Ulysses' Seagrass Success

Will O'Brien shares how his startup Ulysses achieved early success by focusing on seagrass restoration.

"For this first use case, we've built a custom robotic payload. When you're starting and trying to do something new, it's important to get initial traction in a weird place. If we just built the platform, which is an underwater vehicle and a surface vehicle that dock together, we might have trouble getting traction.

Instead, we started with an initial use case. We built attachments that go onto our underwater vehicle that do collecting seeds, planting seeds, and measuring their growth to get initial traction. In our first year, we did a million dollars in revenue with just a five-person team based in San Francisco.

People pay us because seagrass is a critically important ocean ecosystem that, if lost, has very negative downstream impacts. Also, many governments around the world have implemented laws that restrict your ability to damage this plant - if you damage it, you have to pay someone to plant it. So they're paying us to plant it. It's compliance-driven restoration. We have contracts in Western Australia, Florida, and Virginia, all for these general reasons - either compliance-driven restoration or voluntary-led restorations."