CAILabs (Rennes, France), a maker of optical beam shaping products, has raised venture funding of €5 million in a round led by Safran Corporate Ventures, with participation by Innovacom and Starquest Capital. This fundraising will allow the company to strengthen its industrial and commercial development in both telecommunications and industrial applications. The company plans to hire 11 employees in 2017, to help sustain the 160% growth it experienced in 2016.
Founded in 2013, CAILabs is a spin-off of the Kastler Brossel Laboratory (Paris), which focuses on the fundamental physics of quantum systems. It has developed spatial multiplexing products based on its multi-plane light conversion technology, which can manage the shape of light signals transmitted in an optical fiber to increase performance in both telecommunications and local area networks, with sales to Huawei, IBM, Nokia, and KDDI, and installations in factories, companies, universities, and hospitals.
Beyond telecommunications, CAILabs says it has integration partnerships with key industrial players in lithography, additive manufacturing, and laser welding. JeanFrançois Morizur, CEO and co-founder of CAILabs, says, “2017 also marks the realization of a project that we started with Safran Electrical & Power in 2015 regarding a new architecture of aeronautic optical cabling”.
Source: CAILabs