When Samsung Electronics unveiled its new 55-inch screen organic LED television at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Universal Display (Nasdaq: PANL) in Ewing, NJ saw its own prospects rise. Organic LED (OLED) technology uses razor-thin layers of organic semiconductor material to generate light and electronic displays. It is an alternative to traditional LED and LCD technology and offers the potential to create devices that are lighter and use less energy. OLEDs do not use backlighting, which some LED and LCD displays require.

Universal Display develops OLED material and technology it licenses to manufacturers such as Samsung. While OLED screens have made their way into handheld-size devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy series of smartphones, production of larger displays that use the technology has been limited so far.

That seems to be changing with the debut of 55-inch OLED televisions from Samsung and a wicked thin 55-inch television from LG Electronics due for sale by the later half of this year. Steven Abramson, CEO of Universal Display, visited CES in Las Vegas but did not exhibit though his company’s technology could be found around the show. The plethora of smartphones and other devices built with OLED displays increases demand for the technology, he says. “We’ve been laboring in this vineyard for a long, long time,” Abramson says. “After sixteen years, we’re finally starting to see this take off.”

In addition to Samsung, other manufacturers tap into Universal Display’s research and development. “LG is buying material from us,” Abramson says. “We’ll eventually have a long-term agreement with them. Our revenues grow as the OLED industry grows.”

Universal Display reported net income of nearly $6 million on revenue of $21.8 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2011 compared with a net loss of $7.2 million on a bit less than $7.1 million in revenue for the prior year period. The company also … Next Page »

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Things are looking brighter for New York’s EcoSense Lighting, which on Tuesday said it raised $13 million in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures in Boston. Jeffrey Glass, managing director of Bain, says his firm was attracted to the experience of EcoSense’s management in the LED lighting sector.

EcoSense, founded in 2009 by its chairman George Mueller, makes energy efficient LED lighting fixtures for industrial, commercial, and residential use. Mueller calls his products professional grade white LED lighting and says the new funding will help his company increase production and grow its engineering and sales staff. The company currently has a staff of 20. “It will allow us to enter more markets and have more feet on the street worldwide,” he says. Mueller says EcoSense’s prior funding largely came from an undisclosed Series A round from internal investments as well as angel investors.

Mueller previously co-founded Boston’s Color Kinetics, a maker of LED lighting systems that was acquired in 2007 by Royal Philips Electronics for $791 million. “Color Kinetics was a very big business that really invented the color LED space,” Glass says. Ihor Lys, Color Kinetics’s co-founder and former chief scientist, was named technical advisor in Sept. 2010 to EcoSense’s board of directors.

In addition to the management team’s expertise in LED lighting, Glass says Bain Capital was interested in the evolution taking place within the industry. “LED is becoming increasingly competitive with other alternatives for lighting,” he says. “The cost of LED lighting is coming way down while the cost of fluorescent lighting is going up. Incandescent lighting is terribly inefficient.”

EcoSense makes such products as LED floodlights for outdoor use as well as interior lights. The company also made its way into the spotlight last year when its landscape lights were used on “The Vanilla Ice Project”, a home improvement cable television series on the DIY Network.

While Glass says there is room for a variety of players in the LED lighting market, he believes EcoSense’s products appeal to discerning consumers and high-end commercial buyers. “There’s lots of opportunity for many companies [in this market] to be successful,” Glass says.

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Building owners and managers are often reluctant to adopt new energy efficiency technology because they doubt it will be worth the cost in the long run.

Nolan Browne, managing director of the Cambridge, MA-based (for now) Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, is on the same page.

“I fundamentally agree with them,” he says. “If we don’t prove it, why would they want to buy it? We need to prove that it will work or last 20 to 30 years and that the occupant in that building is going to be happy and productive. If not, then it’s a problem.”

His organization is in the process of retrofitting an old building in the South Boston waterfront section known as the Innovation District. The facility will serve as the center’s offices and a “living lab” for demonstrating and validating energy efficient building technologies.

