Oshen

Roughly seventy per cent of the planet is ocean, and almost none of it is watched in real time. The platforms that do the watching are scarce and expensive: billion-pound naval vessels procured over decades, and a thin scatter of buoys and satellites that leave most of the surface unmeasured. Oshen, founded in Plymouth in April 2022 by Imperial College engineers Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds, is trying to close that gap by replacing scarcity with volume.

Its vessel, the C-Star, is a 1.2-metre wind- and solar-powered robot light enough for one person to lift and throw over the side of any boat. It sails unattended for months, transmitting by satellite, and works in constellations of dozens spread across hundreds of miles — dispersing for wide-area coverage or converging on a single area of interest. For defence customers that means a persistent, low-cost watch on waters where sanctioned oil moves with transponders off, where uncrewed vehicles loiter near cables and pipelines, and where illegal fishing and narcotics traffic go unobserved. For weather agencies it means better measurement of ocean heat, the variable that drives hurricane intensification and is currently the least well sampled. Oshen sells the output as data as a service, as vessel leases, or as outright constellation sales.

Customers and partners include the US Navy's Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA, the Met Office, Météo-France and Swedish ocean-monitoring body VOTO. The first fifteen C-Stars took three years to build; the company now produces fifteen every six weeks and has a hundred more on order, with headcount up from seven in September 2025 to nearly thirty. In September 2025 three C-Stars became the first uncrewed surface vessels to report live data from inside a Category 5 hurricane. Oshen bootstrapped until a small angel round in 2024 backed by Wayve co-founder Amar Shah, recorded £1 million of revenue in 2025, and raised £3.6 million led by Lunar Ventures in August 2026.