Last year, Ulysses went through our Combine. 83 companies. One week. Operators, investors, and mission owners pressure-testing every team against real demand.
Ulysses finished 29th.
Not top 10. Not the flashy pick. A team building autonomous underwater and surface vehicles for persistent maritime awareness — the kind of capability that doesn't demo well in a ballroom but matters enormously at sea.
This month, they announced a $46M raise. $38M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. $8M seed from pebblebed and Luke Byrne. US Navy, Australian Government, Great Barrier Reef Foundation already operating their systems.
29th of 83
I keep coming back to that number.
The Combine wasn't designed to pick winners. It was designed to pressure-test companies against the things that actually matter — operator pull, acquisition path, transition risk, mission fit. Some teams that ranked higher haven't raised. Some that ranked lower are building quietly and will surprise people.
Ulysses had the fundamentals. Dual-domain persistence — surface and subsea — at a cost profile that enables fleet-scale deployment. Real hardware in real water. Mako AUVs already deployed commercially. A team with the engineering depth to back the vision: ex-McKinsey, ex-Spire, a former Red Bull F1 chief engineer, and Navy veterans.
What the Combine did was put them in a room with the people who could confirm that. Operators who validated the problem. Investors who saw the signal. Mission owners who said: yes, this gap is real and it's urgent.
The gap Ulysses fills
Western fleets lack affordable, persistent coverage across the surface and the seabed. Traffickers, saboteurs, and shadow assets are costing billions and risking lives. The legacy approach — Kongsberg, L3, Leidos — is single-domain and 10-100x costlier.
Ulysses builds USVs and UUVs that are integrated and designed for manufacturing at scale. Not dozens of platforms. Thousands. Vertically integrated, copy-paste manufacturing, cost-driven engineering that delivers an order of magnitude more units than anyone else in the water.
Their customers aren't speculative. Active CRADA with NSWC. Commercial deployments across the US and Australia. Dual-use from the start — offshore wind, subsea telecom, port security, reef restoration.
What this says about the model
We're still early. But the Ulysses outcome is the kind of signal that tells us the interface is working.
Not because we picked a winner. We didn't. The Combine isn't a selection mechanism — it's a validation environment. What it does is put companies in front of the operators, investors, and mission owners who can confirm whether the problem is real, the solution is credible, and the path to fielding exists.
That's what we're building at Merge Combinator. Not a ranking system. An interface between the people building, the people funding, and the people carrying the mission.
Ulysses was founded by Will O'Brien and Colm O'Brien. Irish-founded, San Francisco-based, ocean-focused. They answered the call and the ocean answered back.
Congratulations to the Ulysses team. $46M says the fundamentals were always there. The Combine just made sure the right people saw them.