PureLiFi was created from research at the University of Edinburgh, received Scottish public support over more than a decade and built an international portfolio of patents around transmitting data through light. On 2 September, the appointment of administrators was filed at Companies House. The company may have failed, but its intellectual property has not disappeared. Patents can be bought and sold like other assets, and PureLiFi’s portfolio now exposes a larger question in Scotland’s economic strategy: when public money helps create and scale valuable technology, what does Scotland retain if the company owning it becomes insolvent?
On 2 September 2026, a five-page notice appeared in the Companies House record of an Edinburgh technology company. It recorded the appointment of an administrator to PureLiFi Limited. The registered office was changed on the same day from Timber Bush in Leith to the Glasgow office of Begbies Traynor.
Forty-two jobs were lost.
The physical company had run out of money. Its technology had not.
PureLiFi spent more than a decade developing optical wireless communications: systems that transmit digital information through light rather than relying exclusively upon radio frequencies. The company grew from research associated with Professor Harald Haas at the University of Edinburgh, where work on visible-light communications established the foundations of what became known internationally as LiFi.
Over the following years, PureLiFi accumulated intellectual property covering receivers, transmitters, optical systems, displays and methods for moving data through light. Public patent databases identify numerous granted patents and pending applications assigned directly to PureLiFi Limited, including inventions granted as recently as 2026.
An insolvent technology company can therefore contain something very different from an insolvent restaurant, retailer or construction contractor. Much of its value may have no physical form.
The desks, computers and laboratory equipment can be sold. So can the inventions.
Scotland helped build PureLiFi
PureLiFi emerged from the University of Edinburgh research environment during the early development of LiFi. The company began life under earlier names before becoming PureLiFi and was established to commercialise technology developed around optical wireless communications.
Its growth was supported by several forms of capital. Private investors supplied substantial funding. University-connected investment also participated. Scottish Enterprise supported the company early in its development; its 2013-14 public disclosure recorded a repayable grant contribution to PureLiFi, while its annual accounts subsequently recorded further grant support.
The Scottish National Investment Bank later became one of the company’s largest public backers. Its published portfolio records a £12.5 million investment in PureLiFi under the bank’s mission to harness innovation. The investment was intended to support development of an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, capable of helping LiFi technology move into consumer devices.
At the time, the company said it wanted to create a centre of LiFi excellence in Edinburgh and contribute to Scotland’s wider photonics industry. The Bank described the investment as patient growth capital supporting highly skilled research and development jobs in Scotland.
Reporting following the administration puts the Bank’s eventual commitment at £15 million, with £14.7 million drawn.
The failure occurred only weeks after PureLiFi registered changes to several floating charges and created a new charge in favour of the Scottish National Investment Bank. Companies House records show that charge was created on 21 July 2026. Other outstanding security interests include a floating charge in favour of Scottish Investments Limited and security held by Innovate UK Loans Limited.
The existence and ranking of security can affect what happens to the proceeds when assets are sold. The complete outcome will depend upon the legal rights contained in the relevant financing documents and the administrators’ proposals.
A patent does not become worthless because its company fails
UK insolvency guidance treats patents as property. They may be licensed, mortgaged, assigned and sold. Where an insolvent business owns a patent, the intellectual-property right can be realised as an asset for the benefit of creditors.
The same applies to other forms of technology-company property. An administrator may sell trademarks, software, databases, websites, equipment, customer relationships and patent rights while attempting either to preserve the business or obtain a better result for creditors than immediate liquidation would produce.
PureLiFi’s public patent record shows why this becomes economically significant. Patent databases list inventions assigned to the company across multiple generations of optical wireless technology. Recent records include a display apparatus allowing optical wireless communication through a display; freeform optical components for receivers; optical wireless interfaces; retransmission systems and network architectures.
Some applications were still being published in 2026. A company can therefore fail financially while owning intellectual property whose legal life continues for years.
The purchaser of that portfolio does not necessarily have to be Scottish. Intellectual property can cross a border without a factory moving, an employee relocating or a lorry leaving a warehouse.
A university spinout can contain more than one kind of intellectual property
There is another complication in university companies. The intellectual property used by a spinout can include rights created at different stages and owned under different arrangements.
