Emily Brooke
British inventor and entrepreneur
Emily Sophie Hastings Brooke MBE (born November 1985) is a British inventor, industrial designer and entrepreneur known for having developed the Beryl (formerly Blaze) Laserlights used for Santander Cycles (the London bike rental scheme).
Early life and education
Brooke attended Royal High School, Bath until 2003. She began a course in physics at the University of Oxford but abandoned it to instead study product design in Brighton.
Beryl Laserlights
Beryl laserlights are bicycle lights which project an image of a bicycle onto the road ahead of the rider, to improve safety by alerting other users when the bicycle is in their blind spot or round a corner.
Brooke developed the laser as part of a project in her final year at the University of Brighton and was entered into an entrepreneurship programme in Boston (funded by Santander). After graduating in 2011 she developed the project further by listing the concept on Kickstarter, gaining attention from Transport for London as well as securing funding from the family of Richard Branson. Her firm, Blaze, was then successful in securing support from Santander who now use the lights on all of the bikes within the Santander Cycles scheme. In May 2018, following a lawsuit from a US registered company also with the name Blaze, Brooke changed her company name to Beryl.
She was appointed MBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours; "For Services to the Economy and Transport".
Her company, Beryl, sells the "Laserlight" and a range of other cycle lights, and also operates dockless cycle sharing schemes in several cities around the UK.
Revent
In 2021, Brooke was one of the founding partners of Revent, an early-stage venture capital fund aiming to support "Founders who share our belief that the greatest and most important opportunity is ...
“Emily Brooke” enters the record as british inventor and entrepreneur. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Emily, Brooke and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q41697051. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2003, 2011 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emily Brooke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.