The company building underwater drones for $50,000

Summary · 4 min read

Will O’Brien is founder and CEO of Ulysses, a company that builds autonomous underwater robots. Ulysses began with seagrass restoration and is expanding into applications including seabed mapping, port security, offshore energy and defense.

O’Brien argues that affordable, persistent underwater robots could turn ocean work from expensive one-off missions into routine operations across conservation, energy and defense. Ulysses started with seagrass restoration and built a modular system that it can adapt to other jobs; the company is bringing more manufacturing and components in-house to meet demand and scale. O’Brien says its underwater vehicles can cost far less than those commonly bought by the U.S. Navy, though energy and defense customers require long qualification and procurement processes. The discussion also covers seagrass’s carbon and habitat value, technical limits such as pressure and low-bandwidth communications, and the need to monitor undersea cables.

Minute by minute

1. 0:23

   Guinness built an early R&D culture. O’Brien traces Guinness’s technical innovation to an in-house research team dating to the 1890s, where researchers were given problems to solve. He says a Guinness researcher developed small-sample statistics to assess hop quality and published the work as Student to keep competitors from learning about the research. He also cites the widget developed for making Guinness at home.

2. 5:53

   Ulysses began with seagrass restoration. O’Brien says Ulysses began by looking for ocean tasks that robots could take on. A cofounder met a marine biologist whose work involved manual jobs such as underwater photography, collecting samples and planting seeds. The company focused on restoring seagrass, as habitat loss and overfishing threaten ocean ecosystems and restoration is 100 to 1,000 times slower than ecosystem loss.

3. 9:21

   A modular platform can handle varied tasks. O’Brien says Ulysses pairs a surface craft, with a 2,000-nautical-mile range, with its underwater vehicle, Mako. Mako’s modular sections let the company add batteries, thrust, cameras or sonar for different jobs. He says seagrass covers 2% of the seafloor but holds 20% of the ocean’s carbon, and that about 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on it.

4. 15:21

   Lower ocean costs could unlock new work. O’Brien calls himself an eco-pragmatist and says the ocean is an underexplored frontier; he argues that cheaper, persistent robots could make more ocean work viable, much as lower launch costs opened new options in space. He calls regulatory green tape a major barrier, citing a proposed Australian seagrass project that had stalled. In a digression, he recounts being falsely accused of shoplifting in Shanghai as a teenager and asking his mother to send Western Union money to get him released.

5. 21:13

   Scale demands deeper vertical integration. O’Brien says the first vehicle used about 80% off-the-shelf components, and the company plans to bring more hardware in-house. Ulysses built its software itself and is developing internal sonar and inertial-navigation capabilities to reduce supply and lead-time constraints. He says the company is turning down contracts while preparing a factory it expects to open next year.

6. 27:43

   Underwater robots need local autonomy. O’Brien says saltwater corrosion and pressure constrain underwater vehicles; Ulysses typically operates to 1,500 meters and has crush-tested its vehicle to 2,200 meters. Acoustic links can carry about 10 kilobytes per second over five kilometers, so the robot must do much of its sensing and decision-making locally. The surface craft retrieves and wirelessly charges vehicles, links them to Starlink and supplies diagnostics; O’Brien says Mako carries about 100 times more onboard compute than other autonomous underwater vehicles.

7. 31:02

   Navy and wind projects test the robots. O’Brien says Ulysses has landed contracts with the U.S. Navy and an offshore wind developer. He describes the Navy work as mine countermeasures. For a California floating-wind project, Ulysses is building a system to inspect power cables for damage and fishing line, with an implement to cut entangling line.

8. 34:10

   Hard-tech founders seek physical-world impact. O’Brien says he sees hard-tech founders as more motivated by building what the world needs than by the software-era aim of making what people want. He links their focus on physical-world work partly to pandemic-era experiences. He also says Christian faith and church have been important to his own community and motivation.

9. 37:55

   Low-cost vehicles face long sales cycles. O’Brien says ship-based ocean work can cost several hundred thousand dollars a day. Ulysses can sell an underwater vehicle to a navy for as little as $50,000, compared with about $5 million for a common U.S. Navy autonomous underwater vehicle. He says energy and defense sales require lengthy qualification and procurement, but contracts can become sticky once won.

10. 43:48

    Autonomy can replace costly ship crews. O’Brien describes underwater jobs that rely on ships, tethered vehicles and crews working shifts, along with substantial support staff. He argues autonomous robots can reduce labor costs, work longer and operate in rougher conditions, with remote oversight through Starlink. He sees a general-purpose underwater platform, rather than vehicles built to carry explosives, as the way to scale ocean work.

11. 45:52

    Cable routes need persistent monitoring. O’Brien says there are about 200 undersea cables and that many outages result from accidental anchor dragging, though some are not accidental. He argues that critical routes, including cables running from the U.S. to Europe off Ireland, need persistent monitoring because manual patrols are too expensive. He warns that targeted damage and surveillance can be relatively easy.

Published Oct 15, 2026.