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 “re …