The $50,000 Underwater Drone - EP 66 Ulysses

Today on the Core Memory Podcast, we're joined by the co-founders of Ulysses, Will and Akhil. They're two Irishmen that came to America to build underwater drones. They just raised a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and we talk about that. We talk about defense, the Strait of Hormuz. We talk about ecological restoration, the Big Blue Sea, and how it could be the next trillion-dollar frontier for disruption in technology. So, Join us and learn more about their seafaring expeditions. My name is Kiley Robinson, and this is Core Memory.

Hello. Hello.

Thanks for joining me. I wanted to start with like who you guys are. Why did you go from like nothing to Ulysses? What brought you here?

Sure. I mean, I can, I can start from my side. I, yeah, I'm Will O'Brien, one of the founders of Ulysses and company president. I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland, so always had a huge affinity for the ocean. All my summers were, yeah, spent on the water, in the water. My mom would just put me in a wetsuit and just send me down to the beach. And lifeguard was effectively my babysitter. But I never thought that there was a business in it or technology in it. I was just like, oh, it's just boats and ships and that's it. Didn't really think twice about it. And I'd started a, been in a startup before and we sold it and we were thinking about what to do next. And I'd known Akhil from college. And, you know, he's like, well, I think these underwater drones, I think you could start a really interesting business in underwater drones. He'd been building aerial drones before, so I trusted his judgment on these things. And we'd worked together on a project in college. And then, you know, once you start to dig, you know, dig a little bit deeper into the underwater domain, you start to realize how little we know about it. And then you start to realize about the technology and the tools available in the underwater world are so limited and so kind of stuck in the stone ages. And then you start to learn about all the problems in nature or the industry or defense that you could solve with like better underwater drones. And I was just like, yes, it was pretty easy, immediate like hook. I think in work with Akhil and Colm and Jamie, you know, my co-founders, I was like, okay, this is a pretty rock solid team, fun guys as well. I was like, I wanted to do something a bit weird as well. I didn't want to do just like, you know, definitely nothing in software. And yeah, underwater drones was definitely, definitely ticked the kind of weird and quirky box. So Yeah. When, when Akhil kind of brought the idea, I was like, yeah, I'm in.

So how did you bring up the idea of underwater drones?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty funny. So, you know, my, I'm Akhil. I'm one of the, one of the other of the 4 co-founders. Uh, it's always funny introducing yourself. It's like, yeah, I'm a co-founder and you assume there's 2 of you, but there's 4, right? Uh, it's a big family, like a boy band.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's perfect.

This is true.

That's perfect.

Um, yeah. I'm also the CEO. My background, mostly engineering, worked on a lot of very interesting problems and various gadgets and widgets and such throughout my career, ranging from self-driving cars to warehouse robotics, medtech, and then aerial drones. That was the last kind of engineering thing that I worked on before Ulysses. Aerial drones, the developments that have happened there over the last like, you know, 10, even 5 years, absolutely insane. You know, it went from like, oh, there's this one guy in the entire like country that has like this camera drone and he's, you know, the most advanced, most advanced guy. And, you know, he's booked out for like years to years in advance to now it's like, oh, you want a drone? Just go on amazon.com. There's like, they're a dime a dozen.

Yeah.

You know, you, and they, you know, they have great cameras, they can fly themselves. Yeah. Uh, they can even carry things, uh, for you as well. And you know, that kind of technological leap completely changed the way, uh, that, you know, the average person can access the skies and, you know, do things in it. But you look at the ocean, it's been the same as Will said, right? You know, you think about the ocean, you don't think, can there be like a big innovative business there? It's just ships. It's just people. You know, it's these really huge, expensive things that haven't changed in centuries. You know, you go back to the time of the conquistadors, it was still massive ships, loads of people, loads of money to do anything important and at massive scale in the ocean. But you look at what's happened in the air, look at what's happened in space, what's happened on the ground, we've moved away from that, you know, to do great things. You can do it with a lot of like really small, really cheap, and really accessible tools that didn't exist for the ocean. And yeah, it was around, it was like around a year and a half after leaving the drone delivery startup that me and Jamie, who also worked at that drone delivery startup, were both bored at our respective jobs after that and thinking about like, I just want to go back to building something really cool that, you know, could have like a, you know, potentially larger impact than getting someone their coffee a couple minutes quicker. And in, you know, in that he had a friend who he met on a surf trip who was complaining about the marine biology research they were doing and how manual and hard and expensive it was. And, you know, in our hubris, we were like, well, you know, surely it sounds like robots could do this work. Why is no one building robots to do this work? And, uh, you know, it snowballed from there.

Right. So you guys are both from Ireland. You went to college together. What college? How did you guys end up in San Francisco after thinking, I'm going to build water drones?

Well, it's funny. It was like, when we thought about like building drones and building the company, San Francisco just seemed like the right place to do it. You know, it it's Silicon Valley. It's where like, you know, the best and brightest and smartest people go to. It's where, you know, all these fantastic hardware, software, everything in between companies have come out of. It's where the talent is. It's where the capital is. Also for customers, you know, they hear you're a San Francisco-based startup and there's an air of credibility to that. And for us, even as we set out to start the company, we always thought we'd end up here.

Yeah, same answer for you.

Yeah, you know, there's kind of, you know, this is a well-trod question, you know, what, San Francisco or LA or Austin or where, you know, where you're going to start your business. And, you know, my, my kind of typical answer, you know, the short answer is like, it's kind of like the Midwit meme or something like that. There's like a 10-second answer, which is like, you know, 8 out of the 10 of the most valuable companies in the world were founded in San Francisco, including Saudi Aramco. Bloody, you know, started in San Francisco, right? Like, like all of these great companies, you know, started here. It's like, okay, you should probably build a company there. And then there's, you know, more verbose answer. You know, you could talk about the frontier origins that San Francisco has, always has been at the cutting edge, whether it's the, you know, the Gold Rush to the Summer of Love to the start of the internet to today. And, you know, there's a certain type of thinking here. But yeah, we didn't really think about it too much. We were just like, yeah, bought the tickets and just like came here.

Totally.

