Anahita Laverack was set to become an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after realizing the challenges of autonomous robotics that inspired her launch. Oceana company that builds a fleet of robots that collect ocean data.
In 2021, Laverack, a skilled sailor, decides 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. He, like others who have attempted this challenge, has been unsuccessful.
“I realized half the reason that all these efforts have failed, number one, obviously it’s hard to make micro-robots live in 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 to know the state of the ocean.”
Laverack went out to different conferences, such as Oceanology International, to find this missing ocean data. He quickly realized that no one had yet figured out a good way to collect them. Instead, he found someone who asked if he could pay him to try to collect the data. He thought that if people were willing to pay him for the data, he could try to come up with a way to retrieve it.
That conversation became the basis for Oshen, which Laverack founded together with Ciaran Dowds, an electrical engineer, in April 2022.
The company is now building a fleet 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 as a child. Laverack said he and Dowds chose not to seek venture capital directly when they launched the company. Instead, he pooled his savings to buy a 25-foot sailboat, lived in the cheapest marina in the UK, and used the boat as a test platform while taking the company over.
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For two years, Oshen will repeat the boats on the coast and immediately take them out on the water for testing.
“In the summer, it’s not too bad,” Laverack said. “The problem is that you really need a boat to work in all seasons. When your robot breaks down, (and) there is a raging winter storm, a 25-foot sailboat is not supposed to go out in those conditions. So, that led to some adventures, which I will not talk about again, but there were certainly some interesting events.”
Creating the technology is difficult, Laverack said, because it’s not as simple as taking a larger robot and scaling it down. These bots need to be mass-deployable and cheap although they also need to be technologically advanced enough to operate and collect data for long periods of time.
Many other companies have succeeded in getting two out of three correct, Laverack said. Oshen’s ability to launch these three to attract 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 the technology wasn’t ready to be rolled out reliably. The organization returns two months before the 2025 hurricane season after Oshen successfully sends the robot into a winter storm in England. This time, Oshen jumped at the chance and quickly built and sent over 15 C-Stars.
Five of the C-Stars were thrown into the ocean and made to position by the US Virgin Islands where NOAA predicted Hurricane Humberto was headed.
Laverack said he expected the bots to only collect data leading up to the storm, but three of the bots managed to weather the entire storm – minus a few missing parts – and collected data the entire time, making it, he said, the first marine robot to collect data through a Category 5 storm.
Now, the company has moved to a hub for marine technology companies in Plymouth, England, and has started racking up contracts with customers, including the British government, for both weather and defense operations.
Laverack said the company will raise venture capital to meet its needs.