Back in March, Soleira Sun presented at MTLNewTech. I didn’t make it, but I looked at the list of startups and this one stood out – because it was so interesting. Simulated sunlight? It clearly wasn’t just a tanning lamp. Could this be for real? I sent an e-mail to founder Eric Pflanzer and we had a chat on the phone. That was over a month ago. Since then, he’s been getting lots of press.
A real appreciation for natural sunlight is what probably drew my attention to this Montreal-based company. At a past job, I used to eat lunch in this gloomy cafeteria that was dead in the center of a large, drab, industrial building in the wasteland between TMR and St-Laurent. I hated being there during my break mostly because there was no natural light at all, not a single window, skylight or other cue about where we were with respect to the surface of the Earth.
Two years ago or so, Eric, a Montrealer who studied chemistry at Columbia University in NYC, was on a beach in Mexico thinking about new business opportunities. Fourteen mojitos later, while flipping through a pile of trashy magazines, he found a small, business-card sized ad for an expo where sunlight-simulation technology was being demonstrated.
Skeptical, Eric cold-called the inventors of the technology, who turned out to be three guys in Sweden. They had built it for automakers, who wanted simulated sunlight for testing. The technology had also been adapted to create indoor beaches. Oh yeah, it generated light that is spectro-radiometrically equivalent to sunlight (i.e it is sunlight).
Eric quickly started working with the developers of the technology to be compliant with Canadian regulations so that it could be brought here and commercialized. His self-funded company of three employees, Soleira Sun, has already won awards: two silver prizes at the IIDEX NeoCon. The technology has been demonstrated in the National Home Show’s “Dream Home” – for the sun deck, the final moment of the tour of the home. Unfortunately it was just for show, the home didn’t come with the Sun installation.
The technology produces light that the brain “knows” is sunlight – a feeling that Eric described as “erotic”. This sensation can be created over very large spaces, for a large number of people – from 5 to 500. It can be tuned for temperature, or to simulate a specific time of day. The UV-A and UV-B levels are reduced so that they are lower than in natural sunlight, making the experience safer as well. And it is designed to be green – the technology recovers as much as 75% of the heat for reutilization. The vision is that the technology will be used in nightclubs, condo projects, hotels – one of the first customers will be a retirement home. Very cool.
Some additional pics:
Today I profiled Montreal-based Soleira Sun, the first of these kinds of posts. I will be covering other startups, individuals, companies, groups, projects that I find interesting in the future.
