Key Takeaways

  • Heavy crewed ships command day-rates in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, worsened by global shipyard backlogs that delay new vessel delivery.
  • Ulysses sells autonomous underwater drones for $50,000, directly challenging the US Navy benchmark of $5 million for legacy autonomous underwater vehicles.
  • Two core markets fund this deployment: defense navies and commercial offshore energy, including offshore wind maintenance and marine restoration.
  • Chris Sacca points out that actual procurement buyers inside large organizations act apolitically and base decisions on hard technical data rather than posturing.
  • Venture capital matches long defense cycles because high initial research costs yield locked-in contracts that competitors cannot easily peel away.

The Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Daily Charter Trap

Every offshore project, whether servicing an offshore wind turbine or planting seagrass, hits the same wall. You need a boat. Not a small skiff, but a massive steel vessel packed with crew shifts, safety officers, support engineers, and complex maritime compliance packages.

Will O'Brien describes the reality: “Big, expensive surface ship, and as you know, we're not building ships fast enough these days, so it's like there's a backlog to even get the ship. Once you even get the ship, You're chartering it at an order of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a day.”

When a ship costs $200,000 or $300,000 every single morning it leaves port, the economics of ocean exploration warp. Operations can only justify massive oil-and-gas discoveries or multi-billion-dollar military installations. Routine maintenance, shallow ecological surveys, and high-frequency coastal patrols become mathematically impossible. The asset cost chokes the market before the work even begins.

Trading Five-Million-Dollar Vehicles for Fifty-Thousand-Dollar Drones

The US Navy has spent decades buying autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) built like aerospace prototypes. Incumbent defense primes treat each subsea hull as a custom, high-margin, low-volume deliverable.

Ulysses took the opposite approach by building hardware designed for serial production. O'Brien points out the price discrepancy: “But if you're working with a navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. For contrast, the most common autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million.”

Dropping unit cost by ninety-nine percent alters tactical behavior. At $5 million, losing a drone during a routine sonar mapping mission ends a career. At $50,000, the hardware becomes consumable. Fleets can operate in swarms, map contested waters, or monitor offshore wind turbine foundations without risking a crew or betting an entire annual budget on a single hull.

Long Sales Cycles Create Moats

Venture investors spent a decade running away from government and defense hardware because sales cycles routinely drag past eighteen months. O'Brien and Sacca argue that founders misread that timeline as a bug rather than an operating advantage.

O'Brien targets two primary customer bases: “So right now, the two main groups we're selling to are, yes, Navy and offshore energy.” Both sectors run deliberate, painfully thorough trials. But once an operational team verifies that a piece of hardware works, switching costs skyrocket.

“I think they're actually the shape of business that venture scale... Venture companies are actually very well suited to go after,” O'Brien says. “We can afford to invest the money in the R&D and wait, because once you win those contracts, you're very sticky, actually.”

Chris Sacca reinforces that founders shouldn't fear the bureaucracy: “When you get to the people who actually get shit done at these organizations, they're incredibly well-informed, and the decisions are apolitical and very sober.” The political theater lives at the executive press-release tier. The officers testing submersibles on deck only care whether the drone survives the sea state.

What to Do With This

Audit your unit economics against the legacy operational wrapper rather than the legacy tool. If you build hardware or enterprise tools, find the $100,000-per-day manual support layer your customer currently pays just to operate an incumbent system. Redesign your device so an entry-level technician can deploy it without chartering support crews. Pitch the end operator who feels the daily pain, not the committee writing press releases.