Plymouth's Oshen raises €4.27M to deploy thousands of ocean robots for real-time planetary sensing

Oshen (Plymouth) has raised €4.27 million ($5 million) in a funding round led by Lunar Ventures, with AlbionVC, Twin Track, and Concept Ventures participating alongside angel investors who join as advisors. The capital goes directly to scaling a manufacturing process the company has already largely solved in small batches — the hard part now is volume.

The company was founded in 2022 by Anahita Laverack (CEO) and Ciaran Dowds, both engineers from Imperial College London. Its product is the C-Star: a 1.2-metre robot that one person can carry and deploy over the side of any boat. Wind- and solar-powered, the C-Star sails autonomously for months without maintenance, transmits data via satellite, and operates in constellations — groups of devices spread across hundreds of miles of sea, reconfiguring to converge on specific areas of interest.

From three years per 15 to six weeks per 15

The headline manufacturing statistic is the story. Oshen initially took three years to produce its first 15 C-Stars. It now builds 15 every six weeks using a standardised assembly process that allows a new technician to complete a unit in under half an hour — and the company says the system can be replicated across multiple production sites. There are 100 C-Stars currently on order.

That transformation from craft manufacturing to repeatable production is what the round funds: not a technology bet, but a scaling bet. Laverack frames it plainly: "It's a manufacturing problem." The question is whether the same throughput discipline holds when order sizes multiply.

The company's operational record is genuine. In September 2025, three C-Stars intercepted Hurricane Humberto north of St Thomas while the storm was rated Category 5 — penetrating the eyewall and feeding data into the US National Hurricane Centre's official forecast discussion. The company says this was a first for any uncrewed surface vessel. Its customers and data partners now include the Royal Navy, the US Navy's Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, NOAA, the UK Met Office, Météo-France, and VOTO (Sweden's ocean-monitoring body). Oshen operates its robot constellations in six countries and sells in three models: data-as-a-service, vessel leases, and outright constellation sales.

The North Atlantic deployment and climate monitoring

The most consequential near-term deployment is a 50-robot constellation in the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, funded by a €2.3 million ARIA grant (the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency). The mission targets what Oshen describes as one of the climate system's most consequential tipping points: a slowdown in the Atlantic overturning circulation whose early-warning signals current instrumentation cannot capture continuously or at sufficient density.

The C-Star constellation's value here is persistence: where a research cruise captures a snapshot, a constellation of autonomous solar-powered robots captures months of continuous data across hundreds of kilometres. If C-Star data meaningfully improves early detection of AMOC variability, the addressable market expands from monitoring contracts to foundational infrastructure for climate science and operational oceanography.

Separately, under a UK Defence and Security Accelerator project, 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. The company's longest single mission is eight months at sea.

The round does not disclose a stage label. Oshen was founded in 2022, has operated commercially since at least mid-2025, and is scaling into a production backlog. The funding is clearly past pre-commercial; the absence of a stage label is the company's own choice.