- Oshen obtained $5 million in financing, with Lunar Ventures as the lead investor, to increase production of its C-Star ocean robots.
- They were the first uncrewed vehicles to obtain real data from within a Category 5 hurricane.
- Currently, Oshen is producing 15 robots every six weeks, a considerable increase over the 15 it produced in its first three years. The company also has 100 more units ordered.
Oshen, a Plymouth-based startup, has raised $5 million to expand production of its ocean robots, which have withstood hurricanes. The fundraising was led by Lunar Ventures, together with AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures, and a number of angel investors, who will also serve as advisors.
“We’re making the ocean’s eyes and ears, and we need a lot of them. Seventy per cent of the planet is covered by the ocean, and we can barely see any of it in real time. That’s not a sensing problem anymore; the technology works, even in the worst conditions on Earth. It’s a manufacturing problem,” said Anahita Laverack, chief executive and co-founder of Oshen.
The ocean makes up 70% of the planet, but very little of it is monitored in real time. Navies invest in only a handful of billion-dollar ships over many years. Weather agencies rely on a limited number of buoys and satellites to track significant events such as hurricanes.
The unmanned surface vehicle market will grow from $0.82 billion in 2025 to $1.59 billion by 2030, with defence spending growing at the fastest rate.
From a 25-foot sailboat to working with the US Navy
Laverack and Ciaran Dowds, both engineering graduates from Imperial College London, started Oshen in April 2022.
The idea came from a setback: Laverack built an autonomous sailing robot for the Microtransat Challenge, but it failed to cross the Atlantic. She realised there was not enough reliable wind and tide data across the ocean. Dowds, an electrical engineer, found the same problem while sailing a 25-foot boat alone through strong winds to recover an early prototype.
At first, they didn’t look for venture capital. Instead, they used their own savings to buy a 25-foot sailboat, kept it at a low-cost UK marina, and used it as a floating test lab for two years. Since then, Oshen has grown from seven employees in September 2025 to almost 30 now, with all manufacturing now in Plymouth.
Oshen’s C-Stars are 1.2-metre robots powered by wind and solar energy, and they’re light enough for one person to launch from a boat. They can work on their own for months, sending data back by satellite. The robots operate in groups, with dozens covering hundreds of miles of ocean. They can spread out for wide coverage or come together at certain spots. Oshen’s longest mission lasted eight months at sea, with groups of robots used in six countries.
Oshen’s competitors
Saildrone, based in Alameda, has raised more than $100 million and carried out major NOAA and defence missions using larger vessels. Sofar Ocean, an ocean sensor company from San Francisco, has raised almost $70 million. Boeing’s Liquid Robotics has employed its Wave Glider platform in both defence and commercial markets for over ten years.
Unlike rivals, Oshen hopes to win similar government contracts by providing affordable, high-volume robots, but this will depend on its ability to keep up with increasing demand.
Mick Halsband, a general partner at Lunar Ventures, stated that governments and public institutions are becoming increasingly dependent on reliable information about the oceans to improve weather forecasting, safeguard critical infrastructure, and enhance maritime security. Up to now, continuous observation of the oceans has depended on a small number of costly platforms capable of monitoring only a small part of the area. The development in autonomy and in manufacturing is now enabling the replacement of scarcity by scale, and Oshen is one of the first companies to turn this change into operational reality.
Oshen’s customer base includes companies involved in both defence and climate-related projects. In the field of defence and security, it collaborates with the US Navy’s Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command on shallow-water surveys and is currently testing a distributed passive acoustic network together with ZeroUSV and MarineAI as part of a project supported by the UK Defence and Security Accelerator.
What’s next for Oshen
The new funding will help Oshen scale up manufacturing and meet rising demand in three areas: passive acoustics for ship detection, protecting subsea cables and pipelines, and anti-submarine warfare.
In the past, naval procurement has favoured a small number of costly, specialised platforms over a large number of cheaper ones. Although Oshen’s hurricane data and production record are important, it remains unclear whether they will affect naval purchasing decisions. The present $5 million investment has not yet settled that question.
