Plymouth-based robotics company Oshen, building a persistent sensing layer for the world’s oceans, has secured €4.27 million ($5 million) in a fresh funding round and is tripling its manufacturing rate to meet demand from navies, weather agencies, and ocean scientists.
The Round
The round was led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, and Concept Ventures, alongside angel investors joining as advisors.
Anahita Laverack, CEO and co-founder of Oshen, framed the challenge the company is solving as one of manufacturing rather than sensing: “We’re making the ocean’s eyes and ears, and we need a lot of them. Seventy per cent of the planet is ocean and we can barely see any of it in real time. That’s not a sensing problem any more – the technology works, and it works in the worst conditions on Earth. It’s a manufacturing problem. So we’ve spent the last year turning C-Star production into something closer to a fast-food kitchen than a shipyard: fast, repeatable, and something you can stand up anywhere.”
The Technology
Founded in 2022 by Imperial College engineers Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds, Oshen delivers wide-area ocean intelligence using constellations of autonomous C-Star robots — swarms of small, wind- and solar-powered craft that provide persistent, wide-area monitoring of the open ocean.
The company’s pitch to navies is a shift in procurement logic: instead of a handful of billion-dollar ships bought in single digits over decades to track submarine activity across the North Atlantic, Oshen proposes managing that job with thousands of cheap, expendable, mass-produced robots.
C-Stars themselves are 1.2-metre, wind- and solar-powered robots designed to be picked up by one person and thrown over the side of any boat. They sail for months without maintenance, transmit data by satellite, and operate in constellations — dozens of small craft spread across hundreds of miles of sea, either dispersing for wide-area coverage or converging on a single area of interest.
Proven in the Field
In September 2025, under contract with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), three C-Stars intercepted Hurricane Humberto north of St Thomas in the Caribbean, penetrating the eyewall while the storm was rated Category 5 — a first, Oshen says, for any uncrewed surface vessel. The data fed directly into the National Hurricane Centre’s official forecast discussion.
The robots serve two other core use cases. In security, C-Stars keep persistent, low-cost watch in waters where sanctioned oil moves on ships with transponders switched off, uncrewed vehicles operate near cables and pipelines carrying power and data, and vessels strip fish stocks or run narcotics unmonitored. In weather forecasting, where ocean heat remains poorly measured, better surface data could help detect rapid hurricane intensification earlier — giving authorities more time to issue evacuation orders — and, as constellations expand, potentially improve seasonal forecasts and long-term climate projections.
Oshen’s customers and partners now include the US Navy’s Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA, the Met Office, Météo-France, and VOTO, the Swedish ocean-monitoring body.
Scaling Manufacturing
Production has scaled to match demand. The company took three years to build its first 15 C-Stars; it now builds 15 every six weeks, using a standardized process that lets a new technician assemble parts in under half an hour — a system designed to be replicable across multiple sites. A further 100 C-Stars are currently on order.
In a project backed by the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator, C-Stars are being trialled as a distributed passive acoustic network alongside ZeroUSV and MarineAI, including a world first in which C-Stars were autonomously launched at sea from an uncrewed mothership. Separately, Oshen is deploying a 50-strong constellation in the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre under a €2.3 million (£2 million) project funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), building an early-warning system for what the company calls one of the climate system’s most consequential tipping points.
What’s Next
Oshen plans to use the new capital to scale up manufacturing and expand into three technical areas where customer demand is growing fastest: passive acoustics for ship detection, protection of critical subsea infrastructure, and anti-submarine warfare.
The company’s longest single mission to date is eight months at sea, and its constellations have operated in six countries, sold under three models: data-as-a-service, vessel leases, and outright constellation sales.
Laverack summed up the company’s ambition: “There is a version of the next decade where the ocean stops being a dark spot. Not because of one clever sensor, but because there are thousands of cheap robots out there, all the time, telling us what’s actually happening. This is our goal at Oshen. We’ve done step 1 — make world-class robots that have achieved world firsts — now it’s time to see the impact a hundred of them can have.”
Source: EU-Startups
