$5m · Other round · Robotics · Plymouth, UK
Plymouth-based Oshen has raised $5m in new funding to expand production of its C-Star ocean robots. AlbionVC says Lunar Ventures led the round, with AlbionVC, Twin Track and Concept Ventures participating alongside angel investors. The company plans to increase manufacturing and develop passive-acoustic sensing, subsea-infrastructure protection and anti-submarine-warfare capabilities.
Oshen builds 1.2-metre autonomous surface vessels powered by wind and solar energy. A single person can launch a C-Star from a boat; it can remain at sea for months, send sensor data by satellite and work with other vessels as a constellation spread across a wide area. The company sells that capability through data-as-a-service, vessel leases and outright constellation sales, giving customers a choice between buying information, capacity or the hardware fleet itself.
Ocean proof shifts the bottleneck to manufacturing
The product has already moved beyond sheltered trials. In September 2025, C-Stars operating with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collected data inside Hurricane Humberto. NOAA reports that one became the first uncrewed surface vehicle to capture and transmit data from inside a Category 5 hurricane, while two others entered the storm when it was Category 4. The vessels sent wind, pressure and sea-surface measurements in near real time, and the National Hurricane Center used the observations in its forecast work.
That operating proof changes what the financing must accomplish. Oshen says it took three years to make its first 15 C-Stars; it can now build 15 every six weeks, has 100 more on order and has grown from seven people in September 2025 to almost 30. The round is therefore aimed less at proving that a small vessel can survive harsh conditions than at making many vessels to a repeatable standard.
Scale matters because the commercial proposition depends on coverage. One compact robot can sample a point or follow a mission, but constellations can spread across hundreds of miles and later converge on an area of interest. Oshen is already deploying a 50-vessel North Atlantic constellation through a roughly £2m ARIA-backed project and is trialling passive-acoustic networks with defence partners, according to AlbionVC’s announcement.
The execution test is whether production cadence, field reliability and fleet software can scale together. More orders validate demand, but hardware economics improve only if assembly, maintenance and deployment become repeatable rather than bespoke. Oshen’s three commercial models can widen adoption, yet each also creates a different operating burden: selling vessels transfers more fleet operation to the customer, while leasing and data services leave more responsibility with Oshen. The new capital gives the company room to industrialise both the machines and the service wrapped around them.
