Autonomous Ocean Data Sailboats

Will O'Brien discusses his company Ulysses, which is building autonomous robots for the ocean to perform important tasks. The company is part of a growing "ocean economy" that includes data collection, infrastructure protection, and environmental monitoring.

Ulysses: Autonomous Maritime Platform

• Core Business: Building a general purpose autonomy platform for maritime operations

  • Simplified: "Autonomous robots for the ocean to do important things"

• Initial Business Line: Working with seagrass

  • Seagrass is a critical ocean plant that:
    • Is 10x more abundant than coral reefs
    • Is 35x better than rainforests at removing carbon
    • Holds about 20% of carbon in the ocean
    • Supports about 25% of the world's most critical fish stocks
    • Is dying off at 7% per annum

• Future Business Opportunities:

  • Servicing underwater data infrastructure
    • Maintenance and inspection of subsea data centers
    • Protection of underwater cables (11 cables have been cut by foreign actors in the past year)
  • Supporting the growing ocean infrastructure for AI
    • Data centers being built underwater (cooling costs go down massively)
    • Microsoft has already experimented with this
    • YC startup called Network Ocean is building and operating these

• Market Context:

  • Ocean becoming increasingly important in this century:
    • Warfare moving from deserts to oceans
    • Climate questions are ultimately ocean questions
    • AI infrastructure buildout requires more underwater cables and data centers
    • Ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink