Three Startups Reinventing Critical Infrastructure
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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Last month, a16z American Dynamism Films screened short films about three portfolio companies: Ulysses builds mission critical underwater robots, Mariana Minerals applies modern technologies to the critical mineral sector, and Radian seeks to mass produce nuclear microreactors. Now all three films are available on a sixteen z's YouTube channel. Before you check them out, today's episode highlights previous appearances by all three company founders. First up, Ulysses Will O'Brien joined MTS last April after their latest fundraise.
Super exciting. So for the audience, what exactly is Ulysses, and what do you do?
Yes. At Ulysses, we're building The Ocean Company. Essentially, if you have a difficult or tough problem to solve in the surface or subsea domain, we build autonomous robots. That solves that problem. The platform is basically autonomous surface vehicles combined with autonomous underwater vehicles built to be cheap enough that you can deploy them at scale over large swathes of the ocean, that they can work together autonomously to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. What kind of critical tasks? Yeah. Sure. We have three main verticals that we operate in. We actually began, yo
Cool. Have you ever played Subnautica?
I haven't, but I I have heard of it.
That's incredible. It seems like Subnautica is like Ulysses the game. I also haven't played it. I I don't really play that many video games, but it's just like it's a game where you, I believe, are a guy controlling a submarine that's going around an alien ocean and exploring things and solving technical problems and fighting sea monsters. Yeah. Pretty much the average day in the
life for Ulysses forward deployed engineer.
What do you think about why there are so relatively few ocean companies? You know, there's a billion space companies. There's a billion satellite companies. There's a billion robot companies, but so few of them seem to be focused on the ocean. And is it just because space and land robots are, like, sexier somehow?
Yeah. I think part of it is part of it is kind of a a, like, narrative. There's, a different narrative for the ocean, and it's not it we you you haven't you haven't got this inspirational framing of iconic images of Apollo and SpaceX, rockets launching again, and you haven't had a company doing the SpaceX version of, let's make this domain sexy again for the ocean. But I think it's worth going back and looking at history to understand that this is an anomaly, a historic anomaly that we haven't been as obsessed with exploring the oceans. Since the dawn of time, mankind has dreamed of sea creatu
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