Plymouth-based Oshen has closed a £3.65m round led by Lunar Ventures, with AlbionVC, Twin Track and Concept Ventures joining alongside angel backers. The four-year-old marine robotics company is tripling production of its C-Star vessels and has 100 more on order.
Oshen was founded in 2022 by Imperial College engineers Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds to attack a problem that has historically been solved with capital equipment: navies and weather agencies buy a handful of very expensive platforms, and consequently see very little of the ocean at any one time.
The company's answer is volume. Its C-Star is a 1.2-metre wind- and solar-powered autonomous vessel light enough for one person to throw over the side of a boat. The craft sail for months without maintenance, transmit by satellite, and operate in constellations spread across hundreds of miles of open water.
The new round of £3.65m, equivalent to roughly $5m, was led by Lunar Ventures. AlbionVC, Twin Track and Concept Ventures participated, with a small group of angel investors coming in as advisers. Neither the round stage nor a post-money valuation was disclosed.
The capital is earmarked for manufacturing rather than research. Oshen took three years to build its first 15 C-Stars; it now builds 15 every six weeks, using a standardised assembly system that the company says lets a new technician put parts together in under half an hour. Management intends to triple the production rate again, and 100 further vessels are already on order.
Commercially, the customer list is unusually institutional for a company of this size and headcount of almost 30. Oshen names the US Navy's Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA, the Met Office, Météo-France and Swedish ocean-monitoring body VOTO among customers and partners. Revenue arrives through three models: data-as-a-service, vessel leases and outright constellation sales.
The proof point investors have latched onto came in September 2025, when three C-Stars working under NOAA contract penetrated the eyewall of Hurricane Humberto north of St Thomas while the storm was rated Category 5. The data fed into the National Hurricane Centre's forecast discussion, and Oshen claims it as a first for any uncrewed surface vessel.
"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," said Laverack, chief executive and co-founder.
Proceeds will fund expansion into three areas where demand is growing fastest: passive acoustics for ship detection, protection of subsea cables and pipelines, and anti-submarine warfare. The company is also deploying a 50-strong constellation in the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre under a £2m project funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
Original source: UKTN — https://www.uktech.news/deep-tech/oshen-raises-3-65m-to-scale-ocean-sensing-robot-fleet-20260821
