ENDER TECH · THE TEAM
MISSION-DRIVEN
BUILDERS.
Born from a DIU's Hacking 4 Defense (H4D) EW training problem. Built by founders who understand both the warfighter mission and the software-native future of defense.
Meet the Founders
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PLATFORM
CEO & CO-FOUNDER
ZACK ZUNIGA
Zack didn't set out to build a defense company. He set out to understand how things work at the physical level — light, signal, spectrum — and kept following that thread until it led somewhere unexpected.
At UCF, he pursued two engineering degrees simultaneously: Electrical Engineering and Photonic Science. While most students were optimizing for grades, he was competing in NASA's BIG Ideas Challenge, building a VTOL delivery system that placed 1st regionally and 4th internationally in high school, and getting elected to the UCF Office of the President's Leadership Council — representing the College of Engineering and CREOL directly to senior leadership and major donors. He was nominated for the Order of Pegasus, UCF's highest honor across 68,000 students, and featured as a student success story during UCF's historic Preeminence designation campaign.
When Valencia College's precision optics program lost its lead instructor, they handed it to a 20-year-old engineering student. His first cohort: 11 students, 11 certifications, 10 job placements. He was still finishing his own degree.
That instinct — build backwards from what's real — is the same one he brought to ENDER . He runs the technical operations of ENDER's RF physics engine: knife-edge diffraction, vegetation absorption, structured multipath, running live on standard hardware.
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B.S. Electrical Engineering (Communications & Signal Processing), UCF
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B.S. Photonic Science Engineering, UCF
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SEMI Undergraduate Certificate — Semiconductor Engineering & Manufacturing
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Order of Pegasus Nominee — UCF's highest academic honor
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UCF Student Success Story — Preeminence designation campaign
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UCF Office of the President, Leadership Council — representative of CECS & CREOL
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Defense Innovation Unit Fellow — Commercialization Track
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Adjunct Instructor, Precision Optics, Photonics & Fiber Optics — Valencia College
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Blackstone LaunchPad Peer Coach — 25+ founding teams
COO & CO-FOUNDER
LIAM ETAN
Liam brings the defense experience that helps Ender navigate the GovCon market. He understands how defense programs move, how technical work becomes funded capability, and how to execute inside complex government environments. Combined with his Master's in Systems Engineering, Liam contributes to Ender’s business strategy, technology roadmap, operations, and government growth.
Prior to Ender, Liam worked at Lockheed Martin as a designer for a High-Energy-Laser beam director, after spending a year as a structural and thermal analyst on JASSM R&D programs and other DARPA-related efforts. He later joined the USAF SEEK EAGLE Office, where he began as a structural engineer supporting the airworthiness process for weapon systems before moving into Program Management. In that role, he inherited responsibility for coordinating analysis across all of the engineering disciplines, supporting test planning, and managing the resources required to move programs forward and he delivered under budget and on schedule every time. During college, Liam led airframe development for the rocket that earned UCF’s experimental rocketry team its first-ever first-place finish at the international FAR competition.
Raised in an engineering and military family, Liam has a passion for defense technology and moving fast. Those two things do not usually mix, but that is exactly why he is a strong fit to help lead Ender as it builds the next generation of defense technology.
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2024 Orlando Business Journal - Inno Under 25
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M.S. Systems Engineering (in progress), University of Florida
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Progam Management Graduate Certificate
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B.S. Mechanical Engineering, UCF Burnett Honors College
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Program Manager/Aerospace Engineer, USAF SEEK EAGLE
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CIV CAT I Quarterly Award
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Defense Innovation Unit Fellow
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Mechanical Designer/Analyst, Lockheed Martin
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Active Secret Security Clearance
In Spring 2023, Zack and Liam were placed on the same team in DIU's Hacking for Defense program at UCF — tasked with solving two real electronic warfare training gaps sourced directly from the military. Before writing a single line of code, they spent months in front of warfighters, pressure-testing problem frames and confirming the scope of the gap.
What started as a class project became a company. They won first place at ARCENT's Innovation Oasis II, were presented to the Commanding General of US CENTCOM, and never looked back. Ender Technologies has been operating out of the UCF Business Incubation Program since August 2024.
Over 300 expert interviews and 50+ warfighter demos later, the conclusion hasn't changed: the military's EW training infrastructure is expensive, rare, and completely disconnected from how the next generation of warfighters actually learns.
HOW WE STARTED
THE ORIGIN