BlueYard leads ZeroPhase’s €5.8M seed

Resilient communication for unmanned defense systems, built and battle-tested in Ukraine

We first met ZeroPhase CTO Benjamin when he was still a professor. He was building software-defined radios between lectures to send to the frontlines in Ukraine — where he saw a gap in radio frequency capabilities. With no budget and no contacts, he shipped 500 radios capable of operating under intense battlefield pressure.

We introduced Benjamin to Florian — now ZeroPhase’s CEO — who we’d known from his time at Blickfeld. Florian brought the operational muscle to scale Benjamin’s technical vision into a category-defining company.

Today, we’re proud to announce that BlueYard is leading ZeroPhase’s €5.8M seed round.

Today, unmanned systems are everywhere — flying and sailing into places humans can’t or shouldn’t go. These systems operate semi-autonomously and feed data to one another in real time. In Ukraine alone, tens of thousands of drones are active at any given moment, accounting for roughly 70% of strikes on personnel and equipment.

But these systems depend on one fragile layer: communication. A jammed signal, a congested network, a burst of interference can bring an entire mission offline. As defense grows more distributed and autonomous, maintaining reliable links under pressure is only becoming more urgent. Connectivity is the new battleground.

That’s where ZeroPhase comes in. The Munich-based team builds and deploys software-defined data links that keep unmanned defense systems connected when it matters most. Their tech is already powering thousands of missions in Ukraine, keeping teams connected even under enormous operational stress.

At BlueYard, we’ve spent years backing founders rebuilding the underlying systems — the rails the world runs on — from compute to biology to defense. Communication is one of these foundational systems.

We’re excited to be backing Benjamin, Florian and the team on this important mission.

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