LabLabee, a Lyon-based hands-on labs platform for Telco Cloud providers, has received €1.4M in a pre-seed round led by Brighteye Ventures (who also invested in Skiller Whale and Twenix), with participation from Accel Capital, Kima Ventures, and e& capital, the business pillar of e&.
Besides, many notable business angels, including Docker’s co-founder, Sebastien Pahl; Executive Telco Cloud Director at Nokia, Anne Tavares; Cisco Global Service Provider Innovation Lead, Patrice Nivaggioli; and Propeller’s CEO, Tambi Jalouqa; as well as multiple friendly angels from Telco, Investment, and IT, also participated.
How will the funding be used?
The company will use the funds to improve the learner’s experience, boost the speed and delivery of its platform, and develop more labs for advanced technologies such as IoT, Edge Computing, and Network Slicing.
Further, the company plans to expand its team, opening up more creative ideas and smarter solutions to current problems.
“I believe that the future of telco networks will be open, elastic, and scalable. And with LabLabee, we are preparing the industry for this transformation through an immersive virtual hands-on platform to make Telco Cloud technologies like 5G or OpenRAN accessible same as we have with web technologies in terms of delay, procedure, and flexibility,” says Samir Tahraoui, LabLabee’s co-founder and CEO about their vision.
Telco operators’ upskilling platform
Founded by Samir Tahraoui and Mahfoud Sidi Ali Mebarek, LabLabee is an upskilling platform that allows telco operators, industrial companies, and training centers to insert practice into their training while cutting the costs of the process.
By providing hardware-free Telco cloud labs, the French company enables students to improve their learning experience and maximise its results, getting them ready for the industry’s transition to the cloud.
Last year, the company worked with eight official partners. Out of it, two are Setelia and TIP Academy, and these partnerships help to provide customers with the labs required to upskill teams efficiently. In addition, the platform is being used by many prominent enterprises and schools, including Orange France, Togocom, and INSA Lyon.
Currently, the French company has 13 labs and 156 challenges in its catalogue for Telco cloud technologies, including 5G, OpenRAN, SDN, and Openstack.
“We believe in investing in the ideas that will progress a bright digital future by acquiring, growing, and supporting visionary tech businesses. LabLabee has the potential to bring sweeping changes in the areas of innovation and digital disruption. In line with our ambitions of digitally empowering societies across the world, we stay committed to supporting such startups who are capable of transforming their novel ideas into the big businesses of tomorrow,” says Kushal Shah, Head of Corporate Venture Capital, e& capital.
David Guérin, Principal at Brighteye, says, “The telco cloud market is under massive transformation, yet industry training has not kept pace. We truly believe in the founders’ ability to transform this overlooked market by helping telco engineers to acquire new skills, upskill and/or reskill in a more efficient, cost-effective, and engaging way.”
