Quartermaster is building a maritime hive mind

Oceans — to state the obvious — are big. That makes it hard for governments, shipping companies, and insurance providers to know exactly what’s happening on them at any particular moment. It doesn’t help that these modern-day ships often aren’t equipped with modern technology or the right software behind those sensors to properly analyze what they see.

Quartermaster, an Arlington, Virginia-based startup, is building a solution to this problem that it calls “SmartMast.” It’s quite literally a package of weather-hardened sensors like cameras and radios that go on a ship’s mast and can relay real-time maritime data. Combined with an analytics platform that can interpret all that information, Quartermaster refers to it as a “continuous, distributed sensing network” — a hive mind for millions of ships.

SmartMast is far more advanced than the current standard known as AIS, or the “automatic identification system,” according to Quartermaster CEO and founder Neil Sobin. AIS is very basic and more or less consists of relayed location pings. It’s also vulnerable. Sobin says Quartermaster’s tech will be less susceptible to fraud, which can be a big problem on the high seas.

“In maritime, AIS is a completely broken system. It’s opt-in, [you] enter your own data, and if you want to do anything nefarious on the ocean, from petty smuggling all the way up to sanctions evasion, you can simply opt out of the system, or spoof it,” he said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “You can take advantage of just how fragile it is.”

Sobin has spent recent weeks repeating this pitch to investors, and they rewarded him with a $43 million Series A funding round. The investment, which Quartermaster announced Wednesday, was co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, a VC firm that backs “remarkable founders from day zero.”

First Round partner Bill Trenchard, who led Uber’s seed round in 2010 and is an investor in Flexport, said in a statement that Quartermaster is “reshaping how maritime operators understand and act on the world’s oceans.”

“Most attempts to bring intelligence to the ocean have run into the same wall: the cost of bespoke hardware does not scale to a planet that is mostly water. Neil and his team have solved that,” he said.

Quartermaster says more than 600 ships using SmartMast have covered 10 million square miles of ocean to date. The primary goal is to create an infrastructure layer for intelligence applications — identifying other ships, collecting training data for companies working on marine autonomy, aiding scientists and robotics experts, and providing data and insights to governments.

In Sobin’s eyes, there’s almost no limit to how Quartermaster’s system can be used, and the company’s already turning up new applications of the tech. For instance, the company said SmartMast-equipped ships have already assisted in “over 20 rescues of mariners at sea.” That’s not a revenue-driving opportunity, but Sobin said Quartermaster is constantly thinking about ways to make life better for mariners, especially because it may win more customers.

“That is work we’re really proud of, but also [those are] the dynamics that help us lock in our network, you know, and create that incentive for mariners to work with us in this way,” he said. “Our approach is to be pro-mariner and to create incentive for the mariner, and I think very few others will figure out how to operate that model as successfully as we have. I think there are a bunch of players in the market who try to sell a sensor to a boat, try to sell a sensor to a fleet operator, and I think those are really challenging pitches to make, because fleet operations are low-margin businesses.”

As for the funding, Sobin said he expects a large chunk of it will be put towards hiring engineers to keep pushing Quartermaster’s tech forward. While that money will help, Sobin also thinks the opportunity will just be too good for some engineers to pass up.

“The ocean has so much low-hanging fruit in computer vision tasks,” he said. For engineers at social media companies, or AI labs, it’s “hard to feel the reward of all of your effort. On the ocean, a single engineer can come in and make a significant impact in relatively short periods of time, simply because no one has worked on the space before.”