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: [[ticker: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.”
