Anahita Laverack

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Anahita Laverack is the co-founder and chief executive of Oshen, a Plymouth-based marine robotics company building autonomous vessels that gather ocean data at scale. She read aeronautical engineering at Imperial College London, graduating in 2022, and came to the sea sideways: a lifelong sailor who wanted to point an aerospace education at the water rather than the air.

The company started as a side project that most people around her thought was a waste of time. Laverack had set out to build a boat capable of completing the Microtransat Challenge, a transatlantic race for autonomous vessels under 2.4 metres that no team had finished in sixteen years of trying. Preparing for it, she ran into a more interesting problem than the one she had signed up for: the wind and current data she needed to plan a crossing barely existed, because the drifting buoys that collect it go where the water takes them. That gap became the company. She and Ciaran Dowds, an electronic engineering graduate she met at Imperial, founded Oshen in April 2022 and bootstrapped it from a 25-foot sailboat moored in a marina, winning Imperial's Venture Catalyst Challenge social impact prize the same year.

Under Laverack, Oshen has gone from a two-person project to a company of roughly thirty with £1 million of revenue in 2025 and customers including the US Navy's Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA and the Met Office. Its defining moment came in September 2025, when three of its C-Star robots sailed into the eyewall of Hurricane Humberto at Category 5 strength and kept transmitting through 30-foot seas — the first uncrewed surface vessels to do it, and data that fed into the National Hurricane Center's official forecast discussion. Her stated ambition is less about the robots than the volume of them: enough cheap, rugged craft in the water that the ocean stops being a blind spot.