Irish eco-focused company Ulysses has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round that was led by Andereesen Horowitz.
The company, which is using autonomous robots to help restore marine habitats such as seagrass, also confirmed a seed round of $8 million, bringing the total to $46 million to help the company build autonomous vehicles to solve critical tasks in the oceans.
The Series A round also saw participation from Booz Allen Ventures and Harpoon Ventures, with the seed round led by Pebblebed, along with participation from Genius Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Superorganism, and ReGen Ventures.
The company, which was established in 2023 by Akhil Voorakkara, Will O’Brien, Jamie Wedderburn and Colm O’Brien, has built drones that can be used to automate ocean habitat restoration, such as the planting of seagrass, which acts as a carbon sink.
The new funding will be used to scale production of its Mako autonomous underwater vehicle, while also moving its Leviathan autonomous surface vessel and Kraken launch-and-recovery system from prototype to production. Ulysses also plans to expand its team, and further invest in product development.
“The ocean is the last great frontier. Every other domain—land, air, space—has seen a revolution in access and capability in the past two decades. The ocean hasn’t,“ said Mr Voorakkara, chief executive of Ulysses. “Operating at sea still means crewed vessels at tens of thousands of dollars a day, and most of the ocean goes completely unmonitored as a result. We’re building autonomous systems that change that equation by orders of magnitude—vehicles that can survey, inspect, and protect our oceans at a scale that’s never been possible.”Learn moreThe company has already field-tested five generations of underwater vehicle prototypes and generated more than $5 million in customer revenue across government, commercial, and scientific partners, and currently operates across defence, ocean science, and commercial survey missions.It currently employs 20 people and generated over $5 million in revenue from customers and partners such as the US Navy, the Australian government, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Mote Marine Laboratory, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
“The Ulysses team has done something rare: they have built hardware that works, deployed it with real customers, and done it faster and cheaper than anyone thought possible,” said Erin Price-Wright, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “With maritime chokepoints under pressure and subsea infrastructure facing sustained attack, the United States needs an autonomous maritime industrial base, and it needs one now. Ulysses is the team that builds it.”
-The Irish Times