The a16z Show · Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Will O'Brien of Ulysses described the company's mission to build autonomous robots for underwater tasks. Their system utilizes both surface and underwater vehicles that can coordinate to address challenges in the marine environment, focusing on areas like conservation and infrastructure support.
“Yes, I mean we were building the ocean company, essentially, if you have a difficult or tough problem to solve in the surface or subsea domain, we build autonomous robots that solve that problem.”
“You know, the platform is basically autonomous surface vehicles combined with autonomous underwater vehicles, built to be kind of cheap enough that you can kind of deploy them at scale over large swades of the ocean, that they can work together autonomously to kind of solve, yes, some of the most critical tasks in our oceans.”
“The commercial vertical, you know, we were doing things like inspecting offshore wind platforms, inspecting subsea cables, doing repairs on undersea infrastructure.”