Anahita Laverack

Anahita Laverack co-founded Oshen in April 2022 with electrical engineer Ciaran Dowds and is its chief executive. The Plymouth company builds C-Stars: wind- and solar-powered robots about a meter long that sit on the ocean surface for months at a time, measuring conditions such as sea temperature, salinity, wave height and wind speed and sending the data back by satellite.

Data from inside a hurricane

Oshen’s case is cost and coverage. Traditional data buoys cost more than £300,000 a year and are vulnerable to storms, as MASSworld reported when Oshen won £2m from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) in February 2025. That award is funding a North Atlantic climate early-warning system built on a fleet of up to 100 C-Stars.

In the 2025 hurricane season the robots faced the hardest test available. Working with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Oshen sent eight C-Stars to the US Virgin Islands and deployed five near the predicted path of Hurricane Humberto. Three survived the Category 5 storm and collected data throughout, as reported by TechCrunch in January 2026.

From prototype to production line

In August 2026 Oshen raised a £3.65m seed round led by Lunar Ventures, with AlbionVC, Twin Track and Concept Ventures, to triple C-Star production. According to The AI Insider, output had already gone from 15 units in three years to 15 every six weeks, with 100 more robots on order. Customers named in coverage of the round include the Royal Navy, the Met Office and the US Navy. The company has almost 30 staff.

Laverack frames the next stage as an industrial one. “That’s not a sensing problem anymore – the technology works, and it works in the worst conditions on Earth. It’s a manufacturing problem,” she said, as reported by Dealroom. The company has spent the past year reorganizing production to be “fast, repeatable, and something you can stand up anywhere”, in her words.

Why it matters to UK technology buyers

Ocean data feeds weather forecasting, defense planning, offshore energy and shipping. Oshen’s model replaces a few expensive buoys with many cheaper, persistent sensors, which changes what an agency or operator can afford to monitor. For UK buyers in maritime, energy and defense, it is a domestic supplier that already counts naval and meteorological agencies among its customers.

Laverack’s achievement so far is to prove the robots survive the worst the ocean can do, then to turn a hand-built product into a repeatable one. The seed round is a bet that demand, not engineering, is now the constraint.