Ulysses

Will O'Brien grew up on the Irish coastline obsessed with the ocean—surfing, diving, scuba diving—but never imagined building a business there. His co-founders had tinkered with aerial drones and self-driving cars at startups like drone delivery and scooter sharing, but none had deep ocean experience. This outsider perspective proved crucial. When they started looking at existing subsea drones to repurpose for their initial mission, they found the market stagnant: the cheapest option meeting their specs cost $500,000—a quarter of their pre-seed funding. "They were crap," Will says bluntly.

The team discovered a critical problem: seagrass—a plant covering vast ocean areas—is dying at 7% per year globally. It's 35 times better than rainforest at removing carbon, holds 20% of the ocean's carbon, and supports a quarter of the world's most critical fish stocks. A billion people rely on it for income; three billion depend on it for food. Restoration is currently manual, expensive, and slow. Will's CTO Jamie "went into a cave for a few days" and emerged with a radical new autonomous underwater vehicle design. "We tested it and we were like, oh shit, this works. It's 10-20 times cheaper than anything we could have bought." Instead of building a generic platform, they attached custom payloads for seed collection, planting, and growth measurement—solving the seagrass problem first to get traction.

Governments worldwide panicked at seagrass loss because losing the ecosystem meant losing fish stocks. Many implemented laws: damage the plant, and you must pay someone to restore it. This created compliance-driven restoration contracts. Ulysses signed deals in Western Australia, Florida, and Virginia—all compliance-based. "They're paying us to plant it," Will explains. With just five people and $2 million raised, they hit $1 million in revenue in their first year.

The timing aligned perfectly with technology windows opening in AI, robotics, and 3D printing. 3D printers enabled rapid iteration. Battery costs crashed due to EV adoption. Drone motors became cheap. Critically, Starlink solved the communications problem—previous satellite bandwidth was too weak to command subsea robots effectively. The team's outsider status prevented them from accepting industry dogma about what subsea drones "should" be. By starting with a specific use case rather than a generic platform, they found immediate product-market fit and revenue.

At 27, Will is positioning Ulysses as a general-purpose autonomy platform for maritime operations. The seagrass contracts are the beachhead. He's exploring massive adjacent markets: protecting undersea data cables (600 active cables globally, virtually undefended, with 11 cut in the Baltic Sea last year by foreign actors); inspecting offshore infrastructure; supporting ocean data centers; and military applications. The robotics and autonomy window is just opening. Will sees this as the next great technology wave—comparable to how space attracted builders after SpaceX proved it was possible. "The low hanging fruit of software has been eaten," he argues. The frontier is hardware, and the ocean is the new frontier.