Ulysses: The Ocean Company

The first-ever Ulysses prototype at Pebblebed HQ, August 2023. Still from S3: The SpaceX of the Ocean.

Summer 2023: Pebblebed HQ is gently baking in the heat of San Francisco's Mission district. A 3D printed robot putters around its dirty aquarium, as its creators size up its gyrations with a critical eye. A splash of water hits the floor, startling Nico, the office Boston Terrier. "Crap. We got water on their floor," deadpans Will O'Brien.

Such workaday scenes birthed our relationship with the Ulysses team. At Pebblebed, we're not only a venture capital firm. We're also a community. We nourish that community by giving space (and sometimes a room) to teams we think are doing something cool. So when we met Akhil, Will, Colm, and Jamie, we wanted to give them space and see what they could do. We set them up in our guest rooms while they were in San Francisco raising their pre-seed round. On their trip to San Francisco, they attracted $2M in pre-seed funding. With these resources secured, the team packed up, left us behind to deal with their aquarium, and returned to Ireland to write their next chapter.

They came to us with amazing ideas, brilliant technology, and a great story. A simple hike between an engineer and a marine biologist friend, which segued into an excited pitch over pints to restore seagrass in Dublin, which birthed a leaky prototype that immediately flooded, and culminated three weeks later in everyone quitting their jobs and flying to San Francisco. These are the people we want to work with: who move toward difficulty with joy rather than dread. In a word, explorers.

That is how we met the team that we believe will become the Ocean Company.

The Long Journey Home

We didn't hear from Ulysses for a while. They were back and forth between Dublin and San Francisco, building, breaking things, rebuilding. We kept in touch the way you do with people you like and believe in: loosely, warmly, with a watchful eye.

During their time away they outgrew their initial pitch. The team that left our warehouse was an ecosystem restoration startup, hoping to find commercial success planting seagrass. The team that came back had grander ambitions. The robots were not just more seaworthy; they were bigger, sleeker, more adaptable. Their target had shifted from simply restoring the ocean to stewardship. They had begun talking about building the autonomous platform for the entire ocean.

Ulysses was converging on its initial model: the Mako. They described the Mako as a Model T for the sea: manufacturable in about twelve hours, and coming with a range of modular accessories to adapt each Mako to its application. Cargo, longevity, size, maneuverability, sensors, actuators. This level of configurability could bring the Mako to a breadth of applications far beyond the initial vision for seagrass planting. We were moved by this grander vision for the company to lead Ulysses' seed round. We reached terms in March 2025, but the seeds of conviction were planted much earlier. Somewhere in that dirty aquarium, perhaps.

Below the Surface

Today, the ocean needs a steward. The ocean economy is already three trillion dollars and most of what happens beneath the surface is monitored sporadically, if at all. The ocean is an exceptionally hard environment for engineered artifacts: saltwater is corrosive to electronics, sealife wants to eat, dissolve, or live inside of everything we build, water renders most wireless communication media inert, and the ocean's sheer vastness propels logistics into astronomic scales. These pressures have previously led to vessels that are cost-prohibitive, on the order of half a million per vehicle. Together, these obstacles have kept great tools out of the hands of those doing work in the ocean.

Customers were pulling Ulysses into use cases the team hadn't anticipated: infrastructure inspection, subsea cable laying, pipeline monitoring. The heavy-lift frame designed to carry a crate of seagrass seed could be repurposed to carry a spool of fiber-optic cable just as well. The coast guard could not possibly deploy enough people to monitor all the trade routes of the ocean for pirates, smuggling, and poaching. But with an autonomous fleet of Makos, this dream is much more in reach. The sea now needs defending as much as it needs restoring, which only makes the work more urgent.

The Adventure Continues

The company is named after James Joyce's magnum opus, Ulysses. The company's official story for the name is just that the lads are from Dublin, and their first office was next door to Joyce's home. But the deeper resonance of the name is the same ancient story that moved Joyce: Ulysses as a modern day Odysseus. The great adventurer who didn't overpower his obstacles, but outwitted them, who survived by being adaptable and stubborn in equal measure, and who took the long way home because the sea offers no shortcuts. These founders took on this adventure because they love the sea, and they love the challenge. It is our great honor to support them on their journey.