Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering raises $38M Series A from a16z to build autonomous underwater drones for defense and offshore energy

Speaker 2: So Yeah. Jordy, anything else?

Speaker 1: No. Great update. Congratulations. Progress. Congrats to the team.

Speaker 2: Have a great day. Cheers. Thanks for hopping on. Goodbye. And up next, we have Akhil from Ulysses. He's the cofounder and CEO. How are you doing?

Speaker 11: Hey, Faz. Good to good to be here.

Speaker 1: Look at that.

Speaker 2: Love you.

Speaker 1: Look at that beautiful drone.

Speaker 2: Massive day today. Kick us off with the announcement. What happened today?

Speaker 11: Well, you know, I've got, you know, my my friend, my Mako here, one of our pet robotic sharks. Oh. And we're gonna be building a hell of a lot more of them. We've just announced our series a led by Andreessen Horowitz, American Diamondism Fund at $38,000,000. Congratulations.

Speaker 1: Very, very, very, very, very cool. And yeah. Why don't you give yeah. What what what is what have the last, like, six six months been like? Will's been on the show before. This is your first time, but kind of walk us through what you guys have been focused on, what the what the opportunities are, and what the future looks like.

Speaker 11: Yeah. For sure. So, you know, as you guys might already know, you know, we're building autonomous maritime robotics to solve the most critical challenges in what is arguably the most critical domain on the planet. You know, we're talking commercial applications ranging from just monitoring and maintaining infrastructure for offshore energy, oil and gas, renewables, also telecoms, you know, maintaining and securing the, you know, critical communications infrastructure, also shipping terminals, ports, that kind of thing as well. And then as we, you know, recently started doing a lot of work in the defense space as well, taking our commercially available and deployed robots, like this Mako behind me that's been on probably a dozen missions for various commercial customers till date, and taking the exact same technology and helping to fill capability gaps for allied forces. You know? You look at shipbuilding where China is ahead of The US by, you know, 200 times or something like that. Unmanned underwater vehicles, the gap isn't that big. You know, it's the gap that can be easily closed. We're the ones closing it. And it's the underwater domain where most of the work happens. It's where all the infrastructure is. It's where all of the communications is, and it's a place where, you know, we have a chance to deliver an asymmetric advantage. And over the last six months, we've been hard at work taking our commercial tech and bringing it in front of allied forces to get it in the water with them.

Speaker 2: So talk about the commercial applications. If I have a, I don't know, oil rig, and I wanna inspect and make sure that the barnacles aren't getting out of control or something, I drop this in the water. Am I piloting it remotely? Does it have an autonomous sort of path that it can swim around on or or, you know, fly around on and and collect data, imagery? What are the sensors stack? Like, what how how am I actually getting value from this on day one?

Speaker 11: So that that's the beauty of the product. It's modular, which means that you can put you know, it's made up of all these sections. You can change the thruster configuration. Okay. You can put different sensors on. You can take other sensors off. So it depends on what you want. You know? Are you trying to do a magnetic analysis of your structure? We have a magnetic a magnetometer payload. Sure. Are you trying to just see what's there? We've got cameras like we have right here.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 11: Are you trying to see through really dark and murky water, really wide areas? Then we have a variety of acoustic mapping sonar payloads

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 11: And things like that. And so then in terms of, you know, can it work autonomously? Can you remote control it? Well, you can do both. That's the that's the fun of it. You know? You could have it, you know, just drop it in the water with a preprogrammed path and be like, hey. Go and search this wide area or, you know, scan all these pylons supporting my rig. Come back, pull the data off, and have a look, and then you might see something interesting. You might see something, I wanna take a closer look. But then you can connect a cable, livestream the data

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 11: And drive it down yourself. Yeah. And then you can look at it. And we support robotic payloads as well. So then you can start interacting with it. You know, you you might wanna scrape something off. You might wanna cut something that's entangled Mhmm. Entangled. You might wanna place something. We have payloads that do all of that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. How are you thinking about range and and battery life and and just all the different trade offs that go into actually getting something that can have an impact for a meaningful amount of time or across a meaningful amount of space? It doesn't look like the biggest ship. How far can it go? How deep can it go? Yeah. What are the options Yeah.

