Oshen built the first ocean robot to collect data during a Category 5 hurricane

Anahita Laverack intended to become an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after an accomplishment during an autonomous robotics challenge inspired her to start Oshen, a company that builds fleets of robots that collect ocean data.

In 2021, Laverack, a renowned sailor, decided to build and participate in the Microtransat Challenge, a competition where participants build and send autonomous micro-robots powered by sails across the Atlantic Ocean. Like everyone who attempted this challenge, she did not succeed.

“I realized that half of the reason all these attempts were failing was, firstly, that it was obviously difficult to make micro-robots survive on the ocean,” Laverack told TechCrunch. “But secondly, they don’t have enough ocean data to know what the weather is like or even know ocean conditions.”

Laverack went to different conferences, such as Oceanology International, to find this missing ocean data. She quickly realized that no one had really figured out a good way to get it back yet. Instead, she found people asking if they could pay her to try to collect the data herself. She thought that if people were willing to pay her for this data, she could try to find a way to capture it.

These conversations formed the basis of Oshen, which Laverack founded alongside Ciaran Dowds, an electrical engineer, in April 2022.

The company is now building fleets of autonomous micro-robots, called C-Stars, capable of surviving in the ocean for 100 days at a time and deployed in swarms to collect ocean data.

But Oshen started small. Laverack said she and Dowds chose not to seek venture capital from the start of the company. Instead, they combined their savings to buy a 25ft sailboat, lived in the UK’s cheapest marina and used the vessel as a testing platform while getting the business off the ground.

For two years, Oshen iterated on the robots on land and immediately put them on the water for testing.

“In the summer, it’s not too bad,” Laverack said. “The problem is that you really have to make your boats work in all seasons. When your robot breaks down, (and) it’s a winter storm that’s raging, a 25-foot sailboat shouldn’t really be going out in those conditions. So it made for an adventure, which I won’t say more about, but there were definitely some interesting events there.”

Getting the technology right has been difficult, Laverack said, because it’s not as simple as just taking an existing larger robot and shrinking it down. These robots needed to be widely deployable and inexpensive, although they also needed to be technologically advanced enough to operate and collect data on their own for extended periods of time.

Many other companies managed to get two out of three answers correct, Laverack said. Oshen’s ability to launch these three operations helps attract customers in defense and government organizations.

The company attracted the attention of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) two years ago, but Laverack said its technology simply wasn’t ready to be deployed reliably yet. The organization returned two months before the 2025 hurricane season after Oshen successfully deployed the robots during the UK’s winter storms. This time, Oshen jumped at the opportunity and quickly built and dispatched over 15 C-Stars.

Five of these C-Stars were thrown overboard and made their way to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where NOAA had predicted Hurricane Humberto would head.

Laverack said they expected the robots to simply collect data before the storm, but instead three of the robots were able to weather the entire storm — minus a few missing parts — and collect data the entire time, becoming, she said, the first ocean robot to collect data during a Category 5 hurricane.

Today, the company has moved to a hub for marine technology companies in Plymouth, England, and has begun racking up contracts with clients including the British government for weather and defense operations.

Laverack said the company plans to raise venture capital soon to meet demand.