Yeah. And so you went from air drones and Now we're underwater. That is like a whole new lot of challenges. I can imagine those conditions. And I just want to talk about like what you guys actually build and some of the challenges you've faced going from like, you know, sort of a different niche to these like completely new like engineering challenges.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. It's very interesting. Yeah, we were absolutely filled with hubris when we started the company when we built things that fly, you know, things that swim. In fact, Jamie, you know, he's got like 20 satellites in space. We've built things that go in space. Colm, you know, he was at Red Bull Racing Formula 1, you know, he's built things that go the absolute fastest on the racetrack. This is like, come on, things that just swim around. I can swim, you know? And it turned out that was not completely the case. There were some difficulties and some things that were different, but That was also, I think, the most fun part of the, one of the most fun parts of the journey, like the first kind of like, you know, 3, 4 months where we kind of made a lot of obvious mistakes just to see what would happen. And, you know, in doing that, we learned very quickly, you know, our whole company, even today, almost 3 years later, you know, one of the ways we operate that allows us to move really fast and build actually really good tech is just put it in the water and see what happens. And we learned to, yes, it's, it's not very, it's, it's very much not the same as, as the, as operating in the air and space or on land. There are numerous critical challenges. One, the environment is absolutely trying to kill you all the time. It's trying to, you know, corrode you. It's trying to eat you. It's trying to, clog up all your motors, any surfaces, any sensors. And is, you know, biofouling one of the greatest challenges of all time? Anyone in the maritime industry will tell you that. And then, you know, there's, of course, you know, you're in space, you actually have global positioning. You're in the air, you have global positioning. You're on land, you have global positioning. In the water, you don't have anything. You know, you can't communicate over high bandwidth, you know, radio frequencies or anything like that. You get really low bandwidth acoustic modems, you're just like, you know, your communication is like bats clicking in a cave. Right. Uh, doesn't go very fast. You can't really convey a lot of information. So you have to make robots that are a lot more capable in terms of an autonomy standpoint and a reliability standpoint. Even if you want to make something that's really low cost and really cheap, The actual expectations for what it does are a lot higher because it has to do those things without any outside input, without any, any help. And that's led to us doing some interesting things like figuring out how to put entire, you know, servers in our, in our robots so they can, you know, you know, we can put one day we'll put an LLM on, on the robots and just be like, okay, go, go scan this pipeline, go, go fix this mooring line, you know, but We do have to get to a point where we can tell the robot to do something and it is going to do those things.

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And what are your robots? You have several. We talked about— I went to your warehouse. Tell me more about what you guys actually build.

Yeah, so, you know, we build unmanned underwater vehicles and we're also building unmanned surface vehicles that act as motherships for these unmanned underwater vehicles. The unmanned underwater vehicles we've been operating for nearly 2 years now. Uh, their most mature platform, uh, they fall under the, what we call the Mako family of vehicles. Um, and they're basically like, think of Makos, uh, or the Mako family is basically a collection of Lego bricks. Uh, you know, and these bricks add and subtract different, uh, capabilities depending on how you stack them. You want a Mako with loads of battery, stack a load of battery modules. And put whatever sensors you want on it. Do you want a vehicle that's really agile and really precise for, you know, really careful maneuvering and manipulation of things in the water column? Then we have the Agility modules that you just stack on. Or do you want something that's heavy-lift capable? And, you know, we've got a heavy-lift configuration that we've, you know, carried 3 people on before. But the thing is, these vehicles that are very different in terms of size, shape, and capabilities, They still all cost the same and they still all, you know, come from the same kind of set, come off the same assembly line. They share, you know, pretty much all the same components. And that allows us to have this one, almost one-size-fits-all vehicle where we can go at, we can do large-scale surveys and data gathering and scanning, but we can also do some of the really, really hard and really expensive things to do in the ocean, you know, infrastructure maintenance and actual installation. So, you know, manipulating things on the sea floor, in the water column, and on the surface. And that has almost limitless applications across, you know, nature, across commercial. So think, you know, oil and gas, telecoms, that kind of thing. And defense as well. You know, a really hot topic has been the mine countermeasure stuff in the Strait of Hormuz. We carry pretty much the same sensors that are used on those platforms today. And they're just, you know, you reconfigure the Mako, you bolt on those sensors, you could have it go out and look for mines. You can change the sensors around and you can have it go and figure out and survey the biodiversity of a seagrass meadow. It's all the same platform.

Yeah, like from the start, you know, I think we've been pretty intentional how we built Mako, working back from this bigger picture of how do you do large-scale work in the ocean and coordinated swarm of robots type of way. From the start, we built from that. If you take the premise that robots are going to do all the important work in the future, and then you take the next premise that they're going to do all the important work in the underwater domain, then the question is, what does that platform look like? So it needs to be modular because there's a lot of different shaped tasks in the ocean. You need to sense, you need to be able to manipulate, you read or write, to use the kind of computer science analogy. And similarly, if you want to produce a lot of them, you need, because the ocean is a massive area, 361 million square kilometers, you need to make them cheap and mass manufacturable. So we've taken a kind of, we call Mako the Model T for the sea. It's built to be mass manufactured. We can make one in 26 hours. It's There's been a lot of design decisions in that regard and it also brings the cost down. Starting price for Omako is, if we're selling them, we more often than not deliver them as services, but with certain customers where we do sales, we can sell them for a base price of $50,000. Compare this to other platforms that do similar things to Omako, that might cost you $5 million. So 100 times cheaper, really getting us to this vision of doing things, swarms of these things. And then there's the other aspect of the platform, which is the interface at the surface. So we have an autonomous launch, recovery, recharge system called Kraken. It sits at the surface, can be put on a boat, can be put on a pier. And this is the thing that takes the vehicles out of the water, recharges them, does data offload, and sends them back out. It's this enabling piece of the infrastructure that is important, as important as the underwater robots themselves, because without them, you don't get this vision of millions of underwater robots doing the thing because you couldn't have people taking them out, filling them up, and sending them back out. You need other robots to do those other important things. And then yes, we're launching a surface vehicle later this year, which would be the mothership for these vehicles, picking them up from locations, picking up the kids from school, dropping them off to where they need to go next. And yeah, another accessory piece in this kind of broader vision of a tech platform that can solve the most important tasks in the ocean.

And when you, when you automate the full stack, and then you can provide it at a cost that allows for scale that matters. Now you can start to change the way you do things at the ocean. Now you can start to move away from, you know, big ships, uh, really expensive staff, you know, these bespoke beautiful systems that are super CapEx and OpEx heavy and really limit, you know, how much of an area you can cover or how much time you can spend out there. To a model where you can actually be everywhere all at once, you know, and you can actually cover all the infrastructure, you can protect all the borders and fishing zones. You can actually use the ocean to put in as much infrastructure as you could dream of having in there. You can also actually start to realistically quantify and understand and extract, you know, all the resources out of the ocean as well. In a way that makes sense.

Yeah. So you guys started with seagrass as a concept, right? So how did we go from seagrass and sort of understanding underwater life and all there is to explore to what you now see as like perhaps defense or just, you know, putting it in the Strait of Hormuz and protecting lives? How did we get from seagrass to defense? And did you, like, did you always see that mission at the start or is that something that developed over time?

