Ocean has built the first ocean robot to collect data in a Category 5 hurricane

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

In 2021, Laverac, a well-known sailor, decided to build a robot and enter it into the Microtransat Challenge, a competition in which participants build and send small, autonomous, sail-powered robots across the Atlantic Ocean. And she, like everyone else who tried this challenge, did not succeed.

“I realized that half the reason all of these attempts failed is because, first of all, it’s hard to make small robots live in the ocean,” Laverac told TechCrunch. “But secondly, they don’t have enough ocean data to know what the weather is like or even know the ocean conditions.”

Laverac participated in various conferences, such as Oceanology International, to find missing ocean data. I soon realized that no one had figured out a good way to collect them yet. Instead, she found people asking if they could pay her to try to collect the data herself. She realized that if people were willing to pay her for this data, she could try to build a way to get it.

Those conversations were the basis for Ocean, which Laverac founded alongside Ciaran Dodds, an electrical engineer, in April 2022.

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

But Oshin started small. Laverack said she and Dodds chose not to pursue venture capital immediately when launching the company. Instead, they pooled their savings to buy a 25-foot sailboat, lived in the cheapest marina in the UK, and used the ship as a test platform while getting the company off the ground.

For two years, Ocean has been training the robots on the beach and immediately taking them into the water to test them.

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

Getting the technology right was difficult, Laverac said, because it’s not as easy as just taking a larger robot and shrinking it down. These robots need to be widely deployable and inexpensive although they also need to be technologically advanced enough to operate and collect data for long periods of time on their own.

Several other companies have succeeded in getting two of the three right, Laverac said. Oshen’s ability to launch all three has attracted clients across defense and government organizations.

The company caught the attention of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) two years ago, but Laverac said its technology isn’t ready for reliable deployment yet. The organization returned two months before the 2025 hurricane season after Oshen successfully deployed robots in winter storms in the United Kingdom. This time, Oshen seized the opportunity and quickly built and dispatched more than 15 C-Stars.

Five of these C stars were thrown overboard and made their way to their location near the U.S. Virgin Islands where NOAA predicted Hurricane Humberto would head.

Laverac said they were expecting the robots to only collect data leading up to the storm, but instead, three of the robots weathered the entire storm — minus a few missing parts — and collected data throughout, becoming, she says, the first ocean robot to collect data through a Category 5 hurricane.

Now, the company has moved into a hub for marine technology companies in Plymouth, England, and has begun securing contracts with customers, including the UK government, for weather and defense operations.

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