Walk into any airport, hotel lobby, retail chain, or fast-food restaurant today and the screens on the walls are probably running half a dozen different operating systems, from five different manufacturers, controlled by software that was never designed to talk to any of them. The industry's dirty secret is that making a screen show the right content at the right time - reliably, remotely, across hundreds of locations - is an engineering nightmare that most companies quietly absorb into their cost of doing business.
Stan Richter looked at that mess and saw a market.
In 2016, Richter and his co-founders Lukas Danek and Michael Zabka were in Prague, building an internal tool to manage large heterogeneous display networks. The tool worked. The problem it solved, they quickly realized, was not unique to them - every content management system in the digital signage space faced the same headache: new SoC chips, new operating systems, new hardware, every month, and zero standardization. A Samsung Tizen display speaks differently than an LG webOS device, which speaks differently than a BrightSign player, which speaks differently than a Chromebox. A CMS company wanting to support all of them effectively needed to hire 15 engineers and never stop.
signageOS became the answer: a single unified API that sits between CMS platforms and hardware, absorbing that complexity once, for everyone. As Richter puts it, the company "boosts the team of each CMS by 15 great engineers that are professionals in digital signage software." The business model is as elegant as the product - white-label subscription, sold to software companies, invisible to end users. CMS partners look more capable. signageOS scales its engineering investment across the entire industry.
The company officially launched in 2018. Within a single month, it had signed 30 non-disclosure agreements with software firms. Richter spent years doing what every startup CEO must: logging serious air miles, attending ISE in Amsterdam, DSE in Las Vegas, pitching the vision that a pure infrastructure play - explicitly not a CMS - could become the de facto standard for how the industry's software talks to its hardware.
It worked. Reflex Capital led a $2M funding round in 2020 - part of $4.2M raised total - with Ondrej Fryc, Reflex's founder, citing the team itself as the primary reason for investment. By 2024, signageOS was well-established enough to acquire SignageLab, one of its own power-user partners, folding expert services capabilities into its growing platform. In February 2025, Stan Richter personally won the Outstanding Individual Gold Award at the Global Digital Signage Awards in Barcelona - the prize going not just to the company but to the person who put in the time, the travel, and the relentless partnership-building required to turn a middleware layer into an industry standard.
Then, at ISE 2026, Richter unveiled something that changed the conversation entirely.
Supra is an edge-based, encrypted streaming platform built on a proprietary, patent-pending protocol. Instead of relying on a device's native SoC browser or local media player - both of which are limited by the hardware's age and specifications - Supra renders content on a local edge server and streams it, fully encrypted, to any connected display, regardless of operating system, chipset, or CMS. The result: existing hardware that would otherwise be replaced can keep working, performing as if it were new. Richter's pitch is direct: Supra extends the usable life of brownfield hardware by two to five years. It makes the SoC chip largely irrelevant. And it runs on standard Linux servers - no proprietary boxes required.
Before Supra, signageOS was the best way to talk to the hardware you had. After Supra, signageOS becomes the reason you don't need to replace it. The company remains a pure software provider, the invisible infrastructure layer - the plumber behind the wall that nobody sees, but everyone depends on.
Richter completed a PhD in International Economic Relations at the Prague University of Economics and Business in 2018 - the same year signageOS publicly launched. He was working at 3M, then at PwC, before finding his way through the xPORT VSE Business Accelerator and into building a company. His background is more analyst than engineer, more strategist than coder. The company was described from the start as "created by developers for developers" - and it shows in the product. But the commercial architecture of signageOS - the white-label model, the partner-first approach, the refusal to compete with its own customers by building a CMS - reflects someone who thought carefully about where value accumulates in fragmented industries. That's a consulting instinct applied to infrastructure.
The company runs dual headquarters: San Francisco for US operations, Prague for global engineering. Richter splits his time between them. He is known in the industry for being the person who shows up - at every trade show, every partner meeting, every opportunity to explain why the fragmentation that everyone else learned to live with was actually a solvable problem. That consistency, compounded over eight years, is what turned a Prague startup into the unification layer for a global industry.