The University of Edinburgh’s current guidance explains that intellectual property created by staff in the course of their university employment is normally owned by the university. A spinout may therefore commercialise university technology under a licence rather than owning every underlying right outright. Later inventions created inside the company may belong directly to the company.
The public record confirms that numerous PureLiFi patents are assigned to PureLiFi Limited. It does not, by itself, disclose the complete contractual relationship governing every piece of foundational technology originating at the University of Edinburgh. Those licence agreements are not set out in the ordinary Companies House record.
That creates several possible layers of value: university-owned intellectual property licensed to a company; patents subsequently created and owned by the company; technical knowledge held by employees; software and designs; and commercial agreements with customers or manufacturers.
An administrator has to establish what the company actually owns before it can sell it.
Public investment does not automatically mean public ownership of the technology
Scotland increasingly uses public money to help private technology companies cross the gap between research and commercial scale. That is deliberate economic policy.
The Scottish National Investment Bank was established to make long-term commercial investments aligned with national missions. Scottish Enterprise has invested alongside private investors for more than two decades. Universities create and license intellectual property into spinouts. Government-funded proof-of-concept programmes help researchers develop inventions far enough to attract commercial capital.
Those interventions do not normally convert every resulting patent into public property.
An equity investment gives the investor shares. A loan creates a creditor relationship. A secured loan may give the lender security over specified assets. A grant may contain conditions governing the project but does not necessarily give government ownership of the invention. A university licence establishes whatever rights the licence agreement contains.
The result is that the phrase “publicly funded technology” can describe several legally different things.
Public money may have paid for early research while the university owns the patent. An enterprise agency may then provide grant support. A public investment institution may later acquire shares or provide growth capital. Private investors may contribute several times as much. Employees inside the company may create additional patentable inventions. By the time the business fails, the economic interest of the Scottish public sector can be distributed across grants, shares, loans, security and indirect benefits rather than represented by ownership of one identifiable asset.
Scotland is preparing to put more public money into spinouts
The timing of PureLiFi’s administration gives the issue a wider economic context.
Scotland’s current innovation strategy places university commercialisation near the centre of its plans for economic growth. In February, the government published a report on turning research into companies, describing new public programmes intended to bridge the gap between discovery and commercial scale. These include a £2.9 million Proof of Concept Fund and up to £7 million for a dedicated impact-venture spinout pipeline. Scottish Funding Council research and innovation support amounted to £328.5 million in 2025-26, including £25 million for knowledge exchange and innovation.
The new Programme for Government goes further. Ministers intend to work with the Scottish National Investment Bank to establish a Scottish Innovation Fund focused on university spinouts and to use public support to help high-potential companies scale and remain in Scotland.
The government’s stated objective is not merely to create more companies. It wants successful spinouts to grow in Scotland rather than develop here and move elsewhere as capital requirements increase.
Its National Innovation Strategy explicitly treats retaining successful spinouts in Scotland as an economic objective.
PureLiFi presents the same issue from the other end of the company life cycle.
Failure is part of venture investment
Public investment in early and growth-stage technology cannot operate on the assumption that every company will succeed. Venture capital works because a portfolio can contain failures alongside companies whose increase in value compensates for losses elsewhere.
Scottish Enterprise describes its own role as investing alongside private capital where a financing gap exists. Its current strategy places greater emphasis on financial returns as well as economic impact so proceeds from successful investments can be recycled.
The Scottish National Investment Bank similarly invests commercially rather than operating as a conventional grant programme. Losses are therefore an expected possibility, not by themselves evidence that an investment should never have been made.
The economic calculation nevertheless extends beyond whether a public investor eventually recovers its cash.
A technology company can create high-skilled employment, expertise, supplier relationships, patents and an industrial cluster during the period in which public money supports it. Some of those assets remain geographically rooted after a company closes. Others are transferable.
Intellectual property belongs to the second category.
PureLiFi had already moved from licensing towards manufacturing
The administrators have attributed the immediate failure partly to a strategic shift. PureLiFi had historically sought to commercialise patented technology through licensing and components. In recent years it moved further into manufacturing its own hardware. That increased the amount of working capital required before corresponding revenue arrived.
The company raised more than £35 million across its life but did not reach profitability before further finance became unavailable.
The collapse therefore contains two separate stories. One is the commercial failure of a Scottish technology company. The other concerns the assets produced during 14 years of research, engineering and investment.
The second story has not finished.
