Illumitex Inc. , LED innovator and maker of the world's most optically advanced lighting products, today announced that it has secured an additional $9.3 million of funding. Existing investors NEA, Morgan Creek Capital, Mousse Partners, Apex Venture Partners, DFJ Mercury and Syngenta Ventures participated in the round. The new round of funding will be used to develop Illumitex's lighting fixture product lines, as well as provide ongoing support to the company's development of proprietary precision beam packaged LEDs.

The company also announced it has hired Chris Hammelef to assume the role of CEO beginning April 16, 2012. Hammelef was formerly the Vice President and General Manager of Hadco Group, one of the largest decorative outdoor lighting companies in North America and a division of Philips.

"In my nearly two decades in senior management roles at major lighting companies, I have never seen any emerging technology with as much potential as Illumitex's precision LED optics for the growing LED lighting market," said Chris Hammelef, incoming CEO of Illumitex. "Illumitex has advanced LED optics to a point where applying that technology to consumer and commercial lighting fixtures can be highly disruptive in the way fixtures are made, installed and integrated into all types of environments. It is truly an honor to assume this role and I am looking forward to working with this dynamic team as they build the next great lighting company," Hammelef added.

"Chris brings with him a unique knowledge of the lighting industry that will allow us to rapidly scale our company and deliver better lighting solutions to a range of new markets," said Randy Johnson, COO at Illumitex. "We've always known we have a winning technology and a winning team, and Chris will allow the entire venture to come together. We are delighted he has joined our team."

Since Illumitex began production of precision beam LEDs in 2008, the company has demonstrated momentum across all facets of its business. While strategies to provide primarily packaged LEDs have driven the company's revenue to date, the focus will now shift to feature lighting fixtures as the lead product offering.

About Illumitex Founded in 2005 by imaging and optics industry veterans, US-based Illumitex's industry-shifting achievements began with a fresh approach to traditional LED design. By refusing to settle for the losses associated with secondary optics, Illumitex's breakthrough LED technology incorporates fundamental physics principles to maximize light extraction at the source. By extracting and directing photons at the die level, Illumitex delivers more usable light to the intended target while consuming less energy. In doing so Illumitex radically transformed traditional LED design and greatly increased functionality with the creation of an LED package that emits light in a uniform, highly-precise beam directly from the source. The result: with die-level optical integration, the need for cumbersome and inefficient secondary optics to control light is obsolete, opening the world to more versatile-and energy efficient-lighting applications than ever before imagined.