LED Roadway Lighting, a longstanding success story of the East Coast startup ecosystem, is looking to innovate in the world of streetlights for a second time with its new smart cities business.

The Liveable Cities project involves the bulk of LED Roadway Lighting’s employees, as well as a handful of dedicated software developers. For the 16-year-old company, the suite of new hardware and software offerings heralds not just a move into internet-of-things products, but also the adoption of a recurring revenue business model that will complement income from product sales.

Founder Chuck Cartmill continues to serve as CEO of LED Roadway Lighting, while son Ken Cartmill runs Liveable Cities. Ken Cartmill said in an interview that the addition of sensor suites has created sizeable new market opportunities.

“We’ve added sensors to lighting controllers, so now we’re doing speed monitoring for road safety, traffic monitoring, air quality monitoring and some video analytics with AI and computer vision applied to the video camera,” he said.

LED Roadway Lighting executive vice president of product development Ken Cartmill.

LED Roadway Lighting’s origins can be traced back to a business Chuck Cartmill founded in Amherst, Nova Scotia in 2002 manufacturing the equipment that was, in turn, used to build LED streetlights. By 2007, the LED bulbs had become efficient enough to replace then-commonplace sodium lights, prompting him to begin manufacturing and selling the new lights out of Halifax.

“(LED street lighting) is starting to get commoditized, but we’ve really learned how to master supply chains,” said Chuck Cartmill. “We still manufacture in Amherst, but we’ve got supply chains in Asia and now India to support Amherst.”

LED Roadway Lighting has about 100 employees and customers in more than 60 countries. The Cartmills estimate they control about 70 percent of the Caribbean LED streetlight market, more than half the market in Canada and about five percent in the United States, which despite being a more competitive marketplace has proved lucrative. The company also has sales in South America, Asia and Europe.

Livable Cities’ key innovation is selling internet-of-things enabled add-ons that can be installed in most streetlights thanks to a set of international standards from the American National Standards Institute and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, also in the United States. The standards were originally developed to facilitate the use of control modules that managed when streetlights were turned on and off and adjusted their brightness. Now, Liveable Cities sells attachments ranging from cameras to air quality sensors that can be moved between streetlights depending on where they are needed, along with the software to run the attachments.

While the attachments have a range of applications related to smart cities and the use of big data in urban planning, they are also designed to safeguard people's privacy. The cameras attach at the wrong angle to film license plates, for example, and store their data only locally until someone retrieves it, rather than uploading it to the cloud.

Streetlight buyers are usually either governments or utilities. For example, NB Power is a customer. But with urban centres increasingly looking to smart city systems to cope with the growing energy and infrastructure demands of modern economies, Ken Cartmill said the company is finding itself able to tap new customers even in geographies where it is already well-established.

“We've always been ambitious in terms of going to new markets on roadways, but we're opening up a few new ones with the sensors, and certainly in ones where we've been participating, but on a limited basis, like the United States, we see a much bigger window of opportunity opening for us with the new sensor technologies," he said.