“Our goal is to become recognized as premier global leader in sustainable energy field,” says Browne. And it hopes to promote economic development through the technology it commercializes, he says.

The Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE) is connected to the Munich-based Fraunhofer Society, an organization formed in 1949 and funded in part by the Marshall Plan to help spur economic recovery in post World War II through research projects that could benefit industry across the country.

Globally, Fraunhofer centers now perform research in a variety of arenas and have about 18,000 scientists and engineers, and a 1.66 billion euro annual research budget. They’re credited with having a role in the invention of things like MP3s and fat-free sausage, to name a few, says Browne. CSE was first formed in 2008 to collaborate with MIT on research in building technology and solar. It is part of a smattering of U.S.-based research centers known as Fraunhofer USA, an independent American 501c3 nonprofit focused on growing the U.S. economy through technology research and commercialization. The USA centers have different structures and non-profit charters than the German group, Browne says.

CSE—which launched with funding from National Grid and Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s the Renewable Energy Trust (now part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center)—works in a few different ways with industry partners. The CSE can be commissioned by companies who are in need new technology or modifications to their existing products, but don’t have the needed internal R&D capabilities. And CSE scientists can come up with an idea and develop the project in house and bring it to potential industry partners. Some of CSE’s projects are publicly funded, focusing on cleantech areas the government has deemed promising. It has attracted research funding from private donors and foundations.

For its South Boston project—dubbed the Building Technology Showcase—CSE will be installing materials and systems from a host of energy efficiency players (Browne wouldn’t name names) and collecting real-time data on how the products are working. The project is costing more than $20 million, and has the support from groups such as the U.S. Department of Commerce’s economic development agency, the city of Boston, MassCEC, the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Economic Development, and Commonwealth Ventures, Browne says.

And it’s not just typical efficiency tools you might think of—like solar panels or energy use monitoring software that the CSE will be

… Next Page »

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Two years ago, we took a close look at Boston-based Black Coral Capital, just as Rob Day was joining the newly formed, cleantech-focused private equity firm as partner. Since then, both the Day and Black Coral names have shown up as part of investments in some innovative cleantech plays in Boston—several that go beyond traditional materials and dabble in the services and IT realms.

On a recent visit, Day had a lot to say about how and why traditional, materials-based cleantech firms should innovate, and the sprouting up of new companies using IT to solve cleantech challenges such as energy efficiency. He’s also pretty rosy on Boston’s up-and-coming (and pretty gritty) cleantech incubators, and the city’s potential to become a center for innovations in energy controls.

Read below for an edited transcript of a chat I had with him at Black Coral’s offices last week.

Xconomy: Tell me about some of your existing area investments, in companies like Next Step Living and Digital Lumens.

Rob Day: With Next Step Living, the business model is coming into homes. It has a full set of options. The idea is, “Hey, what do we have to do to get this home to be more energy efficient and get the homeowner to save more money? What makes most financial sense to homeowners?” They’re establishing themselves as a trusted energy advisor to them.

I see them as a channel, solution provider to the home. I keep not being excited about residential energy efficiency technology and products because there aren’t any good channels. That’s where Next Step Living can solve a major problem.

Digital Lumens is much more your classic technology play. They’re putting together what LEDs can do and what controls can do with LEDs. That’s much more of a hardcore tech play.

The similarity is, in all of these markets you need to provide a full solution.

X: What do you see as some of the next big plays in energy efficiency?

RD: There’s a good opportunity to continue to take building energy intelligence downstream. Energy intelligence for buildings has been aimed at homes, like smart thermostats, or it’s been aimed at very large buildings. But there are hundreds of thousands of buildings out there that are too small to use the existing solutions. There is an opportunity there. Ninety-plus percent of commercial buildings don’t have any intelligence out there.

The key is going to be coming up with something that is very flexible [for buildings between 25k - 50k square feet]. They’re going to need to come up with hundreds of thousands of solutions, and they’ll have to be a little bit more cookie cutter-ish. Because the buildings are all different, it has to be highly flexible and easy to configure. Even EnerNOC is starting to get involved in this. I think Boston has a particular opportunity to be an area of expertise of energy controls for buildings.

