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
- Consultant, McKinsey & Company
- Electronics Engineer, Manna
- Founder, Irish Student Hyperloop team
Notable work
- Co-founded Ulysses, whose modular autonomous-maritime platform combines the Mako underwater vehicle, Leviathan surface vessel, and Kraken automated launch-and-recovery system.
- As Ulysses CEO, oversaw an autonomous seagrass-restoration program whose vehicles collect, process, and plant seed material and are reported to work up to 100 times faster and at 100 times the scale of manual methods.
- Established Ulysses' partnership with the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project to support bathymetric-data collection and contribution to the public GEBCO ocean map.
- As Ulysses CEO, expanded the company's maritime-autonomy work through a Booz Allen Ventures partnership spanning mine countermeasures, multi-vehicle swarming, surveys, and infrastructure inspection.
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