Three Startups Reinventing Critical Infrastructure

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Last month, a16z American Dynamism Films screened short films about three portfolio companies.
Ulysses built mission-critical underwater robots, Mariana Minerals applies modern technologies to the critical mineral sector, and Radiant seeks to mass-produce nuclear micro-reactors. Now, all three films are available on a16z's YouTube channel. Before you check them out, today's episode highlights previous appearances by all three company founders. First up, Ulysses' Will O'Brien joined MTS last April after their latest fundraise.

**Ryan McEntush** (0:33)
Super exciting. So, for the audience, what exactly is Ulysses, and what do you do?

**Will O'Brien** (0:39)
Yes, at Ulysses, we're 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.
The platform is basically autonomous surface vehicles combined with autonomous underwater vehicles, built to be cheap enough that you can deploy them at scale over large swathes of the ocean, that they can work together autonomously to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans.

**Ryan McEntush** (1:07)
What kind of critical tasks?

**Will O'Brien** (1:08)
Yeah, sure. We have three main verticals that we operate in. We actually began, because we were very interested in problems in the world of conservation and nature, and that was the first use case we built our autonomous underwater vehicle, MAKO4.
So that is doing things like mapping, coral reefs mapping undersea ecosystems, using the vehicles to collect seeds and replant them in new locations. That was kind of like a first and early use case. Then, you know, after that we got pulled into our second vertical, which is what we call the commercial vertical. The commercial vertical, you know, we're doing things like inspecting offshore wind platforms, inspecting subsea cables, doing repairs on undersea infrastructure. There's, you know, billions of dollars of assets, you know, in the Earth's oceans owned by energy and telecoms companies. So just basically, you know, protecting them and that sort of thing and keeping them up to date. And then, you know, naturally as well, you know, we got pulled into the world of defense by the US. Navy. They came to us when they heard about our underwater vehicle. They were extremely impressed with some of the specs and very dissatisfied with a lot of the existing options given by the Primes. You know, Mako, our underwater vehicle is truly like best in class for its form factor, the small to medium size. So for them, they're interested in things like how can we find and remove mines, how can we gather intelligence underwater waters, and how can we do other relevant important tasks like protecting ports, harbors, critical infrastructure, that sort of thing.
All done off the same core tech platform, but it's pretty valuable and can be used across each. Like one of the kind of similarities to maybe think about is like people are building general purpose robotic form factors on land in the form of the humanoid. You can't just take a humanoid robot and throw it into the ocean. Like it just doesn't work that way. You have to have something that maybe looks a bit more like a fish or a shark. And that's the kind of platform that we're hoping to build for the ocean.
Cool.

**Ryan McEntush** (3:05)
Have you ever played Subnautica?

**Will O'Brien** (3:07)
I haven't, but I have heard of it.

**Ryan McEntush** (3:10)
That's incredible. It seems like Subnautica is like Ulysses the game.
I also haven't played it. I don't really play that many video games. But it's just like it's a game where you, I believe, are a guy controlling a submarine that's going around an alien ocean and exploring things and solving technical problems and fighting sea monsters.

**Will O'Brien** (3:30)
Yeah, pretty much average day in the life for a Ulysses-4 deployed engineer.

**Ryan McEntush** (3:35)
What do you think about why there are so relatively few ocean companies? You know, there's a billion space companies, there's a billion satellite companies, there's a billion robot companies, but so few of them seem to be focused on the ocean. And is it just because space and land robots are sexier somehow?

**Will O'Brien** (3:54)
Yeah, I think part of it is kind of a narrative. There's a different narrative for the ocean.
You haven't got this kind of inspirational framing of the iconic images of Apollo and SpaceX, rockets launching again, and you haven't had a company doing the SpaceX version of let's make this domain sexy again for the ocean. But I think it's worth going back and looking at history to understand that this is an anomaly, a historic anomaly that we haven't been as obsessed with exploring the oceans. Since the dawn of time, mankind has dreamed of sea creatures, expeditions at sea. Moana.