Our company mission was always, you know, kind of stewarding the ocean for an abundant future. And, you know, any missions that we, you know, thought aligned with that always excited us. But in terms of, you know, starting with the seagrass, it was and remains still one of our, you know, core use cases. But it's a use case where, you know, the scale that you need to operate on is absolutely massive. Right. You're talking like hundreds of thousands of kilometers squared of seagrass that needs to be restored, monitored, protected. And the budgets are absolutely minuscule, you know, the, the, all in a completely inverse relationship.

Academics don't have a lot of money.

Yeah. Well, not, not, not even that. Even the governments and organizations that do still, that's not where they're putting the money. It's, you know, it's a really slow moving space, but. And so to do anything at a scale that matters, you can go out and you can get thousands of volunteer hours. There are programs out there that have tens of thousands of volunteer hours over the course of years of restoration. And the amount of restoration they have done is on the scale of a couple of hectares, a couple of hundredths of kilometers squared in areas where the loss is on the scale of thousands of hectares despite tens of thousands of human hours going into it. So to, you know, to make the unit economics work, you need robots that are really, really cost effective. But then to actually do those complex, that complex work where you actually have to harvest fruits and seeds, you have to process them, then you have to plant them, and then you have to monitor it. Uh, you actually need really advanced robotic technology to be able to do all of that. And it was in developing that we quickly realized that, that problem, well, you know, the scale might change slightly and the unit economics might change slightly, really is pretty universal across the maritime industry.

Yeah.

You know, even with, you know, in the places where there are the highest budgets and there's billions of dollars being spent today, we would look at that and say, well, you're still not getting nearly the value for money that you should.

Yeah.

You know, you're still not able to operate nearly on the scale that you should be able to.

Yeah, they're all the same shape problem. It's all important tasks underwater that are too expensive to do today or just not being done because the tools don't exist. And frankly, we started off in the seagrass work, but moving into both the commercial and defense market, it was actually those markets, they actually came to us. So in both our first kind of client in the offshore wind space, heard about our autonomous underwater vehicle and its capabilities and asked us, could it help with that? To which we said yes, and started working with them. And similarly with the Navy as well, it was a retired Navy veteran who used to work on mine countermeasures work in the Navy, heard about the tool and was so excited about it because he was like, this is exactly what I needed when I was on the inside., and, uh, he wanted to get our capability really quickly, um, to, to his former, you know, um, colleagues, um, and made some introductions for us and, you know, we got working with them then.

And so what does your product do differently than what's already on the market? Like why are, you know, retired generals coming to you guys and saying, we need this now? Why are they blown away?

I think it's the, you know, if you look at the maritime industry, it's really stagnated. Right. You know, the products that are on the market and available today are the same products that are brought onto the market and made available 20, 30 years ago. You know, the large primes and the— and these primes sell not just to defense, but also to, you know, provide services and sell to commercial as well. And the customers have been paying, you know, they don't have any other options. The technology is hard and it is complex and it's not something that you can just walk into and suddenly make way, way cheaper and way easier. And as a result, these companies where the customers are happily paying whatever price that they quote, what incentive do they have to give the customers more for their money, effectively lowering maybe their margins? Why would, if they've got a vehicle that people are spending $5 million for and selling enough of them, What incentive do they have to go and make one for $50,000 and, you know, sell at volume? And you'll talk to them directly and they'll say, well, we don't really care about volume. You know, we just care about having the best units. And, you know, when I hear that, that's great. They've already lost. But for, and for us, it's, you know, again, we coming from, you know, the space industry and the drone drone industry and the automotive industry, there's so many incredible developments that have happened from, you know, the embedded systems, power systems, propulsion systems, communications, compute, and AI and everything, even in just the last like 2 or 3 years, let alone 5 to 10 years, and, you know, sensing and everything. But no one's been, you know, taking, taking stock of that and being like, yeah, let's bring it to the maritime. The maritime domain. And for us, we saw all of that and we were like, this is crazy that it's not being done. And we, you know, quickly realized why it's not being done. They don't have the incentive and, you know, why would they build something from scratch that eats their own business model? All right. But for us, we absolutely have the incentive. You know, we want to deliver orders of magnitude more capability to the maritime industry than what they're getting. Than what they're getting today. And we want to do that to support, uh, you know, civilization doing way, way, way more in probably our most, like, uh, you know, unknown domain.

Yeah, yeah. To speak to that a little more, like, specifics that, like, appeal to our end users in, in, um, our markets, like, um, you know, in the, um, in the defense market, I think what people are very excited about, um, is, you know, we've got, like, 40 over 100 times more compute on board than anyone else in this category of vehicles, small to medium unmanned underwater vehicles, bringing unparalleled capabilities in the subsea domain. As Akhil mentioned, you can't speak with the surface, so you need to have a lot of inference on board to make decisions on the fly. I think that's very exciting to people. The price point is extremely exciting to them as well. They can buy 50 to 100 times more vehicles for the same budget that they had before. Enabling totally different new types of missions. And yeah, the subsea robotic capability is very important as well. A lot of platforms today are very good at gathering data underwater, but not good at robotically doing something like intervening in the subsea, that's an exciting capability. And then on the commercial side, I think a huge unlock there is when you integrate the surface and the subsea vehicles into one. If you look at today what offshore energy companies are spending on an inspection on a pipeline or something like that, they will be charged, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent an expensive kind of topside offshore support vessel. From that offshore support vessel, then you'll have a team on board, maybe 10 people, you know, all earning kind of, you know, single-digit thousands a day. So you get to maybe $50,000 day rate for the team. You throw a vehicle over the side, that might cost them $10,000 a day. So you're very quickly getting this very expensive day rate. And then you have a mobilization and demobilization costs and These projects run into the millions and they're just getting like side scan sonar images of a subsea pipeline. When you integrate surface and subsea, you take away that $100K a day rate for the surface vehicle because you've got an autonomous surface vehicle that maybe you're renting out at $10K a day or something like that. And then, so that integration of surface and subsea means you take out that OpEx cost. And then, as I said, the CapEx for what we do is much cheaper. Our underwater vehicle is much cheaper. Um, so cost is a big thing for folks in the commercial industry that they're, they're very excited about because if you're in offshore energy, you know, you, you can't control your revenue because the price of oil and gas goes like this, right? There's, there's no controlling it, but you can control your costs. Um, so they're very, very committed to reducing costs whenever they can. Um, which makes an offering like ours, um, very compelling.

Totally. And you've talked a lot about the cost. I'm curious, like, how do you make it so cheap compared to competitors? Like, what have you changed? How are you innovating to make it so cheap? Is there stuff you're offloading or how does it work?

