pureLiFi ships world’s first full wireless Li-Fi networking system
Valuing the 2012 University of Edinburgh spin-out at over £14 million, a VC funding round is in process and the company expects to make a announcement on additional funding during the second half of 2015.
The funding news comes as pureLiFi ships the world’s first full wireless Li-Fi networking system. Li-Fi – a term coined by pureLiFi’s Chief Science Officer (CSO), Professor Haas – is a technology based on visible light communication (VLC) that provides full networking capabilities similar to Wi-Fi but with significantly greater spatial reuse of bandwidth.
Investors participating in the latest round were led by London & Scottish Investment Partners (LSIP), a Scottish-based angel group supported by investors from London and Scotland, with additional funding from the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB) and Old College Capital, the venture investment arm of the University of Edinburgh, in a process managed by Edinburgh-based corporate finance firm, Quest Corporate. The investment will be used to support the development and roll-out of the product roadmap and growing the marketing and sales function.
In Q4 of 2014, the pureLiFi team launched and shipped the world’s first Li-Fi network product – Li-Flame – to industry customers worldwide. The system turns off-the-shelf light fixtures into Li-Fi access points that can simultaneously communicate to a plurality of users in a bi-directional fashion. The system consists of the world’s first battery powered Li-Fi mobile unit which is attached to a laptop screen and allows user roaming within a room, or indeed an entire building. Li-Flame continues to see strong demand in Q1 of 2015. The Li-Fi industry is forecast to grow to over $9 billion by 2020¹.
Harald Haas, CSO and co-founder of pureLiFi, said: “Li-Fi is increasingly viewed as a transformative technology that can change the way we use the mobile internet as part of future 5G cellular networks and at the same time be an enabler of the emerging Internet of Things.”
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