X: Is the popular notion that cleantech startups are having trouble getting money true?

RD: It’s certainly out of favor right now with investors, at least … Next Page »

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IT companies dominated New England deals this week, with word of acquisitions, financings, and potential IPOs.

—M/A-COM Technology Solutions, a Lowell, MA-based wireless chip maker, said in an SEC filing that it hopes to raise up to $230 million in an initial public offering. The firm is now owned by semiconductor-focused private equity fund Gaas Labs.

—TechStars Boston 2011 alum Kinvey, a mobile software developer, took in $2 million in seed funding, led by Atlas Venture. The financing also included Avalon Ventures, and Boston angel investors Chris Lynch, Mike Baker, Jennifer Lum, Ty Danco, and Joe Caruso.

—Waltham, MA-based Tantaline, a developer of corrosion-resistant surface alloys for use in the oil and gas, chemical processing, energy, pharmaceuticals, and mining industries, said it snagged a $3.6 million Series B investment. The money came from Harvard, MA-based Berwind Private Equity, and Danish firms Vaekstfonden and CC Holdings.

—My colleague Greg rounded up news about a couple of Boston-area VC firms that are raising money: Kepha Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

—Burlington, MA-based IT virtualization firm DynamicOps wrapped up $5 million in equity-based funding, an SEC filing showed.

—Lumenpulse, LED lighting fixtures manufacturer with U.S. headquarters in Boston, nabbed $16 million in a mixed Series A offering of equity and debt. The funding comes from a group of investors including the company’s management and board, and Silicon Valley Bank.

—Burlington-based Bluesocket was acquired by wireless and communications equipment-maker ADTRAN (NASDAQ: ADTN) for an undisclosed sum. Bluesocket, a maker of wireless networking and security products, will be rolled into ADTRAN’s enterprise networks unit.

—Avalon Ventures led a $3 million Series A financing for Boston-based Nanigans, a provider of a real-time bidding advertising platform for Facebook. The deal also included some Boston-area angel investors.

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Lumenpulse, a manufacturer of LED lighting fixtures, announced today that it has raised $16 million in an equity- and debt-based Series A round of financing. The company, whose U.S. headquarters are in Boston, said the funding will go to market and product development. Investors in the round include Lumenpulse’s management and board of directors, as well as Silicon Valley Bank, which provided a new term loan and working capital line of credit.

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Livermore, CA-based BridgeLux, which is developing epitaxial manufacturing techniques for building cheaper LED lights, has collected $60 million in Series E financing, according to a report today in Dow Jones VentureWire. Craton Equity Partners, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, led the round, which could increase to as much as $80 million, according to the report. The company collected $50 million in Series D financing in early 2010 from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Doll Capital Management, and El Dorado Ventures.

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During a panel discussion with three cleantech investors at the Energy Infotech Forum in New York City yesterday, an audience member posed a provocative question: “What won’t you invest in?” he asked. Scott DePasquale, a partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, responded “consumer space travel.”

DePasquale was only half kidding. Ever since Braemar was founded in New York in 2003, it has invested in virtually every corner of the energy sector. “We don’t fashion ourselves as a cleantech fund,” DePasquale said during a sit-down interview at the conference. “We’re an energy venture capital firm. We invest in cleantech and renewables, but we’re also investing in any technologies that can help extract oil and gas more efficiently and in a cleaner way.” DePasquale works in Braemar’s Boston office, which opened in 2007.

Braemar, which is in the process of raising money for its third fund, has a portfolio of more than 25 investments. They run the gamut from Cerion Energy, which makes a fuel-based additive that reduces emissions, to Convey Computer, which has developed a technology to make high-performance computers run faster with less energy. Braemar also has investments in smart grid, energy storage, lighting, clean coal, solar, and biofuel technology companies.

