Ulysses is building autonomous underwater robots to restore seagrass ecosystems, starting with a service that makes seagrass restoration cheaper, faster, and far larger in scale than manual methods. The company was founded by four Irish co-founders who came from backgrounds in drone delivery, Formula 1 engineering, and commercial sales — none were marine biologists, but they were drawn to a problem most people have never heard of.
Seagrass: the overlooked wonder plant
Seagrass is a marine plant that is 35 times more effective at removing carbon than rainforests and underpins critical ocean health.
It stores roughly 20% of the carbon in ocean sediments — losing these ecosystems would release gigatons of stored carbon.
It acts as a scaffold species: small fish hide in it, other fish lay eggs in it, and it supports the health of global fisheries.
Three billion people rely on fisheries as their primary protein source, and one billion as their primary income.
Seagrass ecosystems have been declining worldwide for 200 years, and restoration efforts have remained small-scale, manual, and expensive — likened to “gardening in a backyard” rather than industrialized agriculture.
An acre of seagrass restoration is the most expensive form of ocean ecosystem restoration, more costly than coral or mangrove restoration, largely because it is done by hand and by divers.
How seagrass restoration works
Restoration involves collecting seeds from mature seagrass fruits, then planting them in areas where seagrass historically existed (identified via mapping).
Ulysses uses seed-based restoration: collect seeds, plant them, then return months later with the same system to monitor growth.
The company’s robots automate both the planting and monitoring steps, replacing manual labor by divers.
The founding story: four lads, one group chat
Co-founder Jamie, an avid surfer, met a marine biologist who complained about how difficult and expensive seagrass restoration was. He called Akil (a friend from a drone delivery startup), who called Will, who called Kum (a childhood friend working at Red Bull’s F1 team).
Within a week, all four were deep in research and decided to start the company.
They were struck that companies were already using drones to plant forests on land, yet nobody was doing this in the ocean — despite seagrass being far more effective at carbon removal and far more expensive to restore manually.
The four co-founders brought distinct skill sets: commercial/government sales, electronic engineering, mechanical systems design (satellites, drones), and ML/hydrodynamics.
Will describes the founding as unplanned — “it was a group chat” — driven by enthusiasm rather than strategy.
First million in revenue and early customers
Ulysses generated $1 million in revenue in its first year and expects to double or triple that the following year.
Will’s prior experience selling e-scooter schemes to governments (as first hire at a European scooter startup called Zip) taught him how to sell new technology to public-sector buyers through relentless RFP responses and understanding local requirements.
At Zip, he and three interns won contracts in seven UK cities against well-funded competitors like Bird and Lime by working extreme hours and tailoring proposals.
Ulysses’ early customers are governments, particularly:
Professor Gary Kendrick at the University of Western Australia was an early believer — the team flew to Australia during planting season to test a mechanical planter, which built trust and led to a major ongoing project.
Other key partners in Florida and Virginia followed.
The go-to-market is a three-sided model: Ulysses (technology provider), a local scientist or biologist (implementation partner), and a government or funding body (sponsor).
Will emphasizes that playing in a domain with no real competition is a major strategic advantage, unlike the e-scooter market where dozens of companies offered identical products.
The broader vision: an ocean autonomy platform
Seagrass restoration is the first application, but the long-term vision is to become a general-purpose robotics platform for the ocean.
Will compares the opportunity to humanoid robotics on land: humans are not evolved for the ocean, so a different form factor is needed for underwater autonomy.
Key technical innovations in the Ulysses platform:
Integrated surface and underwater vehicles: the underwater vehicle (UUV) can dock inside the surface vehicle for transport, giving full XYZ access to the ocean — a rare capability in unmanned marine systems.
Read and write capabilities: most ocean robots only collect data; Ulysses’ platform can physically manipulate the environment (e.g., planting seeds, or with a manipulator arm, performing tasks currently done by commercial divers).
Extremely low cost: both the surface and underwater vehicles are cheaper than any comparable system on the market while offering equivalent functionality, enabling large-scale deployment.
The platform opens up markets beyond restoration:
Maritime domain awareness for Coast Guard and Navy — intercepting drugs, search and rescue, border security.
The Coast Guard faces severe labor shortages, retiring ships due to lack of crew, creating demand for autonomous systems to replace human roles on patrol.
A new product targeting this market is launching later this year.
Market opportunity
If Ulysses could restore enough seagrass to satisfy 10% of the world’s 2050 carbon removal needs (1 gigaton of CO₂), and sell carbon credits at $150/ton, that alone would represent a $1.5 trillion revenue opportunity by 2050.
However, the company has pivoted away from a credit-sale model toward a service model — governments pay Ulysses directly to restore seagrass, because permitting and project timelines for credit generation are complex when the seabed is government-owned.
Difficult moments
The hardest days have been field tests that fail after months of intense engineering work — likened to early SpaceX rocket explosions.
Hardware is unforgiving: one component failure can derail an entire mission.
The team iterates quickly, often returning the next day with a fix, but the emotional toll of failed tests after long development sprints is significant.
The team had no prior experience with autonomous underwater vehicles but built a platform at roughly one-tenth the cost of incumbents, partly through naivety and a willingness to repurpose agricultural machinery concepts for underwater use.
Co-founder Jamie designed a functional AUV platform from scratch in about four days during a flight.
Company culture: vibes-based
Ulysses has a “work hard, play hard” culture rooted in Irish sensibility — nobody takes themselves seriously, there is constant mutual mockery (affectionate), and fun is considered essential.
Will is intuition-driven in hiring and decision-making:
He explicitly rejects over-reliance on data, OKRs, and routine, calling routine “overrated” and arguing that intuition is the most underused tool in modern business.
Recent hires were chosen based on cultural fit and technical competence rather than credentials — both were in their 20s without traditional pedigree but had strong track records and “felt right.”
He references a distinction between “head founders” (like Bezos, data-driven) and “heart founders” (like Steve Jobs, vision-driven), placing himself firmly in the heart camp.
The company has made three recent hires and plans to grow further, prioritizing people who fit the vibe over formal processes.
Personal influences
Steve Irwin is Will’s most important role model — not for technical reasons but for his raw, infectious passion for nature, which Will believes is magnetic and moves people to care about the environment.
Irwin was authentic, adventurous, and unafraid of risk — qualities Will aspires to channel in building Ulysses.
Will grew up by the sea in southwest Ireland, loved animals as a child, and nearly became a veterinarian before his mother steered him toward a more open-ended path in maths, economics, and finance.
Both of Will’s grandfathers were entrepreneurs — one a pig farmer and pub owner who raised eight kids, the other a crane operator and plastics importer who started multiple businesses and lost everything in a recession before starting again. His father also started businesses, normalizing the entrepreneurial path.
Before Ulysses, Will had eclectic experiences:
Lived with Buddhist monks in Nepal for a summer, teaching English and hiking to Everest Base Camp, before ultimately returning to his Catholic faith.
Worked for Denis O’Brien, then the richest man in Ireland, in the Cayman Islands — after sending him a handwritten letter (a tactic Will strongly advocates, calling letters “the ultimate inbox zero” and a deeply human form of communication in an AI-saturated world).
