The Rise Of Underwater Drones
TL;DR
Ulyses is trying to do for the ocean what drones did for the sky — founders Will O’Brien and Aquil argue underwater tech is still “stone age,” with $5 million vehicles and tiny deployment numbers where they think mass-manufactured robots can unlock work across defense, energy, and ecological restoration.
Their core bet is modular, cheap, autonomous hardware at 100x lower cost — the Mako underwater vehicle starts around $50,000 versus comparable systems that can cost $5 million, can be built in 26 hours, and is designed like “Lego bricks” so the same platform can do mine detection, seagrass surveys, or subsea manipulation.
Underwater robotics is harder than air or space in one crucial way: the robot is basically alone — there’s no GPS, bandwidth is limited to low-speed acoustic comms “like bats clicking in a cave,” and the ocean is constantly corroding, fouling, and damaging hardware, so the robot needs much more onboard autonomy and reliability.
The company started with seagrass restoration, then got pulled into defense and offshore energy by customer demand — Ulyses says the same underlying problem keeps showing up everywhere: important underwater work is either too expensive to do at scale or not done at all because the tools don’t exist.
Defense is now a major tailwind because oceans are becoming strategically central again — the founders point to the Strait of Hormuz, undersea cables, illegal fishing, and the Pentagon’s $13.4 billion autonomous systems budget, arguing the underwater domain matters more as satellites make the surface visible but still can’t see below the waterline.
Andreessen Horowitz’s $38 million Series A is meant to industrialize the whole stack — after roughly $3.5 million in early revenue and about $2 million in Q1 alone, Ulyses plans to hire heavily, productionize Mako, and bring its Kraken launch/recovery system and Leviathan surface “mothership” to market.
The Breakdown
Two Irish founders, one weird idea, and a one-way ticket to San Francisco
Will O’Brien says he grew up by the seaside in southwest Ireland, basically raised by a lifeguard while his mom sent him down to the beach in a wetsuit. Aquil came from engineering-heavy work in self-driving cars, robotics, medtech, and aerial drones, and the two reconnected around a simple but ambitious thought: if cheap drones transformed the sky, why hadn’t anything similar happened in the ocean? They didn’t overthink the geography either — San Francisco was where the talent, capital, and credibility were, so they bought tickets and came.
The first lesson: underwater is not just “drones, but wet”
The founders joke that they started with plenty of hubris: one had worked on drones, another on satellites, another on Formula 1, so how hard could swimming robots be? Very hard, it turns out. The ocean is “trying to kill you all the time” through corrosion, biofouling, clogged motors, and near-total communication limits — no GPS, no high-bandwidth radio, just low-speed acoustic comms “like bats clicking in a cave.”
Mako, Kraken, and the pitch for a full-stack ocean robot fleet
Ulyses builds Mako underwater vehicles plus Kraken, an autonomous launch/recovery/recharge system, and plans a surface vehicle called Leviathan to act as a mothership. Will describes Mako as a stack of Lego bricks: add battery modules for endurance, agility modules for fine manipulation, or heavy-lift modules — they’ve even carried three people on one configuration. The bigger vision is millions of robots working in coordinated swarms, with surface systems picking up the “kids from school,” recharging them, and sending them back out.
Why the economics matter more than the elegance
The company keeps coming back to cost because they think cost is the thing that determines whether ocean work happens at all. Their base vehicle can sell for about $50,000 and be built in 26 hours, versus systems they say often cost $500,000 to $5 million; the contrast is deliberate, like calling Mako “the Model T for the sea.” Instead of overengineering for 20-year lifespans and extreme redundancy, they design for fleets, arguing that if one low-cost robot fails and floats to the surface, that’s acceptable when you have hundreds.
From seagrass restoration to the Strait of Hormuz
The original spark came from marine biology and seagrass restoration, where they saw tens of thousands of volunteer hours produce only tiny restoration gains against massive habitat loss. That same mismatch — huge area, tiny budget, inadequate tools — turned out to describe offshore wind, subsea inspection, and Navy use cases too. The shift into commercial and defense wasn’t framed as a pivot so much as a pull from the market: offshore energy operators and even a retired Navy mine-countermeasures veteran came to them saying, in effect, this is the tool we needed.
The defense case: the ocean is back, and stealth still lives underwater
Aquil says one of the defining themes of this century is the renewed importance of the ocean, especially as U.S.-China competition shifts from land wars to maritime contests. Satellites can increasingly see everything on the surface, but they still can’t see underwater, which makes the subsea domain one of the last real stealth environments. That’s why Ulyses talks about mine countermeasures, offshore infrastructure protection, illegal fishing, undersea cables, and persistent presence in places like the Strait of Hormuz.
Revenue, a16z, and the next phase: turning demos into industrial scale
The company says it has done most of its business as a service so far, which gives engineering a tight feedback loop from real missions instead of PowerPoint promises. They cite roughly $3.5 million in early revenue, around $2 million in Q1 this year, and say a16z led a $38 million Series A after seeing the tech, the demos, and how much the team had built with only 5 to 15 people. The next step is straightforward and huge: hire across engineering, operations, acoustics, and go-to-market, bring Mako to production, and get Kraken and Leviathan ready so customers can run true multi-vehicle surface-plus-subsea operations at scale.
Their closing pitch: the ocean is neglected white space for ambitious engineers
The founders end on something bigger than the product. They argue the ocean was once as culturally exciting as space — JFK even asked the Navy to explore a subsea equivalent of the space program — but between classification, accidents, environmental backlash, and a broader retreat from physical-world ambition, the field got forgotten. Their message to young builders is blunt: if SpaceX was the place to go 10 years ago, Ulyses wants to be that kind of frontier for the underwater world now.