The firm’s co-founders bring a wealth of experience and perspective to energy investing, DePasquale says. Neil Suslak has experience as an investment banker in the energy, communications, and transportations sectors. George Reichenbach ran two divisions of the industrial-products maker Norton Company. And William Lese worked for NPS Industries, which made equipment for the power industry, and Vivendi affiliate Sithe Energies, an independent power producer. “What’s unique about us is our founders have a really good sense of what it means to scale technology solutions around the utility customer,” says DePasquale, who was a vice president at GE Energy Financial Services before joining Braemar in 2009.

Braemar’s first fund made just north of $50 million in investments. An early bet on EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC)—a cleantech firm that pulled off a $98 million initial public offering in 2007—helped Braemar launch a second fund with a total of $250 million to invest. And according to a May regulatory filing, Braemar is now in the process of raising $300 million for the third fund.

DePasquale makes a strong case that there’s rarely been a better time for energy entrepreneurs with good ideas to raise capital. Quoting figures from the National Venture Capital Association, he points out that cleantech companies raised … Next Page »

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Braemar Energy Ventures, which has offices in New York and Boston, plans to raise $300 million for a new fund, according to an SEC filing. Braemar focuses on energy technology and is invested in more than 25 companies in the fields of oil and gas, lighting, solar, clean coal, biofuels, smart grid, and more. Its current investments include South San Francisco-based Solazyme, a company that’s making clean energy from algae and other marine microorganisms and that recently filed for an initial public offering.

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Boston-based cleantech startup Digital Lumens has taken in $10 million in a Series B funding from its existing investors Black Coral Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Stata Venture Partners, and has nabbed a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank. The deal brings Digital Lumens’ funding pot to about $25 million.

Digital Lumens has married software and networking technology with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to enable the more efficient lighting of commercial facilities like warehouses. Multiple fixtures in a lighting system can communicate wirelessly to automatically shut off in areas that don’t need as much illumination. The company has said that the technology can slice commercial lighting costs from $1 per square foot to one dime per square foot.

The new money will go to amping up sales efforts—both in the U.S. and abroad—and further developing the product. “We’re growing pretty aggressively in response to really great adoption in the marketplace,” CEO Tom Pincince told me in a phone call on Monday.

Digital Lumens, which just moved into new office space in Boston, has added six or seven employees just this year, bringing its total headcount to about 30, Pincince says. “People want to be part of a company that’s experiencing real customer traction,” he says. “It’s the demand to be a part of the cleantech revolution.”

Speaking of that cleantech revolution, which Pincince also referred to as the “next story in New England,” Digital Lumens has also recently attracted some executives from other Boston-area energy and lighting companies. In February, Fritz Morgan joined the company as chief product officer. He was previously CTO of Burlington, MA-based LED maker Philips Color Kinetics, and most recently worked as senior vice president of engineering Joule Unlimited, a Cambridge, MA-based renewable energy firm. Last November, Digital Lumens announced that Mike Rubino, former chief financial officer of Waltham, MA-based battery maker A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE) would be joining Digital Lumens as CFO. [[An earlier version of this post mistakenly said Fritz Morgan was CEO of Philips Color Kinetics. We regret the error.]]

Digital Lumens started out focusing on warehousing customers, but has also begun to look to lighting up manufacturing sites and retail stores. It’s targeting all aspects of the supply chain: customers “who make things, who store things, and who sell things,” Pincince says.

As far as product development goes, Digital Lumens has plans for the software and networking components that control the LED light strips and fixtures in its products. Pincince ultimately sees that technology as playing a part in smart buildings, by helping building managers understand their energy footprint and better respond to overall energy demands. Later on down the line, Pincince says he hopes the Digital Lumens technology could collaborate with other third-party applications to “become a foundation for intelligent buildings.”

