Lighting start-up sees a bright, lampless future ahead.
Scientist says no one will need lamps when building materials provide illumination
Michael Helander wants to revolutionize commercial lighting and advanced manufacturing — but first, he’d like to sell you this lamp. The lamp is called the aerelight. It’s flat and thin and shines a warm, bright light. It’s a neat-looking and effective lamp, but that’s not why Mr. Helander hopes you’ll sign up for an online preorder.
Mr. Helander, the 29-year-old chief executive and co-founder of OTI Lumionics Inc., is hoping the customers who buy the aerelight will be able to provide feedback about the technology that powers it. The light the lamp emits comes from an organic light-emitting diode or OLED, a developing technology that passes electricity through carbon-based dyes and pigments to power lights and displays.
As a PhD student in materials science and engineering, Mr. Helander and his lab partners made some tweaks to the process early researchers had used to make OLEDs that have the potential to make them more efficient and simpler to manufacture. When large companies started showing interest in buying the technology, the students and their professor decided to start their own company instead.
“We kind of realized as we went through those negotiations, ‘Wow, they’re trying to get this technology for cheap,’ ” Mr. Helander said. “We thought, this doesn’t make sense. Let’s try to make a go of it.”
OLEDs are already used in electronic displays, the best-known example being Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Galaxy smartphone. OLEDs emit light throughout an entire surface, as opposed to from a single point like conventional light bulb or inorganic LED, and have the potential to one day be used to create foldable smartphones.
OLED displays are already a multibillion-dollar market, but their use in lighting is just coming into play. If manufacturing costs come down and the technology develops, panels of OLED lighting could be used as a building material, doing away with the need for light fixtures.
John Francis, a Toronto businessman and OTI Lumionics mentor, said the potential of the technology and the team excited him enough to invest. Mr. Francis worked with the company through the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, which helps entrepreneurs affiliated with the university launch businesses.
“I was intrigued by the science,” Mr. Francis said. “It’s really a new and better way of manufacturing this type of lighting.”
Mr. Helander won’t disclose the amount of funding he’s raised, except to say it’s in the millions of dollars.
The company has completed its seed round of funding and is now courting more investors to expand its staff and move into a new facility, with the goal of being self-sustaining by 2017.
The major challenge facing the OLED lighting market is the cost of manufacturing. Mr. Helander said he’s applying for federal and provincial funding to open a factory, where the company could take advantage of the faster and more efficient process the founders developed.
“We’re just so counterintuitive to the whole industry. Everyone’s set on this mindset that the only way to bring the cost down is to build bigger and bigger factories,” Mr. Helander said. “It’s partly the unique materials and process we have that allow us to do simpler structured organic LEDs, faster manufacturing.”
Jonathan Melnick, a senior analyst with the emerging technology research and advisory firm Lux Research Inc., profiled OTI Lumionics in a
So aim for the stars, dream really big, aim for that
report last year. He said the improvements the company has made to the process of making OLEDs have potential, but believes going into manufacturing is a risky strategy.
“We get a lot of ambitious companies that think the market’s going to take off very quickly, and then they scale and they get these unsustainable cash-burn rates,” Mr. Melnick said. “Once you start building up the facilities, your clock starts ticking very quickly.”
Mr. Melnick said a future world in which OLED s are used as a building material, replacing conventional light fixtures, is a long way off. “We think that’s going to take a long time to really emerge in a serious way,” he said.
But Mr. Helander said proving the naysayers wrong is exactly why he wants to get into manufacturing. If the company doesn’t try, it will never know what it could have achieved, he said.
“If you’re only going to aim for something very conservative and low, even if you exceed that, you haven’t gotten very far. So aim for the stars, dream really big, aim for that and if you fall a bit short, you’ve done way better.”