Drake Star Partners Advises Photonics Solutions Provider Cailabs On Its Fundraising Led By Safran Corporate Ventures And Existing Investors Innovacom, And Starquest Capital

Safran led a €5m fundraising, subscribed by Safran Corporate Ventures and the current shareholders. This fundraising will support CAILabs’ industrial and commercial development along with its international expansion.

Jean-François Morizur, CEO & co-founder of CAILabs, commented: “CAILabs has grown by 160% in 2016 and experiences a flourishing year in 2017 in both local area networks deployments and its growing number of industrial partnerships outside of telecommunications. CAILabs’ project with Safran, which consists of a new cabling architecture for the next generation of airplanes will be completed in 2017 as well.”

CAILabs had already raised €3.5m from specialist funds such as Innovacom and Starquest as well as business angels. Sandrine Vergnory-Mion, Principal at Drake Star Partners, said: “This €5m investment is a major step forward to support CAILabs’ objective to spread its unique technology worldwide.”

Francis Lorentz, Chairman at Drake Star Partners France, added: “Drake Star Partners is very proud of its involvement in the private placement by a major French aerospace player into a growth company whose disruptive innovation based on quantum optics can be leveraged in aeronautics as well as the industrial and telecommunication markets. This operation is a great example of the complementarity between the power of major corporations and the agility of growth companies.”

Drake Star Partners team: Albert-Louis Bilger.

About CAILabs

Founded in June 2013, as a Kastler Brossel lab spin-off, CAILabs has developed a disruptive light shaping technology. Since 2014, CAILabs commercializes innovative solutions allowing to increase optical fibers’ bandwidth. In 2015, Japanese operator KDDI has set a new optical fiber bandwidth world record thanks to CAILabs technology. Over 2016, the LAN optical fiber solution AROONA has won multiple innovation prizes, including Huawei Digital-In-Pulse prize.

For more information, please visit www.cailabs.com

About Safran Corporate Ventures

Safran Corporate Ventures is Safran’s corporate investment arm, aimed at financing startups or innovative SMEs. Since its foundation in April 2015, it has contributed to the funding of seven disruptive companies, operating in Safran’s areas of expertise such as Embedded Systems, Materials, New Services or New Flying Platforms.

For more information, please visit www.safran-group.com

About Innovacom

Pioneer of innovative capital in France, Innovacom has invested c. €1bn since 1998 to support hundreds of startups in the digital field.

Recognized as a specialist of groundbreaking technology projects, Innovacom contributed to dozens of IPOs, and around 150 industrial divestitures including some of the most emblematic French innovation success stories such as Business Objects, Inventel, Soitec, Aufeminin.com, and Digitick. Its latest successes are related to various fields like videogames (Owlient), medical imagery (Olea Medical) or lately smartphones components with Heptagon.

Through its seed and innovation funds, Innovacom 6 and Technocom 2, the company manages a portfolio of companies such as 21Net, AirLynx, Aryballe Technologies, CAILabs, Cozy Cloud, Exagan, Feeligreen, G2mobility, Intersec, IS2T/MicroEJ, I-Ten, Matrixx Software, Predicsis or Robart.

Innovacom is an independent investment capital company certified by the AMF.

For more information, please visit www.innovacom.com

About Starquest Capital

Starquest is a capital investment structure dedicated to industrial innovation. It supports more than 100 startups, putting stress on efficient energy supply, cyber security and high-value added industrial components. Since 2008, the core ethos of Starquest has remained the same: Human before Excel, a rigorous strategic analysis before business plans. Starquest has become one of the major venture capital players in France, accomplishing more than 15 operations per year.

For more information, please visit www.starquest-capital.com