Algerian edtech company, LabLabee closes $3.4M seed to expand its offerings and accelerate 5G, cloud, and AI adoption for telcos and industries.
Reach Capital led the funding round with support from Classera, while existing investors, Brighteye Ventures and e& capital, participated. Business angels such as Cedric Sellin (investor and advisor in tech) and Mohammed Husamaddin (VP of business development at Naseej) also joined the funding round.
The edtech plans to establish a leadership position in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) market, accelerating their expansion into the US market through hyper scalers partners such as AWS, Azure and GCP, and expanding their offerings with new hands-on training labs including VMware, Redhat and Windriver.
LabLabee plans to improve the learning experience with immersive features, including a sandbox learning environment for users to learn, practice, and test on one platform. They will also expand their course catalogue with new topics like the fourth industrial revolution (industry 4.0), telco Security, telco AI, and edge computing.
Furthermore, the startup will expand its international team by hiring engineering, sales, and customer support experts to better serve its growing user base.
Co-founded by Samir Tahraoui and Mahfoud Sidi Ali Mebarek in 2021, LabLabee provides hands-on learning experiences in future network technologies with a major focus on cutting-edge technologies in telco, telco cloud, enterprise, industry 4.0, and networking.
The company works with telecom operators, vendors, industrial companies, software firms, system integrators, universities, and many others to integrate hands-on practical exercises into their training programs at a reduced cost.
What LabLabee offers to its users
A recent survey shows the biggest obstacle to cloud-native adoption for telecom operators is a lack of internal skills. LabLabee says it addresses this by offering affordable, on-demand labs in technologies like 5G, IMS, OpenStack, GitOps, CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes, helping learners gain expertise and apply these skills in their work.
General Partner and Co-Founder at Reach Capital, Esteban Sosnik, noted that LabLabee was created due to Samir’s frustrations in the telecom industry, both from his experience as an engineer and a trainer.
“He, Mahfoud and the team bring the ideal blend of deep technical experience and industry knowledge to help workers upskill, reskill and thrive in this critical sector. We could not be more excited to back LabLabee,” he added.
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Tahraoui explained that future networks are increasingly open and constantly adapting to business needs with telcos, systems integrators, and industrial engineers facing the challenge of learning new technologies, and architectures, and maintaining a wide range of skills.
However, he highlighted that “LabLabee’s benefit is to make learning easier, faster and field-ready.”
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