Anahita Laverack was set on becoming an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after a realization at an autonomous robotics challenge inspired her to launch Oshen, a company that builds fleets of robots that collect ocean data.

In 2021, Laverack, a storied sailor, decided to build and enter a robot in the Microtransat Challenge, a competition where participants build and send autonomous sail-powered micro-robots across the Atlantic Ocean. She, like everyone else that has tried this challenge, was unsuccessful.

“I realized half the reason that all of these attempts were failing is, number one, obviously it’s hard to make micro-robots survive on the ocean,” Laverack told TechCrunch. “But number two, they don’t have enough data on the ocean to know what the weather is or even know what the ocean conditions are like.”

Laverack set out for different conferences, like Oceanology International, to find this missing ocean data. She quickly realized that no one had really figured out a good way to collect it yet. Instead, she found people asking if they could pay her to try to collect the data herself. She figured that if people were willing to pay her for this data, she could try to build a way to capture it.

Those conversations were the basis for Oshen, which Laverack founded alongside Ciaran Dowds, an electrical engineer, in April 2022.

The company now builds fleets of autonomous micro-robots, called C-Stars, that can survive in the ocean for 100 days straight and are deployed in swarms to collect ocean data.

But Oshen started small. Laverack said she and Dowds chose not to pursue venture capital right away when launching the company. Instead, they combined their savings to buy a 25-foot sailboat, lived at the cheapest marina in the United Kingdom, and used the vessel as their testing platform while getting the company off the ground.

For two years, Oshen would iterate on the bots on shore and immediately take them out on the water to test them.

“In the summer, that’s not too bad,” Laverack said. “The problem is you really need your boats to work in all seasons. When your robot breaks, [and] it’s a winter storm that’s raging, a 25-foot sailboat shouldn’t really be going out in those conditions. So, that led to some adventure, which I wouldn’t say any more about, but there were certainly some interesting events there.”

Getting the tech just right was difficult, Laverack said, because it’s not as easy as just taking an existing larger robot and shrinking it down. These bots needed to be mass deployable and cheap despite also needing to be technologically advanced enough to operate and collect data for long periods of time on their own.

Many other companies have successfully gotten two of the three correct, Laverack said. Oshen’s ability to get all three started to attract customers across defense and government organizations.

The company caught the attention of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) two years ago, but Laverack said that their tech just wasn’t ready to be deployed reliably yet. The organization reached back out two months before the 2025 hurricane season after Oshen had successfully deployed the robots into winter storms in the U.K. This time, Oshen jumped at the chance and quickly built and sent over 15 C-Stars.

Five of these C-Stars were thrown overboard and made their way into position by the U.S. Virgin Islands where NOAA predicted Hurricane Humberto was headed.

Laverack said they were expecting the bots to just collect data leading up to the storm, but instead, three of the bots were able to weather the entire storm — minus a few missing parts — and collected data the whole time, becoming, she says, the first ocean robot to collect data through a Category 5 hurricane.

Now, the company has moved to a hub for marine tech companies in Plymouth, England, and has started racking up contracts with customers, including the U.K. government, for both weather and defense operations.

Laverack said the company plans to raise venture capital soon to keep up with demand.