Anahita Lavelac had aspirations of becoming an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn when a challenge in autonomous robotics inspired her to start Ocean, a company that builds fleets of robots to collect ocean data.
In 2021, Lavelac, a well-known sailor, decided to build a robot and compete in the MicroTransat Challenge, a competition in which participants build autonomous sail-powered micro robots to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Like everyone else who tried this challenge, she failed.
“We realized that half of the reason all these attempts failed was that, first of all, it’s obviously difficult to make microrobots survive in the ocean,” Laverack told TechCrunch. “But secondly, they don’t have enough data about the oceans to know what the weather is like or even what the ocean conditions are like.”
Mr. Laverack attended various conferences, including International Oceanography, to find this lost ocean data. She soon realized that no one had yet come up with a good way to collect it. Instead, they found people asking if they could pay to collect the data themselves. She figured that if people were willing to pay for this data, she could build a way to get it.
These conversations formed the basis for Oshen, which Loverluck co-founded in April 2022 with electrical engineer Ciaran Dowse.
The company is currently building a fleet of autonomous microrobots called C-Star, which can survive in the ocean for 100 consecutive days and are deployed in swarms to collect ocean data.
But Ocean started small. Laverack said she and Dowse chose not to immediately pursue venture capital when starting the company. Instead, they combined their savings to buy a 25-foot sailboat, lived in Britain’s cheapest marina, and used it as a guinea pig until they could get the company off the ground.
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Ocean used the bot repeatedly on land for two years, then immediately took it out on the water to test it.
“In the summer, it’s not that bad,” Laverack said. “The problem is that the boat has to work all season. If the robot breaks down; [and] A winter storm is brewing and there is no way an 8 meter yacht should be sailing under these conditions. So that led to some adventures, I won’t say any more about that, but there were certainly some interesting things that happened. ”
Loverluck said it was difficult to properly implement the technology because it wasn’t as simple as simply miniaturizing existing large robots. These bots needed to be cheap and able to be deployed in large numbers, but also sophisticated enough to operate independently and collect data over long periods of time.
Many other companies have been successful in getting two out of three correct, LaVerack said. Ocean’s ability to do all three has started to attract customers across defense and government organizations.
The company attracted the attention of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) two years ago, but Laverack said the company’s technology is not yet ready for reliable deployment. The organization renegotiated two months ahead of the 2025 hurricane season after Ocean successfully deployed robots during the UK’s winter storms. This time, Ocean jumped at the chance and quickly built and shipped over 15 C-Stars.
Five of these C-Stars were thrown overboard and entered the US Virgin Islands where NOAA predicted Hurricane Humberto would be headed.
Laverack expected the bots to only collect data leading up to the storm, but instead, she said, three of the bots were able to survive the entire storm, with the exception of a few missing parts, collecting data all the way through, making them the first marine robots to collect data through a Category 5 hurricane.
The company has now moved to the UK’s offshore technology hub in Plymouth and has begun securing contracts for both weather and defense work with customers including the UK government.
Laverack said the company plans to raise venture capital soon to meet demand.
