You know what sucks? When you’re flying a drone against Russian targets somewhere deep on the frontline and—suddenly—your comms line goes dark. It’s an experience that will be all too familiar to our Ukrainian military readers, and one that startup Zerophase is trying to make way less common.
Late last week, the German data link company announced that it’s raised a €5.8M ($6.8M) seed round led by Blue Yard Capital, with participation from “multiple” angel investors. CEO and co-founder Florian Petit told Tectonic that his team will use the funding to hone their product, expand production, and—eventually—expand into new tech in the EW space.
“We see ourselves as very well positioned to go very broadly into the electronic warfare segment,” he said.
EW really is the cool hip thing these days, isn’t it?
Ground zero: Zerophase is one of those nuts-and-bolts kind of defense tech startups that is building super critical tech, but that you might not have heard of. The company was founded in Germany four years ago, Petit said, mostly in response to the connectivity issues they saw on the battlefield in Ukraine.
“We understood once the invasion into Ukraine happened that there is a big need for data links for communicating from the drone to a ground station—especially video information,” he said.
The team reached out to frontline units and technical support teams in Ukraine to try and understand what they needed. “[We wanted to understand] the exact mission profiles, what success looks like for them, and what they need from a connectivity system to make that success happen,” Petit added.
The answer? A data link that’s about the size of a pack of cards, Petit said. The communication system “dynamically adapt[s] to jamming, interference, and signal degradation,” according to the company, and can ensure comms stay up even in the most EW-heavy and jammed environments.
- Zerophase’s data link can transmit video, telemetry, and command and control data—everything you need to control a drone or a drone swarm.
- Petit said the system is modular and upgradeable, depending on the size of the drone—you can switch out the amplifiers depending on how strong you want the data link to be, and how much room you have.
- Petit couldn’t tell us an exact price per unit, but says it’s in the “low four digits.”
- He told us they’ve deployed about 1,000 units in Ukraine and flown about 10,000 missions.
“Our technology proof points are there— it’s very hardened against jamming,” he said. “What I can assure you is that there are several drone units in Ukraine [that] are daily using our stuff.”
And it sounds like investors like what they’re seeing.
“At BlueYard, we seek technologies that let free societies build toward human flourishing while holding the line against oblivion,” Michael Wax, GP at BlueYard Capital, told Tectonic. “By enabling trusted communication in the most demanding conditions, ZeroPhase’s systems—already tested in Ukraine—are a quiet but critical part of that balance.”
Buy it up: And their customers aren’t just Ukrainian military units—Petit said that they’re working with other German drone companies to integrate the data link on their kit.
“There are a few very big ones, and we have roughly talked to 2/3 of the [German] market to integrate our stuff,” he said.
Plus, they aren’t stopping at data links for drones. “There’s a wide spectrum of RF warfare [and] electronic warfare going on,” he said. “We are now making sure that even under these heavy electronic warfare circumstances, we can transmit. But we are also looking into various different areas, for example, detecting [EW] or also doing [jamming] ourselves.”