Luminus Devices Founder and Chief Technology Officer Alexei Erchak (Part 7)

SM: Where is the company in terms of revenues and actual designs and production volumes?

AE: We have revenue from the projection television market. We also have revenue from the front projection applications, and that is increasing as well. One big application is LCD. What we have done to try and accelerate that is work closely with Jabil Circuit. They are one of the largest OEMs in the world, the third largest actually. We have been working with them because first, we are not going to build the backlight ourselves so we need someone to integrate this whole thing, and second it will allow us to drive the cost down and be competitive with CCFL.

Jabil already sells LCD televisions to the big TV companies. They OEM the TVs for them. We have been working with them closely, and we expect to have a product out in late 2008, possibly early 2009. The LCD backlight unit recently won the gold award at the SID show. The other two companies that won the award were Apple for the iPhone and Sony for their OLED TV. I look at that and think ‘which of these companies does not belong – Sony, Apple, and Luminus’. It is really great to be in their company. That was a strong indication to the television manufacturers that what we are doing is real, and we are very confident that we are going to be able to get into the market. The only question is what premium does it come in at, and that is really question of pricing for our customers.

Luminus is not a profitable company right now. We are still venture-backed. We recently took in another big round of funding.

SM: Can you take me through the gyrations of your investors given all of the market developments?

AE: All of our investors, including Stata Venture Partners who were our first investors, have invested in every single round.

SM: Who were your other investors?

AE: Series A was DFJ and Stata. Series B was a doubling down by those two, and Argonaut Capital joined as well. The C round was led Battery Ventures. The D round was co-led by Battery and another investor and the big round we just brought in, which was our E round that closed in January, was for $72 million.

SM: Who led that one?

AE: That was led by Braemar Energy. They are the most recent investors, and it is interesting because they are energy investors. They are investing in us because of the newly realized potential of LED for lighting. Forget about display; while it is great and could carry the company by itself, the future that they are investing in is energy efficiency for general lighting. It is about replacing lamps and building new infrastructures on high-efficiency platforms. The lighting industry is huge. This is a multi-billion dollar industry with millions of tons of carbon emissions savings.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Luminus Devices Founder and Chief Technology Officer Alexei Erchak
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