Yeah, not really stuff we're offloading, but we have a very different way of doing things. If you look at the platforms that cost, you know, $500,000, $5 million, $15 million, they're really engineered to, you know, often last a long, long time.

Yeah.

And they also, you know, are often over-engineered quite heavily. Uh, you know, a degree of over-engineering is always good, but you know, the, it's like this thing is made to last 20 years, but we'll put components that'll last 40 years in it just to, just to be safe. Um, and then the, you know, they're made like, let's make the systems, you know, quadruple redundant. So, you know, this thruster could fail, this battery could fail, the brain could fail, and it'll still swim and, uh, and do the thing. And you know, these things become very complex. And frankly very bloated and very, very, very expensive. We've taken very much an opposing approach where it's like, you know, if our things cost 10 times less, let alone 100 times less, it doesn't need to last 20 years anymore. It'll be fine if it lasts 5 years or, you know, if it lasts, you know, 6 years. Or, you know, it's 100 times less cost. If it lasts even 2 years, it's fine. And then, you know, it's like, it's a lot easier for us to choose materials. We can choose materials that actually have a much lower manufacturing and machining cost and also procurement cost. When you don't need to use titanium or as high a grade of aluminum, you can get away with a lower grade of aluminum that's anodized. That's actually, you know, a lot less machine time, a lot faster, and thus a lot more to actually work with and also just cheaper to get off the line. And that's just for the pressure vessels and the, you know, the raw materials. And then you look at things like the, you know, the internals, the electronics. It's like, well, if, you know, the thing starts to go wrong and fails and floats to the surface, That's actually not so bad when you have 100 of them.

Right.

Or when you have 1,000 of them, it's pretty bad when you only have one of them in the water. So now the electronics and the internal control systems and safety simpler, safety systems can be a lot simpler. And when they're a lot simpler, our, you know, internal PCBs that run through the whole vehicle and, you know, handle communications and data and power and payloads. We can spend a lot, a lot of time on actually making the features good, you know, having much higher data bandwidth, having much more power capacity as well, rather than spending a lot of time and expense on, you know, making this thing like triple redundant or, you know, something, something like that. And then in terms of the modularity, if you look at most vehicles on the market today, each like some of them, many of them are modular, modular. But they're like, each module is an independently sealed vessel and it's really expensive to have electrical and data connections between sealed vessels. The connectors alone, a pair can be like thousands of dollars, which is pretty crazy. And you know, they're also then really hard to work with in terms of servicing or maintenance, or if, you know, the user wants to make a change or do something with, whereas ours, you know, It's like one continuous air volume all the way through. Makes our, our construction a lot easier, makes our maintenance a lot easier, takes a lot less time. Again, brings the cost down way, way further. And then there's other things we do which are, uh, more like, you know, technical breakthrough aligned, but it's more like, what have we learned from like space and drones that we can bring to this? And, you know, we, we're doing that in areas where, you know, we're starting to make our own motors., and doing it very differently to a lot of what's on the market today. Uh, and that should mean that we should be able to get, you know, motors that are ready to do the full ocean depth, but for tens of dollars instead of thousands of dollars, right? Um, our navigation systems, you know, the best, uh, not even the best, the bog standard inertial navigation systems are like $75,000 or $100,000, and that's just to like, know where you're going. And that's not even like you can use, you spend $120,000 and you can stay underwater for your whole 3 days. Sorry, for your whole 3 days, you spend that much money and it's like, great, you can stay under the water for like 2 hours and then you still have to surface or whatever. That's crazy amount. You know, we are working on systems that'll probably be able to do the same thing for orders of magnitude or, an order of magnitude lower cost. You know, going from $100,000 to $10,000 and maintaining that capability is huge. And that's, you know, part of what I think part of the benefit of us not being from the maritime industry. We look at the way a lot of things are done and we don't take the answer for face value.

Right.

You know, we talk with our team. We have an exceptional team of engineers who always come to us with crazy ideas. It's like, You guys don't need to spend that much money on that. What if we just made it ourselves or did something else? And then, you know, we're like, hell yeah, let's try it, see what happens. Yeah.

And there's nothing new. I mean, this is just what like SpaceX did for space. It's just like companies have, nobody's really done that for the ocean yet. So it's, yeah, taking the same kind of like, you know, design philosophy.

Really high idiot index and, you know.

Yeah. In the maritime space, yeah.

So, you know, I was reading about you guys in the Free Press. I thought that was a really interesting article and it's now like sort of my pet interest is sort of disrupting these industries. Like you guys have the maritime industry, it makes perfect sense why there hasn't been a lot of investment and thought there because it's not like immediately, uh, like a critical point. Now it is like, look at the news now. It's like a very, very important piece to, you know, uh, a war that we are fighting in the Middle East. So I'm just curious, like, you know, what was that, uh, coverage like for you guys? How are you guys thinking about defense in that way? Because it talks about all of these other American companies coming together and innovating in this space. So how do you guys fit into that?

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the kind of prominent themes, I think, of this century is this resurgence in how important the ocean is. And a key part of that is going to be in terms of defense, right? One of the kind of big trends we're facing right now is increased geopolitical competition between the United States and China. America is shifting from maybe a track record of preparing for wars that took place over a desert, and now it's moving towards wars that could take place over an ocean. That requires a very different composition of forces and capabilities that the US has not maybe invested in as much previously. So as a result, yeah, there's a lot of efforts going on right now in the Navy to kind of future-proof themselves. Obviously you want to avoid a conflict and get ready for that. But the underwater domain is going to be very critical to any potential conflict in that world. The underwater domain, again, in a future where satellites can see everything everywhere on Earth all of the time, well, they can't see underwater. So it's one of the few places remaining where you have stealth. Similarly, it's one of the areas where the US has the most strategic advantage already. The kind of status of American capabilities on shipbuilding compared to Chinese is pretty scary. Chinese making hundreds of ships per year, the US making single-digit numbers of ships per year.

That's crazy to me. When I read that stat, it was mind-blowing, actually.

But in the underwater domain, when it comes to the submarine fleet, the US totally mogs China in this regard. They're just totally light years ahead of Chinese capabilities in the subsea domain. The US's nuclear submarines are just really, really far ahead there. So it's an area where the US already has strategic advantage and an area where they can further accentuate that with unmanned systems. Again, in an era where you have hypersonics on the surface that could potentially take out any surface asset, or drones that could take out any surface asset, again, the underwater domain becomes a place where you could get some competitive advantage because you can't use hypersonics to take out unmanned underwater vehicles. So yeah, it's a domain I think that'll be very important. And yeah, I mean, the nice thing about our platform is there's a lot of defense-type missions that I can look after. We've talked about the mine countermeasures mission. It's an area where we're already working with Navy on, but there's intelligence reconnaissance type missions in the subsea domain, protection of offshore infrastructure as well. When you pair our underwater vehicle to a surface vehicle, we can stay out in the ocean for many months at a time protecting subsea cables and these sorts of critical assets. So yeah, it's an area we're spending increasingly more time on and having a lot of traction in.

