Long a pillar of French telecoms, Rennes is preparing to regain a central place in this industry. No longer thanks to copper or fiber, but via light beams from space. It is Cailabs (170 employees, confidential turnover), the Rennes deeptech that local elected officials readily describe as a “nugget”, which is rekindling this technological flame: the company is preparing to provide the metropolis with a factory dedicated to “optical ground stations”, this equipment capable of ensuring ultra-fast laser links between satellites and the Earth.
20 million euros investment
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The industrial project will be large-scale: with a building of nearly 10,000 square meters which will be located on a former Eureden site, rue de la Roberdière. Less than 1 kilometer from its 3,500 square meter head office located in the Chevrons business park west of Rennes. Called “Factory 27”, the factory will see the light of day in the second half of the year 2027, against an investment of 20 million euros. It will be carried out by Faubourg Promotion, the engineering division of the Parisian group Idec, which will also be the owner.
Imagined on two levels, the tool will symbolize the vertical factory of tomorrow, low in land consumption. “With the Cailabs project, Faubourg Promotion is driving a new generation of corporate real estate, based on the intelligent verticalization of land and the decarbonization of activities,” explains Chazli Baalbaki, deputy general director at Faubourg Promotion.
The project constitutes an early Christmas present for an entire region. Cailabs plans to create around a hundred new jobs behind its factory, with an increase of up to 300 employees in the long term. A phase of hiring production operators, technicians and logisticians will start in 2026.
“Economic impact lever”
The Cailabs factory project embodies the renewal of French industry called for by President Macron to regain value. As such, it is a winner of the France 2030 plan. The amounts collected by the State are kept confidential. “More than an industrial investment, it is a lever of economic, technological and strategic impact, at the crossroads of deeptech and space,” explains the Rennes-based company in a press release. It positions Cailabs as a key player in optical communications in NewSpace (space), while consolidating our territorial roots in Rennes.”
From the manufacture of optical cables to that of optical ground stations
Everything has happened very quickly for Cailabs in recent years, particularly when it was discovered, in 2017, that optical fiber could pass through the atmosphere. “At that moment, we started to enrich our solutions,” relates Jean-François Morizur, founding CEO of Cailabs. “At the beginning, we sold optical cables and electronics and fiber optic solutions for laboratories. Then modules that allow data to be transmitted and sent. And at the end, from 2021, we said to ourselves: we are doing the entire station alone. Among other things, because no one was really doing it seriously. Today, we are the leader in this market…” The Cailabs optical ground station in this case is a system which allows data to be received and sent with satellites using a very precise laser beam. In simplified terms, it is a circular dome 4 m in diameter which houses a telescope and optical equipment.
Objective: 50 stations per year
In its new factory, Cailabs will be able to produce fifty stations per year by 2028, compared to around ten officially under contract today. The 39-year-old young boss from Rennes – a graduate of Normale Sup (physics promotion) and holder of two doctorates in quantum optics – is not getting excited, however. “Our objective is not to produce 50 stations per year because that would be a market demand. 50 is the maximum capacity of the building if we push it to the maximum. We can do 20, 30, maybe 40, but we must not sacrifice R&D which is what allows us to stay ahead…” Still. The marketing of products from its current production sites doubles every year.
Jean-François Morizur, founding CEO of Cailabs — Photo: Baptiste Coupin
“If we reach 20 or 30 stations per year, we will ask ourselves the question of a second building…” A land reserve would already be planned for the Breton Elon Musk.
Data transported very quickly
For Cailabs, the ground station activity really starts in 2021 with Keraunos, a program carried out for the Defense Innovation Agency (AID). Its demonstration in the summer of 2024 constitutes a world first: a high-speed optical link between a nanosatellite in low orbit and a commercial station on Earth. The transmission of data without latency, at the speed of light, demonstrated the benefits of Cailabs technology, which constitutes a profound break with transmissions previously carried out by radio.
“SAR systems (radars on board satellites, editor’s note) produce masses of data. Recovering them in a few minutes, and no longer in hours, completely changes operational use,” underlines Jean-François Morizur. Since the Keraunos program, the Cailabs product has become standardized. Today, optical ground stations represent more than 80% of the company’s turnover, whose customers include States, embassies, NGOs, telecom operators, etc. The European and American markets are two vast areas of conquest. In the United States, the Breton company recently set up its US subsidiary in the state of Virginia to respond to “significant expansion in the American market”.
A sovereign technology at the service of European Defense
The CEO of Cailabs remains discreet on the company’s revenues, but the momentum is clearly on the rise: each station is trading “in the single digits to seven zeros.” Another strong signal is the participation of the European Investment Bank and the Defense Innovation Fund in the fundraising of 57 million euros completed at the start of the 2025 school year. Support which confirms the highly strategic nature of the Rennes scale-up, both for France and for Europe.
In a tense geopolitical context, where information superiority becomes a decisive advantage, mastering fast and secure satellite telecommunications constitutes a major challenge. Cailabs technology is therefore at the heart of the European defense system of tomorrow.
