The company building underwater drones for $50,000
Will O'Brien, founder and CEO of Ulysses, sits down with John Collison and Chris Sacca to discuss how autonomous underwater drones can transform maritime operations, from seagrass restoration and offshore wind maintenance to naval defense. They explore the historical innovations of Guinness, the engineering hurdles of high-pressure and low-bandwidth marine environments, and the economic shifts required to vertically integrate and mass-produce underwater robotics at a fraction of legacy military costs.
- Underwater acoustic telemetry caps out at roughly 10 kilobytes per second over five kilometers, making remote cloud processing physically impossible beneath the surface. Read →
- In the 1890s, Guinness built an undirected industrial research lab that hired elite scientists without specific assignments, telling them to inspect operations and find problems worth solving. Read →
- Heavy crewed ships command day-rates in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, worsened by global shipyard backlogs that delay new vessel delivery. Read →
- Seagrass covers only 2% of the ocean floor but captures 20% of marine carbon, far outperforming coral reefs that take most climate funding. Read →
- Around 200 undersea fiber optic cables carry virtually all transatlantic telecommunications and global financial transactions. Read →
- Global factories produce roughly 20 million aerial drones every year, compared to only 1,000 to 2,000 commercial and defense underwater drones. Read →