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Wilmington, MA-based Electrolytic Ozone, a developer of novel ozone generator technology as a safe alternative to chemical and thermal sanitizers, announced today that it has completed its Series A financing. The company, which is a spinout of the global supermaterials company Element Six, did not reveal the financial details of the first-round funding, but an SEC filing from earlier this year shows that the company raised $4 million of a planned $6 million equity offering, from one unnamed investor. Electrolytic Ozone, which previously operated out of the Cambridge Innovation Center, recently opened its facility in Wilmington, as its corporate headquarters, research and development facility, and manufacturing site. The new funding will go to marketing the company’s technology to original equipment manufacturers for use in appliances like dishwashers, ice faucets, and washing machines.

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Fremont, CA-based Redwood Systems, which makes networks for powering and controlling LED lighting systems in large buildings, said yesterday that it has closed a $15 million Series B financing round. Index Ventures led the round, which was joined by existing backers Battery Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners. Index Venture co-founder and partner Neil Rimer has joined Redwood’s board. The company says it will use the funds to improve its technology and expand in key markets, including internationally.

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Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, the nanotechnology startup that has struggled to regain altitude after a high-flying debut in 2001, is switching on the afterburners this week.

To finance a move to a larger facility where it will have more space to manufacture its nano-engineeered materials for lighting and digital displays, the company is about to close a $25 million Series E venture round, with $5 million more potentially to follow by October 1, CEO Jason Hartlove told Xconomy on Monday.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, is supplying $15 million of the new equity investment through its affiliate Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The rest is from the company’s existing investors, and the $5 million second tranche is reserved for new investors. [Correction: In an earlier version of this paragraph, the second tranche amount was listed as $10 million.]

At the same time, Nanosys is announcing two other agreements with Samsung. There’s a multi-million-dollar licensing deal that will give Samsung access to Nanosys technology that could help it manufacture more efficent thin-film solar panels. And Samsung will also fund work at Nanosys to develop new quantum-dot crystals—the core of the startup’s technology for lighting enhancement—that don’t contain cadmium, a toxic element whose use is restricted in Europe and other regions.

The deals are critical ones for Nanosys, which wandered for years without a commercial product and brought in Hartlove as a turnaround CEO in 2008 (see this July 21 profile). The agreements give the startup more resources to expand into the two markets—displays and batteries—where Hartlove believes it can most quickly commercialize its own work, while at the same time allowing it to cash in on unexploited parts of its patent portfolio, particularly in solar technology. “This is a strategically important deal for us,” Hartlove says.

Gearing up to move to new quarters has been one of Hartlove’s highest priorities. The company has won a contract to supply the quantum dot phosphors inside the “QuantumRail,” a component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to Korea’s LG Innotek, and is pursuing additional customers. That means it now has to make the phosphors in industrial quantities. But in its current location—tucked into a Palo Alto office park with burgeoning Web and software companies such as Facebook a stone’s throw away—the startup is “basically out of capacity, really footprint-limited and fire code limited,” says Hartlove.

The company will use the growth capital round to open a new facility in a larger industrial park. “It’s here, still, within the Bay Area,” Hartlove says. “We haven’t announced a site yet, but that’s what the new capital is for, the capacity expansion to meet our 2011 revenue goals.”

The next problem is an environmental one. Manufacturers of smartphones and notebook computers can use the QuantumRail technology to tune the frequencies emitted by the LED backlights in their liquid crystal displays, resulting in a far richer range of colors. But there’s a downside—the quantum dots, which are actually nanocrystals made of cadmium selenide. Cadmium is a … Next Page »

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Jason Hartlove has a name and a rakish mug worthy of a soap-opera star, a resume that any Silicon Valley engineer would envy, and a bit of swagger as a turnaround CEO. He co-invented the optical mouse at Hewlett-Packard, ran a 3,000-employee manufacturing operation for HP spinoff Agilent in Malaysia, and set South Korea’s struggling MagnaChip Semiconductor on its current path to an IPO. “One of my investors said this—so I won’t claim it for myself—but I am a technology MacGyver,” Hartlove says. “If you give me some piece of technology, I can really figure out what to do with it.”

