When people think about progress in LEDs or power electronics, they usually look at the obvious levers: brighter chips, tighter drivers, clever optics.
But if you trace failure modes and warranty claims backwards, you keep ending up in a less glamorous place: the metal‑core PCB, and specifically the thin dielectric layer that decides whether heat ever leaves the system at all.
In our previous piece, The thermal bottleneck inside modern lighting, we walked through the physics, policy tailwinds, and market sizing behind this problem. This note is the footnote to that thesis: here is the company we chose to build on top of it.
Helionis Labs is our bet on this layer. This is why.
What Helionis is Building
Helionis is an IMS (Insulated Metal Substrate) design and manufacturing company focused on solving the thermal bottleneck at its root cause.
Conventional MCPCBs rely on laminated dielectric sheets and copper etching. This limits thermal performance, creates material waste, and effectively blocks true additive manufacturing. Helionis replaces this with an in‑house printed, ceramic‑filled dielectric and silver‑based additive circuit printing. That combination enables thinner insulation, better heat flow, higher yield, and fewer process steps. This approach is both cheaper at the board level and improves product performance.
In practice, Helionis does three things differently:
Designs the dielectric in‑house. Instead of buying a fixed laminate, they formulate a composite of polymer matrix, ceramic fillers, and adhesion promoters tuned to aluminium.
Prints it directly on aluminium. Screen printing allows them to hold dielectric thickness around 50–75 µm versus the 100–200 µm common in standard MCPCBs.
Prints the circuit additively. Silver inks survive 300–400°C sintering without oxidising, enabling clean traces without copper etching.
The result is an IMS board that is materially more thermally efficient than incumbent MCPCBs, with a shorter heat path and a process that can, in principle, scale inside a factory rather than a lab.
Why This Approach Matters
As we wrote in the pre‑read, the substrate market is barbelled.
At one end, global majors supply high‑performance IMS and thermal PCBs with advanced ceramic‑polymer dielectrics and embedded copper inlays, often reaching 3 W/m·K and above. These are excellent products but are priced for high‑margin, lower‑volume programmes and typically arrive in India as imports.
At the other end, low‑cost MCPCB suppliers use older plastic or epoxy dielectrics. Indian PCB houses assemble aluminium‑backed boards for LED OEMs but rely on imported laminates and do not own substrate chemistry.
We believe there is still an open lane for a company that offers high‑end thermal performance at mass‑market cost - especially in India, where the board product is largely import‑dependent and OEMs are actively looking to backward integrate and work with local suppliers, even when headline specifications are only similar.
Helionis is aiming squarely at that missing middle: a domestically manufactured, high‑performance substrate platform for mainstream wattages, starting with LEDs and expanding into power electronics.
How Helionis Fits India’s Supply‑Chain Moment
Another part of our conviction comes from how Helionis sources and manufactures. The company uses commodity raw materials (aluminium, ceramics, polymers, silver) and builds value in the formulation and process, not in fragile or geo-exposed inputs.
We believe this innovation is both a strong value proposition and relatively de‑risked from supply‑chain shocks, because:
The inputs are commodity materials,
The process is designed to run in‑house, and
The company’s strategy is to keep core manufacturing under its own roof.
In a world where dielectric laminates are often imported and subject to currency moves, shipping timelines, and geopolitical risk, this matters. Controlling manufacturing in‑house is a good strategy going forward, for margin as well as reliability.
Where Helionis started, and Where It Can Go
Helionis is deliberately starting where thermal pain is visible, and switching costs are manageable: LEDs. The first customers are likely to be Tier‑1 lighting OEMs (street lights, industrial, floodlighting) and automotive suppliers (DRLs, headlamps, exterior modules), as well as fragmented MSME manufacturers who can move faster.
The initial go‑to‑market has three layers:
Core: IMS boards as components in existing supply chains, replacing MCPCBs inside familiar form factors.
Support: a small line of high‑power LED luminaires to demonstrate system‑level advantages and act as live reference designs.
Future: extension into EV chargers, motor controllers, drones, and wide‑band‑gap power systems where thermal dissipation requirements are high and markets are large.
LEDs are a beachhead. The physics that Helionis is engineering against - heat density at the substrate - repeats in each of those adjacent verticals.
The Team We Are Backing
We back teams where the founding skill set matches the bottleneck. In Helionis, that bottleneck is part materials science, part manufacturing engineering.
The founders bring:
deep experience with LED systems, glass‑based IMS platforms, and high‑power luminaires, and
global plant operations and reliability experience in chemical manufacturing.
With this combination, Helionis can design the dielectric, build the line, and speak credibly to OEM engineering teams about both lab data and production realities.
Why We Invested
We invested because the company is solving a real industrial constraint at the right abstraction level. The market already has good chips, good drivers, and good system integration, but the board remains a thermal choke point in many high-power applications. Helionis is not trying to win on cosmetic differentiation; it is trying to change the thermal behaviour of the board itself, which is where a meaningful part of the value is trapped. That is the kind of problem we like: technically specific, commercially legible, and tied to a bottleneck that shows up in every device the market wants to scale.
The other reason is that the business fits how we think the energy transition will be built in India. Transition VC backs engineering-led companies that work on how energy is produced, stored, moved, and consumed, and we have said repeatedly that we are looking for hard technical problems inside those supply chains rather than surface-level software layers. Helionis belongs in that frame because better thermal substrates are the enabling infrastructure for higher power density, longer life, and lower system cost.
The energy angle is also important because heat is wasted energy. Every degree of unnecessary thermal rise forces the system to spend more on cooling, derating, oversizing, or replacement. In LEDs, that translates into lower efficiency at the fixture level and shorter service life; in power electronics, it translates into constrained power density and poor reliability under load. By improving thermal transfer at the substrate, Helionis is effectively reducing avoidable energy loss inside the hardware stack, which is exactly the kind of physical efficiency gain the energy transition depends on.
Helionis also has the right supply-chain logic for India. Its inputs are commodity materials, its process is designed to run in-house, and its value is created through formulation and manufacturing control rather than imported laminates or scarce inputs. That matters in an energy transition built on domestic production, because the winners will not only be the companies with the best spec sheet; they will be the ones that can manufacture reliably, at scale, with fewer dependencies and less import exposure.
For that reason, Helionis is not just a materials company or a board house. It is a manufacturing company positioned inside the energy stack, starting with LEDs and extending into power electronics, where thermal management is a constraint on performance and scale. The investment is a bet that this layer will matter more as India localises hardware, raises power density, and pushes more of its industrial energy demand through compact, thermally constrained systems.
