Networking Training Startup Bags $3.4 Million Seed Round: Exclusive

'We saw the paradigm shift happening in telecom,' LabLabee CEO Samir Tahraoui tells CRN in an interview.

LabLabee, a startup that provides a platform for training workers at solution providers and vendors in the latest technology for networking, telecommunications and 5G use cases, has raised a $3.4 million seed round of funding as it prepares to take on the U.S. market.

The France-based vendor bills its training as immersive, affordable and essential at a time when demand for 5G, internet of things and cloud computing surge and transform the telecom industry. Its more focused nature on telco technologies differentiates it from larger training platform providers, Samir Tahraoui, LabLabee co-founder and CEO, told CRN in an interview.

“We saw the paradigm shift happening in telecom, moving to cloud native,” he said. “And a lot of engineers, technicians, they need upskilling and reskilling because it's not like moving from 3G to 4G. 5G is a new ecosystem.”

LabLabee Funding Round

In a June report, International Data Corp. (IDC) said that it expects worldwide sales for telecom and network application programming interfaces (APIs) to hit $6.7 billion in 2028, up from $700 million in 2023, as the industry sees a rise in communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS), cloud and other digital platform players.

Phil Walker, CEO of Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based solution provider Network Solutions Provider, told CRN in an interview that his customers have been investing in upgrades to network security.

“People are starting to realize that even though their endpoints are protected, that their network visibility outside of the firewall is limited,” Walker said. “And when you factor cloud in there–that they have less control over how people are accessing their data and accessing the company because of work from home.”

Reach Capital led the funding round. Classera, Brighteye Ventures, e& capital, Cedric Sellin and Mohammed Husamaddin, vice president of business development at Naseej, participated in the round.

Growing In The US

LabLabee plans to leverage the funding for gaining a leadership position in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and accelerating growth in the U.S. The vendor wants to grow its headcount and its partnerships with the leading cloud providers and add hands-on training labs for VMware and other vendors.

“We combine everything – technology from the vendors, theory from the experts, the trainers and the immersive way to do it, like Coursera and Udemy, but adding some labs,” he said. “We combine everything in one platform.”

Partners so far include Juniper, Wind River and Amarisoft. The company has about 30 employees and offers class graduates certifications, the CEO said. LabLabee views SIs as a go-to-market (GTM) route as well as potential customer base.

“When they provide professional services to their customers, they include, every time, training and education and tools they can help their customers to be satisfied because it's part of their customer success journey,” he said.

LabLabee’s platform offers training in areas including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), Kubernetes, OpenStack and other areas important to telco and cloud. LabLabee works with telco operators, vendors, SIs, universities and other organizations.

Customers can also customize learning paths for learners based on digital transformation initiatives, Tahraoui said. “If they are going to cloud native, they can do cloud native. If they are going to 5G private, they can have 5G private.”

In an example of a LabLabee course, the vendor offers a four-day, 16-hour OpenStack class with hands-on labs for 1,000 euros (about $1,100).

The vendor is at work on an end-to-end sandbox learning environment for practicing and testing and adding lessons on edge computing, telco artificial intelligence (AI) and security.

Roots In The Channel

Tahraoui (pictured above) started LabLabee after years of experience in telco with solution providers and vendors. He started LabLabee in 2021 after leaving Mavenir with the title of technical lead, according to his LinkedIn account.

His resume includes about three years with Orange, leaving in 2020 with the title of telco core engineer. With Orange, he worked “on multiple Telco and Automation projects with different providers” including Nokia, Atos, Oracle, Mavenir and Red Hat, according to his LinkedIn account. Tahraoui spent about a year with Capgemini–No.4 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–as a telco cloud consultant, leaving in 2017.

His time in telco taught Tahraoui how difficult training can be due to the industry’s expensive hardware and the need to schedule hands-on labs with vendors, and vendors are not necessarily the best at education, he said.

“Most of the telcos, they are still working with this model,” he said. “The problem of this model is (it is) rigid.”

Private 5G network deployments by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nestle, Aramco and more illustrate the growing demand for telco, Tahraoui said. Transportation, oil and gas and defense industry organizations are also deploying private networks.

And as artificial intelligence continues to spread throughout a variety of technological areas, AI in telco is only in its early days and will likely require workers to update their skills. Tahraoui doesn’t see AI replacing humans in telco and networking, he said.

“It's difficult to train AI people (for) telecom,” he said. “The only way to do it is to continue to work with your telecom engineers, telecom workforce, and help them to understand AI. And it's why skills and upskilling is very important.”