Speaker

Will O’Brien is the co-founder of Ulysses, the San-Francisco startup slashing the price of subsea operations with swarms of autonomous surface and subsea drones. In two years Ulysses has turned a garage-built UUV into a revenue-generating fleet that restores seagrass meadows ten times cheaper and a hundred times faster than diver-led work, landing projects with The Nature Conservancy, the Western Australian Government, and the U.S. East Coast’s top marine-science institutes. Backed by Lowercarbon Capital, ReGen Ventures, and other venture capital investors, Will leads Ulysses’ commercial strategy, marrying low-cost vehicles with autonomous docking to make persistent ocean robotics more scalable. A native of Cork, Ireland, he now splits his time between San Francisco shipyards and offshore test sites, pushing to redefine what “industrial grade” means underwater.