Oshen, a Plymouth-based robotics company 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 was led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track and Concept Ventures, alongside angel investors joining 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 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,” said Anahita Laverack, CEO and co-founder of Oshen.
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. It builds C-Star constellations: swarms of small, wind- and solar-powered robots that provide persistent, wide-area monitoring of the open ocean.
According to the company, navies procure a handful of billion-dollar ships in single digits over decades and spend much of their time tracking submarine activity across the North Atlantic. Oshen aims to manage this job using thousands of cheap, expendable, mass-produced robots.
C-Stars 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, dispersing for wide-area coverage or converging on a single area of interest.
In September 2025, working 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. Oshen claims that this is a first for any uncrewed surface vessel. The data fed into the National Hurricane Centre’s official forecast discussion.
In security, C-Stars keep a persistent, low-cost watch in waters where sanctioned oil moves on ships with transponders switched off, uncrewed vehicles operate near cables and pipelines that carry power and data, and vessels strip fish stocks and run narcotics where no one is watching.
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. As C-star constellations expand, the resulting data could also improve seasonal forecasts and, over time, climate projections.
Oshen reports that its 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.
Its C-star production has scaled to match. The company initially took three years to build its first 15 C-Stars, and now builds 15 every six weeks using a standardising system that allows a new technician to assemble parts in less than half an hour, making it replicable across multiple sites. Oshen also revealed that 100 more C-Stars are 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.
Oshen is also 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), to build an early-warning system for what the company calls one of the climate system’s most consequential tipping points.
The company plans to use this 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.
Oshen’s longest single mission to date is eight months at sea, and its constellations have operated in six countries and are sold in three models: data-as-a-service, vessel leases, and outright constellation sales.
“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,” added Laverack.
Source: EU-Startups