Yeah, and there's some cool things like, think illegal fishing enforcement, you know, no governments really have the money to spend on that because of how expensive the current tools are and just in terms of owning them, but also operating them, you know, like a destroyer can cost upwards of a million dollars a day just to be out there. Um, but when you have, you know, tens of thousands of unmanned surface vehicles with underwater vehicles that can you know, like I said, be everywhere all at once. Now you can look at problems like that and actually have realistic solutions, solutions to them. And, you know, applications like that really, really get us, get us very excited.

Yeah. And so something you guys had mentioned is that you've got a customer requesting 10,000 vehicles. I'd love to hear more about your customers if you can talk about them, like how are they using your vehicles? Using the service? Like, is there any cool story you've heard so far?

Yeah, I mean, the 10,000 vehicles one is, is really cool because that is the exact type of application that we want to, we want to enable with our technology that wouldn't be possible if our robots, you know, weren't as capable as they are while being the cost that they are. You know, it's an application that is today, you know, it's a seismic survey type application that is today served by, really expensive assets. The surveys cost tens of millions of dollars.

Yeah.

Really expensive. But if you had underwater vehicles that can carry the right sensors that could go out and survey these large areas, becomes very compelling.

Yeah. I mean, so we have 3 customer types, the nature customers, the commercial customers, the defense customers. Yeah, there's different aspects that excite all of them. Again, the thing that excites the nature customers, again, it's ecosystem restoration at a scale they never thought was possible. Offshore energy customers, it's doing important tasks at a very large scale in the subsidy domain at a fraction of the cost. And then for defense customers, it's capabilities that again, were never possible before at this scale. So yeah, the specifics on what we're doing with with all these customers, it's all different. And that's the beauty of the business is that the same platform that we've built initially for seagrass is this thing that has just massive ramifications for anyone in the ocean.

Totally. And so it was $3.3 million in revenue in the last 2 years, is that right?

Well, that was our most recently announced number. Yeah, we're upwards of probably, yeah, that was $3.5 million for 2 years. Yeah, we're kind of Q1 closing on, yeah, $2 million in just Q1 this year.

Wow. So yeah, and that'll probably be our quietest, quietest quarter of the year, I hope. I think so.

So like, how does that shake out? Is a lot of people buying the vehicles, using the services? Like, how is that sort of slicing up in the pie?

Services mainly. Yeah. So as you know, I kind of said we have two main ways of working with customers. We offer them vehicles and operate them for them as a service. But for select, you know, defense customers, we will sell them the assets. And yeah, predominantly most of our operations today have been services. But the beauty of that is that by developing, by operating services, you get a really tight feedback loop between the tech you're building, you operate it, you see where it works and where it doesn't work, and then you can work with engineering to then go and fix these two things on it that didn't work that well on that mission. And then that means you have this extremely robust product that when you go sell them to someone like the Navy, it's been tested and it's got hundreds of hours on it. It's not just this idea that you're not selling them a PowerPoint slide, you're selling something that you can be like, look at all these mission reports we've done all around the world. This thing works.

And so you guys just raised new money from Andreessen Horowitz. Is it through the American Dynamism Fund? Can you tell me more about what that is, how you guys came together and all that partnership?

Yeah, it's very interesting, but we'd been friends with a couple of their associates since we moved here. They were some of the first people we met. They were super friendly and we'd always be telling them about some crazy mission that we're running out in Australia or Florida or Virginia or even out here and they were always quite interested in we had this new office, this facility where just in the last year, we are middle of last year, we started like doing all this big vertical integration push, making all our mechanical stuff in-house, starting to do a lot of our electronics assembly and stuff in-house as well. And we started moving really, really fast. You know, we, you know, start of 2025, we were on like iteration 2 or 3, end of you know, now we're like closing in on iteration 6 of our platform and, you know, we landed some pretty interesting, pretty big contracts. And so, you know, they came by, they spent an hour with us, they saw the tech in action. We did a really cool, some really cool demos of like our launch and recovery system of the vehicle in action. So it showed them some of the reconfigurability that we had that really sets us apart. And, you know, for them, they saw a company that was building technology that had the potential to, has the potential to forever change how we do things in the ocean, but not just talking about it. You know, we were building it, have actual customers, a killer team that's just constantly innovating and executing on all sorts of crazy projects. And that got them, that got them super stoked. Yeah. Yeah.

I think they were excited by, I think as well, like Yeah, real tech, but also like we're doing it off like pretty lean team as well. Like this time last year, we were like 5, you know, this time like last Christmas it was 5 people, this time last year maybe 8 people. When we did the fundraise, like 15 people, but you have a full, you know, TRL 9 level subsea system that is like the best in the market. So yeah, I think, yeah, and we're making millions of dollars in revenue.

So Yeah, we're not, and that's like making millions of dollars of revenue with many, much more to come. And we're still just doing like a, a lot of like similar services, right? In some cases that to what others are doing today. As you know, when we pull off the automated launch and recovery system and the surface vessel and really bring that cost down, this scale that we're gonna be able to operate at and the level of services we're gonna be able to provide. They're, you know, they're gonna be completely industry changing.

Yeah. And so tell the audience how much was this Series A? This was your Series A, right?

Yeah.

How much?

$38 million.

And so what do you plan to do with this fresh funding? What are your dreams, ambitions?

So, you know, right across the board, we're hiring massively today. You know, we're hiring technical people, you know, mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, embedded engineers, software, Engineers where, you know, you're building out an acoustics team because those sensors are really, really expensive. The most expensive part of our vehicle is the stuff that we don't make. So we want to make them to really, you know, bring the cost down and make the product way better. You know, we're also hiring our first like operations team, which is really exciting. Of course, hiring head of talent to help build this team up. And then, you know, on the commercial side, there's a number of hires there we're really excited to be making too.

