Oshen
"Persistent, wide-area ocean intelligence"
Plymouth, UK firm founded 2022 building 1 m wind-and-solar C-Star sailing drones; C-Stars sent data from inside Category 5 Hurricane Humberto.
Oshen is a British maker of small autonomous sailing vessels, called C-Stars, that are deployed in coordinated groups to collect ocean, weather and underwater acoustic data. The company was founded in April 2022 by Anahita Laverack, chief executive, and electrical engineer Ciaran Dowds, both engineering graduates of Imperial College London, and is based on the Plymouth waterfront in south-west England, where all manufacturing now takes place. Before taking venture funding the founders used their own savings, including buying a 25-foot sailboat that served as a floating test platform for two years.
The C-Star is an uncrewed surface vessel about one metre long, light enough for one person to launch from a boat. Oshen's published indicative specification lists wind and solar propulsion, endurance of more than six months, acoustic and met-ocean payloads, and Iridium SBD satellite communications with on-board edge processing. The company states that its longest single C-Star deployment has exceeded 200 continuous days on station. It sells the vessels as constellations: one C-Star gives continuous observation at a point, while a networked group covers a wide area. In 2026 the C-Star PC13 sailed 3,555 miles from Gran Canaria to Barbados in 127 days, through busy shipping lanes and Tropical Storm Dolly, the first successful completion of the Microtransat Challenge for autonomous sailing boats after more than 30 attempts since 2010.
During the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season Oshen built 15 C-Stars for NOAA and deployed vessels near the US Virgin Islands; three sailed through Hurricane Humberto and kept transmitting, which NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory reported as the first time such a small uncrewed vehicle had collected data inside a Category 5 hurricane, with gusts above 150 mph recorded. Defence work includes Royal Navy-funded trials off Iceland in which a C-Star-deployed hydrophone detected maritime assets up to 10 nautical miles away in storm conditions, a UK Defence and Security Accelerator-supported passive acoustic network project with ZeroUSV and MarineAI, and seabed mapping trials with the US Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. The UK research agency ARIA made a 2 million pound award for a 50-vessel C-Star fleet to act as an early-warning system in the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre under its Forecasting Tipping Points programme, and the company has reported missions with Meteo-France and in the Baltic.
Oshen raised 5 million US dollars in a round led by Lunar Ventures, with AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures and angel investors participating. At the time of that round it was producing about 15 vessels every six weeks with 100 more units on order, and headcount had grown from seven in September 2025 to almost 30. Its team is drawn from naval operations, sailing engineering and aerospace research.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
C-Star
One-metre wind-and-solar autonomous sailing USV deployed in constellations for ocean and acoustic sensing.
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Company Facts
Founded
2022
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
employees 10-50
Primary Region
Europe
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
$ 5,000,000
