Digital Lumens Closes $10 Million To Bring Smart, LED-Lighting To The Industrial Market

A Boston-based, cleantech startup Digital Lumens closed a $10 million series B investment, the company announced today, that will allow it to bring its LED-based, intelligent lighting systems to warehouses and industrial facilities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico near term. The company’s earlier backers all participated in the series B, including: Black Coral Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Stata Venture Partners.

Previously, the company focused on making warehouses greener in terms of lighting-related energy consumption. Digital Lumens’ chief executive, Tom Pincince, said of the company’s progress and near term strategy:

We’ve built a complete [lighting] solution from the fixture through the networking and the software. Our customers use, but don’t “do” lighting, unlike other the owners and operators of some commercial office buildings. It is valuable for them to have a single point of contact, and technology that guarantees interoperability within their facilities as they upgrade and retrofit their lighting systems to become more energy efficient.

Part of our appetite for growth is not just from warehouses to the broader manufacturing and industrial base here, but outside of the U.S. We can address Canada and Mexico. We’re also looking into expanding overseas to address European and Asian markets that have similar requirements for energy efficiency, and in many cases, a culture of efficiency that’s far more mature than the U.S. along with energy prices that are multiples of what we pay here.

Digital Lumens will also use some of its series B funding to develop new features for its LightRules software. LightRules helps facility owners and operators set up parameters by which they want their lights to respond to a number of factors, like brightening when the number of people in a facility increases, for example, or dousing at times of low occupancy. LightRules, down the line, will offer more granular controls, automating the lights’ response to energy pricing, and more.

One of Digital Lumens’ recent customers, Americold, replaced its older lighting systems— which used more energy, generate more heat, and aren’t as durable in the freezing temperatures of cold storage warehouses— with LED-based systems. The companies, and LEDs Magazine reported, that the installation was responsible for energy savings of 90 percent.

Mike Rubino, Digital Lumens chief financial officer remarked that working with the company’s earlier backers allowed everyone at the startup to get back to growing the business. Rubino is well-known for helping to take another cleantech firm, A123 systems public. While he could not comment on timing, he and the executive team at Digital Lumens do have hopes of an eventual public offering in the U.S.

As Digital Lumens focuses on greening factories and warehouses, and international expansion, a peer and competitor in the industry Redwood Systems, yesterday revealed that it is moving into smart building controls beyond lighting as part of its strategy.