Maritime Startup Quartermaster Raises $43 Million to Turn Ships Into a Sensing Network
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The world’s oceans are vast, which makes it surprisingly hard for governments, shipping companies, and insurers to know what is actually happening on the water at any given moment. Part of the problem is that many ships still lack modern sensors and the software needed to make sense of what those sensors pick up. Quartermaster, a startup based in Arlington, Virginia, has raised $43 million in a Series A round to close that gap.
The round was co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, a venture firm that backs founders from day zero. The company announced the financing on a Wednesday.
At the center of Quartermaster’s product is a system it calls SmartMast. It is a package of weather-hardened sensors, including cameras and radios, that mount on a ship’s mast and relay maritime data in real time. Paired with an analytics platform that interprets all of that information, the company describes the result as a continuous, distributed sensing network, essentially a shared intelligence layer for millions of ships.
According to founder and chief executive Neil Sobin, SmartMast goes well beyond the current standard, known as AIS, or automatic identification system. AIS is basic, amounting to little more than relayed location pings, and it is vulnerable. Because it is opt-in and relies on self-entered data, anyone looking to act badly at sea, from petty smuggling up to sanctions evasion, can simply opt out or spoof their information. Sobin says Quartermaster’s technology is far less open to that kind of fraud.
So far, more than 600 ships running SmartMast have covered 10 million square miles of ocean. The main aim is to build an infrastructure layer for intelligence applications, such as identifying other vessels, gathering training data for companies working on marine autonomy, supporting scientists and robotics researchers, and feeding data and insights to governments. The company says SmartMast-equipped ships have already helped in more than 20 rescues of mariners at sea. While those rescues do not drive revenue, Sobin frames the pro-mariner approach as something that helps lock in the network and gives mariners a reason to work with the company.
On the use of funds, Sobin expects a large share to go toward hiring engineers to keep advancing the technology. He argues the work itself is a draw, pointing out that the ocean offers a great deal of untapped opportunity in computer vision, where a single engineer can make a real impact in a short time because so few people have worked on the problem before.