Investing in Ulysses
a16z invests in Ulysses Series A
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. — Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
American naval supremacy has been one of the strongest organizing forces of the post-war era. Thick hulls and wide decks kept trade routes open and maintained seven decades of relative peace among great powers. But that supremacy was expensive, built on a fleet of exquisite and highly capable systems designed for a different time. A single Virginia-class submarine costs several billion, takes years to build, and requires over thousands of suppliers. Each vessel is staffed by a crew of 130+ people, and every mission they carry out puts their lives in harm’s way. Carriers, destroyers, and frigates are no cheaper or faster to commission. Reliable as platforms, yes, but increasingly dangerous and difficult to maneuver in a world of asymmetric threats.
At the same time, the undersea domain has taken center stage. Much of the world, it turns out, rests on the ocean’s floor. Fiber optic cables, vast offshore resources, maritime chokepoints, all increasingly contested under the waves, from the Baltics, to the Strait of Hormuz, to the South China Sea. Security in this environment cannot rest on undersea assets too precious to deploy.
Modern deterrence demands something different, and Ulysses is building it.
The founders, Akhil, Will, Colm, and Jamie, came to this country and created something we had been struggling to produce: a small, autonomous underwater vehicle that aims to outperform the primes at a fraction of the cost. We’re excited to partner with the Ulysses team for their Series A.
The American dream
Ulysses’ initial market was as unglamorous as it was demanding. Having cut their teeth building drones in Ireland, the team asked why similar consumer technology didn’t exist for the ocean. They started talking with commercial customers across energy, marine management, and research who, it was clear, would pay for anything that actually worked; among Ulysses’ first competitors was a human diver with a shovel planting seagrass. This was both a technically and economically challenging environment in which to develop a product. Nonetheless, Ulysses was forged in the crucible of price-sensitive, commercial markets, ultimately yielding a low-cost, powerful yet flexible, and highly manufacturable platform.
The Department of War took notice. The mechanics of passive sensing, active inspecting, and undersea manipulation turned out to have other applications. Critically, the platform is fundamentally modular — adding new capabilities works like snapping on LEGOs. More range? Add a battery. More speed? Another propeller. More compute? A more powerful GPU module. A sensitive mission? Just attach “mil-spec” hardware into standardized ports where it’s needed, like an API. If you don’t need something, take it off and it’s cheaper, lighter, longer-range. The competition, by contrast, had built for diverse and exquisite use cases, and in doing so, had once again produced something too precious for the vast majority of modern missions.
The Department of War came to Ulysses for solutions. With a vertically integrated manufacturing facility and fresh capital, they’re ready to scale to protect the world’s oceans.
Building the ocean company
But when we walk into Ulysses’ office, we’re reminded that the vision is much broader. Exposed wooden beams like the belly of a ship. Sea creatures across every wall and dangling from the ceiling. A poster of Steve Irwin by the door. These are people who started this business because of their love of the sea. To protect it, to explore it, to send machines where humans can’t go. And there’s a lot of ocean out there waiting.
The company takes its name from Joyce’s Ulysses, a retelling of the Odyssey set over a single day in Dublin. It fits, and not only because the team’s first office was next door to Joyce’s home in Ireland. Like Odysseus, they’re up against giants, and winning not through brute force but by being smarter and more adaptable. Ulysses is also the name of the submarine in Disney’s Atlantis, where they voyage to the bottom of the sea to find a lost civilization — which, after getting to know them, may have had a bit more to do with their name than the novel.
This is an incredible team on a course to conquer the blue frontier, and we’re thrilled to be joining them. They’re hiring engineers and operators in San Francisco.
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