Cailabs is one of those French “deeptech” startups that actually has real tech, not just a slick deck. They’re in the optical comms business, which in plain terms means building ground stations and terminals to shoot lasers at satellites and hope clouds don’t ruin the party. Their secret sauce is something called multi-plane light conversion, which sounds like a Hogwarts spell but is basically a clever way of making laser beams less useless when they hit the atmosphere.
The company started in telecom optics but smelled the money drifting into space and defense. Now they’re pitching optical ground stations that can pull down data at 10+ Gbps, which is impressive until you remember the bottleneck is still weather. They just raised €57 million from the European Investment Bank and others to crank out up to 50 ground stations a year by 2027, which is either bold or delusional depending on whether they’ve actually tried running OGS hardware in, say, Brittany in November.
SES has been testing their kit, which is a decent validation since SES doesn’t exactly hand out contracts as charity. They’re also hitching rides on Exotrail’s Spacevan to demo terminals in orbit—because nothing screams “serious supplier” like paying someone else to take your widget up for a test spin.
The strategic bet here is obvious: spectrum is a mess, governments love “secure, unjammable” buzzwords, and laser links look sexy on PowerPoint. But physics is still physics. Clouds don’t care about your Series C, and you’ll still need RF fallback unless you’re comfortable with data blackouts every time the weather turns ugly.
Cailabs could carve out a real role as Europe’s go-to OGS supplier, especially since Brussels is desperate for any homegrown capability that doesn’t scream “bought from California.” But they’re not killing RF, they’re not building the future backbone of global internet, and they’re not immune to the boring reality that optical is a complement, not a replacement. If they can industrialize without tripping over cost and logistics, they’ll be a respectable part of the satcom supply chain instead of another footnote in the “laser hype” scrapbook.