But at Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, where he took over as CEO in October 2008, Hartlove may be facing his biggest challenge yet. With an impressive portfolio of patents based on work at MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and other institutions, the nine-year-old company has repeatedly been described as one of the most promising in a batch of nanotechnology startups that emerged around the turn of the millennium. In its early years, it investigated areas like solar cells and display electronics where it was thought that nano-engineered materials could lead to higher power output or greater efficiencies. But real commercial applications for nanotechnology insights have been slow to emerge, and Nanosys has yet to bring a single product all the way to the market (the first is set to appear in the fourth quarter of this year, if all goes according to plan).

“The clock is ticking for Nanosys…since its financial backers are counting on a return on investment in another three to five years,” wrote Technology Review magazine. That was in 2004—just a few months before Nanosys called off a planned IPO that still hasn’t happened.

Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove

After the pulling the plug on the IPO, “the company sort of struggled a little between 2005 and 2007 about what exactly its mission was,” Hartlove told me earlier this week. “It continued to do some directed research but didn’t really have an eye toward commercialization.” The shakeup year was 2008: CEO Calvin Chow was let go, former Symyx Technologies CEO and Venrock partner Steve Goldby became the company’s interim leader (he’s still chairman today), and the board recruited Hartlove to find Nanosys some real products.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Hartlove’s tactics since 2008 MacGyveresque, and so far, he hasn’t even used a Swiss Army knife. He has focused the company on the two research programs that seemed most likely to produce marketable products in the near future. And he has pushed forward one of them, a “QuantumRail” component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to the point that the company is earning “real revenue from real paying customers,” in Hartlove’s words. The first customer is LG Innotek, which plans to use the QuantumRail in 5 million phone-sized displays by the end of 2010; its purchases recently contributed to Nanosys’s first break-even month.

Demand for the nanocrystals that go into the QuantumRail, as well as the high-capacity anode material that Nanosys is developing for the lithium-ion battery industry, is growing fast enough that the company will soon need to find larger quarters outside Palo Alto, Hartlove says. And within 18 months, he says, the company hopes to be in a position to restart the IPO process. “We’ll have display products on the market, battery products on the market, a track record of revenue and profitability,” he says. “Those are the milestones.”

At least one Nanosys investor, Lux Capital, seems to buy into Hartlove’s optimism. “Things have really accelerated and they’re on a rapid path to success,” says Josh Wolfe, a managing partner at the New York-based firm, which contributed to a … Next Page »

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Conservation is a big deal in California. While per capita energy usage has climbed approximately 50 percent from 1975 to 2005, according to presentations by former California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld, California managed to keep the growth of energy consumption at about  2 percent per capita over the same period—largely by requiring aggressive energy conservation measures.

As part of that overall conservation push, San Diego Gas & Electric convened its fifth annual SDG&E Energy Showcase to recognize their customers’ biggest success stories at reducing energy waste. For example, by installing LED lighting, sophisticated refrigeration controls, and taking other conservation measures, Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) cut its electricity consumption by 5,200,000 kilowatt hours a year—or about 28 percent—and estimates it will save about $4 million in reduced energy costs over five years. And it won’t take forever to recoup its upfront investment in energy savings. The company, which provides laboratory equipment and supplies for biotech labs, also got $724,526 in rebates and incentives from SDG&E to do the energy efficiency work.

As part of its showcase, SDG&E also holds an exhibition for the companies that provide the products and services that help SDG&E customers reduce their energy costs.

“We want to make sure [energy conservation successes] are visible to our customers,” says Mark Gaines, director of energy efficiency and demand-response programs at SDG&E, one of two utilities that are owned and operated (and generate about half the revenue) by San Diego-based Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE). Gaines says SDG&E doesn’t certify the individual companies that provide energy efficiency services. Rather, he says, “We certify the technology, so we have a list of technologies that are available for rebates.”

