Having secured notable accomplishments in the development of their solar and wind-powered, autonomous ocean boat known as a C-Star, Oshen are in a major growth period with new funding to match.
We caught up with Oshen Co-Founder Ciaran Dowds to learn more about Oshen's story, their achievements to-date and how they see their data collection ocean robot developing in the years to come.
Oshen was founded in 2022. Where and how did the initial idea begin?
CD: "Anahita and I started Oshen straight out of university in 2022. It grew out of a masters project to build an autonomous sailing boat for the MicroTransat Challenge, which involves attempting to cross the Atlantic with a boat less than 2.4 metres long.
Working on that project made two things clear to us. First, huge areas of the ocean are barely observed, both in terms of weather and ocean conditions and what is happening on or below the water. Second, most of the emerging marine autonomy industry was concentrating on relatively large, expensive and highly capable vehicles, usually designed for hydrographic survey or payload delivery.
We became interested in changing the economics of ocean observation. If a vessel is small and affordable enough, you stop thinking about operating one boat and start thinking about operating a fleet (or as we call it, a constellation!). If those boats can stay at sea for long periods, that fleet could provide continuous monitoring over a wide area, a bit like the networks of weather stations and CCTV cameras we have on land.
That led us towards a small, low-cost, wind-powered platform. Wind power allows the C-Stars to operate at high latitudes during winter, when there may not be enough solar energy available. It also means their endurance is mainly limited by how long the hardware lasts, rather than by fuel or battery capacity.
Their small size is important too for global logistics. A C-Star can be lowered into the water by hand, without specialist lifting equipment, and several can be shipped around the world relatively easily, including by air freight."
What made you choose Plymouth as the right home for Oshen and the production of your C-Stars?
Plymouth gives us something very few places can: deep water on the doorstep. We can take a C-Star from the workshop to the open sea in under an hour. That means we can test constantly, rather than relying on occasional large trials. When you are developing hardware that has to survive the open ocean, being able to test, learn and make changes quickly is a major advantage. The wider marine cluster is another big reason for being here.
Plymouth has a concentration of naval architecture, marine autonomy, defence and academic expertise, and it is a good place to find engineers who want to work on real ocean hardware. Turnchapel Wharf also has its own ecosystem within that wider cluster. We have good relationships with other companies on site working in similar areas, and there is a useful exchange of knowledge, experience and equipment between us.
Deploying the C-Star into a Category 5 hurricane seems to have been a major step. How did this deployment come about, and what did you learn?
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has run hurricane-monitoring campaigns for many years. It uses a mixture of equipment, including buoys, aircraft, dropsondes, ocean gliders and, more recently, autonomous surface vessels. NOAA approached us in 2025 to ask whether we could provide data during the Atlantic hurricane season. We had operated C-Stars in UK storms, but never in anything as severe as a hurricane, so there was a fair amount we didn't know. We agreed to try it. We only had about two months to prepare, so there was no opportunity for a complete redesign. We made a number of changes to improve robustness and sent seven C-Stars out in August 2025.
A few weeks into the mission, three of them intercepted Hurricane Humberto. One passed into the eye while the storm was at Category 5, the highest category. It experienced 150mph winds. The intercept was not perfect. We took some damage to the wind sensor and solar panels while exiting the eyewall, but we kept transmitting data, even during the storm. The mechanical failures were valuable because it showed us exactly where the weak points were. We have used what we learnt to improve this year’s vessels.
It also demonstrated why small, persistent vessels are well suited to hurricane monitoring. Hurricanes move much faster than most autonomous vessels can, so the vessels need to be positioned in advance and wait for the storm to reach them. That can mean spending weeks or months holding position in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. A drifting buoy cannot hold position, while using enough larger autonomous vessels to cover the same area is extremely expensive. Because the C-Stars are small and relatively low-cost, it is practical to put enough of them in the water to improve the chances of being in the right place when a hurricane passes. And if the worst happens and a single c-star is damaged, its not a critical failure to the mission, there are others available in the network to fill the gaps and continue monitoring.
You are currently going through a major expansion in production. What has driven this growth, and what skills do you need to add to the workforce?
We have moved from proving that the C-Star works to needing to build a lot of them at once. Over the summer, we built 30 new vessels across several contracts running in parallel. That changes the nature of the problem. Building one C-Star is mainly an engineering task. Building 30 of them repeatably, to the same standard and on a deadline, is a manufacturing challenge. It needs different people, processes and ways of working.
That is reflected in the skills we are bringing into the company, particularly production engineering, manufacturing, testing and quality control. We are currently increasing our team of experienced technicians to build C-Stars. We are also adding new capabilities to the C-Star for different customers, so we are continuing to recruit engineers, particularly in embedded software and electronics. With more projects and contracts planned for next year, we are also growing the team responsible for project delivery and field deployments.
How many people does Oshen currently employ, and where do you see the business going over the next five to ten years?
We currently have 29 people, up from just five when we first moved onto the site in August 2024.
In the future, we expect the focus to shift from individual vessels to constellations.Today, a customer generally buys a deployment involving a certain number of C-Stars for a particular mission. In future, we want customers to be able to buy coverage: a persistent presence in a region, with data being gathered continuously and the whole constellation managed as one system rather than as a collection of individual C-Stars.
That is the main technical and operational challenge ahead of us. It is increasingly less about designing the hull itself and more about building the autonomy, communications and operational systems needed to manage large constellations across the world.
Learn more about Oshen
To learn more about Oshen's small, wind and solar-powered autonomous robot boats, or to discover careers with Oshen, visit oshendata.com