About
Akhil Voorakkara is co-founder and CEO of Ulysses, the San Francisco-based maritime autonomy company building low-cost autonomous underwater and surface vehicles. A Dublin City University engineer, he came up through hardware-heavy environments — winning a SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition Innovation Award as one of five team members on a pod that pulled nearly 1G, and shipping early computer-vision drone work that became a calling card for his autonomy-on-the-edge instincts. He started Ulysses in Dublin in 2023 with co-founders Will O'Brien, Jamie Wedderburn, and Colm O'Brien, then relocated the company to San Francisco to build for the U.S. Navy and the American offshore energy market. Under his leadership Ulysses has shipped the Mako AUV at roughly 1/20th the cost of legacy underwater drones and closed $46M across seed and a16z American Dynamism-led Series A in early 2026.
Previous roles
- SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition team (Innovation Award)
- Computer vision / autonomous drone projects (Dublin)
Notable work
- Ulysses
- Maritime autonomy
- Robotics
- Computer vision
- Hardware engineering
- Defense tech
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