Most Silicon Valley tech startups can’t claim that their founders won a Nobel. Soraa can.

Nobel Prize winner Shuji Nakamura. Photo: Soraa

The Fremont LED company was co-founded in 2008 by Shuji Nakamura, one of three researchers who on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the blue light emitting diode. The white LED bulbs now proliferating in homes and businesses across the world all sprang from that discovery.

“It is very satisfying to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality,” Nakamura said Tuesday. “I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting worldwide, and that is why we founded Soraa.”

Red and green LEDs had been around for years (think digital watches, circa 1978). But blue LEDs remained elusive until 1993, when Nakamura — building on research by Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano — started experimenting with a different material for making them, gallium nitride.

That invention made possible white LEDs, which combine all three primary colors.

Nakamura made his discovery while working for a small company in Japan, and in a major challenge to Japanese corporate tradition, he sued the company to get a piece of the profits. He also moved to California, taking a position at UC Santa Barbara. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla approached Nakamua and two of his university colleagues with the idea of founding an LED startup, and in 2008, Soraa was born.

“Shuji is simply brilliant and well deserving of this honor,” said Soraa CEO Jeff Parker. “Largely as a result of his work, Soraa has been able to push the boundaries of what is possible in high-performance LED lighting.”

To read the Chronicle’s 2012 profile of Soraa, click here.

Nakamusa, Akasaki and Amano will split the $1.1 million prize that comes with the Nobel. They’ll also just an illustrious list of winners that includes Albert Einstein and Pierre and Maria Curie.