Yeah, yeah, like out of marketing and these sorts of things. So yeah, I think hiring will probably be the number one focus immediately after the round. I think Mako is a pretty developed platform right now, so we want to bring that to production and be able to start ripping massive orders on it. And then on the kind of other side of the house, Kraken and Leviathan, our launch recovery system and our service vehicle, want to get them to production readiness such that this time next year we're able to start taking large orders on, on those platforms. And, uh, and yeah, like, we have initial traction in each of these markets that we're working in now, but time to take that to the kind of next level. And, um, yeah, uh, you know, we've pretty consistently, like, uh, you know, done some nice increases on revenue year over year since the start. So just like keep that, keep that going, um, and, uh, yeah, drive broader adoption across these fields. And I think what we're One of the things I'm most excited for to see in the next year is to see like, um, the, the whole suite of technologies that we're building working together in unison in customer operations. Um, you know, we've tested and worked on a lot of these things, um, independently in tests and that sort of thing. But doing a large at-scale multi-vehicle surface and subsea operation for a customer will be, um, something we will, we will do in the next, um, in the next year. And I think that will be really, really sick seeing the vision come together of like this swarm of robots doing at-sea work. And then you're like, okay, wow, you've done it for that. Then it's like, you know, time to pour in more gas on the fire and just go, you know, go ham.

Yeah, it's putting our money where our mouth is, you know, and showing that our tech really does do the— do what we say it's going to do and does it at the cost, uh, that we're, we're targeting. And yeah, it's going to be fun building out our first like internal fleet. You know, we've got 5 vehicles now, we want to get that to like, you know, 10, 20 vehicles, have the, you know, team take our vehicles from what is today hundreds of hours in the water to thousands or rather tens of thousands of hours in the water. So when we say that we have the best maritime platforms, we don't mean best by like on paper specifications, but we mean best by, you know, hours in the water, actual work done. Yeah.

And, you know, sort of going back to my pet project, the American Dynamism Fund is so interesting. And I was listening to an Acquired pod from a partner at A16z talk about like this concept. And I'm just really curious what you guys make of this concept, like what you're gaining from it and why you might feel that we need this. Because over the last week, I mentioned to you guys when I saw you in the office that this has become my pet project because I started reading Freedom's Forge and I was like, damn, like Why don't we make things like we used to? And I mean, I'm obviously very new to this and it's Ashlee Vance's will that he really wants me to get into it, but it's interesting. So please tell me more about this fund and like why it matters.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's, there's been a real resurgence in the last year or so of people investing in real-world technologies, things you can touch and feel. And you know, it's kind of actually surprising that it took this long for it to catch on. I think, I mean, American Dynamism were one of the first in the space to catch on to this many years ago, realizing that we need to onshore more manufacturing, invest in defense capabilities, build robots for working in austere environments and doing dangerous tasks. I think they were early to it. But when you think about it from an investor perspective, you look at the top companies again in the world, as well as being founded in San Francisco, most of them are hardware companies or companies that have a significant hardware component. Amazon is significant bunch of it is, it's a software business, but it's a data center business, right? Tesla, obviously, and look at the IPOs that are going to happen this year as well, right? Whether it be like Anduril or whether it be the SpaceX one, or even like, again, any of the AI builders, they're hardware companies, right? They're hardware companies and software companies. So I think people are starting to realize that the biggest companies that are being built today are hardware companies and being like, well, that's Maybe we should put some money into those early-stage ones. So I think that's happening. And I think as well, in a world where I can vibe code a DocuSign replacement tool in just 10 minutes or something like that, it's kind of hard to vibe code a Ulysses replacement. It might take you a little bit longer. So I think there's probably excitement on that side. But then I think more on the founder side, I think we kind of hit peak software a few years ago. And I think you also have a generation of kind of 20-something founders these days as well now where like the software just doesn't excite us. We're looking for something more meaningful. We're looking for something a little bit more real. One of my own kind of personal theories is like we had like, we're a set of founders that spent maybe 2 years of the prime of our lives in our early 20s locked indoors due to COVID. And I think for me anyway, at least that made me really want to just go out and do something in the real world as well. I don't want to look at it on their screen. Again, most of my days by looking at screens. But I want to do something in the real world, something real impactful, something that drives real change in a domain that I find important. And I think you're seeing a lot of founders like that as well. These young people, 20-somethings, very disaffected maybe at the world, and they're choosing a creative project of company building to affect that change that they want to see in the world. So I think that's some of the appeal to the building in the real world for these young people is like, it's, I don't want to be virtual anymore. I want to be in the real world. I do enough of that.

Yeah. I think to add to that, I think, you know, from our discussions when we're talking to the folks at American Dynamism, they're very, very excited to back companies that are adding capabilities to the country that the country has kind of let go of.

Yeah.

You know, and this is like across the board where you know, that shipbuilding stat being a prime example of that, where it's like, what are we doing? You know, we've spent so many decades now outsourcing a lot of the, you know, a lot of critical work and, you know, pushing the whole, you know, globalism and everything. And it's been good for a lot of things, but at the same time, it's, you know, allowed it's allowed a lot of complacency that is going to come and, you know, it's going to come and bite us hard if things keep going the way they're going. So it's really, really important to build that capability here and continue to compete on merit, not just on capital, you know. You can't just pay money to, you know, do something somewhere else. You need to have the capabilities at home so that you, can, you know, be the best.

Yeah. It's so interesting. I was just in Canada doing an episode and they were talking about having their own like sovereign rocket defense companies. And you guys are two Irishmen who came to America. So like, what does that mean to you to build it in America versus, I know it probably sounds silly, but why not Ireland?

Well, I mean, you know, I'm definitely not, we're not the first like Irishmen to get on a boat, um, or a plane, uh, you know, and cro— cross the beautiful Atlantic and come here in search of a founder fortune.

It's a genetic memory thing.

Yeah. 150 years ago, we had the potato famine and it sent a lot of Irish people over here. So, it's not uncommon. I mean, I'm the first in my family to leave it. And I bet as Irish as they get, Murphys and O'Briens all like to stay home in Cork. But yeah, I mean, look, I think both of us, I think, want to do something very impactful and meaningful with our short lives that we have on this earth. And company building is probably one of the most impactful things that you can do, especially when you work on an important problem. San Francisco is probably one of the best places you can build a company. So it's a, you know, and we both love America and have like fallen in love with San Francisco and Northern California since moving here. And love this country and everything that it stands for. So I think it doesn't take many logical jumps to be like, wow, this is so exciting to build a company here to support this national interest. We might at some point in our future have a satellite office in Dublin. I think my mom would be very happy with that, but get home a bit more often. But yeah, I think we're very excited to be based here and be serving kind of national interest.

Yeah, I think it's again, like you want to be where the stuff is happening. You know, you want to be building in a country that is actually doing stuff, putting its money where its mouth is and actually, you know, standing up for the, you know, morally what's good or, you know, whatever, but still participating through action, not just words and not just throwing money around, which I think a lot of countries in a lot of places have just resorted to doing. It's like, you know, they'll come out with these great flashy statements, but what are you actually doing? Even though America is doing less than it once was, it is still doing the most, you know, and we want to be a part of that and we want to help, help it get back to being on the level it once was, you know, like just after, you know, like just after the last war when this was the place where all of the industrialism was happening, where the greatest innovation was happening. We want to keep that going and keep that growing.