More than 70 companies registered as exhibitors, and there was a strong showing by companies that specialize in … Next Page »

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Boston isn’t Houston as far as energy industry hubs go. But here in New England, there is a lot of innovation with light-emitting diodes, these energy-conserving tools that can be found everywhere from homes to warehouses to urban skyscrapers, and embedded in products like TVs, projectors, medical devices, and software systems.

Light-emitting diodes, which are semiconductors that release energy when voltage is applied, are commonly referred to as LEDs for short. They’ve long been seen as energy-efficient lighting replacements, but the technologies sprouting up out of this city aren’t nearly so straightforward.

“There’s no doubt that we’re at the front end of a major trend here,” says Flybridge Capital Partners general partner Jon Karlen, who sits on the board of Digital Lumens, a Boston-based startup. LED technology started with massive architectural lighting displays from Philips Color Kinetics (another Boston-area fixture), but is spreading to more everyday, consumer uses, he says. “We’re just seeing it crack open general illumination. Everywhere you see a light bulb, there’s going to be an LED fixture in the next five to 10 years.”

We’ve counted at least five companies working in the LED space in Boston. These companies make everything from LED chip inserts for existing lighting fixtures, to commercial scale LED displays, to smart lighting systems that pair efficient LED lighting with sensors and computer systems to intelligently control the illumination in industrial facilities.

There’s a reason why the area’s LED-related companies each seem to do something a bit different, says Canaccord Adams senior equity analyst Jed Dorsheimer, who follows trends in the lighting and solar industries. In almost every segment of the LED production process, there’s room for innovation—from cost to efficiency to overall technology, he says.

“It’s well suited to smaller companies that are more nimble and that can focus on a particular piece or aspect of the supply chain,” he says.

Read below for snapshots of the five companies we rounded up in the space.

—Last year, Wade wrote about this Luminus Devices’ near speed-of-light transition from concept to business. This company is the brainchild of MIT-trained physicist Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, John Joannopolous. Luminus Devices, based in Billerica, MA, now says it makes the world’s brightest LED, in the form of what it calls PhlatLight chipsets, named for photonic lattices. The technology could light up everything from residential spaces to arenas to TV studios, but that depends on getting the LEDs into preexisting devices and fixtures.

This condition hasn’t deterred Luminus investors. The company has raised … Next Page »

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Everyone knows that traditional incandescent lamps are inefficient and energy-wasting. But LEDs, one of the technologies vying to take their place, produce light that feels harsh and cold by comparison, leading many customers to shy away from them.

Watertown, MA-based QD Vision thinks it can use its “quantum dot” technology to solve both problems—energy waste and LEDs’ unpleasant color—and it’s about to get a chance to test that belief in the marketplace.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor material that emit light when excited by light or electricity. QD Vision, a six-year-old MIT spinoff, has come up with a way to apply thin films containing the quantum dots to the external faces of conventional LEDs. That converts the harsh LED light into something warmer and more pleasing, similar to the light produced by incandescent bulbs, without sacrificing the high energy efficiency typical of LEDs.

According to QD Vision, LEDs processed with quantum dots are roughly six times more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, and over three times more efficient than halogen lamps with comparable color quality. Converting all incandescent lighting in the U.S. to LED lighting could reduce the nation’s total electrical usage for lighting by a third, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

A sign that QD Vision’s technology is gaining traction appeared this month when Charlotte, NC-based LED manufacturer Nexxus Lighting (NASDAQ: NEXS) announced initial production and shipment of its new replacement light bulbs, which use QD Vision’s quantum dot films. Nexxus says its so-called Array Quantum LED bulb fits directly into 400 million lighting fixtures already in place in the U.S. It’s the first time QD Vision’s quantum dots have turned up in a commercial product.

“Our Quantum Light optic is the first product that lets manufacturers make warmer-colored, high-efficiency LED lamps,” QD Vision president and CEO Dan Button said in a statement. “These features are vital to their widespread adoption.”

Xconomy first profiled QD Vision in April 2008. While there are a number of companies around the globe developing quantum dot technology, the Watertown startup is the first to apply them commercially, according to Button.

