Oshen, a British robotics company building a persistent sensing layer for the world’s oceans, is tripling its manufacturing rate to meet demand from navies, weather agencies and ocean scientists. Its swarms of one-metre wind-and solar powered vessels deliver real-time ocean intelligence for security, climate and infrastructure.

Navies procure a handful of billion-dollar ships in single digits over decades and spend much of their time tracking submarine activity across the North Atlantic. Oshen’s bet is that the job needs the opposite – thousands of cheap, expendable, mass-produced robots, built like compute hardware, at sea.

Oshen’s customers and partners now include the US Navy’s Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA, the Met Office, Météo-France and VOTO, the Swedish ocean-monitoring body. Its C-star production has scaled to match. The company initially took three years to build its first 15 C-Stars, and now builds 15 every six weeks with a standardising system that allows a new technician to assemble parts in less than half an hour so it can be replicated at multiple sites.