Anahita Laverack was destined to become an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after realizing that an autonomous robotics challenge inspired her to launch Osena company that builds fleets of robots that collect ocean data.
In 2021, Laverack, a famous sailor, decided to build and enter a robot in the Microtransat Challenge, a competition where participants build and send autonomous microrobots powered by sails across the Atlantic Ocean. She, like everyone else who tried this challenge, was unsuccessful.
“I realized that half the reason all these efforts have failed is number one, it’s obviously hard for microrobots to survive in the ocean,” Laverack told TechCrunch. “But number two, they don’t have enough ocean data to know what the weather is like or even what the ocean conditions are like.”
Laverack set out for various conferences, such as Oceanology International, to find this missing ocean data. He quickly realized that no one had 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 find a way to capture it.
Those conversations were the basis for Oshen, which Laverack founded with Ciaran Dowds, an electrical engineer, in April 2022.
The company is now building fleets of autonomous microrobots, called C-Stars, that can survive in the ocean for 100 days at a time and are deployed in swarms to collect ocean data.
But Osen started young. Laverack said she and Dowds chose not to immediately pursue venture capital when starting the company. Instead, they pooled their savings to buy a 25-foot sailboat, lived in the UK’s cheapest marina and used the boat as their test platform while they got the company off the ground.
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For two years, Oshen repeated the robots on shore and immediately took them out into the water to test them.
“In the summer, that’s not too bad,” Laverack said. “The problem is that you really need your ships to work all the time. When your robot breaks, [and] It’s a raging winter storm, a 25 foot sailboat really shouldn’t be going out in these conditions. So that led to some adventure, which I won’t say more about, but there were definitely some interesting events there.”
Getting the technology right has been difficult, Laverack said, because it’s not as easy as simply taking an existing larger robot and shrinking it down. These robots had to be mass deployable and cheap, although they also had to be technologically advanced enough to operate and collect data for long periods of time on their own.
Many other companies have gotten two out of three right, Laverack said. Oshen’s ability to launch all three attracts customers in defense and government organizations.
The company caught the attention of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) two years ago, but Laverack said its technology was not yet ready for reliable deployment. The organization returned two months before the 2025 hurricane season after Oshen had successfully deployed the robots in winter storms in the U.K. This time, Oshen seized the opportunity and quickly built and dispatched over 15 C-Stars.
Five of those C-Stars were launched out to sea and put into place off the US Virgin Islands, where NOAA predicted Hurricane Humberto.
Laverack said they expected the robots to just collect data leading up to the storm, but instead, three of the robots made it through the entire storm — minus a few missing pieces — and collected data the entire 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 technology companies in Plymouth, England, and has begun contracting with clients including the UK government for both the weather and defense businesses.
Laverack said the company plans to raise venture capital soon to keep up with demand.
