The $50,000 Underwater Drone - EP 66 Ulysses

**Kylie Robison** (0:00)
Today on the Core Memory Podcast, we're joined by the co-founders of Ulysses, Will and Akhil, the two Irishmen that came to America to build underwater drones. They just raised a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and we talk about that. We talk about defense, the Strait of Hormuz. We talk about ecological restoration, the Big Blue Sea, and how it could be the next trillion-dollar frontier for disruption and technology. So join us and learn more about their seafaring expeditions. My name is Kylie Robinson, and this is Core Memory.
Hello, thanks for joining me.
I wanted to start with who you guys are. Why did you go from nothing to Ulysses? What brought you here?

**Will O'Brien** (1:01)
Sure, I mean, I can start from my side. Yeah, I'm Will O'Brien, one of the founders of Ulysses and company president. I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland, so I always had a huge affinity for the ocean. My summers were spent on the water, in the water. My mom would just put me in a wetsuit and just send me down to the beach, and lifeguard was effectively my babysitter.
But I never thought that there was a business in it or a technology in it. I was just like, oh, it's just boats and ships and that's it. I didn't really think twice about it.
I'd been in a startup before and we sold it. We were thinking about what to do next, and I'd known Akhil from college. He's like, well, I think these underwater drones, I think you could start a really interesting business in underwater drones. He'd been building aerial drones before, so I trusted his judgment on these things, and we'd worked together on a project in college.
Then once you start to dig a little bit deeper into the underwater domain, you start to realize how little we know about it and then you start to realize about the technology and the tools available in the underwater world are so limited and so stuck in the Stone Ages. Then you start to learn about all the problems in nature, the industry or defense that you could solve it like better underwater drones. I was just like, yes, it was pretty easy, immediate hook. I think in working with Akhil and Colm and Jamie, my co-founder is like, okay, this is a pretty rock solid team, phone guys as well. I was like, I wanted to do something a bit weird as well. I didn't want to do just like, definitely nothing in software. Underwater drones was definitely take the weird and quirky box. When Akhil brought the idea, I was like, yeah, I'm in.

**Kylie Robison** (2:49)
How did you bring up the idea of underwater drone?

**Akhil Voorakkara** (2:52)
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
I'm Akhil, I'm one of the other of the four co-founders. It's always funny introducing yourself. It's like, yeah, I'm a co-founder and you assume there's two of you, there's four.

**Kylie Robison** (3:05)
Right.

**Akhil Voorakkara** (3:06)
It's a big family.

**Will O'Brien** (3:06)
Like a boy band.

**Kylie Robison** (3:07)
Yeah. That's perfect.

**Akhil Voorakkara** (3:08)
This is true. Yeah, I'm also the CEO.
My background, mostly engineering, worked on a lot of very interesting problems and various gadgets and widgets and such throughout my career, ranging from self-driving cars to warehouse robotics, to med-tech, and then aerial drones. That was the last engineering thing that I worked on before for UACs.
Aerial drones, the developments that have happened there over the last 10, even five years, absolutely insane. Yeah. It went from, oh, there's this one guy in the entire country that has this camera drone, and he's the most advanced guy, and he's booked out for years in advance to now. It's like, oh, you want a drone, just go on amazon.com. There's like 30,000. Yeah. They have great cameras, they can fly themselves. They can even carry things for you as well. And that kind of technological leap completely changed the way that the average person can access the skies and do things in it. But you look at the ocean, it's been the same. As Will said, you think about the ocean, you don't think, can there be a big innovative business there? It's just ships, it's just people.
It's these really huge, expensive things that haven't changed in centuries. You go back to the time of the Conquistadors, it was still massive ships, loads of people, loads of money, to do anything important and at massive scale in the ocean. But you look at what's happened in the air, look at what's happened in space, what's happened on the ground, we've moved away from that. To do great things, you can do it with a lot of really small, really cheap and really accessible tools that didn't exist for the ocean. And yeah, it was like around a year and a half after leaving the drone delivery startup that me and Jamie, who also worked at that drone delivery startup, were both bored at our perspective jobs after that and thinking about like, I just want to go back to building something really cool that could have potentially larger impact than getting someone their coffee a couple of minutes quicker.