French optical startup CAILabs has raised €5 million ($5.7 million) to strengthen its industrial and commercial development. The funding was led by Safran Corporate Ventures with the participation of Innovacom and Starquest Capital. "Indeed, this fundraising will enable the company to acquire resources, in particular human resources, to move from a seed phase to a deployment phase," said Jérôme Lecoeur, an associate at Innovacom. “But beyond that, it demonstrates the ability of CAILabs’ technology to establish itself over time in various fields beyond telecoms.” CAILabs has developed a spatial multiplexing technology that manages the shape of light signals transmitted in an optical fiber to increase performance for networks. CAILabs offers a data flow speed up to 400× faster without having to change the fiber. Beyond telecommunications, CAILabs has realized integration partnerships with key industrials actors in lithography, additive manufacturing and laser welding. “These collaborations help maximize the impact of CAILabs innovative technology,” said Jean-François Morizur, CEO and co-founder of CAILabs. “2017 also marks the realization of the project that we started with Safran Electrical & Power back in 2015 regarding a new architecture of aeronautic optical cabling.” A spin-off of the Kastler Brossel Laboratory, CAILabs is a developer of innovative technologies for the processing of light beams.