The Breton Privateers Hunting Radio Ghosts on the High Seas

In the heart of Brittany, a French region steeped in maritime history and a spirit of fierce independence, a new kind of seafaring adventure is unfolding. It’s not a tale of swashbuckling privateers in search of treasure, but one of brilliant engineers and visionary entrepreneurs hunting for ghosts. These are not spectral apparitions, but “dark vessels”—ships that deliberately vanish from global tracking systems, seeking to operate in the shadows of the law. The company hunting them is Unseenlabs, and its vessels are not sailing the seven seas, but soaring through the silent void of space. Their mission: to make the unseen, seen.

Founded in 2015 in the city of Rennes, the cradle of French telecommunications, Unseenlabs has, in less than a decade, established itself as the world leader in a critical and unique form of space-based intelligence. By capturing and analyzing radio frequency (RF) signals from orbit, they provide a new layer of truth about the activities on our oceans, a truth that is unjammable, un-falsifiable, and indispensable for modern maritime defense and security. This is the story of how two brothers, inspired by their naval heritage, developed a technology many thought impossible and, in doing so, changed the way the world sees its oceans.

An Origin Forged by the Sea

The story of Unseenlabs is intrinsically linked to the sea through its founders, brothers Clément and Jonathan Galic. Their father was a sailor in the French Navy, and from a young age, they were immersed in the maritime world. They understood its vastness, its importance to global commerce, and its inherent vulnerabilities. As they grew, with Clément developing a sharp business acumen and Jonathan cultivating a deep expertise in radio frequencies and signal processing, they turned their attention to a fundamental flaw in maritime surveillance.

For years, the maritime world has relied on the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Mandated by the International Maritime Organization, AIS requires vessels over a certain size to continuously broadcast their identity, position, course, and speed. It was a revolutionary step forward for safety and transparency. But it has a critical weakness: it relies on cooperation. A ship’s crew can easily turn off their AIS transponder, effectively cloaking their vessel and rendering it invisible to conventional tracking systems.

The Galic brothers recognized that those who wished to conduct illicit activities—from illegal fishing and smuggling to sanctions evasion and piracy—were exploiting this vulnerability with impunity. “We started from a simple observation,” explained CEO Clément Galic. “The geolocation of ships by satellite is based on cooperative beacons, AIS… It is very easy for a ship that wants to be discreet to cut this beacon. The ship then becomes ‘dark’.” They decided to create a tool to lift this veil, to provide a source of truth that no one could simply switch off. Their goal was to detect the fundamental, physical reality of a ship’s presence through its RF emissions.

The Single-Satellite Breakthrough

The challenge was immense. The conventional wisdom at the time held that accurately geolocating an RF signal from space required triangulation—receiving the same signal from three or more satellites simultaneously. For a startup, the cost of building, launching, and operating a constellation large enough to achieve this was astronomical and commercially non-viable.

This is where the genius of Unseenlabs, driven by CTO Jonathan Galic’s technical prowess, came to the fore. The brothers and their small, dedicated team developed a proprietary payload and a suite of highly advanced algorithms that could achieve what many thought impossible: geolocating a specific RF signal with high precision from a single satellite. This monostatic approach was their secret sauce, the technological breakthrough that would become the engine of their success.

By focusing on the non-cooperative signals that all ships emit—from their navigation radars to their communication systems—they could build a unique electromagnetic fingerprint for any vessel on the water. Their system doesn’t just see a dot on a map; it characterizes the electronic signature of the emitter, providing invaluable intelligence on the nature of the vessel and its activities. This innovation slashed the barrier to entry, transforming a multi-billion-dollar concept into an achievable business plan.

With their groundbreaking technology in development, the company secured its first round of seed funding in 2017 and began the arduous process of building their first satellite. On August 19, 2019, aboard a Rocket Lab Electron launcher, BRO-1 (Breizh Reconnaissance Orbiter-1, a nod to their Breton roots) was successfully deployed into orbit. The world’s first independent, commercial RF geolocation satellite was operational. The hunt for dark vessels had officially begun.

