Company History

Daktronics was founded in 1968 by Drs. Aelred Kurtenbach and Duane Sander, professors of electrical engineering at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD, USA. The company began with the design and manufacture of electronic voting systems for state legislatures. In 1971, Daktronics developed the patented Matside® wrestling scoreboard, which was the first product in the company's growing and evolving line of "catalog" scoreboards.

The company branched out into the design and manufacture of large custom scoreboards and computer-programmable displays. Daktronics now offers the most complete line of scoreboards and display products of any company in the world, including long-lasting light emitting diode (LED)-based systems. Today a majority of the company's display products utilize LEDs because of the low power requirements and high reliability of the technology.

Tens of thousands of Daktronics scoreboards and display systems communicate with millions of people every day, in nearly 100 countries on six continents around the world. If you watch sports on television, including the winter or summer Olympics; professional or college football, basketball, baseball, and hockey; and PGA and Senior PGA TOUR golf tournaments, you've probably seen our scoreboards in the background keeping track of the action. Your local bank or shopping center may have one of our electronic displays to help communicate with customers. Your state or national legislature probably uses an electronic voting and display system developed by Daktronics to assist in the organization and dissemination of information for members, media, and the public. Travelers at airports, in cars, and in train and bus terminals count on Daktronics displays for information to help them get where they are going.

Since its beginnings in 1968, Daktronics has grown from a small company operating out of a garage to a world leader in the display industry. The company employs more than 2,300 people working under more than 500,000 square feet of its manufacturing and office facilities. In 1994, Daktronics, Inc. became a publicly traded company, offering shares under the symbol DAKT on the NASDAQ National Market system.