The Nexxus Lighting deal dates back to December 2008, when … Next Page »

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Investors continue to pour cash into Luminus Devices, the Billerica, MA-based maker of bright, efficient LEDs, at a rate that would startle most entrepreneurs in the life sciences, let alone the hardware, computing, and infotech industries. Luminus announced today that it has raised $19 million in Series F funding, from a group of existing investors that includes Argonaut Private Equity, Braemar Energy Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Stata Venture Partners. The round, the first since a $72 million Series E round in May 2008, brings the eight-year-old startup’s total financing to roughly $159 million. Xconomy profiled Luminus in October 2009.

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Boston-based stealth-mode startup Digital Lumens has raised $5 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing published December 31. The company, whose board members include Jon Karlen of Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners and Lee Barbieri of Dover, MA-based Stata Venture Partners in Dover, MA, specializes in high-efficiency lighting technology. Digital Lumens previously raised $6.3 million in May 2009, as Ryan reported.

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Luminus Devices in Billerica, MA, may hold the record among Massachusetts technology companies for the shortest time between conception and launch. But the journey since then has been anything but straightforward.

One summer day in 2002, recent MIT PhD graduate Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, physicist John Joannopolous, were meeting to talk about whether Erchak should accept a lucrative job offer he’d just received, or start his own company—perhaps around the work he’d done in Joannopolous’s lab on ways to use photonic crystals to extract more light from LEDs. “John said, ‘Let’s give Ray Stata a call and see what he thinks,’” says Erchak.

Stata, of course, is the famous MIT alum who co-founded Analog Devices, and a frequent venture investor in local startups. He took the call, and said he had half an hour to talk—but only if Erchak and Joannopolous could come to his office right away.

“We flew out of John’s office, sped down the Mass Pike at 90 miles per hour—at this point I still had jeans and a T-shirt on—and we ended up at that meeting,” Erchak recalls. “We walked into a big board room totally unprepared, except for some slides I’d grabbed out of my PhD presentation. We said ‘We have no idea how to deploy this technology, but if you give us some seed funding, we’ll go figure it out.’ Ray, being a very entrepreneurial-minded person, said that was all he needed to hear.”

By the end of the day, Erchak was at an attorney’s office signing incorporation papers—and had a promise of $200,000 from Stata.

Seven years and at least three iterations of its business plan later, Luminus Devices makes the world’s brightest LEDs, using highly guarded methods based on Erchak’s research and other technologies to manufacture its own “PhlatLight” chipsets right here in Massachusetts. (The “Phlat” stands for photonic lattice.)

The company is poised to help reinvent not only portable devices such as pocket projectors, but the entire lighting industry. Retail, residential, outdoor, stadiums and TV studios, you name it—almost anywhere there’s a conventional incandescent or fluorescent bulb, Luminus’s technology offers a brighter, longer-lasting, less toxic, and in many cases more energy-efficient alternative.

“This company is a home run just waiting to happen,” says Keith Ward, a lighting industry veteran who joined Luminus five months ago as president and CEO, replacing founding CEO Udi Meirav. “LEDs are seven times more efficient than incandescent and starting to surpass halogen and metal halide, so if you can fit them into the existing infrastructure, it’s a win.”

Unfortunately, that’s a big if. The one shadow in Luminus’s outlook is that the company is entirely dependent on device makers, lighting-fixture manufacturers, and other partners to get its PhlatLight LEDs out into the world. It’s a fact that has sent the startup back to the drawing board twice—the first time shortly after Stata’s seed investment, when it became clear that the company’s initial target market, cell-phone manufacturers, weren’t ready to incorporate a new light source into their displays, and the second time just in the last two years, as an unexpectedly rapid drop in the price of big-screen LCD televisions killed off demand for rear-projection DLP televisions, an application for which Luminus’s large, bright LEDs were thought to be ideal.

But Luminus’s investors have signaled their confidence by continuing to pour cash into the company—most recently, in a $72 million Series E round led by … Next Page »

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