Guest
Will O’Brien
Founder & CEO, Ulysses
Real Alpha has cut 7 moments of Will O’Brien (Founder & CEO, Ulysses) talking, from an interview on Cheeky Pint published Oct 15, 2026.
What Will O’Brien said
Scaling underwater drones requires rethinking the supply chain
“For us, it's scale, lead time. There's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. There's maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones.”
Will O’Brien24:39 Underwater drones can cost far less than Navy vehicles
“But if you're working with a navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. dollars.”
Will O’Brien38:57 Undersea cables need persistent monitoring
“All of these areas should just be like persistently monitored 24-7. But it's much too expensive to do that manually.”
Will O’Brien47:01 Underwater robots must compute locally because communications are slow
“Yes, you can do like 10 kilobytes per second over like five kilometers.”
Will O’Brien28:56 Ulysses is building robots to inspect wind cables and cut fishing line
“we're building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the floating offshore wind lines.”
Will O’Brien32:31 Seagrass restoration starts with mapping suitable habitat
“Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds. And you go and collect the seeds.”
Will O’Brien13:58 Cheaper ocean access could enable persistent operations
“if you could actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can do.”
Will O’Brien18:07
The episode
Cheeky PintThe company building underwater drones for $50,000
Will O'Brien & Chris Sacca
21:34of 49:55 · Oct 15
