklin, Tenn.-based U.S. Electrical Services Inc.
Solais backers include Amherst, Mass.-based Long River Ventures and Shelburne, Vt.-based based Fresh Tracks Capital L.P. The latter also is an investor in SolarOne Solutions Inc., a Needham, Mass.-based company that sells solar-powered street, canopy and landscape lighting that relies on LEDs.
The city of Stamford is replacing hundreds of streetlamps with LED equivalents from Fairfield-based General Electric Co. Shelton-based Hubbell Inc. also sells LED retrofit kits for streetlights.
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