Silicon valley techcrunch series#

The company nearly failed multiple times for lack of funding and required many bridge financing rounds, short-term payroll patches and even personal loans of substantial magnitude for this impactful technology to survive. On multiple occasions, the technology was at risk of never seeing the light of day. Soraa is now on its third generation of LED products, and its future is promising but success was not always obvious. Further, Soraa’s LEDs lasts far longer and produce fundamentally better quality light than any other lighting technology today. Many pundits advised against their approach, but today, GaN on GaN requires 80-percent less capital expenditure (CAPEX) and 80-percent less material to produce the same amount of light as a conventional LED. In the Silicon Valley tradition, Soraa defied conventional wisdom that their technology was too expensive and impractical. Today, Soraa is the only GaN on GaN LED in the world, and it’s on a trajectory to be the most efficient LED lighting technology by far. Physics based technology development and startups are extraordinarily difficult as many valuable things are. True innovation is hard Even the Nobel Prize committee has recognized that Shuji and his partners, “succeeded where everyone else had failed.

Rather than focusing on lighting the world, investors are too often myopic about understanding or investing in this kind of high-risk, deep scientific innovation. Most of Silicon Valley has turned its back on the groundbreaking research required to ultimately transform how people live. “The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.” Today, the Nobel Prize committee has finally recognized this groundbreaking work. These conversations eventually led to Shuji starting Soraa in 2008.

Silicon valley techcrunch series#

In 2001, after reading a technical article written by Shuji about GaN on GaN LEDs, we began a series of conversations spanning the course of seven years about the potential magnitude of the technology’s application to lighting.

They join an esteemed group of Nobel laureates that includes Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Niels Bohr, all of whom have fundamentally changed the course of human history. I want to congratulate Shuji Nakamura, the founder of Khosla Ventures portfolio company, Soraa, and his fellow collaborators who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics today. TechCrunch | Could a Nobel Prize-winning innovation have almost been overlooked by Silicon Valley?