And so, uh, you know, on the topic of America and sort of this newfound interest in like maritime innovation, uh, the Pentagon just carved out $13.4 billion for autonomous systems. How much of that is actually accessible for a 20-person startup in San Francisco versus like like a Lockheed or, you know, like how is that coming down to you guys?

Yeah, I mean, some of it will get allocated to existing programs of record. So that's, you know, locked in. There's vendors selected for those programs. But, and you know, some of it will go for surface, you know, assets, which is not like necessarily the field that we're leading in right now. We're more focused on kind of the underwater stuff. But yeah, I think the important thing to look at is not like maybe how much of it, but how much of it relative to what it was 2 or 3 years ago, right? A number of years ago, it was single-digit billions. Before that, it was hundreds of millions. Next year, it'll probably be another multiple on that. So when you have that much new budget created in such a short space of time, that gives a lot of opportunity then for companies like us to go in and position ourselves such that the next underwater vehicle program of record that is set up is Ulysses vehicles on that program and that we're, we're there. So I think that's kind of the more interesting thing to look at in that regard is like the rate at which it's increasing.

Yeah, it's, it's hard, but it's getting better.

Right, right. And so, you know, looking forward to the next 5 years for Ulysses, like what does it look like if it all continues to go fabulously? Like what are you hoping for?

Hundreds to thousands of robots deployed globally. Uh, you know, we, we want to be operating in the most critical maritime domains across commercial, nature, security. And, you know, when people think of The Ocean Company, that's Ulysses.

Yeah, exactly. The same way that SpaceX is synonymous with space. I think like what that looks like in actuality is like, you know, networks of vehicles in every critical waterway around the world's surface. And so see the Gulf of America, the Irish Sea, the Gulf, the Arabian Gulf, everywhere you go, there's just networks of these Ulysses vehicles doing these important tasks in the same way that you have Starlinks here all over the skies and SpaceX going in and out of space every day. You have Ulysses vehicles doing that. You have remote operation centers all around the world. We're multi-product at that stage as well, many different classes of underwater vehicles beyond Mako. Many different surface crafts, many, maybe even other form factors.

And, uh, and yeah, it's, you know, really interesting to think of sort of autonomous war. And this is something I was asking you guys about in the office of like, what does that, what's the need for that? It didn't make sense to me, like for us to go all the way to completely autonomous. And you guys explained it really well. Could you explain like what that sort of looks like if we have all of these Ulysses products all over the world, how does it help?

Yeah, well, I suppose the point is deterrence, right? We're not building to start wars, we're building to stop them, right? The idea is that you have the capabilities so strong that nobody wants to aggress against you. But I think where the maritime domain is right now and why it needs autonomy is because it is absolutely massive. It's actually unfathomable to think about how big the ocean is. So you need autonomy because you need a lot of assets and there's not enough humans on this planet to look at the data streams coming from each of these vehicles that you need to protect all of the offshore, to protect the fishing fleets in South America, to protect the critical undersea infrastructure like cables that bring your brilliant internet to the United States that could be tampered with, to protect any of these ports where all your goods every day come in and out of. You just need autonomy in that regard. So the idea is that, yeah, you build enough of these vehicles, you make them autonomous, it acts as a deterrence for bad actors because the ocean really is the Wild West, right? It actually is the wildest domain on Earth right now. There's always crazy stories coming from the ocean. Pirates still exist. It's not like this imaginary thing. So yeah, I think if we can build our capabilities up, You prevent any war and you turn this disorder domain into an order domain. It becomes the Wild West to this resource that already gives so much to people, to humanity. It's like this huge source of protein, daily source of protein, huge source of income, but it has so much more to give. And you give people the tools then to really just take as much and steward this resource appropriately and manage it. That's what got us into it in the first place, the nature problem. We were like, How are we managing our oceans so poorly? You can start to restore the fish stocks, you can start to stop illegal fishing, you can restore the ecosystems and solve all these other downstream things as well.

And in the event that war actually does happen, well, you shouldn't be sending people out there. As Will said, the domain is so massive and so vast and ultimately, what are you fighting for control of? The resources, right? The ability to have your telecommunications cable, the ability to extract to get oil from this oil field and own that, the ability to, you know, pipe it somewhere, the ability to use this shipping route, you know, Strait of Hormuz again being a very relevant and in-time example. And the control of all those domains can be established and maintained with completely unmanned systems. You know, people don't need to be out there doing that work.

So I'm, I'm thinking of the scale that you guys hope for, and I've been to, you know, where you guys assembled these underwater drones and it feels like you guys are gonna need a lot of scale. You said 10,000 for one customer is wild. So like how do you see yourself getting there to that capacity? 26 hours for one Mako, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, I mean, that's, that's today on the current machines without like really any optimization or, you know, and it's not even, proper machinists or technicians running the systems, it's the engineers who designed them. But that's the thing where, you know, we feel like we're that good and we're just in the, you know, early days, the scaling, the pre-scaling up stage. We've been designing the vehicles from the ground up to be mass manufactured. And that goes through every level, you know, in terms of how the mechanics actually go together. But also how they're machined. How do you take an aluminum pipe stock and then actually turn it into the pressure vessels? That affects, to make that as easy and as cheap and scalable as possible, that affects the design. Even the electronics, what ICs, what chips are we selecting? Do we have really easy, stable, and quick supply chains? All of those things are considered right from day one. They're not things that we go and, you know, we've done 5 or 6 iterations and then we need to do like production-ready revision and that'll, that will allow us to scale really rapidly. You know, we always talk about it's just a copy and paste, you know, the same set of, you know, 4 machines that we have in the office, just copy and paste those in a larger space and we can do everything that we need to do.

And, you know, you talked a little bit about like the, the most expensive parts for our, the ones that we don't make ourselves. Again, my, my pet niche, like how important is it to, to bring those in-house and how challenging is that gonna be? Because, you know, I'm not a manufacturer or an engineer, so when I read these books, I'm like, why don't we do everything here? But it's like obviously a very, very hard task. So how are you gonna sort of take that on?

