Will O'Brien
Will O'Brien is the co-founder of Ulysses, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous surface and subsea robots for maritime operations and ecosystem restoration. A native of Cork, Ireland, he leads the company's commercial strategy and oversees a fleet of low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles used in projects ranging from seagrass restoration to commercial and defense applications. He is best known for scaling Ulysses from a garage-built prototype into a revenue-generating robotics company backed by venture capital investors including Lowercarbon Capital and ReGen Ventures.
“Our underwater vehicle Mako was made of these kind of LEGO building blocks... we have a sonar front module.”
Source→“We can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. For contrast, the most common autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is somewhere in the order of maybe $5 million.”
Source→“They were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s.”
Source→“there's the make something people want moniker, and I think this group is way more like, make something the world needs.”
Source→“Saronic don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships, and they're just going to become a new shipyard.”
Source→“He had been building aerial drones for food delivery with Manna and was like, surely you could build an underwater equivalent.”
Source→“O'Brien's first startup was 'the first scooter sharing startup in the UK and Ireland,' where he learned to sell to government.”
Source→“the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.