Sector
Sports Lighting as a Service
Cities, school districts and venue operators know exactly what they need: modern LED lighting that cuts energy and maintenance costs and makes fields usable. What they do not have is the capital budget to buy it. Lighting as a service solves that by changing who owns the asset — and in doing so it turns a purchase nobody can afford into infrastructure with contracted cash flow.
The problem with buying lighting
Sports and municipal lighting is a classic deferred-capital problem. Fixtures age, energy bills rise, maintenance gets expensive, and the replacement is a large one-time capital outlay competing with roads, schools and public safety for a constrained budget. So the upgrade waits. Fields go dark early, events are lost, and the operator keeps paying for inefficiency.
The technology is not the constraint. LED lighting is mature, efficient and long-lived. The constraint is entirely in how it is paid for.
How lighting as a service works
Under a lighting-as-a-service model, the provider designs, installs, owns and maintains the system. The customer pays a service fee over a multi-year term — typically funded, in whole or in part, by the energy and maintenance savings the new system produces. The customer gets modern lighting with no capital outlay and no maintenance burden. The provider gets a portfolio of long-dated, contracted cash flows secured by essential public assets.
That second half is what makes it infrastructure. Long-lived physical assets, an essential end use, proven technology, and predictable contracted revenue from creditworthy public and institutional counterparties: it is the profile core infrastructure investors pay premiums for, arriving through a business that is still scaling.
Why the capital markets had not caught up
Each project is small. The counterparties are diverse. There was no standard contract, so no standard way for a lender to underwrite a portfolio of them. Providers funded growth from their own balance sheets and grew only as fast as retained earnings allowed. This is precisely the capital markets gap Lieef exists to close: proven technology, trapped by the absence of a financeable structure.
NGU Sports Lighting
NGU delivers sports lighting as a service to municipal, educational and commercial venues. In 2025, Lieef committed $60MM to support NGU’s project pipeline. The investment reflects the thesis directly: a proven technology, a sticky customer base with an essential need, contracted revenue, and a management team that had already demonstrated the model and needed capital and structure to scale it.
The City of Syracuse, New York, illustrates the customer side of the equation — as Athletic Business reported, the city found a brighter solution by not buying its sports lighting.
Read the announcement · NGU Sports Lighting
Where the model goes next
Lighting is the clearest example of a broader pattern: capital equipment that a customer needs but should not have to own, converted into a service with contracted cash flow. The same logic applies to fleet charging, to on-site power, and to the microgrids and behind-the-meter generation that data centers increasingly require. See how we think about infrastructure growth equity.
This page describes Lieef’s investment perspective and is provided for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and it does not describe any specific investment. Please read the Important Disclosures on our homepage.