Ultracategories via Kan extensions of relative monads

Abstract

Many structured categories of interest are most naturally described as algebras for a relative monad, but turn out nonetheless to be algebras for an ordinary monad. We show that, under suitable hypotheses, the left oplax Kan extension of a relative 2-monad on categories yields a pseudomonad having the same category of colax algebras. In particular, we apply this to the study of ultracategories to recover the 'ultracompletion' pseudomonad.