Irish eco-focused company Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering has raised $2 million (€1.85 million) in a pre-seed round that will help drive growth at the start-up.
The company, which is using autonomous robots to help restore marine habitats such as seagrass, plans to use the funding to support key hires, including to its engineering team.
The funding round was led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from biodiversity venture capital firm Superorganism, and ReGen Ventures, which invests in planetary-scale regenerative technologies. Among the list of angel investors were Intercom founders Eoghan McCabe and Ciaran Lee.
“What we’re doing, all going well, is going to be a multi-decade endeavour. These are going to be long-term partners for your business,” said cofounder Will O’Brien. “A very clear next step is to scale up our existing projects, and start working in other locations, such as in Europe.”
The company, which was established in 2023 by Akhil Voorakkara, Colm O’Brien, Jamie Wedderburn and Mr O’Brien, has built drones that can be used to automate ocean habitat restoration, planting seagrass at a tenth of the cost of comparable systems, while making the projects larger and faster. The drones collect seeds from healthy donor meadows, replanting them in areas where seagrass has been lost, monitoring its growth.
Seagrass is a powerful carbon sink, capturing 35 times more carbon than rainforests. The company is set to capitalise on new laws that mandate large-scale restoration, such as the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, driving demand for its services.
“Seagrass is the little-known hero of the ocean, capturing 35 times more carbon per acre than rainforests and providing critical habitat for coastal species,” said Ryan Orbuch, Partner at Lowercarbon Capital. “Until now, hand planting was the only way to restore it. Ulysses’ underwater drones make it 10x cheaper and are ready to scale restoration efforts today.”
The company has already generated almost $1 million in revenue from Government and conservation partners, demonstrated successful seagrass restoration in trials with the University of Western Australia, and partnered with the Nature Conservancy Virginia and Government agencies in Florida and Australia on large-scale seagrass restoration projects.
The company is planning more fundraising next year. “Not because we need it, but because we know we’re doing something really well, and we want to grow the team, grow the company, and go from making a couple of robots to dozens of robots,” said Mr Voorakkara. “Right now, we feel that we’re limited in the amount of projects we can take on and we want to unlock that. We know the demand is there, and we have the ability to fulfil that demand if we can grow the team and build more robots.”
The technology could also have other applications in the future.
“What we’ve developed is an autonomous underwater platform that is really capable, but also much, much, much lower cost than almost anything else on the market,” said Mr Voorakkara. “We are really excited to see where our technology can be applied.”
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