The July security documents may determine part of what happens next
Companies House shows three charges outstanding against PureLiFi. One is held by Innovate UK Loans Limited. Another floating charge is held by Scottish Investments Limited. The most recent, created on 21 July 2026, names the Scottish National Investment Bank as the person entitled to the security.
A floating charge can extend across a company’s undertaking and property and can give a secured creditor rights that an ordinary unsecured investor does not possess. The precise priority between creditors and the assets covered by each charge requires the underlying security documents and insolvency process to be examined rather than inferred from the headline amount invested.
That will affect the public-money account of the collapse. A £14.7 million drawdown and a £14.7 million final loss are not necessarily the same thing. Recoveries can occur through secured assets or a sale of the business and intellectual property, although there is presently no public basis for assuming what those recoveries will be.
The administrator must now establish what can be sold and at what price.
A patent portfolio can leave Scotland while the research that created it remains
The University of Edinburgh will continue to conduct research into optical wireless communications. Professor Haas’s academic work and the research environment from which LiFi emerged are not assets of PureLiFi’s insolvency estate simply because the company entered administration.
The company-owned patent portfolio is different.
If those rights are sold, their next owner could continue development in Scotland. They could be acquired by another British company. They could become part of the intellectual-property portfolio of an international semiconductor, communications, defence or electronics group. Individual patents could also be licensed or transferred under whatever arrangement produces the best outcome available to the administrators.
The legal process is designed primarily around the insolvent company and its creditors. It is not designed principally to preserve a national technology strategy.
That creates a point of contact between insolvency law and Scottish industrial policy. Government may spend years helping research move from a university laboratory into a company because it wants high-value technology anchored in Scotland. Insolvency can subsequently place the resulting commercial rights into a process whose purpose is creditor recovery.
The Scottish Government is now preparing new investment vehicles specifically to create more university spinouts and help them become larger companies. PureLiFi provides an early test of another part of that model: what Scotland’s public institutions retain when a company does not reach the scale for which it was funded.
The answer will not be found in the original investment announcement. It will appear in the administrator’s proposals, the security rights registered against the company, the ownership and licensing terms attached to its intellectual property, the eventual purchaser of the patents, and whatever proceeds return to secured and unsecured creditors.
The company that carried the name PureLiFi may now be in administration. The technology developed inside it remains property. Who owns that property next will determine where part of the value created in Edinburgh over the past 14 years goes.
Sources:
PURELIFI LIMITED: Filing History
Companies House — updated September 2026
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC394047/filing-history?page=1
PURELIFI LIMITED: Charges
Companies House — updated September 2026
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC394047/charges
PURELIFI LIMITED: Company Overview
Companies House — accessed September 2026
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/SC394047
pureLiFi
Scottish National Investment Bank — 13 July 2022
https://www.thebank.scot/portfolio/purelifi
Bank’s Investments Deliver Real Impact for Scotland
Scottish National Investment Bank — 2023
https://www.thebank.scot/banks-investments-deliver-real-impact-for-scotland
Patents Assigned to PURELIFI LIMITED
Justia Patents — accessed September 2026
https://patents.justia.com/assignee/purelifi-limited
IP Management
Edinburgh Innovations, University of Edinburgh — 1 July 2024
https://uoe-edinburgh-innovations.ed.ac.uk/for-staff/form-a-company/ei-company-support/ip-management
Technical Guidance for Official Receivers: Intellectual Property and Other Intangible Assets
The Insolvency Service — 26 March 2021; updated 20 April 2026
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/technical-guidance-for-official-receivers/39-intellectual-property-and-other-intangible-assets
Ideas to Impact: Public Sector Support for Research Commercialisation — Strengths, Ambition and Progress Report
Scottish Government — 11 February 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/ideas-impact-public-sector-support-research-commercialisation-scotland-strengths-ambition-progress-report/
Ideas to Impact: Scottish Spinouts Report
Scottish Government — February 2026
https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/progress-report/2026/02/ideas-impact-public-sector-support-research-commercialisation-scotland-strengths-ambition-progress-report/documents/ideas-impact-scottish-spinouts-report/ideas-impact-scottish-spinouts-report/govscot%3Adocument/ideas-impact-scottish-spinouts-report.pdf
Programme for Government 2026 to 2031
Scottish Government — 1 September 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/programme-government-2026-2031/
