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Plymouth Ocean Robotics Startup Oshen Raises Nearly 3.7 Million Pounds to Scale Its Hurricane Tested Sensing Fleet

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • 6 days ago
  • 3 min read
Oshen, a Plymouth based ocean robotics company spun out of Imperial College London, has raised just under £3.7 million (around 5 million dollars) in a funding round led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures and a number of angel investors. The company was founded in April 2022 by engineering graduates Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds. For UK founders building outside the usual London postcodes, and outside software, the round is a useful data point. It shows that hardware businesses building genuinely novel technology can still attract serious early investors, even when the product spends its working life at sea rather than in a demo room in Shoreditch. What Oshen builds Oshen's core product is C-Star, a 1.2 metre autonomous vessel powered by wind and solar energy that can operate unsupervised at sea for months at a time, gathering ocean data for defence, climate and scientific customers. The company says its robots were the first uncrewed vehicles to gather real data from inside a Category 5 hurricane, a claim that has helped it win interest from navies, weather agencies and research institutions including the Royal Navy, the Met Office and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Oshen, a Plymouth based ocean robotics company spun out of Imperial College London, has raised just under £3.7 million (around 5 million dollars) in a funding round led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures and a number of angel investors. The company was founded in April 2022 by engineering graduates Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds.


The round is a useful data point for those building outside London and outside of software. It shows that hardware businesses building genuinely novel technology can still attract serious early investors, even when the product spends its working life at sea rather than in a demo room in Shoreditch.


What Oshen builds


Oshen's core product is C-Star, a 1.2 metre autonomous vessel powered by wind and solar energy that can operate unsupervised at sea for months at a time, gathering ocean data for defence, climate and scientific customers. The company says its robots were the first uncrewed vehicles to gather real data from inside a Category 5 hurricane, a claim that has helped it win interest from navies, weather agencies and research institutions including the Royal Navy, the Met Office and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.


What the money is for


The new capital will go toward addressing manufacturing bottlenecks as demand grows across both defence and climate monitoring. That is a telling detail. It signals the company has moved past proving the technology works and into proving it can be built at scale, historically one of the harder transitions for UK hardware founders to finance, and one that traditional seed and Series A structures are not always well suited to support.


Why it matters beyond one company


The round is notable less for its size than for what it represents. A UK university spinout building physical, defence relevant hardware has attracted a syndicate of specialist early stage investors within roughly four years of founding, at a moment when British venture capital is increasingly concentrated in AI software. Deep tech and dual use hardware have become one of the more resilient corners of UK fundraising this year, and Oshen's raise adds to a run of similar rounds this month, alongside other specialist syndicate backed defence and deep tech companies, rather than the generalist growth capital that dominated the previous cycle.


For founders building outside software, the read across is that specificity, a clear buyer, a clear problem and a defensible technical moat, continues to unlock capital even in a tight seed market. The Plymouth and Imperial College pipeline is proof that it does not take a London postcode to do it.


Key Takeaways


  • Oshen has raised just under £3.7 million (around 5 million dollars), led by Lunar Ventures with AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures and angel investors.

  • The Plymouth based company builds autonomous C-Star ocean sensing robots used by defence, climate and scientific customers, including the Royal Navy and the Met Office.

  • The round will fund manufacturing scale up as demand grows, a milestone many UK hardware founders struggle to finance.

  • The raise fits a wider August pattern of specialist syndicates backing UK deep tech and dual use hardware outside London.

  • Founded in April 2022 by Imperial College London graduates Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds, Oshen has scaled from concept to a defence and climate relevant sensing platform in roughly four years.

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