The original team of cybermancers was supposedly attempting to "build a bridge" - which basically means that they were Darke's cronies. They produced cyberzombies as part of the plan to cause mana spikes that would allow horrors to come in and take over - or at least, that's what they thought they were doing.

What they were actually doing is producing an effect that would allow someone to persist in life after they were, from a magical standpoint dead. That's Essence Loss to us people in the 6th world, but people (and dragons) from the 4th world knew of another technique that would leave you dead from a magical perspecive: Death Patterns. See, you could do some major hoodoo such as for example make the dragonheart, but then you'd die - just like running out of Essence.

The other thing that Darke was doing was locating the horror bridge point and then putting it in his research notes which he had to submit as progress reports to the Aztechnology board of directors. The thing is, as is now clear, Dunkelzahn was on that board of directors and received the whole deal.

Which is exactly what he wanted, since as you'll recall, Dunkelzahn knew the bridge location, used his death to make the dragonheart, and then respawned as a cyberzombie positioned on the bridgepoint. Also, Darke's plans were leaked to Shadowrunners who killed him with extreme predjudice.

In short, funding for the Blood Mage Gestalt was guaranteed quarter after quarter by voting shares on the board that belonged to Dunkelzahn. He made sure that Darke got funding from Aztechnology so that he could personally benefit from the cybermancy and have continuous progress reports on the attempted horror invasion.

Now that Dunkelzahn is dead, the Blood Mage Gestalt's "more evil" platform doesn't have any takers and the cybermancy project has been turned over to other interested parties who don't want a horror invasion out of the deal.