![\"ZPB10](\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/assets\/ZPB10-Elec-Lucibel.jpg\")
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In the suburbs of Paris, a nondescript building in Rueil-Malmaison fails to paint the stereotype picture of a startup that I’ve come to expect. I have ventured outside of the comfort of the startup-packed Sentier district in Paris in order to meet Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Granotier, the founder & CEO of Lucibel<\/a>, a startup specialized in lighting.<\/p>\n Admittedly, I’m late to the game on writing about Lucibel – even Fran\u00e7ois Hollande visited their factory before I did<\/a>. The company, founded in 2008, had already raised more than \u20ac20 Million from private investors like BPIFrance, CM-CIC & Aster Capital<\/a> (a VC fund sponsored by Alstom, Solvay, Schneider Electric & others) before they IPO’d earlier this month on the Euronext Alternext, raising yet another \u20ac17 Million and prompting my visit.<\/p>\n I\u00a0spoke with Granotier about why he thought there was room for another lighting company, next to giants like Philips. He told me first that 70% of lights will be LED by 2020. The second was that\u00a0an LED company looks nothing like a\u00a0traditional lighting company – new factories, new sales strategy, new engineers, etc. – which means that\u00a0large players like Philips have to stay quick on their feet and invest quite a bit of money to convert to the future. “Philips is Kodak,” Granotier chimed, referring to Kodak’s demise when they were unable to anticipate the rise of digital cameras (seems pretty obvious in retrospect, doesn’t it?) – I asked Granotier “If Philips is Kodak, who are you?” He said he’d have to think on that.<\/p>\n Still, Granotier has a pretty brilliant vision for the future of lighting. Given that\u00a0consumer light bulbs are a commoditized space, Lucibel focuses most of their efforts on the enterprise space – offices, retail stores & factories – where they say clients are seeing the return on in investment from switching to Lucibel in just 6 months. Granotier said that he thinks that the light bulb as we know it will disappear – a vision he backs up by pointing out that the original reason that screw-in light bulbs were created was because the lifespan of a lightbulb was so short and there were so many in a given room that you needed to be able to switch them out on the fly, a problem LED lights (50,000 hour lifespan, roughly 7 years of non-stop power) don’t have. Still, light bulbs are the now, and so Lucibel has brought innovation to the space – their\u00a0“Luciflora<\/a>” light uses a unique patented ‘flower’ design, allowing them to use just 5 Watts of LED energy, while producing 400 lumens (a measurement for light), leveraging a hollow interior and slits on the sides in order to keep the light cool\u00a0using natural air flow (demonstration in French here<\/a>).<\/p>\n “Tomorrow, all lights will be connected” – Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric\u00a0Granotier, CEO & founder, Lucibel<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Photo-luciPanel-doubleSided\"](\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/assets\/Photo-luciPanel-doubleSided-e1406725365150.jpg\")
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