Lusoco - Innovation in billboards

Lusoco is a company started in 2017 by two engineers: Teun Wagenaar (former owner of company Peer+) and Jeroen ter Schiphorst, chemical technologist and CTO of Lucoso. Teun is mainly responsible for strategy and tapping into the various networks. Jeroen mainly deals with technology and day-to-day operational matters. Meanwhile, with several patents and won competitions to their name, the two gentlemen, together with 3 employees, are making great strides to bring their stand-alone, energy-generating signage solutions to market. We talk to Jeroen about the company, its unique technology and its ambitions to bring its products to market commercially.

3 promises

The key to Lusoco 's unique technology is the use of its proprietary developed fluorescent inks that absorb and transport sunlight to the solar cells on the side of the energy-generating glass or plastic. Energy that is used to emit light in the evening, night or early morning. In doing so, Lusoco has 3 promises with their products:

1. Extremely good readability - A lot of light is lost when advertising signs are currently lit. "Because with us the image itself glows, almost no light is lost and we are much more readable."
2. No light pollution - Digital billboards with lighting must be on 24/7 to have any image at all. During the day, that means it's blasting against the sun, and at night it often causes huge light pollution. "With us, the image is visible by default during the day and we use smart sensors to be able to dim the sign at night as well."
3. Virtually no energy consumption - or even generation - "In addition, regular advertising displays consume an awful lot of energy. Our signs do not consume any energy at all or even generate it. This is done using the so-called Luminescent Solar Concentrator(see the origin of the name Lusoco here) technology. During the day, the image can bring the light to the side where we have placed small solar cells and at night the same image can glow on the side using LED lighting. We have protected this through 4 patents."

For comparison:

Digital screen: 10,000 kWh per year consumption Illuminated poster: 600 kWh per year consumption

Lusoco sign: generate their own energy

Our strength

"Our strength lies in developing solvent-free Lusoco inks printed on crystal clear film via roll-to-roll printing, gathering data and collaborating with current parties within the market. One of these parties is Dimix.

We actually never planned to buy a printer. We have a small printer (up to A4 size) at the chemistry lab at Eindhoven University of Technology that we used - with some different print heads on it - to make the first tests. We first wanted to outsource the larger format printing to a foreign party, unfortunately this proved unsuccessful. So over a year ago we tied the knot and decided to look into a large format printer ourselves. This is how we ended up at Dimix."

Earnings model

To date, Lusoco has brought in 850,000 euros in investment.

Earnings model

"First of all, we will have to go through the whole production chain to successfully bring a new product to market, but we really focus on the prints. We have also built our patent portfolio around the inks, so we can use standard inkjet printers to sell our foils, which can then be laminated by local glass parties, for example. We buy the films, we make the inks ourselves. The solar cells are also in-house, because we noticed there that there was no product on the market yet that has a strange shape like we have. The print with glowing inks allows us to bring the light to the solar cells."

Demand from the market

"Besides looking for niches ourselves where we could add value, we also notice that we get requests from the market from various sides. Think of stickers and prints that are currently not illuminated, but as a stand-alone product are very suitable for wide application where the customer would like to see this illuminated in a sustainable way.

We are finding that we are getting a lot of traction on the inks and the annealing of these and the energy generation is becoming an afterthought for certain applications. The energy generation allows us to enable the glowing effect of the inks for off-grid applications, advertising signs that are illuminated without being connected to the power grid, while for specific other applications where power is not a factor, the focus is really on glowing.

A piece of aesthetics is important. By applying the prints on transparent surfaces and, depending on the application, providing not only the inks but also the associated electronics, it can be widely used. Here we are becoming much more of a platform technology, where our ink development is at the forefront and with which we can ensure that we can achieve new possibilities or make things possible that are not yet possible at the moment. Our goal for the next six months is to start probing this in different market segments and make a choice on that."

Colors

The pure colors we are using now are similar to the M and Y channel in CMYK printers and with that we can mix a lot of shades (see picture). What we are currently doing is developing an ink that is blue, only blue has a crazy property and that is that it looks blue during the day but can emit a different color at night. This has to do with the difference between the absorption and emission of the dyes. This is also visible to a lesser extent with the yellow dye, where the green emission becomes more apparent on a black background. We are looking at whether we can compensate for this in the technology. It will also depend on the customer, some customers will not want to make a concession in (brand) color, where for other customers it is considered slightly less important."

Future

"We are currently working on a number of things, including, expanding the color palette and options in this. We are also investigating what the longevity of the applications is. This, of course, is crucial to determine what it is ultimately best suited for.

The advertising market is not where we stop. Because we work with light, glass and energy, our platform technology is more widely applicable. For example, we see opportunities in automotive to apply glowing elements and we see the facades of buildings as a broader canvas to apply our technology.

Here we are working with major parties and making smart connections so that we can also scale up this product from the Dutch market to the European market and then go global. We are already laying our first lines in America and China."

Video: https: //videopress.com/v/U8Q1gijO

Want to know more?

Visit lusoco.com for more information.