Edinburgh-based pureLiFi has secured a £10m investment to help it achieve a global rollout of LiFi – a wireless technology that uses light rather than radio frequencies to transmit data.
The investment, provided by Scottish National Investment Bank, will enable pureLiFi to further develop new technologies while opening up additional markets in areas such as mobile phones, tablets, wearables and other connected devices.
The bank says the investment aligns with its mission to invest in innovation and future industries, creating high-value jobs in world-class businesses.
LiFi is able to provide fast, reliable wireless communications with unparalleled security compared with conventional radio frequency systems such as WiFi and 5G. The technology can also be complementary to WiFi, offering transformationally improved performance when the two technologies are used together.
According to pureLiFi, the number of connected devices in the average home has more than doubled in the past two years. As more devices connect to struggling home WiFi networks, bandwidth is split, interference increases and response times slow for everyone. LiFi could therefore solve such issues by decreasing congestion and improving the security and quality of connections. PureLiFi aims to achieve this using LiFi ecosystems such as ‘LiFi@Home’, which it demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year.
Commenting on the new funding, pureLiFi CEO Alistair Banham said: ‘The Bank’s investment will help us achieve our vision to connect everyone and everything with LiFi. We introduced our technology to the world from Scotland and it is important for us to grow our company and ecosystem from here. Our vision is for Scotland to be a recognised centre of excellence for LiFi. In the future customers from around the world will come to us for our innovative technology and leverage the wider photonics ecosystem that already exists here in Scotland.’
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Jimmy Williamson, executive director, at the Scottish National Investment Bank, added: ‘The Bank’s investment will support pureLiFi as they look to scale up their operation, allowing them to take the innovative technology to the global market. By backing them the Bank is also investing in highly skilled research and development jobs in Scotland and endorsing pureLiFi’s vision to create a centre of excellence of LiFi. We are excited to provide them with the growth capital that will help them reach the next stage in their development.’
