Lyon: LabLabee, the world’s first hands-on labs platform for Telco Cloud, has received €1.4M in a pre-seed round to support its long-term mission of democratising Telco Cloud by making training for those technologies more interactive, accessible, and affordable for everyone.

The funding comes from major technology conglomerates and large global Edtech funders. The round was led by Brighteye Ventures, one of the biggest Edtech VC funds in Europe, followed by Accel Capital, Kima Ventures, and e& capital, the investment pillar of e& (formerly known as Etisalat Group).

Many notable business angels also participated in this round, such as 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 coming from Telco, Investment, and IT.

“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.” said Kushal Shah, Head of Corporate Venture Capital, e& capital.

Co-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.

David Guérin, Principal at Brighteye, said: "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."

By providing accessible, hardware-free Telco cloud labs, LabLabee enables students to improve their learning experience and maximize its results, getting them ready for the industry’s transition to the cloud.

“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 with the purpose of making Telco Cloud technologies like 5G or OpenRAN accessible same as we have with web technologies in terms of delay, procedure, and flexibility,” said Samir Tahraoui, LabLabee’s co-founder and CEO about their vision.

Over the past year, the startup has worked with eight worldwide official partners. Two of its partners 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.

LabLabee now has 13 labs and a total of 156 challenges in its catalogue for Telco cloud technologies including 5G, OpenRAN, SDN, and Openstack. With the fresh capital raised, the company will be able 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.

“This round is a good milestone for us to continue designing and developing new lab technologies for our current and future customers.” -Samir Tahraoui.

Following this round, LabLabee is planning to expand its team as a part of the company’s goal to drive more innovation, opening up for more creative ideas and smarter solutions to current problems.