For a start up you have some highly experienced founders and a team to match already in place, how did the company come together and why?

Mike, Stephen and I have all worked together in the past but through different and independent ventures. I worked with Mike through my previous design and engineering company Haberdashery, where Mike was the chairman, and Mike worked with Stephen over the years as they actually grew up together. It was inevitable that Stephen and I would work well together, and unbelievably fortunate that Stephen had such an extensive career in Digital Out-of-Home, prior to him joining Lightvert!

I would venture to say that we have one of the best, most dynamic and well-rounded teams in early stage tech in London.

Lightvert's own description of the company is a digital out of home media technology company. Which does what?

Simply put, we are building an outdoor media business, developing new technologies to engage out-of-home audiences and introduce new viewer behaviours.

Our first product is ECHO, a revolutionary new type of outdoor display technology whereby, through the virtues of this new medium, the viewer receives a far more intriguing and experiential means of engaging with outdoor cultural and advertising messages, whilst at the same time the medium provides very powerful benefits for brand advertisers.

While we are fully focused on raising our equity seed funding round through Crowdcube (http://www.crowdcube.com/lightvert) ECHO is just the start, and we will be developing other new and complimentary technologies as the business moves forward, building out our network of ECHO displays around the world.

You have a highly unusual product in the advanced development locker, ECHO, not rocket science maybe but certainly space age in concept. Can you talk us through Echo as the potential looks incredible?

Sure, ECHO is a hyper-scale persistence of vision display system. That is quite a mouthful, but here is what it means. Persistence of Vision is a phenomenon in the human eye where when you look at any bright light and then look away, you see a ghost of that bright light for just a moment. Our ECHO technology uses this phenomenon to literally print an image in the viewer's retina temporarily and safely. So the image only exists in the viewer's eye and not in reality! It really feels like magic when you see it.

We're launching the company off the back of this initial technology. To date we've achieved quite a lot including:

  • Raised 30% of our £670,000 seed funding target (17.89% equity on offer)
  • Signed sales partnership agreement with Kinetic World Wide (part of WPP group)
  • We've patented the technology globally
  • Built six fully working prototypes and privately demonstrated them to investors and advertisers.
  • Won £212,000 of grant funding from the UK government through an Innovate UK smart grant.

Unlike standard screen media, our hardware consists of only a single vertical line of light measuring no more than 200mm wide, this line of light blinks out the columns of pixel data from an image, and each column is temporarily imprinted in a different location in the viewer's retina as their eye moves, and by the way the average person performs horizontal eye movements every hour. So the ECHO medium is completely unlike a standard screen, in that rather than lecture to the viewer with a fixed image, ECHO makes large-scale temporary impressions of an image to the viewer.

One of the many benefits, aside from the very personal and compelling experience of viewing ECHO media, is that ECHO hardware has such a small footprint that we can unlock vast amounts of advertising real estate which is otherwise unavailable to traditional screen media. It can literally be fixed between the windows of an existing building and dramatically lowers the building's planning permission barriers to entry, compared with traditional screen media.

How long has it taken for ECHO's possibilities to be fully understood by backers and potential investors?

One thing is for sure, our investors recognise that unbelievable revenue potential for Lightvert! It's an incredible business opportunity.

This process is still underway, and we're still working to close our seed round of funding through our Crowdcube equity crowdfunding campaign. Introducing a new and highly experiential display medium like ECHO takes time. Many investors who are not experienced in the industry are wary of this, but those that know the industry are getting in line to back Lightvert. We're constantly demonstrating the technology and showing video of it in action and looking for new ways to communicate its unique characteristics to investors and the media industry.

Global ambitions?

Absolutely! DOOH is well established across the EU, North America and APAC, and rapidly emerging in countries such as India. And with our target brand clientele being ever more international in their reach and unified in their messaging, Lightvert, by necessity, will be a truly global business.

What would be your measure of success in the next five years ?

We're working hard to do something very rare and special here, introduce a wholly new medium to the world. As such our measure of success will be seeing viewers really engage with our ECHO displays and in seeing the talented people in the creative industries using our ECHO technology in new and exciting ways that we at Lightvert have not yet imagined.

www.lightvert.co.uk and to invest www.crowdtube.com/lightvert