We’re proud to announce that Enlighted CTO and Co-Founder Tanuj Mohan has just been named as the LEDs Magazine Sapphire Awards ‘Illumineer of the Year’, an honor which represents an individual or team who has developed innovative technology that enables high-quality lighting products while lowering operational and/or product costs.

Tanuj is an industry visionary, who in his early years found himself programming alone at night while sitting in a fully lit and air-conditioned building. Bothered by wasted resources, he knew networking and network management concepts could solve the problem. With the onset of LEDs, cheap microprocessors and ubiquitous wireless the time was right. In 2009, Tanuj launched Enlighted and became committed to bringing IoT to the commercial marketplace.

Tanuj built smart sensors with onboard processors, but needed a location for the sensors to effectively implement and scale IoT technology across entire buildings. This is where lighting enters the story – which provides ubiquitous location and eliminates the need for new networking or electric cabling. This discovery alone changed smart lighting as we know it, with lighting now playing a critical role in the IoT.

His expertise in mesh networking and built-in security also helped address key issues the IoT was facing like network overloads and security breaches,helping create the foundation for the Enlighted System’s widespread implementation in commercial buildings.

See the full list of winners here, where our Cheshire Public Schools case study also took home an awardin the SSL Smart Lighting Project category. After an LED lighting installation featuring Enlighted IoT technology, audits confirmed a total annual savings of $125,000 in energy costs coupled with maintenance savings of $30,000 per year in the Cheshire Public School System. In addition to providing energy savings, the system efficiently manages building temperatures and electrical outlet plug loads, while also monitoring human movement patterns.