In January, they won the Danish Tech Challenge and $75K prize. In May, they won the EIT Venture Award and the Nordic Cleantech Open. Now, Climate-KIC start-up Nordic Power Converters steps it up with an investment from Copenhagen-based SEED Capital and a line of prominent business angels.
Nordic Power Converters have also partnered with the Danish company HeSaLight http://hesalight.com/ to supply minimum 50,000 premium power converters for LED lighting.
Vision and product
Nordic Power Converters’ vision is to revolutionize the power converter market, where the technology has only seen incremental innovation over the previous 30 years.
The first application of their power supply will be in LED lighting products. LED lights can last quite long, but the complete products often fail sooner than expected because of the limited lifetime of the power converter. Further, the size of the power converter negatively affects the aesthetics and design potential of LED products. Nordic Power Converters has developed a power converter that solves these exact challenges.
"Nordic Power Converters is a textbook example on how to bring research from idea to commercialization through entrepreneurial PhD students, who are able to attract experienced commercial forces."
Investment Manager in SEED Capital, Richard Breiter.
Their power converter doubles the lifetime, is five times smaller and reduces production costs considerably compared to existing products.
Strong investor alliance
The investment in Nordic Power Converters is made in syndication between ten business angels and the venture capital firm SEED Capital.
“I have followed the project over a couple of years and the core technology is now developed and demonstrated, the business model established, and the team assembled. There is a strategy to get the products to the end-user, via partnerships, in the near future. Therefore, I believe the time is right to get this venture off the ground. Nordic Power Converters is a textbook example on how to bring research from idea to commercialization through entrepreneurial PhD students, who are able to attract experienced commercial forces,” says Investment Manager in SEED Capital, Richard Breiter.
Read Line Byrfelt Grønlykke’s article in its entirety.
Nordic Power Converters was founded in the summer of 2014 as a spinout from DTU with a technology platform developed during the previous five years. Their power converters can be used in a number of products like LED lights, laptop chargers and power supplies integrated in screens and entertainment equipment.
The team has doubled in size in the first half of 2015 to 8 full time employees and seeks to repeat this in the second half of 2015, and again in 2016