How i5LED, LLC‘s CEO Is Disrupting The LED Industry, Again
George Pappas is on his second go-round with building an LED display manufacturer, and this time he’s applying some 25 years of direct experience to make i5LED a very different company.
i5LED is much smaller in headcount, taps into (and more deeply leverages) carefully selected manufacturing partners, sells mostly through channels instead of direct, and emphasizes its ability to apply vast in-house experience to projects that need custom designed and engineered solutions.
Founder and CEO Pappas is also investing much more time building top of mind awareness of his company and capabilities within the pro AV and digital signage industries.
Based in Sacramento, California, i5LED designs and does final assembly of bespoke projects, and bolsters the variable nature of custom jobs with ready-to-go indoor and outdoor LED displays.
i5LED has all the conventional video wall products that compete on visual performance and innovation with much larger manufacturers, but it also has an expanding list of much more specialized and somewhat unique visual products – including an outdoor display that’s light enough to attach to building scaffolds and hoardings, and a micro-thin mesh product that sits on the inside of windows, turning them into bright screens without blocking views in or out.
Just two years old, i5LED generated some quiet attention in February 2024 as the LED manufacturer behind what was arguably the most talked-about display at the global industry’s largest trade show, Integrated Systems Europe in Barcelona.
The German distribution company Lang AG had a vast 0.9mm fine pitch display – dubbed LEDgend – at the front of its stand, at the busiest crossroads of the sprawling exhibition center. While it was the company’s name on the stand, Lang is not a manufacturer and word got around that the Chip On Board display was developed with and for Lang by i5LED.
Driving Differentiation
i5LED’s small but hyper-connected business development team spends a lot of time talking to everyone from systems integrators to architects and engineering firms to make them aware of its abilities and interest in taking on jobs that aren’t in the wheelhouse of larger, volume sales-focused major manufacturers, or smaller firms that mainly resell and support finished overseas products.
“For some of the bigger integrators,” says Pappas, “when they get difficult jobs, something that’s not out of the box, we’re able to do a virtual tour with them and their client, talk them through the technology needs and options, and help them sell and close deals.”
“There are very few engineering companies that someone can go to that would specialize in knowing how light emitting diodes work, all the parameters, what kind of driver chips, what kind of FPGAs to use. There’s just a lot to know … but we do,” says Pappas.
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Source: https://www.sixteen-nine.net/2025/01/24/how-i5leds-ceo-is-disrupting-the-led-industry-again/
