Oshen is building for one of the planet’s largest blind spots. Oceans cover most of Earth, yet vast areas are still observed only intermittently because ships, buoys, satellites, and crewed missions cannot provide persistent coverage everywhere. The Plymouth-based company is trying to change that with fleets of small autonomous robots that can stay at sea for months and spread across hundreds of miles to collect weather, acoustic, and maritime data.
The company has raised €4.27 million, around $5 million, led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures, and angel investors. Oshen plans to use the capital primarily to expand manufacturing as demand grows from defense agencies, weather organizations, and ocean researchers.
Oshen was founded in 2022 by Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds, two Imperial College engineers whose backgrounds combine sailing, robotics, and electrical engineering. Their original insight came from trying to understand why autonomous vessels repeatedly failed long ocean crossings: the machines were not just fighting rough seas, they were operating with too little real-time information about the ocean around them.
Its answer is the C-Star, a 1.2-metre wind- and solar-powered robot designed to be deployed quickly, transmit data by satellite, and operate in coordinated constellations. Dozens can disperse for wide-area coverage or converge on one region of interest. In 2025, three C-Stars collected data inside Category 5 Hurricane Humberto, demonstrating that small autonomous platforms could survive conditions that make conventional observation difficult.
Oshen is now shifting from proving that the robots work to proving they can be manufactured at scale. The company says it has reduced production from three years for its first 15 units to 15 every six weeks, with 100 more on order.
That manufacturing transition may matter more than any single deployment. If Oshen can make persistent ocean sensing cheap and repeatable, the ocean could start to look less like a blind zone and more like a continuously observed network.