Speaker 11: This is one of our

Speaker 4: this

Speaker 11: is our one of our more compact vehicles. You know, this one's about sixty sixty five inches in length, but, you know, we can go in excess of a 140 inches because you can stack batteries. You know? Sure. This one here, in this configuration, it's not the most hydrodynamic

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 11: Configuration, which means it's not the most efficient. So it's only gonna go maybe 20 nautical miles with one battery box. But if you want it to go 60 nautical miles, put three battery boxes on. Yeah. Or if you take the thruster pods off and you just have this big tube, that's the most efficient. And then you can actually go, you know, four four battery boxes in length because you take the pods out. That gives you space for another battery box. Yep. Then you can go up to 250 nautical miles.

Speaker 2: It's going slower but farther. That makes sense.

Speaker 11: Yeah. Yeah. And it's also a more efficient shape.

Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah. More efficient. I saw that there's two cameras on the front. Is that for stereoscopic vision, or is one of them telephoto, one of them is wide angle? Why two lenses on the front?

Speaker 11: In in this case, you it doesn't really show up, but they are actually two separate lenses. Okay. Two different sensors as well

Speaker 2: Oh, sure.

Speaker 11: Just different use cases. But they're they're modules. You can see this port is actually blank here, but we make we actually make our own cameras as well, and you can plug them in with different lenses. You can have a stereo configuration. Yeah. You know, we've actually got ones on top here as well. Because this one, you know, the idea is you can have it, like, swim, like, underneath structures, and you should be looking up and doing inspection up above. So You're making your own Again,

Speaker 2: very flexible. How vertically integrated are you? This feels like with defense applications, it's really important to be onshore, but I would imagine trying to take advantage of as much of the supply chain as you can. What's been the build versus buy strategy?

Speaker 11: Well, we we found come you know, coming into this, we there's there are a lot of things we honestly wanted to buy, and we looked into buying, but we found the the idiot index in maritime is is insane.

Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8: You know?

Speaker 2: It's What is the idiot index again? Can you break that

Speaker 11: It's metric down? Yeah. That that's, you know, the the metric that Musk came up with where, you know, what's the ratio of the cost of the raw materials in a part

Speaker 2: That's right.

Speaker 11: Versus what you're actually paying for it.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 11: And, you know, there's been, like, you know, sensors and, you know, motors and other parts that we, like we get in, we take them apart. We're like, why are we paying a $150,000 for this thing? It's got, like, microcontroller in in here worth $10, some, you know, networking and pair of switches. And, you know, it's not even like, okay. This is really new, really advanced technology, and they need to amortize the development costs. It's like, we're buying a sensor that's 20 years old. Yep. Why are we still paying this much for it? Yep. You know? And the thing is this the, you know, the the tech and the knowledge and the fundamentals have been publicly available for a long long time for a lot of the stuff that we're bringing in house. So, you know, for us, it's like, if you look at the maritime industry, it's been the same for centuries. You wanna do something big and important, you get a big ship, lots of expensive equipment, and you're really CapEx and OpEx heavy.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 11: Right? But that's not the case anymore in space, in the air, on land. You know? We wanna bring that moment to to the to the ocean as well. And what that's necessitated is a ton of vertical integration. All the metal that you see on this, all our pressure vessels, they're machined in the machines just over there. Wow. All the internal brackets and mounts, everything, also machined on those same machine. The plastic fairings and propellers and everything three d printed on the three d printers over there, all the internal printed circuit boards with all the electronics. We don't make the boards ourselves yet, but we do have the ability to actually assemble the boards. You know, we get the raw components in, place them on the boards, and they've got an automated line doing that. And that's massively brought our cost down, made it much easier for us to have a product that's fundamentally very easy to scale, but also massively like, save us tons of money in terms of development time and iteration speed. You know, there's things we've done that we did in three days that before we brought machining and has probably would have taken us three months.