Yeah, a lot of it is, is really hard. There's, you know, technologies where, um, there's like one supplier less left in the US that can actually make this transducer. Onshore for you because it's all being farmed out to, you know, Azure or wherever. It's not easy by any means, but the beauty of it is it's all stuff that has been done for decades and a lot of it doesn't necessitate, hey, we need to create a new way of doing this or we need to invent this capability from scratch. And a lot of it is a, you know, an idiot index problem., you know, a process optimization problem where it's like, well, this is the thing that has been used for the last 20 years. You look at it and you look at the technology that's available for us today and you rebuild that with the technology that's available for us today and suddenly it costs 10 times less and is way easier to make. Uh, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff like that and a lot of low-hanging fruit we're gonna be able to hit. But there are some things that are going to take, take quite a long time. But the thing is, even today with, you know, using a lot of off-the-shelf stuff, we're still orders of magnitude cheaper and we still have the same or better capabilities than what's on the market.

I was going to ask about the cheaper stuff earlier. In a way, you know, this is sort of a tale as old as time, this sort of upstart that's like, we can make this cheaper and more available and get into everyone's hands. It doesn't have to be this expensive, you know, bureaucratic device. But I'm thinking like if you're going to the Strait of Hormuz or somewhere, those really expensive failure modes seem to make more sense. But how are you thinking of that from an engineering standpoint? Because it feels like they would need to be really robust to take on Iranian mines, you know.

I mean, this is the beauty of the modular, um, system, right, is that like if we want to swap in expensive robust sensors that have been battle-proven, you know, 1,000 times. Well, it's just like, you don't have to redesign the vehicle. It's literally just like, let's take out the front, you know, the nose cone and put in a more expensive, you know, sensing module in there. Oh, we want more onboard compute. Let's take out the compute module, put that. Again, this is the beauty of the modular design is that, okay, your base cost is really low, but the minute someone's like, nah, I need this capability, you just snap it in. And it's super easy. So yeah, for those types of use cases, we can do all that. We're just like, we're pulling the floor down really, really, really.

Yeah. And ultimately to operate in the ocean, it has to be super robust.

Mm-hmm.

You know, that we, there's nothing we can do about the fact that the environment's always trying to, trying to kill you and getting transported out there and, you know, being out on the water is a harsh environment that's, you know, constantly beating you about. So there is, yeah, there is that floor that we absolutely need to meet and we, and we do, but the fact of the matter is, you know, we cannot, today we don't just like meet the bare minimum, we do more than that. But the thing is a lot of the vehicles that are out there, they have, you know, become so bloated and so full of stuff that it's, you know, they've become these massive complex gargantuan really expensive things. And we're starting from scratch. We are able to make a lot smarter choices.

So, you know, we're on the pod today because you guys raised your Series A. I've known Will for a while now. It's really cool to have you guys on. I, I want to make sure that we sort of touch on everything that's important to you guys. Like, what is the big message, you know, as you guys scale? And I mean, it's, it's growing like crazy. So how do you feel? What's most important to you right now?

Yeah, I think, you know, uh, from my side, it's definitely like Hiring also, you know, putting our money where our mouth is. We want to get way more hours in the water, get way more case studies up there, you know, spend way more time with customers and just really show that we're not just talking about doing this, but we are actively out there and we are delivering globally.

Yeah, I think, you know, the— Gil mentioned the talent points. I think that's like massively important to us. I think I think a message we are trying to get home to people, young, smart individuals that want to work on meaningful problems is that for decades, if you actually go back to the '60s, people thought that the— were as excited about ocean exploration as they were about space exploration. In fact, in 1961, JFK wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy commissioning him to look into a subsea equivalent for the space program.. And we had these programs like Conshelf and others were building subsea habitats and people were dreaming about a future where we had habitation in the sea, where we'd found all the lost treasures of antiquity. We had discovered what is really lurking in the depths, all these stories and mythology of these sea creatures, are they real? What's going on down there in that domain? It was becoming increasingly important in the Cold War as well, the subsea domain. Only recently declassified in the last few decades and how important the submarines were in the Cold War. And then we forgot it, right? We forgot about the maritime domain. We kept the space dream alive. It kind of died for a few decades, but we went to the moon. But more people have been to the surface of the moon than they have been to the deepest depths of the ocean, to the Mariana Trench.

Why did we forget it? How is that even possible? It's wild to me.

So there's a few reasons. There is a, there's, you know, part of it is all of these programs went classified. There was also some unfortunate deaths in these like subsea exploration programs, which kind of shuttered funding. Additionally, there was a change in kind of our perception of the ocean. There was, we changed, you know, Cousteau was this, you know, he invented the, the regulator. He's a world-famous ocean explorer, and he was really the champion for subsea exploration. Him and others who were champions of the space shifted more from an explore and find out to a preserve and protect model of how we should interact with our oceans, which was totally right. We were doing some absolutely deplorable things to the nature in the world's oceans. There was oil spills happening, there was strip mining of resources, there was bottom trawling, which was massacring environments. And he spent a lot more of his energy. So our cultural beacon that was leading it, totally well-intentioned, focused more on the problems in the matter of nature, forgot it. So these things came as a confluence, and this was fitting into a broader decline in doing things in the physical world that was starting around the '60s and '70s. So, it kind of rides along that wave as well. And where we're sitting here in 2026, 50, 60 years later, is looking at young engineers and stuff like that. And these are people being like, this is the most important place for you to spend your time. Building capabilities in this world is the most important place for you to spend your time. It has been totally neglected. There is huge white space for you as an engineer and individual to really be groundbreaking. We have engineers that joined us straight out of college, working on designs for certain aspects of our vehicle, be it motors, sensors, and otherwise, that if they pull these things off, this will be looked back on in years as the people who worked on the refinements that SpaceX were making to their engines. You see these rapid iterations of the SpaceX engines over time. We're doing that to the subsea domain. And I think we're trying to appeal to people in that regard, being like, yeah, if you want to work on a neglected, difficult problem with a ton of white space, the underwater domain is totally where you can do that, where you can do new things for the first time. And Ulysses is home for those people. Where people were going to SpaceX 10 years ago, they should be coming to Ulysses today. It's that big of a problem space. So that's what I would like to get home to anybody listening to this today. It's like, come work at Ulysses. There's a ton of jobs, a ton of difficult work to do. We'll pay you, feed you, we'll give you Guinness. We have a tap in the office. We have a lot of fun, but we work hard. We don't take ourselves too seriously. Um, and yeah, you should come work at us.

Amazing. Thank you guys so much for joining me on the podcast. Um, can't wait to see you in 5 years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, thanks for having us. Hopefully in 5 years it's underwater. You'll see HQ.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Perfect.

I'll be there.

I'll bring my goggles. Thanks guys.

You too. Thanks, Kyle.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Kylee Robison. And/or Ashlee Vance, or both of us together. It is produced by Ashlee Vance and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and Jon Sortland, and the show is edited by always the Jon Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and E1 Ventures for all your support. This is my first ad read. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening and watching. We love you. You, please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all of those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.