# Ulysses: The Ocean Company

*June 8, 2026 · By Keith Adams and Myko Huff*

> From a leaky seagrass-planting prototype in Dublin to the autonomous platform for the entire ocean—how Ulysses is building the Ocean Company.

![First ever Ulysses prototype, August 2023](/blog/ulysses/first-prototype.jpg)

*The first-ever Ulysses prototype at Pebblebed HQ, August 2023. Still from
[S3: The SpaceX of the
Ocean](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLA_vbpxblY).*

Summer 2023: Pebblebed HQ is gently baking in the heat of San Francisco's
Mission district. A 3D printed robot putters around its dirty aquarium, as
its creators size up its gyrations with a critical eye. A splash of water
hits the floor, startling Nico, the office Boston Terrier. "Crap. We got
water on their floor," deadpans Will O'Brien.

Such workaday scenes birthed our relationship with the Ulysses team.
At Pebblebed, we're not only a venture capital firm. We're also a
community.  We nourish that community by giving space (and sometimes
a room) to teams we think are doing something cool. So when we met
Akhil, Will, Colm, and Jamie, we wanted to give them space and see
what they could do. We set them up in our guest rooms while they
were in San Francisco raising their pre-seed round. On their trip
to San Francisco, they attracted $2M in pre-seed funding.  With
these resources secured, the team packed up, left us behind to deal
with their aquarium, and returned to Ireland to write their next
chapter.

They came to us with amazing ideas, brilliant technology, and a great
story. A simple hike between an engineer and a marine biologist friend,
which segued into an excited pitch over pints to restore seagrass in
Dublin, which birthed a leaky prototype that immediately flooded, and
culminated three weeks later in everyone quitting their jobs and flying to
San Francisco. These are the people we want to work with: who move toward
difficulty with joy rather than dread. In a word, explorers.

That is how we met the team that we believe will become the Ocean Company.

## The Long Journey Home

We didn't hear from Ulysses for a while. They were back and forth between
Dublin and San Francisco, building, breaking things, rebuilding. We kept in
touch the way you do with people you like and believe in: loosely, warmly,
with a watchful eye.

During their time away they outgrew their initial pitch. The team that left
our warehouse was an ecosystem restoration startup, hoping to find
commercial success planting seagrass. The team that came back had grander
ambitions. The robots were not just more seaworthy; they were bigger,
sleeker, more adaptable. Their target had shifted from simply restoring the
ocean to stewardship. They had begun talking about building **the**
autonomous platform for the entire ocean.

Ulysses was converging on its initial model: [the
Mako](https://www.theoceancompany.com/technology). They described the Mako
as a Model T for the sea: manufacturable in about twelve hours, and coming
with a range of modular accessories to adapt each Mako to its application.
Cargo, longevity, size, maneuverability, sensors, actuators. This level of
configurability could bring the Mako to a breadth of applications far
beyond the initial vision for seagrass planting. We were moved by this
grander vision for the company to lead Ulysses' seed round. We reached
terms in March 2025, but the seeds of conviction were planted much earlier.
Somewhere in that dirty aquarium, perhaps.

## Below the Surface

Today, the ocean needs a steward. The ocean economy is already three
trillion dollars and most of what happens beneath the surface is monitored
sporadically, if at all. The ocean is an exceptionally hard environment for
engineered artifacts: saltwater is corrosive to electronics, sealife wants
to eat, dissolve, or live inside of everything we build, water renders most
wireless communication media inert, and the ocean's sheer vastness propels
logistics into astronomic scales. These pressures have previously led to
vessels that are cost-prohibitive, on the order of half a million per vehicle.
Together, these obstacles have kept great tools out of the hands of those
doing work in the ocean.

Customers were pulling Ulysses into use cases the team hadn't anticipated:
infrastructure inspection, subsea cable laying, pipeline monitoring. The
heavy-lift frame designed to carry a crate of seagrass seed could be
repurposed to carry a spool of fiber-optic cable just as well. The coast
guard could not possibly deploy enough people to monitor all the trade
routes of the ocean for pirates, smuggling, and poaching. But with an
autonomous fleet of Makos, this dream is much more in reach. The sea now
needs defending as much as it needs restoring, which only makes the work
more urgent.

## The Adventure Continues

The company is named after James Joyce's magnum opus, Ulysses. The
company's official story for the name is just that the lads are from Dublin,
and their first office was next door to Joyce's home. But the deeper resonance
of the name is the same ancient story that moved Joyce: Ulysses as a modern day Odysseus. The
great adventurer who didn't overpower his obstacles, but outwitted them,
who survived by being adaptable and stubborn in equal measure, and who took
the long way home because the sea offers no shortcuts. These 
founders took on this adventure because they love the sea, and 
they love the challenge. It is our great honor to support them on their
journey.

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**Keywords:** portfolio, robotics, ocean