October 14, 2026
Cree Lighting USA Vendors Left Holding Paper, Not Payment
With one judgment in and more claims pending, can unpaid suppliers follow the money to the new LLCs now licensing its products?
Last month, the Racine County clerk entered a $195,213 judgment against Cree Lighting USA in favor of Mayville Engineering Company (MEC). The total covers $194,484 in unpaid invoices plus $729 in court costs.
Judge Eugene Gasiorkiewicz granted summary judgment on August 28. Cree Lighting USA had answered the complaint, then never responded to MEC’s discovery. Under Wisconsin law, MEC’s unanswered requests for admission were deemed admitted, including one stating that the nonpayment was due primarily to cash-flow constraints.
The 13 invoices in the case also show how early the strain began. MEC shipped heatsinks, driver extrusions and fixture mounts to Cree Lighting USA’s Sturtevant plant between April 29 and July 28, 2025, on 45-day terms. The first payment came due in mid-June. According to the complaint, none were paid.
Cree Lighting USA kept ordering production parts through the summer, after the first MEC invoice had already gone unpaid. In October 2025, the company furloughed roughly 580 workers with no return date. By December, two other suppliers, Pace Industries and MES Inc., had also sued over unpaid balances.
Fighting Where the Exposure Is
The company has shown more energy elsewhere. In the consolidated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act class actions, its counsel has answered complaints and contested how the class is structured. The workers allege the October 2025 furlough was a mass layoff in disguise, one that should have come with 60 days’ notice.
The math helps explain the effort. A class built around the March layoffs covers 172 workers, while one built around the furlough covers roughly 580. A company that let a $194,000 vendor claim reach judgment without contesting discovery in Racine County, while fighting the federal class actions, appears to see more room to fight in the latter.
Follow the Money: Same Products, Same Spokesperson, New Companies
In May 2026, substantially all of Cree Lighting USA’s assets were sold in an Article 9 auction, a sale run on behalf of a secured lender, to Beta LED Lighting LLC and Lumen LED Lighting LLC. Both are Delaware companies formed days before the sale. Sabu Krishnan, Cree Lighting USA’s former CEO, is involved with managing Beta LED, according to a company spokesperson. The new companies share more than a product line with the old one. The same spokesperson, Rowan Lawson, handles media inquiries for Cree Lighting USA and both new entities.
When assets change hands this way, the buyer generally takes them free of the seller’s unpaid bills. That could leave MEC holding a judgment against a company with little left to collect.
Courts can make an exception when the new company is essentially the old company under a new name, with the same owners, the same management and the same business. That question carries more weight now that Beta LED is licensing certain Cree Lighting commercial luminaires to Phoenix Lighting, putting revenue from the Cree portfolio in the new company’s hands. Whether Beta LED is far enough removed from Cree Lighting USA to leave the old debts behind, or close enough for a creditor to pursue, is an open question for the company’s unpaid vendors.
How much protection the sale provides depends largely on who the secured lender was, and on whether the auction was a genuine arm’s-length foreclosure or one arranged with the old company’s insiders.
Last week, we asked Lawson whether Beta LED or Lumen LED would reconcile any part of the MEC judgment. We also asked how letting the case reach judgment squares with the company’s March statement to Inside Lighting that it expected to “positively, fairly and quickly resolve any disputes.” We did not receive a reply.
Vision Plastics and Fanlight (which does business as NaturaLED), with roughly $649,000 in claims pending in the same Racine courthouse, also have a stake in the answer.
