Rebecca Szkutak
8:00 AM PST · January 17, 2026
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/17/oshen ... hurricane/Anahita Laverack was set on becoming an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after a realization at an autonomous robotics challenge inspired her to launch Oshen, a company that builds fleets of robots that collect ocean data.
In 2021, Laverack, a storied sailor, decided 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. She, like everyone else that has tried this challenge, was unsuccessful.
“I realized half the reason that all of these attempts were failing is, number one, obviously it’s hard to make micro-robots survive on 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 know what the ocean conditions are like.”
Laverack set out for different conferences, like Oceanology International, to find this missing ocean data. She quickly realized that no one had really figured out a good way to collect it yet. Instead, she found people asking if they could pay her to try to collect the data herself. She figured that if people were willing to pay her for this data, she could try to build a way to capture it.