Will O’Brien

Will O’Brien is the co-founder and president of Ulysses, a San Francisco–based robotics company building autonomous systems for offshore survey, inspection, and infrastructure work. Ulysses pairs fully autonomous, long-endurance motherships with fleets of Mako underwater drones to handle end-to-end subsea operations — high-resolution surveys, condition assessment, and light inspection, repair, and maintenance — at around half the cost of conventional, manned survey spreads. The hybrid-electric motherships stay on station for more than six months at a time and deploy both underwater and aerial vehicles for dual-domain awareness, enabling far more frequent monitoring of cables, pipelines, ports, and offshore wind and oil-and-gas structures. Ulysses is already surveying floating offshore wind structures off California for the California Energy Commission, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Booz Allen, and Lowercarbon Capital. Will’s message to the offshore industry is direct: it remains prohibitively expensive to work at sea, and autonomy is the paradigm shift that finally changes the economics.