Building the Constellation, Expanding the View

The success of BRO-1 was immediate and profound. The data it began to collect provided a level of maritime domain awareness that had never been available before. Governments, navies, insurance companies, and environmental groups quickly recognized the value of this new intelligence layer. Demand surged, and Unseenlabs moved quickly to scale up its operations.

A €20 million Series B funding round in 2021, co-led by Supernova Invest and the French government’s Definvest fund, provided the capital to accelerate the deployment of their constellation. What followed was a rapid succession of launches. From 2021 to 2025, the BRO constellation grew from a single pioneering satellite to a fleet of more than a dozen, launched on a regular cadence aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rideshare missions.

Each new satellite increases the constellation’s revisit rate—the frequency with which it can monitor a specific point on Earth. What started as a novel capability to spot a single dark ship has evolved into the ability to monitor fleet patterns, detect abnormal rendezvous at sea, identify ships spoofing their AIS locations, and provide persistent surveillance of strategic maritime chokepoints.

Today, the Unseenlabs constellation provides the most comprehensive and accurate commercial RF detection service on the market. From their operations center in Rennes, they task their satellites, process the complex data, and deliver actionable intelligence to a growing list of international clients. They can tell a client not only where a vessel is, but what kind of radar it’s using, helping to identify the type and class of the ship.

A Critical Tool for Defense and National Security

While Unseenlabs serves a diverse range of commercial clients, its impact on the defense and intelligence sectors has been particularly significant. In an era of renewed great power competition, understanding maritime movements is fundamental to national security.

The Unseenlabs dataset provides defense clients with several key advantages:

• Detecting Sanctions Evasion: When a nation attempts to evade international sanctions, dark vessels are a primary tool for illicit ship-to-ship transfers of oil and other goods. Unseenlabs can pinpoint these meetings in the middle of the ocean, providing concrete evidence of illegal activity.
• Combating Illegal Fishing (IUU): Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing depletes fish stocks, destroys marine ecosystems, and costs the global economy billions of dollars. Fishing fleets often switch off their AIS to plunder protected waters. Unseenlabs can unmask these fleets, allowing national authorities to intercept them.
• Countering Smuggling and Piracy: From drug trafficking to weapons smuggling, illicit actors depend on the anonymity of the open ocean. By tracking dark vessels, Unseenlabs provides law enforcement and naval forces with the intelligence needed to disrupt these criminal networks.

The value of this capability has been recognized by major defense players around the world. In a significant validation of their technology, the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) signed a multi-year contract with Unseenlabs in 2024 to provide space-based RF geolocation services. The Royal New Zealand Air Force will use the data to support a wide range of security missions, including monitoring for sanctions-breaking and combating illegal fishing in their vast maritime domain.

“Unseenlabs will provide us with a new, unclassified commercial data source that will assist in building our understanding of maritime activity in our areas of interest,” said Tony Davies, the Capability Branch Chief of the NZDF. This partnership demonstrates the trust that sophisticated defense organizations are placing in the data provided by the Breton startup.

A Vision for the Future

Having firmly established its global leadership, Unseenlabs is not resting on its laurels. The company raised an impressive €85 million in a Series C funding round in early 2025, led by Supernova Invest, Uninvest, and new strategic investor GMV, a Spanish aerospace and defense giant. This capital infusion is fueling the continued expansion of the BRO constellation and the development of new data products and services.

The vision is clear: to offer an ever-more persistent and detailed picture of maritime activity. As the constellation grows, the time between satellite passes will shrink, moving closer to near-real-time global coverage. This will enable even more advanced applications, such as tracking a specific vessel of interest dynamically as it transits across an ocean basin.

From their headquarters in Rennes, a city that marries deep history with high technology, the Galic brothers and their team of over 80 employees continue their mission. They have taken a problem rooted in the ancient traditions of the sea and solved it with the cutting-edge tools of the space age. They have proven that even in the vastness of the ocean, there are no shadows deep enough to hide from a persistent eye in the sky. Unseenlabs is more than a satellite company; it is the purveyor of a new kind of truth, a critical guardian in the complex and often dangerous maritime world. The ghosts of the high seas now have a hunter, and its name is Unseenlabs.